User-Interface

It’s sad to see France Télévision chose a proprietary platform (MS Silverlight) to develop its web platform for video delivery … They developed this “thing” with public money; the content should at least be available to all the public eyes (even the “without Silverlight” link requires to have Windows Media Player 11 which even recent MS-Windows PCs do not have). Here are some general reasons why it’s a bad idea to develop something with Silverlight: ...

Very often, your company doesn’t allow you to install a new software on your company computer. For this purpose, Portable Apps is a very interesting website: it contains a lot of free software ready to be used, without any installation process. Moreover, it releases latest version of software very quickly. For example, 1 or 2 days after the launch of Mozilla Firefox 3.0, it was already in Portable Apps. Most Firefox plugins (" add-ons") can be installed in the Portable apps version of Firefox, but not all of them. The Adobe Flash plugin is one of the few ones that you can’t install without administrator rights … ...

I don’t know if it’s a bug or a feature (*) but the Windows Task Manager doesn’t seem to refresh its graphs when we are moving its window. It’s barely noticeable when you usually move it (**) but you can spot this behaviour when one of your other windows is freezing. ( larger screenshot) (*) I know this post is nearly useless but I’m tired of waiting for this freezing software … ...

Since Thursday, Google Code is hosting the OpenSocial project, a group of APIs allowing the development of common software for a certain number of “social networking” websites (e.g. LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, …). Before Thursday, every programmer wanting to develop a software for social networks had to learn an API, how to write code and sometimes a new language for each of these networks (when these ones exposed a public API!). Now, OpenSocial gives access to the most common functions of all the participating networks. Currently, the API gives access to: ...

Image seen on a post on the Hyper Dog Blog: Fortunately, the content was still longer than the right pile and bottom line of buttons. Can’t someone create a “social network of social networks” (and call it “Web 3.0” of course) to help those poor recognition-hungry-bloggers? ;-)

Small news to share my amazement for CSS: changing the design of my website took me around 15 minutes (based on a Ganesh Gunasegaran’s initial template). The content didn’t change. Only the way “semantic elements” are displayed was changed (+ some minor adaptations, of course). Et voilÃ! :-) Next step: adapt this blog design to my website design (I won’t do it right now).

I have plenty of other things to do but, this evening, I decided to stop a little bit and try some LiveCDs I freely got at Fosdem. Since I did it very quickly and was tired, don’t take what I wrote for granted: LiveCDs are there to be tested. Download one and test it by yourself! The first LiveCDs I tried were derived from Sun OpenSolaris (and on the OpenSolaris starter kit DVD). BeleniX was quite cute, directly launching XFCE. Quite a few applications were there. Some refresh problems were also present in the console. An old USB key was recognised without problem, as most parts of my low-end workstation. ...

On his blog, Laurent wanted to know who is this guy. I though it was an interesting starting point to see how good is Retrievr, “an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch”. Although my drawing skills really needs to be improved (and their drawing tools more refined - always blame the others for your weaknesses ;-) ), a first sketch gives some interesting results (see screenshot below): 7 retrieved photos (44%) show a b/w human face in “frontal view” (if you count the dog, it’s even 8 correct images). ...

In his blog, Jonas Hielscher wrote about an animal controlled computer game), where a player can play Pacman against real crickets! It is so cool, I shamelessly copy and paste his screenshot here : I find it cool to see nice application of tracking, like I did (tracking) with my rodents: Tracking of a rat in the Morris water maze rat = big, red spot on top its trail from bottom is also in red ...

This week-end, I attended a scientific meeting and, although the content of the presentations were often interesting, they also often lacked attractiveness. This reminded me two videos I stored, some time ago, on my hard disk. Sébastien Lorion called them “refreshing”. And, for me, not only these presentations look beautiful, they also talk about an interesting topic: who are you on the internet ? In the first presentation (a keynote at OSCON 2005), Dick Hardt talk about what is identity and how do we prove who we are, in the online world. ...