So i installed the developer preview of Windows 8 (i was actually more interested in Visual Studio 11 rather than Win8) and i decided to share some opinions. To be honest since Win8 has been unveiled for the first time, i've been a bit puzzled about the decision to have the same OS for both tablets and desktop and combine those 2. (i mean touch is so different from mouse & keyboard that it makes no sense to mix them together).
 
Tablet : as a tables OS , Win8 looks fine. But to be honest, i don't really think it matters. Apps matter. Sure it won't be a problem from MS to get good apps for the tablet (i actually think by the time it alunches next year, MS will more apps than Google's honeycomb). But the way it see it, there's no market for tablets. I simply don't think there's going to be a "post PC" era. PCs (desktops and laptops) are here to stay. The keyboard (which is basically the best way to interact with a machine) is here to stay. Sure, MS can't affort not to sell a tables OS. But it looks like they spent too much time working on the "tablet side" of the OS in detriment of theit bread & butter : the desktop.

Desktop : well there are improvments of the desktop OS (it took what....5 years to finally get proper multimonitor support ?) but they certainly didn't improved the OS as much as i would have liked for the desktop use. Worse still they started to change things that only make sense for the tablet :

- replacing the start menu with the table specific start screen. This doesn't make any sense (even if you can tehnically "use" that screen with mouse&kb). Nobody is going to launch apps by scrolling horizontally and looking for a tile with the app name. If you want to improve the OS just add a freaking keyboard launcher not the tiles screen.

- they started replacing "default" controls with their "touch" equivalent (for instance in Control Panel the checkboxes have been replaced with the new Toogle Control). Using the toogle with the keyboard is bad (not to mention that toogle takes way more screen space than the checkbox).

So, in conclusion, i have the feeling Win7 will be the new XP. We're going to use it for a while....

Just updated Windows Live Writer and the latest version has the useless Ribbon UI. Don’t get me wrong Ribbon might be useful for beginners but it’s useless for advanced users. The problem is that the UI is mouse “oriented” and  most “actions” don’t have keyboard shortcuts. Also on some apps that use Ribbon  the toolbar buttons tooltips don’t have the keyboard shortcuts.

Live Writer is the kind of app that really didn’t need Ribbon. I see it’s becoming a trend at Microsoft and I don’t really like it.

Change “localhost” to “127.0.0.1.” (notice the dot after 1). This should do the trick.

Just tried the latest Haiku release. Great stuff. Even in VirtualBox this stuff is super fast (reminds me when i first tried BeOS 10 years ago). Haiku is a remarkable OSS feat.

Get it from here

It sucks that you can’t enable full screen when you have 2 monitors. I mean…seriously….i want to write code on 1 monitor  and watch a full screen presentation (code is kind of hard to watch in a small window , you know ? ) on the other monitor.  It makes sense to exit full screen on 1 monitor but it doesn’t make sense on 2.

Is that so hard to implement ?

My latest project is now live. Topi is a microblogging platform for the romanian market. It was a single man effort (except for some graphic design which was made by my wife) and i'm happy with the result.

So, if you speak romanian and you're interested in a Twitter like service, then please also look at Topi.

Happy to be back. That's all.

Interesting documentary about the first days of the Mozilla project.

Few things jumped (back) to mind :

- Microsoft was beeing sued for making a free product. Oh...the irony.

- Netscape Navigator was pretty crappy compared to IE (4). Using IE4 in Win98 was a MUCH better experience than using Netscape.

- try to imagine the browser landscape today if Ms wouldn't have abbandoned IE after winning the Netscape battle.

- kind of ironic to see that a corporation opened the code to save itself, failed to do so (AOL buy Netscape sealed the deal) but , years later, there is a company which makes money from Netscape's code (yeah..i know....most of the code is rewritten but you get the point).

I was reading the ArsTechnica's hands on with the Moblin platform and it really does like it could shake up a little the netbooks market. As a plus, leaving aside the fact that is backed by Intel, this is a project that tries to do something different (from a UI perspective) and could gain some traction.

We'll see if it can steal some marketshare fromWin 7/XP.

Looks like the Opera browser is 15 today. Go and check out their site for a throwback on how the web looked like 10-15 years ago. It's almost friggin amazing how much the web evolved...