Barence writes "Mozilla has announced that its plans to bring Office 2007's Ribbon interface to Firefox, as it looks to tidy up its 'dated' browser. 'Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menu bar is going away,' notes Mozilla in its plans for revamping the Firefox user interface. '[It will] be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon, [which is] now in Paint and WordPad, too.' The change will also bring Windows' Aero Glass effects to the browser." Update: 09/24 05:01 GMT by T : It's not quite so simple, says Alexander Limi, who works on the Firefox user experience. "We are not putting the Ribbon UI on Firefox. The article PCpro quotes talks about Windows applications in general, not Firefox." So while the currently proposed direction for Firefox 3.7 involves some substantial visual updates for Windows users (including a menu bar hidden by default, and integration of Aero-styled visual elements), it's not actually a ribbon interface. Limi notes, too, that Linux and Mac versions are unaffected by the change.

nerdyH writes "The first netbook preinstalled with Moblin v2 for Netbooks will launch next week, possibly at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, or else the Linux Foundation's LinuxCon in Portland. Then, within the next couple of weeks, the Moblin Project will release the first stable release of the Moblin v2 Linux distribution, which began beta testing in May."

CWmike writes "Google is developing a product called Fast Flip that aims to make it simpler and faster to browse through news articles on the Web, a process the company says is cumbersome and discourages people from reading more online. Fast Flip, which lets readers glance at pages and browse through them quickly without having to wait for multiple page elements to load, was expected to go live late Monday at the Google Labs Web site. The idea is to try to replicate online the ease with which people flip through the pages of print magazines and newspapers in the offline world. This could motivate people to read more online, which Google argues will help publishers attract more readers and increase their revenue. However, when users click on a Fast Flip link, they will be taken to the corresponding publisher's Web site, where the Google technology will not be on hand to display the page more quickly."

NiteMair writes "The Haiku project has finally released an official R1 alpha, after 8 years of development. This marks a significant milestone for the project, and it also debuts the first official/publicly available LiveCD ISO image that can be easily booted and used to install Haiku on x86 hardware. Haiku is a desktop operating system inspired by BeOS after Be, Inc. closed its doors in 2001. The project has remained true to the BeOS philosophy while integrating modern hardware support and features along the way." Eugenia adds this link to an article describing the history of the OS, along with a review of the alpha version."

appleprophet writes "WebGL is an upcoming standard from the Khronos Group, the same standards body behind OpenCL and OpenGL ES. It defines the use of OpenGL in websites using the standard canvas element. In other words, websites will be able to render hardware accelerated, 3D graphics natively inside of a web page. In the last week, WebKit, the rendering engine behind Safari and Google Chrome, has added initial support for WebGL, which means it probably won't be too long before Macs and iPhones everywhere get OpenGL web apps. This could have big implications for gaming. HTML5 has steadily been encroaching on desktop applications' territory, but I don't think many people expected browser-based, hardware-accelerated graphics this soon."

An anonymous reader writes 'In the article entitled Apple vs. Microsoft — A Website Usability Study, Dmitry Fadeyev, co-founder of Pixelshell, compares Apple's and Microsoft's web sites from a usability perspective, and Apple is the winner. Scott Barnes, PM at Microsoft, agrees with him and suggests the problem is because various site sub-domains have different management.'

The Digital Foundry blog has an article about measuring an important but often nebulous aspect of console gameplay: input lag. Using a video camera and a custom input monitor made by console modder Ben Heck, and after calibrating for display lag, they tested a variety of games to an accuracy of one video frame in order to determine the latency between pressing a button and seeing its effect on the screen. Quoting: "If a proven methodology can be put into place, games reviewers can better inform their readers, but more importantly developers can benefit in helping to eliminate unwanted lag from their code. ... It's fair to say that players today have become conditioned to what the truly hardcore PC gamers would consider to be almost unacceptably high levels of latency to the point where cloud gaming services such as OnLive and Gaikai rely heavily upon it. The average videogame runs at 30fps, and appears to have an average lag in the region of 133ms. On top of that is additional delay from the display itself, bringing the overall latency to around 166ms. Assuming that the most ultra-PC gaming set-up has a latency less than one third of that, this is good news for cloud gaming in that there's a good 80ms or so window for game video to be transmitted from client to server."

sv_libertarian writes "Mozilla recently updated its product roadmap through 2010. According to the first draft, the current browser will see a minor update in Q4 2009 and another in Q2 2010. Version 4.0 is headed for an October or November 2010 release and will bring a new user interface and browser sync integration. 'There is not much information on [what] this new user interface will look like, but the first mockups that have been posted on Mozilla's website suggest that the Mozilla team favors a Google Chrome-like design that integrates Windows 7 graphics features. Overall, window elements seem to be floating over the background.' The mockup page emphatically notes that the design is not final."

angry tapir writes "MenuetOS is an operating system written entirely in assembly language. As a result it's extremely quick and compact (it can even fit on a floppy disk, despite having a GUI). It can run Quake. Two of the developers behind MenuetOS took time out to talk about what inspired them to undertake the daunting task of writing the operating system, the current state of Menuet and future plans for it."

recoiledsnake writes "OpenOffice.org has prototyped a new UI that radically changes the current OO.o interface into something very similar to the new ribbon style menus that Office 2007 introduced and which have been extensively used throughout Windows 7. The blog shows a screenshot of the prototype in Impress (the equivalent of PowerPoint), but this UI is proposed to be used across all OO.o applications. Some commenters on the Sun blog are not happy about OO.o blindly aping Office 2007, and feel that the ribbon UI may be out of place in non-Windows operating systems."

