Linuxart

Christkindlesmarkt photos

garrett — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:36:48 +0000

To celebrate this holiday season, here are a few photos I recently took of the Christmas Market (Christkindlesmarkt) in Nürnberg.

You can see the above in higher res on my Flickr stream (as well as all sorts of other photos), or see lots more Christmas Market pictures on my public Facebook gallery.

Have a Merry Christmas, and a happy New Years, Hanukkah, etc.!

Google Wave & native scrollbars

garrett — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:03:36 +0000

For those of you also using Google Wave, you may have noticed the funky scrollbars. They’re bad for all sorts of reasons, most notably performance.

Máirín (rightfully) complained about them in a community designers’ wave we’re in, so I decided to take five minutes to see if I could implement a hack… and was successful!

Basically, with essentially 4 simple lines of CSS, we’re able to easily turn on your browser’s native scrollbars and turn off Google’s weird scrollthing. Since I published it on userstyles.org, it’s available for Firefox (using Stylish or Greasemonkey) and Chrome/Chromium (since it now has native Greasmonkey support).

Scrolling is now extremely quick in comparison, and it acts as expected.

Get it here: System scrollbars for Google Wave

A blog post

garrett — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:25:47 +0000

For whatever reason, my “oh yeah, I have a blog!” blog post has shown up on Planet GNOME… again.

Is it there to serve as a reminder that I actually do have a blog, and I should do these posting-blog-posts and uploading-pictures things?

Here’s a picture that I uploaded yesterday. It’s a sunset over the dunes in Gran Canaria. (GCDS was amazingly great.)

Also, I guess I should update my hackergotchi on PGO… and probably post something about SUSE Studio sometime… and perhaps update that Nautilus mockup as well?

Nautilus, streamlined

garrett — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:58:01 +0000

While at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, an impromptu graphic and UI design session erupted in the hotel hackfest room. We worked on GNOME artwork and design related subject matter. A few of us discussed and sketched wireframe mockups of gnome-shell and Nautilus.

This hackweek, I decided to start fleshing out the mockups. I tried getting gnome-shell properly working on my machine (running openSUSE 11.1), and was mostly unsuccessful there. I have a lot of ideas based on the BetterDesktop usability studies we did at Novell (years ago) and would be interested in helping out the gnome-shell crew. (:

I saw David’s recent blog post on a simplified Nautilus and decided to skip past gnome-shell (for now) and produce something that should hopefully benefit all users of GNOME (regardless of using gnome-shell or not): Streamlining Nautilus.

These somewhat-polished mockups are based on the wireframes and discussions (that we unfortunately did not write down) from GCDS. They are not pixel perfect (but should be somewhat close). A menu bar is not included in the mockups (similar to David’s screenshot) — but the menus do need to be retooled as well.

Icons not in the toolbar would be configurable somehow. Keyboard shortcuts would all work the same.

…There are many more notes in the actual mockup, so click the thumbnail teaser graphic and view the full thing at 1:1 size already! (:

As stated in the mockup, you can contact me via @garrett on Twitter, over email, or in IRC. (I prefer Twitter and IRC over email, by-the-way)… or you could post a comment on this blog post too.

Desktop Summit!

garrett — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:34:26 +0000

I am heading to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit… but first, need to quickly finish packing! (:

It’ll be an amazing time. I’m excited to see everyone attending!

git sucks‽

garrett — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 11:11:06 +0000

A few people on Planet GNOME are complaining about git, so I figured I should also post an example about git’s shortcomings when passing unexpected command line arguments.

$ git make me a sandwich
git: 'make' is not a git-command. See 'git --help'.

As a counter-point, let’s see how well bzr handles this…

$ bzr make me a sandwich
-bash: bzr: command not found

At this point it seems fairly obvious that version control systems (even distributed ones) are not good chefs — after all, that’s what sudo is for.

Muinshee, for you… thanks to Twitter and the Banshee devs.

garrett — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:24:58 +0000

Quick background: Muinshee is a special UI (user interface) for Banshee, an open source music player, in the style of Muine, another open source music player. It’s really neat (if you’re a minimalistic Muine fan) because Muinshee is a mashup of Muine’s simple interface backed by Banshee-power.

How it happened: I recently sparked off a nice little tweetversation (a conversation on Twitter) about the old Muinshee teaser blog post. In a few 140-character-max back-and-forths, it went from an “oh yeah, rember that!?” moment… to getting a tip from Gabriel Burt (the guy who made the Muine UI for Banshee) himself… to me quickly tweaking Banshee’s starter script (and crudly adding 64-bit support today, btw)… and then releasing the tiny hack of a script on github’s gist (which is the paste-and-create git repo service).

Muinshee: it's like a baby Banshee!

Like what you see? Download the Muinshee script (updated: fixed a bug. oops!) and place it in your path somewhere (the bin subdirectory in your home directory should work nicely). After that, just run “muinshee” and you’ll be in minimalistic UI play queue heaven.

Then, of course: Thank Aaron, Gabriel, and hordes of other rockstar developers for their awesomely great music player! (With the best sync’ing support around, excellent Last.fm integration, podcasts, library management, etc.… you may just want to stick with the full-blown Banshee, though! *smile*)