16 Mar The Graphic Friday
Category: Unfiled

There has been a whole buzz of news in graphics, GUI, Open Source, and all topics in between in this week, prompting for a new weekly; The Graphic Friday. I’ve mostly decided to add this weekly because there has been an influx of demand for more (regular) posts concerning typography and graphic design (or eye candy, whatever you’d like to call it ;)).

Everyone’s favorite linux distribution, Ubuntu, has gotten a website redesign. A lot of negative feedback was unearthed with the redesign, but I must say, I like it. It’s gotten a sense of information architecture now (most needed information, like a link to the forum, a link to the files, etc), and it’s, well, in line with the general ‘Human’ theme they have had going on in Gnome for a long time now – complete with rounded corners. Ooh, rounded corners, they just seem to be popping up everywhere, don’t they?

Anyway, for even sexier Open Source desktops, a Beryl equivalent of Gnome-Look was also launched today; Beryl-Themes. For those unacquainted with Beryl (you must have been living under a mountain to miss this whole ‘Linux’ thing), it’s a super-dope 3d desktop, complete with theming abilities and productivity enhancements like zoom (as seen in OS X), ‘exposé) (as seen in OS X), and negative (as seen in any OS).

And even more sexy UI news from Open-Source land; Neil J. Patel, a new true innovator in the GNOME project (GNOME is as much as the entire UI in a lot of Linux distributions, and a host of other features that are essential to any desktop operating system) released some screenshots of Affinity, a new GNOME search tool (not quite unlike OS X’s Spotlight).

affinity-beagle 1.png

That’s Affinity set loose on Beagle’s backend (Beagle is a search engine, metadata indexer, much like Tiger’s Spotlight 1.01).

I want to conclude this one Open-Source edition of the Graphic Friday with a film I have just seen, and I rate second best anime next to Akira; Howl’s Moving Castle (grammar nazi cataclysm avoided by Jelmar). It’s immense – what a great movie. I can absolutely recommend it to anyone who enjoys a whole lot of eye candy and weird, speampunk-esque worlds. Impeccable animation and a very strong plot make it a joy to watch.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses

  1. 1
    Claude Bolduc 

    Glad to see you discovered Miyazaki-san. Check out his two previous works too: “Princess Mononoke”, a surprisingly thoughtful work on nature and industrialization, and “Spirited Away”, the initiatory journey of a young girl; it won an Academy Award for the best animated picture of the year…

  2. 2
    sebastiaan 

    Yeah, it’s funny you mention that, as I have recently seen both, along with Ghost in the Shell 2. Such inspiring films! I think Miyazaki-san is truly a master at play.

Trackbacks