the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name “Micropolis”

I think this is a very good move from EA; although the game is dated, it’s still a very useful and educational game. It was quite inspiring for me in my younger years as well.

Now there’s a thing we little know and love about Apple; an open-source rendering engine and kernel (and of coures, even more open-source projects slightly less significant than those).

MRTG produces pretty graphs of networks statistics, and I integrated them into my Leopard desktop using a space station icon I am working on, a bit of Photoshopping and Geektool 2.1.2 (since the website is down, I’ll host it here for the interested). Geektool, in turn, is a preference pane that lets you show console output or images on your desktop, refreshed at a certain interval.

I’ll let the result speak for itself (click for larger version over at flickr);

If there’s any interest for it, I’m willing to write a nice how-to for setting all of this up easily. Drop a comment if you want to see such a post.

Link to the deviation in question…

I haven’t been very verbal lately and I couldn’t because I have had some life-changing moments that really need some thought. Perhaps I’ll divulge or make a long post about it a bit later on but at the moment, I’m really having some questions with utmost relevance about my future, my life in general, and well, what you are presented with here, my company, my idea, my ambitions. As I have said before, July will turn out an exciting month, but I can assure you it’ll be more of a rollercoaster to me and even more of a complete astonishment to you (or perhaps not, I just hope so). So, more updates soon… there has been huge progress in my work, and in my life. There’s certainly no lazy silence here. Not ever.

Now, I’ve always been an open-source enthousiast. I’ve applauded the decision of the GNOME team to keep most of their decisions behind closed doors and not really take all the crazy feature suggestions serious. KDE 4, for some reason or another, thought it was a great idea, UI-wise, to just slap about 3 buttons on each icon on your desktop as you hover over it. Other than being brightly colored, they are quite nondescript. If this blog post wouldn’t exist, I’m quite sure very few people would know what it does. In the screen-cast you can actually see the person in question opening a file by clicking a badge over the icon with a gear on it. Oh, of course - if we click on gear icons in UI’s, files open. A totally logical piece of causality that commonly accepted.

Okay, I hear you say, it’s not even done yet; he’s just made it to show what it can do! Well, in that case, fantastic job regressing in the history of UI design. We’ve been doing everything possible to limit nondescript buttons and too much choice in the UI on the Mac; it’s in our interface guidelines. GNOME has been doing a great effort to keep it as simple and minimal as possible. What do these guys do? They just liberally sprinkle badges all over existing icons, that were meant to serve the function of the badges in the first place.

If you still think this is a good idea, you might imagine taking this step in OS X. Imagine you open Mail.app, and in the list of emails, every email is preceded by four brightly colored dots. It’s not really clear what function they have, but it seems you know because some icons on the dots seem familiar. You click the orange one and your email is suddenly gone. What happened? Well, your choice for a compact list view made the icon on the orange dot illegible and it was the button that marked it as trash. You go to your trash, where you click the green dot, and it opens a reply template. You can imagine the problems with such colored dots in small sizes.

UI design is a great job. You can think up all sorts of awesome stuff and these days, we have 3d interface possibilities for the willing. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should just do everything you can imagine because you think it’s cool. The reason why people like me are hired is that we weigh every possible user in. The same reason why the GNOME team is often criticized for being overly conservative when it comes to UI additions. KDE’s been known, to me, as the desktop with the ‘in progress’ cursor of a bouncing object and it’s XP-like icon sets. It’s never been usable, pretty, or otherwise impressive to me. This addition adds to that.

The comments on digg do make me smile. I loved this one;

” I wonder when the apple fanboys will raid this and clam they stole it from apple. sigh”

Somehow, I doubt they will.