Vezquex

GUI Prison

The landscape of first class, traditional, desktop-style operating system graphical interfaces is undergoing radical change. Across the board: Windows 8, OS X Lion, Ubuntu Unity, and Gnome 3. Vendors have market pressure from svelte touchscreens running shiny new mobile OSs, plus the rapid iteration and fluidity of the web. I imagine the thinking goes along the lines of:

Our OS is in danger of being squeezed out of the market. We must adapt to survive.

The new interfaces are shaping up to be beautiful and suited for touchscreens. Worrisome, though, are the regressions and abandonment of core interface elements. But the snag is fixing what ain't broke. This threatens users who intend to use an up-to-date OS for heavy duty, mouse-and-keyboard computing. There are many useful GUI shell concepts we use constantly:

• Scroll bars indicate where you are in a document.
• Windows show multiple apps on screen at once.
• Taskbars and docks for quick app switching and launching
• Vertical text menus

All of these concepts are under attack in recent or upcoming major OS revisions. You may update and find your favorite feature swept under the rug as a legacy setting or missing entirely.

Choices are wonderful. We should fight for freedom from GUI tyranny. Pixels on a screen are easy to manipulate. CSS and JavaScript have broken free. On the web, we can dictate every pixel and behavior to our heart's content. Why should the OS be any different? Maybe you don't want to stare at a grid of icons. Maybe you don't want to waste vertical room on toolbars or white space. Whatever you prefer, it's time to break free of the GUI prison. You choose the features, layout, and colors. I applaud Android for the ability to swap launchers, a huge step in the right direction. Mozilla Labs is working on the Chromeless Browser.

We need the chromeless OS.

Dark and Wide user style for Hacker News

I created a user style 2 years ago for HN to remove the margins to play better with narrow windows and remove that hideous orange bar. Yeah, I know its a trademark of the site, but it draws attention away from the headlines. If you want that one, it's Hacker News Plain. (User styles are rules in CSS that can override the originals, so you can view websites in different ways.) So anyway, I came to the conclusion at some point that I much prefer dark over light backgrounds. I love reading HN (member for 1070 days), so it was time to take matters into my own hands once again.

Writing CSS for HN is a bit of a challenge because it does not have many IDs or classes for the HTML elements. Attribute, descendant, and child selectors work alright, though. For a time, I was experimenting with a monospace font and multiple colors but in the end decided against those features. The blue link color is neutral yet easy to distinguish from the text. Visited links are gray, except for the menu, because those pages get new stuff all the time.

Features:

• Black background for comfortable night reading
• Full width (up to 50em per comment)
• Left justified
• No images
• Crisp Unicode vote buttons ▲▼
• Highlighted links on mouse-over

You may want to zoom the page a bit. 120% works for me.

Feel free to fork this style, and let me know what you come up with.

A non-threatening social network

Facebook is scaring people right now. The latest round of announcements at their annual conference is reaffirming suspicions that participating on Facebook is prone to leak sensitive personal information to potentially any site you visit. There is really no need for this delicate dance of zero-login, cookie-based triage. There are already two battle-tested protocols for distributed logins: OAuth and OpenID. These have matured to a point that they take just a few clicks if you are already signed in on your provider's site.

I have a different vision than Facebook, and I am executing that with MixNote. There is not a constant threat of your data falling into the wrong hands, because you control it, and this is transparent to you. Your identity won't follow you around the web; rather you may choose to reveal certain aspects of yourself to only parties you trust. At any time, you can fine tune the privacy level of a portion of your data. And you can grant access to apps to write data on your behalf, but only at a level you feel comfortable. Eventually, this could be done with OAuth, so that an app could prompt you, asking for some permission, but in early development, MixNote will require manually setting a special tag on some object.

I have other concepts to share in the future about this unorthodox, but incredibly powerful site. If you can't wait, visit MixNote, and try the demo. Yes, I realize it's a pastebin, but with a little imagination it is already a lot more, and this will be all the more true at a later stage of development. Email me if you have any questions, or wait for my next blog post.

Apple iPad initial thoughts

Good pricing with 6 models and $30 per month 3G. Kudos on making their own processor. Quite surprising that Apple didn't need any help from Texas Instruments or Nvidia. As with the iPhone, there is no multi-tasking, which really helps performance. The 1 Ghz CPU could probably keep a few things running, but it really depends on the RAM. How much RAM does it have? I'd guess 1 or 2 GB. I predict a software revision down the road that allows you to run a few iPhone size apps side by side. Edit: The worst part here is the web browser doesn't have tabs. I have been using tabs for about 6 years, and can't imagine browsing without them. Leaving out tabs is inexcusable, and a deal breaker for most users. Not sure if a video camera will come in a hardware revision or a peripheral.

The resolution is 1024 by 768. Not wide screen or high definition (although the pixel density is plenty). So most new videos will not fill the entire screen unless cropped. Of course, there is a huge back catalog of 4:3 television shows that fit perfectly (and actually look lame with black bars on the sides on our wide screen monitors and televisions). The ratio is probably nice in portrait mode for reading books and other text. Speaking of reading, there are e-books and a dedicated New York Times browser. Steve Jobs mentioned they're using some standard book format. Not sure if that is rich enough. I'm hoping to see HTML5 take off and for some sort of magazine or newspaper style of website to emerge, similar to all the websites optimized for iPhone that have popped up.

Let's hope that gaming will be epic. Given that the device will sell well, I can see a few friends laying their iPads on a table and doing some interesting LAN gaming, such as real time strategy.

Anyway, these are just my initial thoughts. Even if it's just a big iPhone, this is definitely a shakeup in in the computer landscape.

Lurch

Wisdom teeth are gone, which restores my health and mind. The PAX video game convention was fun again, with another impressive batch of indie Xbox games and a swell Jonathan Coulton / Paul and Storm concert. Second year of college starts in two weeks. My startup idea is remains ever-present in my mind since the start of 2009, but I have sadly neglected to work on it. I have been watching the web churn this summer, amusing me to no end. Off the top of my head: