Some articles recovered. Yay! \o/

Managed to recover few articles through WaybackMachine. <3

Decided to release them all, unedited and raw… (thus, there is “slight” possibility for typos and the likes)

Hello interwebs

Decided to bring back the blog, so here we are and here we go. Downside? I realized ALL of my old blogposts went to the way of the dodo when I changed service providers… :/

Killing the mouse. And no, it’s not touchscreens.

For some time now people (analysts?) have been predicting the death of a computer mouse, by touchscreen and lately by multi-touch. I’m, however, going to claim that both of those technologies are absolutely outgunned by a simple Logitech. And as a cherry on the top, I’m going to give my take on the computer mouse killer.

Why touch-technology has lost already

The statement that simple touch technology is going to be replacing the mouse is just simply dimwitted. Why? Simply because they are used in two completely different context: Whereas touch-screen rock the handheld world, computer mouse reigns as the sole emperor of the desktop computing. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love touchscreens and even multi-touch, however, neither of them have the power or the ergonomics of even the simplest 5€ mouse, when it comes to desktop computing. Just think of the time you use your computer daily; 2 hours? 4 hours? For me it would be something like 8-10 hours. Now, keep your hand pointed to the screen, as you would be clicking a button on it, and see how long you can go. Now, do the same test with the mouse. See the difference? On continuous use, mouse wins hands down. Sure, touchscreens are intuitive but when it comes to desktop use, they just suck. Unless. And this is big if, unless the whole paradigm of desktop computing changes to something drastically different.

Then what?

How to generate free buzz for your open source project

Youre probably smart enough to figure out what in my opinion is a great way for generating that magic buzz around your open source commitment. Yeap, I claim that it has something to do with user interfaces. (Well, isn’t that news)

Three years ago I happened to stumble upon interesting project called ReactOS; a “free version” of Microsoft Windows – open source (blackboxing Windows components) and able to run Windows applications out of the box. Sounds sweet BUT… There’s always a catch. The thing that struck my eyes was the user interface, not because it just was so sweet, far from it. It struck my eyes because it was far from attractive, which in my eyes, was doing good job of destroying the appeal of the whole software. Hence, I decided I wanted to pitch in.

Now, years later I stumbled upon the same project and I even found mockups I made for the project from my harddrive. This provoked some thougths.