Archive for September, 2007

3D Desktop Effects with the Beryl Manager on Ubuntu

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

I’ve known about Beryl for some time but have been skeptical about installing it. 3D effects and other desktop eye candy is cool but it doesn’t trump productivity and stability.

It turned out I was wrong on both of these points. I finally made the move to Beryl and was surprised by the results, which are quite good. Most importantly I’ve since found lots of productivity-related features in Beryl that go beyond “eye candy”. Here is a short list:

  1. Rotating among several desktop workspaces is plain cool but it is also very encouraging towards actually utilizing multiple desktop workspaces.
  2. The animation effects on minimizing and closing windows are not to be estimated as a continuous source of geek-type inspiration.
  3. Hitting F9 displays all active windows in the current workspace at the same time (like tiles) so you can pick the one you want. Hitting F8 does the same for active windows in all workspaces. Great stuff! When many windows are opened I hate cycling through!
  4. Using the “Windows” (Super) key in combination with “h” toggles maximizing the window horizontally. I love this one: a life saver for wide-screen laptop users. Doing the same in combination with “v” toggles maximizing the window vertically.
  5. Alt+F8 initiates resizing a window.

There are many other features I haven’t yet come to but I already feel much better about using a great desktop environment.

I am running a T60 Thinkpad with an ATI card (Radeon x1400). I use the proprietary fglrx driver because the free Radeon driver doesn’t support my card well. Given this my path to Beryl required using Xgl to get the 3D effects. You can find instructions by searching for “Beryl Xgl fglrx” or use this link.

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Notes from the Rich Web Experience Conference, San Jose CA

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

I attended a rather direct and revealing talk given by Alex Russel the project lead for the Dojo Toolkit. Given the importance of the Dojo toolkit I was curious to see what Alex would have to say. His talk, titled “Standards Heresy” with the subtitle of “Dojo and the Rise of Open Web Pragmatism” focused at length on standards – what makes a good standard, how does it relate to competition, what makes a good standards body, and so on?

So why the focus on standards? Douglas Crockford, a senior JavaScript architect at Yahoo and creator of JSON gave the keynote speech in which he pointed out a number of failures of rich web development as realized in browsers to date. The notable failures are what he calls “insecurity” or the lack of security on the browser side (e.g. any JavaScript code downloaded as part of your page has access to any other data on the page including cookes, session id’s, etc.) and the lack of advancement in presentation technology (HTML 4.0 dates back to 1999). According to him standards bodies have failed us and it is a striking conclusion considering the fact the number of mainstream browsers isn’t that big.

Continuing on this theme Alex Russel drew out the W3C specification timeline. What we have is HTML 4.01 in 1999, XHTML 1.0 in 2002, DOM 3 Core in 2004, CSS 2.1 in 2007, (CSS 2.0 dates back to 1998). HTML 5 is scheduled for late 2008 and CSS 3 according to him is a mess. Enter WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Group). This group is focused on evolving HTML in parallel with the W3C HTML working group and the resulting specifications are likely to be implemented in major browsers. Membership in this organization is much more open, there are no fees and in many ways it is much more of a grassroots movement focused on innovation.

Alex characterized ajax toolkits as “symbiotic parasites”, which have continuously pushed the bar of web evolution in terms of what can be done with what we have. This certainly rings true given the existence of ~ 200 ajax toolkits out there. There are efforts to try and bring this ecosystem of toolkits closer together through the work of the Open Ajax Alliance and to me that’s a welcome development bringing many players to the table but what remains is a lack of progress in the underlying capabilities of HTML, DOM, and CSS. Who knows maybe WHATWG will bring about much needed innovation.

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