February to Hardy?

Well, here we are in February and I’ve hardly touched Ubuntu in the past month. The Photoshop projects that just have to be done (still another couple of weeks out on that) have kept me busy.  In the midst of my projects, I’ve noticed that Vista is actually getting faster. “WTF, weren’t you just complaining about how slow Vista is?” you must be saying. Well here me out. I took the Vista SP1 RC a while back and I’ve noticed that booting from full hibernate is now very fast on Vista. Also wake from sleep is lightning quick…almost as quick as my wife’s Macbook! Not only that, but network file copies are moving along a bit better now. I’m waiting until the true final release candidate is out to upgrade the server, but as far as my laptop goes, SP1 is turning out to make Vista actually usable. Now if they can only get to SP2 in the next couple of months…

Also, I’ve gotten used to my Yahoo widgets on the desktop. I tried the gdesklets thing on Ubuntu, but they just didn’t look nice. “Who cares?” screams the peanut gallery. For those of you functionalism aficionados, don’t get me wrong, I’m in the trenches with you guys. But I’m slowly starting to see how having some nice eye candy makes my computing life better and more enjoyable, not to mention more functional. This is rather important since I’m on my various rigs at least 8 hours a day, if not more. So let’s look at the lay of the Vista land for me:

You’ll see that I have RocketDock and my various Yahoo widgets running. I check the stock ticker thing about 63 times per minute even though my portfolio is a buy and hold sort of outfit. Also the RocketDock is GREAT. It mimics how the most important part of the Mac UI (for OSX, OS9ers please go home to your straw huts and crazed ranting). I truly enjoy using it because I can customize all of the little icons with great ease. Sure I burnt about a day looking for and downloading every free icon set on the planet and then another day organizing them (I’ve yet to convert the mac-only icons, but we’ll get there someday), and a couple of minutes picking which ones represent my apps the best. Frivolous? Maybe. But all of that upfront investment in my time has led to allowing me to actually have a tiny ounce more of computing joy each and every time I use my m1330. Also both of these helpful little tools are great timesavers. About 98% of the time, I launch apps from RocketDock which is much faster than VistaBubble->All Programs->{sift….sift….sift….ah there it is} or even VistaBubble->{type some random word in the search bar…sift…ah there it is}.

This is not to say that I haven’t kept abreast of the Ubuntu forefront (especially in regards to the XPS m1330). Let’s see…oh biggest news EVAR–well at least for those of us that own a Dell XPS m1330’s with the Intel 965 graphics chipset and want to run Ubuntu.  Apparently Hardy Heron has a fix that allows compiz fusion effects to work on our computers!  If you recall, I tried to get this working and eventually found out that it was busted deep down in the guts of yee old driver and gave up. According to this bug report, it seems that the issue has been fixed or at least mitigated, but it does not seem to be performing well (nor does it seem to look very nice). The very last comment by Timo seems to suggest that the performance enhancements that are needed will not be going into Hardy Heron and thus they may actually remove compiz support. While I lament the thought, I guess it is the right choice since they’re in alpha trials already.

Also, I’ve jettisoned the Gimpshop enhancements for Gimp, but have not had a chance to learn the standard Gimp UI. Things are definitely different. I’ll have to track down some Photoshop->Gimp command map or video tutorials after I’m done with the urgent projects on my plate at the moment.

Anyway, the fact that compiz may actually be working on Hardy Heron means I may take an early upgrade and see how it works.  Maybe I will be able to get a dock thing working and may have to see if I can jimmy gdesklets to run Yahoo widgets.  Sounds like some good fun after my urgent Photoshoppery is complete.

Wow, that was short…

So I was excited to get back into Ubuntu mode last night and tried using Gimp (modified with Gimpshop to make it somewhat familiar) to create a post card for my wife’s upcoming solo art show.  Lo and behold, Gimp seems to be a rather unstable little beast.  I’m not sure if it is Gimp or the Gimpshop mods that make it bork, but I would get random crashes whenever I opened up a few large-ish files (about 5MB each…hardly anything out of the ordinary for compositing work).  So back over to Windows I run to use Photoshop.

Also, my experimentation with Rhythmbox album art embedding didn’t go too well either.  I’m back over in Windows using iTunes (of all things!) to manually copy album art from the iTunes crappish randomly named separate file debacle and pasting them in the ID3 tag using iTunes’ UI since it actually works.

Well, maybe after I get a few of these fires put out I’ll head back over to Ubuntu land for some more experimentation.  There simply has to be a better way.

Gimp Interface Redesign ! « Blogomation’s

Gimp Interface Redesign ! « Blogomation’

Apparently, the Gimp UI is in need of a facelift–I’ve yet to try it, but plan on doing so as I’d like to have a real practical use for my Ubuntu install (actually I’d like to have Ubuntu Studio up and running as soon as it gets Gutsy-fied).

It looks like the Gimp folks are tackling one of the core issues of making Linux mainstream: usability. There are tons of open source developers out there, but how many open source usability/UX designers? While I’m sure there are quite a few, I think their numbers and prowess are dwarfed by the developers.

Anyway, check the robo-translation.

UPDATE: I stand corrected…you go open source UX designers.