What if Microsoft designed the iPod box?
From the Scobleizer, humorous look at how the ubiquitous iPod packaging might turn out if Apple outsourced the design to Microsoft.
Enlightenment and XGL
Novell has made available the source for XGL, an X-server architecture for Linux. It’s to Linux what Quartz Extreme is to OSX. Although its status is still in early development, it has raised my expectations for the desktop interface in Linux machines.
XGL: switching desktops with Compiz and the rotate plugin
For the multitude of window managers available(KDE, Gnome, Metacity, et al), none has really made an impression for being visually arresting and attuned to the user. KDE, the one I’m using now, is functional but looks a little too similar to the Windows interface.
All save one, Enlightenment.
Enlightenment DR17
Currently, DR17 is under heavy development but it looks very promising at this early stage. Interestingly, both XGL and Enlightment DR17 seem to borrow design inspiration from OSX. It remains to be seen whether all ease of use will match up with all that eye candy. But for now at least, the state of the Linux desktop looks very good indeed.
Productivity with Ruby on Rails
I’m currently building a web application using Ruby on Rails for my agency. Its primary purpose is to facilitate communications within the projects that are being worked on. So I guess it bears more than a passing resemblance to the original Rails application, Basecamp. But the main point of this post is now the application itself, its the process of constructing it.
When Rails first burst onto the scene, productivity gains compared to heavier frameworks/tools were optimistically estimated to be 10x, 20x greater. As the initial hype wore off and people of more varied experience started using Rails to develop their own applications, these people reported the gains to be at a more realistic 4x to 8x. I’ll admit readily that that I was swayed by these early numbers, I never did like the code, compile, package and deploy cycle associated with J2EE. So when the opportunity to use Rails in an actual application came up, I grabbed it without any hesitation.
Working with the framework has certainly put things in a clearer perspective for me. While my productivity has definitely improved from using Rails, it hasn’t exactly been the 8x jump that I had hoped, or even 4x from before, when I was using PHP. While ActiveRecord is great as an ORM, the costs or tradeoffs always come from having to learn the intricacies of the framework and having to change my way of software thinking to the framework author(s)’.
Reading Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month really brought home a lesson I should have learned way before:
There is no Silver Bullet.
Rails is no exception and its creators don’t refute that.
Waterfall2006
Always wanted to manage your projects with endless processes and plans? Are your developers being too productive with that new fangled agile development crap? Then Waterfall2006 is for you! Go back to the roots of the software development process, sequential development, change control boards and all that goodness, your next software project can take twice as long to run and you can charge 4 times as much!