taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

UIs: Apple planning ‘Spoken Interface’ for 10.4. Damn! This was one of the main reasons I chose Linux over MacOS X for my new laptop!

You see, Linux has xvoice, which combined with a scriptable window manager and the now-samizdata version of IBM’s ViaVoice for Linux, means that a whole lot of UI navigation can be performed via voice.

Well, now it seems Apple are into the idea too — and they’ll probably do the job right and without the samizdata. ;) (Found via WorldChanging).

Politics: The full Bruce Sterling ‘State of the World 2004′ speech.

Tags: apple, damn, interface, laptop, linux, macos, planning, spoken, uis, window, xvoice

Linux: I’m really getting into KDE 3.2. I’ve been looking for a music player that is better at handling large collections of MP3s better than the venerable XMMS, without much luck:

iTunes is, of course, the ‘gold standard’, but is Mac/Windows only, so that’s not going to work on my Linux machine.

Rhythmbox is getting there as an iTunes clone, but right now is woefully incomplete. It fails to play lots of my music, has serious interface shortcomings — you can rate songs, but then there’s no way to use those ratings, and you cannot edit any of the tag metadata in the released version.

JuK is the new KDE music player app. Initially, I wrote it off — it uses the clunky interface of ‘one big list’, at first glance.

But after Rhythmbox managed to confuse itself sufficiently so that it would only open as a 3-pixel-high window (seriously!), I gave JuK another try. Summary: it kicks ass.

It turns out that the multi-pane ‘artists, albums, and tracks’ mode of iTunes and Rhythmbox isn’t actually necessary, since JuK improves on it using a very nifty dynamic ‘Tree View’ mode.

Another nice feature is the MusicBrainz integration; it has built-in support for querying MB’s servers to get correct tag data for your music. In fact, its tagging support is fantastic — this is unsurprising, as it looks like it started off as a tagging app.

Being a well-written KDE app, it exposes some nifty scripting support via DCOP, and a quick look-over with KDCOP reveals a nice set of APIs — for example, running dcop juk Player playingString tells me the name of the track and artist playing right now. I’m not sure if there’s a way to register for callbacks on events like ‘track change’ just yet, here’s hoping…

No sign of rating support just yet, though; my dream player would allow me to rate my tracks, and then make a dynamic playlist which selects tracks by rating, playing the top-rated ones more often and never playing the bottom-rated ones. Here’s hoping it’s in the pipeline ;)

All in all, though, it looks like I’ll be giving JuK a try.

Tags: app, interface, juk, kde, linux, mode, music, player, rate, rhythmbox, support

Several MailMan mailing lists I run have been really painful to admin, due to spam overload combined with Mailman’s pretty crappy ‘pending messages’ admin interface, which goes like this: scroll down to each message, select ‘discard’ radio button, scroll to next, select ‘discard’ radio button, repeat until wrists hurt.

Thankfully, waider has saved my lists from oblivion. this script, given the list URL and the admin password, will log in to the admin interface, get the list of pending messages in the queue, scan each one using Mail::SpamAssassin (of course ;), and ditch the spam.

It just cleaned out 182 spams from one list, leaving all of 7 valid requests in the queue. Beautiful!

Dublin: Stefan Geens posts an IrishBroadband success story. See, it really works!

Tags: admin, button, interface, list, mailing, mailman, queue, radio, scroll, spam

A glowing review of Win4Lin 5.0 from ‘Open for Business’.

Gotta say, I use Win4Lin regularly, and it’s totally flawless. I had a bit of difficulty getting it installed — the installer didn’t like my kernel for some reason, if I recall correctly, and I had to go grepping through the install script (!). But it’s fantastic once it’s running.

The really impressive thing is when it boots Windows (in a window on your Linux desktop) much faster than Windows boots natively on the same hardware ;) Still haven’t figured out how it does that.

It does a nice job of a virtual network interface too; easier to admin than VMWare’s fake-net-with-DHCP thing. It just insmods a new network module, with a new ethernet address, and that responds to arp requests alongside your ‘real’ Linux interface’s address. Then all the control of IP address, network etc. is under Windows control.

I haven’t found an app that doesn’t work with it yet. (Mind you I hear Direct/X isn’t supported yet fully, so most games are probably out.)

I’ve even used it to watch Quicktime movies — which is pretty impressive when you consider that they’re displaying to a (Win4Lin) framebuffer, which is then displayed to another (VNC) framebuffer, which then displays to the hardware.

Tags: address, control, framebuffer, hardware, interface, linux, network, thing, win, windows

Andrew McGlinchey writes about a Fly UI: ‘I have seen one of the finest instances of user interface design ever, and I saw it in the men’s room at Schipol airport in Amsterdam. In each of the urinals, there is a little printed blue fly. It looks a lot like a real fly, but it’s definitely iconic - you’re not supposed to believe it’s a real fly. It’s printed near the drain, and slightly to the left.’

I’ve heard of this one before, and yes, it is an aiming-improvement UI. It started in France around the turn of the century, if I recall correctly. One important fact: it’s not a fly — it’s a bee. You see, it’s also a visual pun — the french for ‘bee’ is ‘apis’, geddit?

(I’d have commented on the blog, itself, but it’s one of those ‘create an account to comment’ places — too much trouble!)

He’s also spot-on about why tea is big in Ireland: ‘The climate is cool, grey and damp. Steady doses of warm drink with a nice gentle caffeine push really keeps you going.’ Hey, works in the Himalayas too ;)

Tags: airport, bee, design, drain, fly, interface, lot, room, schipol, user