BlueProximity is really cool. Sadly is couldn’t get it to work with my Treo 650 
But imagine the cool if you walk away from your computer and it lock, you return and it unlocks. That would make an impression on your colleagues!
Do you write a text or do you want to share some information? Do you create a drawing or do you want to explain some idea?
I think the current desktop is either application- (Windows, Gnome) or document- (Mac OS X) oriented. But why? I don’t use my computer to open applications or create documents, I like to get a task done. I’d like an interface that is task oriented!
Task oriented design is a well known approach for interaction designers but somehow this never entered the desktop metaphor. The desktop is still mostly aimed at starting applications and handling files. Which is nice and important, but very inefficient. I think the desktop should be able to do those tasks for me. Gnome DO is quite good at finding the application I want to open, and Nautilus is quite good at organising files.
An idea would be to give the user the possibility to create tasks for itself. For example: I want to create a project plan, instead of: open OO Writer, select the project plan template and start writing. I hear you say: “You can use the templates for that!”. Indeed, I could, but then the flow would be: go to a folder where I want to create the plan, right click, find the template I want, create the file, name it, open it. Not efficient.
I’ve written a doc a while ago about a webbased task oriented desktop. Maybe I should expand that into something that fits on the desktop. Next holiday I’m going to work on that…
[Update]
I’m not up to date with what Adobe wants with it’s Air. But what I’ve seens from the demo’s it’s pretty cool. Whatever it really is, they’ve released it for Linux now:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
I’ve installed it and I’m looking for stuff to play with….
Ubuntu Tweak used to be a little pathetic tool when I first found it. It gave you a nice entry to the settings in gconf-editor, but that was it. The guys did improve the thing quite a bit now.
It gives you easy installation of several apps like AWN and Cairo, it gives you some metacity settings, power management control. No rocket science, but it’s sweet and very well designed.
I will probably not use it a lot, but it’s a nice tool that gives users access to a lot of interesting tweaking.
Wow, Sun is on the loose! VirtualBox 2.0 has been released: http://www.virtualbox.org/.
I don’t see the difference with the 1.6.2 that I used to run. I guess a lot was improved, but I have a really simple approach to vitalization: if I notice it then I don’t like it, and I haven’t noticed VirtualBox ever. That means it’s working for me.
So, why did I update? Hey, I’m an IT guy! I need to run the latest version 
OpenOffice.org has released the first release candidate of their 3.0 version.
They’ve updated the GUI a bit, which is a bit better then the 2.4, but it still doesn’t really compare to MS Office 2007. It reads MS Office 2007 blahx files now, frankly: who cares? Nice is that the notes in Writer are now shown in the margin, instead of a tiny yellow flake in the text.
Overall it’s pretty good, but not the huge improvement I hoped for.
If want to go through the German thoroughness then read the release notes: http://development.openoffice.org/releases/3.0.0rc1.html
It’s quite easy to install:
That’s it. There should be entries in the gnome menu, pretty good install for a release candidate. What they should have mentioned that you should kill the config directories in your home.
I tried to start OO3 without that, but then it kept throwing document recovered messages at me.
I’ve blogged about this before, but I really like the Elementary Desktop Project. Since they have a real site now. I thought I spend a little attention to them again. It made me change desktop wallpaper.
do
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