Tao of Mac

Oct 10th 2005 · 1 min read

Back To Work

Ah well.

(And that's as far as I'll go regarding going back to work.)

Changing the topic, here's some commentary on the news:

  • The /Hermione was plastered all over the news today (even on , apparently - maybe it was CNN or Bloomberg, not sure). My feelings towards it are lukewarm - I am no fan of UIQ's convoluted user interface, the form factor is too brick-like, and no matter how many radio bearers the thing supports, between it and a there's really no contest - I'll take RIM's stuff any day, on usability and battery life alone. Plus the device itself isn't the technical breakthrough that the or the were.
  • And yeah, I know about the litigation proceedings - it won't impact RIM much, I think - the recent ruling got a lot of undeserved bad press, and taking it as a herald of doom is, well, just typical Slashdot fodder - RIM's more likely to wear down NTP's "patents" one by one.
  • BetterDesktop looks nice, and is a very laudable effort to help the Open Source community get a feel for what usability is all about - I wish they hadn't used Theora for the videos, though, even if there are MPEGs available. It's Ogg all over again, and it sucks.
  • Tango is also interesting, since one of the things that irks me the most about shifting between Gnome and KDE is the multiple inconsistencies in visual styling - anything that tries to unify them is welcome, and having a consistent set of SVG icons is a great starting point.
  • 802.11e was approved. I've been waiting for this for ages - now to see what vendors make of it (which is not likely to be much considering the mess that Wi-Fi is turning into).