JamesGecko

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey with some friends last night. All two and a half hours. It’s like the Moby-Dick of films. Classic, but in sore need of a good editor. While I don’t regret watching it, it strikes me as one of those movies you don’t really need to see more than once every five to ten years. Also, I really want to see a remake. You know how every few years Hollywood predictably makes an awful remake of some old movie?

thesixtyone, a social music discovery site, recently rolled out a new version of their site. By “new”, I mean that the user interface is almost completely removed from the previous version. See for yourself; here’s the old siteand the new one. With the update, thesixtyone’s UI became much more minimalist and much functionality was actually removed. Through simplification, the site became less easy to use. What follows is my highly amateur critique of some usability issues.

There are several rather obscure, underused, or nerdy words which have entered my vocabulary. These include (but are not limited to) grep, huzzah, w00t, and frob. Recently, I have realized the need for a new addition: “duck.” A bit of context. My academic advisor, Dr. Baas, is a fount of deep CS wisdom. He frequently emits it in various slightly odd (but extremely quotable) bursts in the classes he teaches. These quotes are often passed from student to student in a sort of computer science oral tradition about things which actually matter.

Many of the people in the CS department at LeTourneau have recently joined Google Wave. Thus far we’ve used it as a planning resource for the campus ACM chapter, for setting up a new computer lab, and a method of communication in a software engineering course. Here are two quick things I’ve noticed about it. Wave is for groupsYou can use it as a one-on-one communication tool, but it’s overkill. Nonetheless, it’s used for individual comms.

So, after a long spurt of mucking around in Windows 7, I’m back to Ubuntu 9.10 (now in beta!) One thing that’s struck me about the jump back is how much cleaner everything feels. On Windows, I’d be hard pressed to find two applications I use regularly that use the same widgets. Windows Explorer, Firefox, Notepad++, Access 2007, iTunes, Steam, DestroyTwitter – they all look different. Everything seems to need an inconsistent appearance to jump out and grab the user’s attention.