Edward Tufte on computer interface

The error of the modern computer interface is that it segregates information by its means of production. The user shouldn’t have to know what an operating system is, or even an application. The first GUI’s at Xerox PARC were just a desktop and documents. — Edward Tufte, quoted by topfunky, 2006

There is no need for workaday users to see an operating system interface at all; the current OS interface is bureaucratic bloat, an unnecessary impediment and tollgate. Users are interested in direct links to documents, not in operating systems and aps. — Edward Tufte, Ask E.T. forum, 2002

Nintendo porting Squeak to their own research OS?

Apparently, Nintendo works on an open-source (research) operating system (and now, fasten your seatbelts) in which all user-land code is written in JavaScript, graphics being handled by Cairo. There’s even a Squeak port available. It’s not early April in Japan, right? (Via langreiter.com simple plainness)

It’s funny because some months ago I was thinking how great it would be to revive the 16 bit-era and turn the Wii into a compact computer that can be connected to any TV set, but this time with the capability of running Squeak instead of BASIC or some other obscure language. Now, if they could actually publish a Squeak channel — imagine friends and family gathered around the flat screen to build Etoys with the wiimote…

OLPC and Etoys featured in EDGE 177

EDGE magazine features an article titled “Teaching the world to play” in its July edition on the natural fit between the OLPC and videogames. The OLPC is currently bundled with two game programming environments — Etoys and pygame — and games like the original SimCity are being ported and enhanced to support learning-based extensions.

There are also interesting comments by Ben Sawyer and Don Hopkins on the introduction of videogames in education, and the hope that the children will make the software their own by modifying the source code, not just by playing it.

Houston, haven’t we already been there?

Even if the logo may suggest that the same old concept of a shell for Rich Internet Applications is going full circle again, “Apollo is not directly related to Macromedia Central”, says Adobe.

Sure, with a 5-9 MB runtime and PDF as one of its native formats, Apollo is gaining enough weight to break new grounds and bury itself even deeper than its forerunner.

From a developer’s point-of-view, it is interesting to observe the move from highly interactive design environments (i.e. Director, Flash) to a text format and an all-purpose source code editor to design user interfaces. Did we experienced a shift lately where the number of visually-oriented people dropped so significantly that Adobe had no other choice than to go all text?

Bye bye Blogger

Blogger was really starting to get on my nerves lately as it failed once again to transfer the posts on my FTP server. Obviously, it was time to move on and this blog now runs on WordPress.

The transition was a bit awkward since the Blogger’s FTP publishing settings were interfering with the import tool, but after a few trials, all the posts and comments were back in WordPress.

The news feeds have also permanently moved and any request sent to atom.xml or rss.xml should now return a 301 response with the new URL.

Let’s call them Dynabooks

In the 1990s there will be millions of personal computers. They will be the size of notebooks today, have high-resolution flat-screen reflexive displays, weigh less than ten pounds, have ten to twenty times the computing and storage capacity of an Alto. Let’s call them Dynabooks. — Alan Kay, 1971

A mockup of the Dynabook built out of wood

Chapter 3 of Designing Interactions starts with a portrait of Alan Kay and is available as a time-limited free download. This book really looks amazing and features valuable material on computer history and user interaction.

The other Second Life

Secondlife isn’t the promised-land of some post-human immersive reality. It isn’t going to become the replacement for the Internet. There are many reasons, but I’m going to examine just one—The Croquet Project. — Icon Serpentine, This Virtual Life

This article provides a nice summary of the main features of Croquet from the perspective a Second Life resident.

Continuation? I want it never heard of it…

(via Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants) Do you remember the time when continuation was the mot du jour and everyone under the sky wanted it in their favorite language? Well, it seems that since the new Ruby VM drops support for continuation, JRuby is dropping support too. According to the developers of JRuby, they are “unable to find any use of continuations in the most popular applications” and they consider that it is “more difficult for anyone to wrap their head around than other more verbose models”… Yes, they know about Seaside, but it does not count, does it?

F-Script is the runner-up in the Apple Design Awards 2006

F-Script has been selected as the runner-up in the Best Mac OS X Developer Tool category of the Apple Design Awards 2006.

ODE Plugin for Mac-Intel

As seen on the Squeak-dev mailing list:

You might download the Intel-Mac version of Takashi’s ODEPlugin for Squeak VM 3.8.12betaU

-> http://g-24.net/squeak/ode.html

See also http://languagegame.org:8080/ggame/15 and ODECo (SqueakMap)

… very cool stuff!

I tested the plugin with Squeak 3.8-3665 and Croquet 1.0.10 (beta).

Cheers
- Gerald.