Dogfooding is good for your software. Nothing seems to sniff out bugs more than just regular usage. Most open source developers don't have a testing team, and BeOS and Haiku developers don't have a huge community they can depend on for testing. Don't get me wrong, gentle reader, I'm not ripping on the BeOS community. By no means. The community is just not as big as the Linux hordes or the marketplace for Windows and MacOS. This means that while a particular program might be quite good and appealing, there just aren't that many people downloading BeOS software. This would be why I've been flinging code with the IDE of my own making.
Writing code with Paladin has been quite nice, actually. Once in a while I'll run into something that makes me say, "Wait, it shouldn't do that," or "What in the world?! Why doesn't that work?!" Some of the features that I've put into place are nice to have, like the Run Logged or the ability to set run arguments. These features -- or ones like them -- might be commonplace in Windows land, they certainly aren't here.
What have I been working on, you ask? Minesweeper, of all things. This is another little time waster that I've enjoyed on other platforms and, like BeIDE, there isn't a version that can be legally redistributed. It's playable and is skinnable, but it's missing some stuff -- high scores and a few other smaller features. It'll be nice to have around once I have it ready to release.
As a result of all this hacking, Paladin is, once again, a better IDE for wear. There is a major regression in RC5 which causes empty files to appear in the editor when you double click on a file in the project window. There are some other bugs that have gotten a good squishing, but there are a few more items on my to-do list before it's quite ready for release. Despite the seemingly endless number of candidates, there will probably be a point where I declare a 1.0 despite outstanding bugs, but in a case like that, none of them will be showstoppers like the one I just described above.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Bad Usability: Sometimes Intentional?
You gotta wonder if there are companies that do this on purpose.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Presto: Instant-On Linux from Xandros
A while ago Xandros, the producer of a commercial Debian-based Linux distribution, announced Presto, a way to jump into Linux without the usual boot time to make Skype calls, browse the Web, and edit documents. Yesterday in my inbox was an e-mail announcing the availability of the public beta version of Presto. I was really wondering if it's possible to get the "instant-on" boot times advertised and if they really are that fast.
Downloading and installing Presto from the website is easy enough. The installer is 483MB, so it's smaller than most of the major Linux distributions, but larger than the little ones like DSL and Puppy Linux. It installs (and uninstalls) the same way that Ubuntu can be installed through Wubi and on my machine, everything installed without a hitch. There was one minor bug I had to deal with, but for my purposes here, I'm not going to bother with it here, being a beta version and all.
Boot times are impressive. From the time that I hit Enter at the boot menu to choose Presto, it was literally 10 seconds to the desktop. While I'm not so sure I would call that instant-on, the only OS I've ever seen to boot that fast is BeOS. By comparison, XP SP3 on the same machine takes over a minute. Ubuntu takes somewhere between 1 minute, 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Ouch. The test rig is neither a dinosaur nor a bleeding-edge gaming rig: an AMD64 3000+ with 2GB of RAM on a 320GB Western Digital EIDE hard drive. The major marketing point behind Presto seems to be pretty much valid in this case.
Once booted, you are greeted with a rather spartan desktop with a panel along the left side of the screen. The desktop environment is Xfce4 and immediately available are Firefox for web browsing, Pidgin for instant messaging, Skype for voice chat, the Thunar file manager, and a launcher for the Xandros Application Store and that's it -- sparse, but the Store makes installing other programs a cinch.
The Application Store is nothing new if you're familiar with Click and Run from the days of the Linspire distribution. For the uninitiated, Click and Run is a way to install a program with one click from the Firefox web browser. Many programs in the store are free, but there are also web services and commercial products, as well.
The only real downside to using Presto that I found was the lack of customizability. Having used Xfce and GNOME extensively and experimented with KDE 3 and 4, I'd say that Xfce is a good middle ground between GNOME and KDE for the amount of options offered to the user. Unfortunately, I found none of that available. In fact, the only way to open a terminal window is by right-clicking in a file manager window and choosing Open Terminal Here. It appears that the user is not permitted to add another launcher to the panel or to access the regular control panel that comes with Xfce.
