What’s the best thing about your favorite operating / windowing system? What’s the best thing about your least favorite system? I was thinking about it this morning, considering the most inspirational design in each of the systems I’ve used. While not every vendor finds that balance of excellence, releasing a functional system is itself a difficult problem.

• Windows XP/Vista: I love how the login/desktop locking system works. It supports multiple users properly, making switching between them trivial.
• Gnu/Linux + xorg + Gnome: multiple desktops + Compiz. It’s a developer’s dream, like a desk the size of a large room. Enough room for a dozen editor windows, without having to navigate a mess of windows or tabs.
• Apple’s OSX: It’s a brilliant looking desktop, with the best font rendering, colour and monitor management (nailing multiple monitor support). It does other things well, but I’m always impressed with its affinity to photo/video/music productivity.
• *nix: I love how the unix philosophy wreaks of pragmatism. It’s simple, decoupled, and completely bent toward scaled production uses.
• Nintendo’s Wii/DS/etc.: In a word, casual. Simple, predictable, and fun to the bone.

So what do you love about the systems you’ve used?

You think it’s a conspiracy by the networks to put bad shows on TV. But the shows are bad because that’s what people want. It’s not like Windows users don’t have any power. I think they are happy with Windows, and that’s an incredibly depressing thought. – Steve Jobs on “suck”

I’ve had several hours to play with Inkscape 0.46 since it was released, and despite the minor version increment, a lot has changed.

New features

• A “fill” tool, making it trivial to turn bitmaps into vectors quickly
• 3d drawing shapes (including perspective)
• A tweaking tool, making it easy to nudge/blur/soften shapes
• Several new effects (including path effects)
• Many performance improvements, including huge improvements in blur speeds
• Better gradient tools
• Dockable tool windows (nicely done too)

I’m especially excited about the “fill” tool, as it simplifies tracing scanned sketches and logo bitmaps. The tool creates vectors using a flood-fill algorithm, based on the zoom level and configurable limits (fill method, threshold, gap-closing, etc.). In my tests so far, I’ve been able to turn pencil sketches into vectors quickly¹, as well as scans of real-world-objects.²

1. Normally tracing complex sketches takes me hours ↩
2. I created the fuji logo by scanning + fill-tracing an old, decaying T-Shirt logo ↩

It’s difficult to pick a development stack on Windows. Is Windows development falling into the minority?

For what it’s worth, I prefer C++/QT/Boost/STL on Windows, despite the cost and complexity. C# was disappointing, based on having to deploy the runtime with the application (and lack of portability). Python + QT sound enticing, but really I’m looking forward to Webkit/PHP/Apache.

I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it. — Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO Be, Inc.

Windows 2008 is the Ogre release. It’s available in 8 different bundles, not including the per-user and per-CPU charges. Really, WTF are they thinking? The pricing is complex, expensive, and historically the OS is pretty average. ¹

1. The question is: are there enough enterprise systems tied to Windows Server to support the insanity? ↩

It’s been a few weeks since I booted to my XP partition at home. So when I boot this morning, every single application¹ informs me that it has an update, forcing me to stop everything I’m doing to wait for the downloads and required reboots. It only took 20 minutes, but boy did it take the wind out of my morning productivity.²

Updates impose on your users. When will we get that? We push so many things on the people using our software, without really considering what they want. We argue for the user, with a facade of our own ego, not really knowing or caring what they want (but readily supporting our own viewpoints). Today software sucks.

1. Updates included: Windows update, Trillian, Cygwin (via E), E, and iTunes … bah! ↩
2. Especially annoying was Windows XP, who asked me 3 times if I wanted to reboot ↩

Another release of the e-Editor for Windows. This release (1.0.4) includes: split screen, tab reordering, faster startup, and more.

I’ve noticed a strange thing about developing software on Windows. I’m always on the lookout for good tools, as the operating system doesn’t provide any itself. Windows ships with a reasonable kernel, file system, and barely passable window manager, but that’s about it. Text editor? Terminal emulator? Remote administration tools? Development tools? Archive tools? Scripting tools? What it has are marginal, and you have to hunt down anything even close to reasonable … and even then it’s a crap shoot.

A good terminal emulator, shell, packaging system, and scripting environment are what I miss the most on the platform. Cygwin does a good job of porting some of the familiar *nix tools to Win32, but they’re warty, and always feel out of place. Combine Cygwin with an improved terminal emulator (project home), though, and you end up with something workable. Window management is still a dog, and the Visual Studio, while housing a great compiler and debugger, takes some effort to coerce into a professional, automated, multi-platform build environment. It’s all doable, but man does it lack finesse.

But that’s us developers: idealistic, perfectionist, and occasionally cranky.

Another cmd.exe replacement terminal emulator for Windows. Surprisingly it works in the two cases where all other Windows terminal emulators fail: Cygwin + Bash + resizing, and the SQLite console. Does tabs, custom colours, and comes with source. Sweet.

Now let’s see how stable it is.