Saturday, October 29, 2005

GNUstep/Gorm videos

I uploaded a new video showing a custom palette in Gorm and its use -- isn't it great to code a complex volume dataset visualizer without a line of code ? ^_^

I also cleaned up a bit the main page..

I should probably make a video showing the services in action !

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Subtext

Found on Martin Fowler's bliki, an interesting short summary of the OOPSLA'05 conference, along with interesting links. One of them is Subtext, a really cool language / programming environment (you perhaps already encounteered it, it was featured on slashdot some time ago...). Definitely something interesting -- check the demo (flash video) and the researcher's blog. Lots of good points / ideas about what should be a programming environment ;-)

I wonder if we could extend some ideas about ide to really dump the text editing, or at least relay a lot more on metamodels of the code.. Dynamic Aspects seems to head into that direction ;-)

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Nokia 770

I received today my new shiny toy, the Nokia 770:



I put online some pictures of it..

First impressions:


  • it's light ! yet it doesn't feel "crap" :-)

  • the form factor is surprisingly nice (even if coming from a newton I wouldn't mind a (physically) bigger screen)

  • applications are a bit slow to start. Hopefully things will improve -- even if as it is it's ok, I wouldn't mind instantaneous starts ;-)

  • redrawing is a bit slow too :-/ is it because of X or gnome.. ?

  • the screen is absolutely gorgeous !! really beautiful and luminous :-) (the pictures I took don't completely do it justice)

  • playing movie is ok (there's a trailer for ice age 2 on the machine), but could be improved..

  • lack of pppoe configuration for wifi VPN (or if there is, it's not obvious, but well, I just got it, so I perhaps overlooked something)

  • installing a package is easy :-)

  • The UI is quite good, as a PDA UI -- definitely better than PocketPC (well, duh..), obviously less good than the newton, but hey, it's not too bad..



So well, overall, I'm quite pleased -- the device is indeed very, very cool. Things can be improved, but it's already quite nice. The UI is ok, even if what I would like to do is (obviously ?) install GNUstep on it, and then modify GNUstep to blend on the Maemo platform (with a possible replacing of maemo in an improbable future). Anyway, as it is running linux, it seems an ideal platform for me -- both for experimenting with etoile/gnustep on a PDA (see a previous post about that, and see what I posted about the newton for what I think is good on a PDA...) and as a good client for the system I'm working on at uni...

I'm not sure if there's a market for a "web tablet" device, but I don't think that the Nokia 770 will only be a "web tablet" anyway :-) -- there's already ports of doom, abiword, the GPE pim stuff, etc.

Nokia has a winner in the linux community I think :-) -- which means that you can expect lots of software for the Nokia, and it already started... It also look like an excellent device for ebooks, administrators (as an X/VNC/ssh terminal), etc.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Yeah

Just finished (completely, as in "theoretically nothing to add") the paper I was working on for wscg.. (they don't even have a LaTeX template, only a Word one (!!), and it is rather ugly imho..)

Hopefully I'll have some more free time now to work on camaelon and étoilé ;-)

Talking about étoilé, Quentin created a blog ! Étoilé dev will use it to rant about the project :-) -- hopefully it will become an interesting news place..