This lack of customization makes me wonder what Presto's target market is. It seems too limited to bother with on a reasonably modern PC and worthwhile only in a semi-embedded role, such as the OS shipped on a netbook. Nontechnical users won't care what's on it as long as they can use Word (which they can't). Power users will probably find it fairly limiting like I did, and Free Software advocates will most likely look elsewhere, being this is a proprietary distro.
Personally, I find the boot and shutdown times amazing -- it boots as fast as BeOS and shuts down faster than Haiku, which is really saying something. Once booted, though, it feels like something's missing. There are some nice choices in the Application Store, but the ones which were unfamiliar to me were almost exclusively the non-free choices. Somehow, I just don't find Presto compelling. Here's to waiting for the Jaunty Jackalope release next month.
Downloading and installing Presto from the website is easy enough. The installer is 483MB, so it's smaller than most of the major Linux distributions, but larger than the little ones like DSL and Puppy Linux. It installs (and uninstalls) the same way that Ubuntu can be installed through Wubi and on my machine, everything installed without a hitch. There was one minor bug I had to deal with, but for my purposes here, I'm not going to bother with it here, being a beta version and all.
Boot times are impressive. From the time that I hit Enter at the boot menu to choose Presto, it was literally 10 seconds to the desktop. While I'm not so sure I would call that instant-on, the only OS I've ever seen to boot that fast is BeOS. By comparison, XP SP3 on the same machine takes over a minute. Ubuntu takes somewhere between 1 minute, 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Ouch. The test rig is neither a dinosaur nor a bleeding-edge gaming rig: an AMD64 3000+ with 2GB of RAM on a 320GB Western Digital EIDE hard drive. The major marketing point behind Presto seems to be pretty much valid in this case.
Once booted, you are greeted with a rather spartan desktop with a panel along the left side of the screen. The desktop environment is Xfce4 and immediately available are Firefox for web browsing, Pidgin for instant messaging, Skype for voice chat, the Thunar file manager, and a launcher for the Xandros Application Store and that's it -- sparse, but the Store makes installing other programs a cinch.
The Application Store is nothing new if you're familiar with Click and Run from the days of the Linspire distribution. For the uninitiated, Click and Run is a way to install a program with one click from the Firefox web browser. Many programs in the store are free, but there are also web services and commercial products, as well.
The only real downside to using Presto that I found was the lack of customizability. Having used Xfce and GNOME extensively and experimented with KDE 3 and 4, I'd say that Xfce is a good middle ground between GNOME and KDE for the amount of options offered to the user. Unfortunately, I found none of that available. In fact, the only way to open a terminal window is by right-clicking in a file manager window and choosing Open Terminal Here. It appears that the user is not permitted to add another launcher to the panel or to access the regular control panel that comes with Xfce.
This lack of customization makes me wonder what Presto's target market is. It seems too limited to bother with on a reasonably modern PC and worthwhile only in a semi-embedded role, such as the OS shipped on a netbook. Nontechnical users won't care what's on it as long as they can use Word (which they can't). Power users will probably find it fairly limiting like I did, and Free Software advocates will most likely look elsewhere, being this is a proprietary distro.
Personally, I find the boot and shutdown times amazing -- it boots as fast as BeOS and shuts down faster than Haiku, which is really saying something. Once booted, though, it feels like something's missing. There are some nice choices in the Application Store, but the ones which were unfamiliar to me were almost exclusively the non-free choices. Somehow, I just don't find Presto compelling. Here's to waiting for the Jaunty Jackalope release next month.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
March Madness... Basketball it Ain't
Tonight I just finished what will hopefully be the end of a 6-week schedule run where everything seems to happen all at once with starring (instead of directing, like in years past) in the Spring Program at school. This particular one involved an adult part in addition to the kids' parts, so I was asked to do it. The program went off without hardly any problems, so I'm happy.