Not many days ago, we mentioned ZDNet's interview with Nicholas Negroponte, in which Negroponte had some harsh things to say about Sugar and its connection to the slower-than-hoped uptake of the XO. Ivan Krstic (formerly head of the OLPC's security innovative subsystem) responded to Negroponte's claims, which he says are "nonsense." Among other things, he mentions that Sugar "was the name for the new learning-oriented graphical interface that OLPC was building, but it was also the name for the entire XO operating system, one tiny part of which was Sugar the GUI, and the rest of which was mostly Fedora Linux."

griffjon writes "In an interview, Nicholas Negroponte claims that the biggest mistake OLPC made was the revolutionary Red Hat-based Sugar desktop environment — instead, he says, they should have built Sugar as an application that ran on a 'vanilla' Linux OS. Some disagree."

kpoole55 writes "I've been googling for an answer to a question and I'm not making much progress. The problem is image collections, and finding the better of near-duplicate images. There are many programs, free and costly, CLI or GUI oriented, for finding visually similar images — but I'm looking for a next step in the process. It's known that saving the same source image in JPEG format at different quality levels produces different images, the one at the lower quality having more JPEG artifacts. I've been trying to find a method to compare two visually similar JPEG images and select the one with the fewest JPEG artifacts (or the one with the most JPEG artifacts, either will serve.) I also suspect that this is going to be one of those 'Well, of course, how else would you do it? It's so simple.' moments."

rift321 writes "VLC media player, which we all know for simplifying the playback of pretty much any codec out there, has finally released version 1.0.0. Here's a quick list of improvements: live recording, instant pausing and frame-by-frame support, finer speed controls, new HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0), new formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS) and major improvements in many formats, new Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder, video scaling in fullscreen, RTSP Trickplay support, zipped file playback, customizable toolbars, easier encoding GUI in Qt interface, better integration in Gtk environments, MTP devices on Linux, and AirTunes streaming."

suka writes "During a keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Nokia's Quim Gil announced that a future release of Maemo is going to be built around Qt. Maemo Harmattan is going to switch away from GTK+ / Hildon, derStandard.at reports from the conference." Michael Pyne also writes with a post describing day one of the conference from a KDE perspective.

Matt Asay writes "Walk the halls of any open-source conference and you'll see a large percentage of attendees with ironically non-open-source Apple laptops and iPhones. One reason for this seeming contradiction can be found in reading Matthew Thomas' classic 'Why free software usability tends to suck.' Open-source advocates like good design as much as anyone, but the open-source development process is often not the best way to achieve it. Open-source projects have tended to be great commoditizers, but not necessarily the best innovators. Hence, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently stated that Red Hat is "focused on commoditizing important layers in the stack." This is fine, but for those that want open source to push the envelope on innovation, it may be unavoidable to introduce a bit more cathedral into the bazaar. Without an IBM, Red Hat, or Mozilla bringing cash and discipline to an open-source project, including paying people to do the 'dirt work' that no one would otherwise do, can open source hope to thrive?"

Mark writes "Usability expert and columnist Jakob Nielsen wants to abolish password masking: 'Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.' I've never been impressed by the argument that 'I can't think why we need this (standard) security measure, so let's drop it.' It usually indicates a lack of imagination of the speaker. But in this case, does usability outweigh security?"

nerdyH writes "Intel's interesting 3D UI technology has arrived at a significant milestone. Emmanuele Bassi on Monday released Clutter 1.0rc1, commenting 'This is a development release of Clutter 0.9 leading towards the 1.0 stable cycle. It is the first release candidate for the 1.0.0 release.' Clutter is a centerpiece of Intel's Moblin stack for netbooks, MIDs, and IVIs. It aims beyond the traditional 2D 'desktop' UI metaphor, stepping up to a 'theatrical' metaphor in which 2D interface objects are likened to 'actors' moving around on a 3D 'stage,' with developers in the role of 'director.' Also updated Tuesday: the Clutter-GTK+ library, aimed at helping GTK+ developers Clutter up their existing apps."

LionMage writes "Much has been made previously of how China's Green Dam software must be installed on all new PCs in China, and of more recent revelations that the software may create exploitable security vulnerabilities or even provide the Chinese government with a ready-made botnet to use for potentially nefarious purposes. (One of those prior articles even discusses how Green Dam incorporates blacklists from CyberSitter.) Now the BBC is reporting that Solid Oak's CyberSitter software may have had more than just a compiled blacklist lifted from it. Solid Oak is claiming that actual pieces of their code somehow ended up in Green Dam. From PC Magazine's article: 'Solid Oak Software, the developer of CyberSitter, claims that the look and feel of the GUI used by Green Dam mimics the style of CyberSitter. But more damning, chief executive Brian Milburn said, was the fact that the Green Dam code uses DLLs identified with the CyberSitter name, and even makes calls back to Solid Oak's servers for updates.'" Relatedly, reader Spurious Logic writes that Green Dam won't be mandatory after all, according to an unnamed official with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

An anonymous reader writes "KDE 4.2.4 has been released. See the release announcement for details." Barring a "security issue or another grave bug," this is the end of the KDE 4.2 line, which means for distros based on long-term support, it might be the thing to get used to for a while.