Blogpost: Who ate that byte of apple?

Ganesh Venkateshwara writes about his experiences with Apple hardware and software on the iBook G4 and his eventual migration to Ubuntu Linux.

Out of enthusiasm and out of sheer curiosity, I wanted to own an Mac. So I got one, not a shiny new one, an old, but an equally shiny white, iBook G4. After about 5 months of continuous usage of the default OS that came with it (OSX 10.3 aka Panther), I bid it a farewell.

Full post at: http://tovganesh.blogspot.com/2009/05/who-ate-that-byte-of-apple.html

Ripping one’s guts out…

Dramatic title?

Perhaps so, but KDE 4 development seems to be following this paradigm to the fullest — enough to make Stephen King proud!

KDE 4 has a laudable goal of revitalizing the internals, making the underlying framework robust and extensible. This is a reworking of function, perfectly acceptably and a valid developmental goal. KDE 4 also went the bling-bling way of oooh– shiny new interface at the same time.

The result?

It’s a dog’s lunch at the moment, stretching developer resources and skewing schedules. Notwithstanding a grand launch of KDE 4.0 which is ready yet not ready for general consumption (go figure!). After all, we’re real software developers and not language lawyers!

This is not a commentary on the state of KDE 4, but rather on the simultaneous reworking of form and function which resulted in neither being complete for a general use… yet.

Of course, the oft-repeated refrain is… KDE 4 will rock with release 4.1!

Yeah. Right!

Replace KDE 4 in the above commentary with Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows or any but-it’s-going-to-change-computing-forever software system… the end-result is the same!

Do More to Achieve Less?

The kickoff menu in KDE-four-oh provides the following options to leave a session:

Let’s say we select Logout. This generates the following dialog:

It’s always good to have a choice, a second chance to change one’s mind. But it does seem slightly overkill asking confirmation for the options selected from the kickoff menu earlier.

While there are definitely valid use-cases for the End Session dialog (such as electing to terminate a KDE session from a Logout plasmoid), it’s just another annoyingly extra step in the workflow from the menu option. Perhaps a good configuration may be to provide an option to skip the reconfirmation dialog in the scenario discussed above.

One Step Forward, N Steps Back?

This is one story that’s as old as time.

What is it with technology and progress, that it must ultimately lead to retrogradation?

Is such the story unfolding with the File Manager component of KDE 4: Dolphin versus Konqueror? Only time will tell!

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