In the fewer-than-usual spare moments that I've had, I've been dogfooding Paladin again. This time? Minesweeper. Once again, I've found yet *more* bugs in the unstable version, but I have a sinking feeling that they're also in the current release candidate (#4), so I'm betting there's going to be yet another one after it. You'd think there'd be fewer of them at some point. Sheesh. BeOS had a Minesweeper clone, but not Haiku -- or at least not an open source one. It's turning out to be a fun way to find bugs in Paladin, so I figured why not?
In unrelated news, courtesy of the illustrious C|Net, Spiralfrog, the ad-supported free(?) DRM-crippled music service has closed its doors. Good riddance. For those who don't know the history, back in October '07 I posted -- at my old site, no less -- about getting shafted by the Digital Restrictions Management included in each song downloaded from SpiralFrog following a reinstall of Windows. I have never forgotten it, either, and I don't intend to. Goodbye, Spiralfrog, no one will miss you.
In the fewer-than-usual spare moments that I've had, I've been dogfooding Paladin again. This time? Minesweeper. Once again, I've found yet *more* bugs in the unstable version, but I have a sinking feeling that they're also in the current release candidate (#4), so I'm betting there's going to be yet another one after it. You'd think there'd be fewer of them at some point. Sheesh. BeOS had a Minesweeper clone, but not Haiku -- or at least not an open source one. It's turning out to be a fun way to find bugs in Paladin, so I figured why not?
In unrelated news, courtesy of the illustrious C|Net, Spiralfrog, the ad-supported free(?) DRM-crippled music service has closed its doors. Good riddance. For those who don't know the history, back in October '07 I posted -- at my old site, no less -- about getting shafted by the Digital Restrictions Management included in each song downloaded from SpiralFrog following a reinstall of Windows. I have never forgotten it, either, and I don't intend to. Goodbye, Spiralfrog, no one will miss you.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Paladin can Bootstrap Itself Now
Up until now, it's been possible to build Paladin using Paladin, which isn't that big of a deal -- the project manager part of the IDE is very much a simple build. PalEdit, however, is not. Only now is it possible to build it with Paladin.
The primary reason for the complexity with PalEdit are rez files. For those unfamiliar with it, rez is the name of a resource compiler for Macintosh. Maarten Hekkelman, the programmer behind Sum-It and Pe, wrote a version for BeOS which uses text-based resource files for menus, dialog windows, key bindings, and more. Sum-It and Pe -- and by inheritance, PalEdit -- use these files extensively, so until now, jam has been a requirement to build Paladin's text editor. While this is not a shot at jam, for someone who much prefers an IDE to a text editor and a terminal, this is a pain.
It's not all perfect, though. This is the development branch, after all. There are issues in building Sum-It, but this might be because of the speed with which I put the project for building it together. Then again, putting together a project with Paladin should be quick and relatively painless. Either way, the rez resource compiler isn't all that helpful in handling errors in its files. In the process, though, I patched some more bugs in the stable branch. Progress is good. :)
The primary reason for the complexity with PalEdit are rez files. For those unfamiliar with it, rez is the name of a resource compiler for Macintosh. Maarten Hekkelman, the programmer behind Sum-It and Pe, wrote a version for BeOS which uses text-based resource files for menus, dialog windows, key bindings, and more. Sum-It and Pe -- and by inheritance, PalEdit -- use these files extensively, so until now, jam has been a requirement to build Paladin's text editor. While this is not a shot at jam, for someone who much prefers an IDE to a text editor and a terminal, this is a pain.
It's not all perfect, though. This is the development branch, after all. There are issues in building Sum-It, but this might be because of the speed with which I put the project for building it together. Then again, putting together a project with Paladin should be quick and relatively painless. Either way, the rez resource compiler isn't all that helpful in handling errors in its files. In the process, though, I patched some more bugs in the stable branch. Progress is good. :)
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