For my next talks on IICO and may on TYPO3 Camp Berlin i bought a nice Phillips SNP 3000 presentation stick. It is made for OS X and Windows and so i get sure it will run on Ubuntu Linux too. The USB hardware was identified (use dmesg on shell) but it didn't work at all
After some tries on a Mac i figured out that it runs their only when using teh USA keyboard option. So i added an additional "USA" keyboard layout to my Ubuntu Lucid (System > Preferences > Keyboard). Now anything works fine in Evince (PDF) and OpenOffice Impress and.
While the presenter stick works like a simple keyboard device it is software independent and can be used on any software.
Did you recognized there so much new OS stuff around: We have Android 3, WebOS 3, Ubuntu 11.04 with own interface, Gnome 3, Apple 10.7. "Lion" and most ugly and not much innovative Windows 8. iOS5 (from Apple too) will coming soon. So it seems computing, user experience and interaction design will start into a much reinvented era (ok may not on Windows) and i'm eager to see which concepts work and which does not.
So many people missed new stuff here, so i decided to restart blogging again about web development, graphics, handy tools, design and 3D.
So may you yourself how my desktop looks like, here is a screeny of it: I'm using Ubuntu Lucid with hidden top panel and Gnome Do (i really love the combination as launcher and dock). I created my own theme based on the Finery theme and a much extended version of the Eikon icons.
The Gnome Color Management project has now it's own website. GNOME Color Manager is a session framework for the GNOME desktop environment that makes it easy to manage, install and generate color profiles. They integrated ArgyllCMS for calibrating devices. A lot of the progress and the details can be found on Richard Hughes blog too.
This year seems to be a year of operating systems. There was Ubuntu Jaunty, Moblin 2, the announcement of Chrome OS, Snow Leopard from Apple, WebOS for the Palm Pre and Windows 7. Besides the release of Jaunty all these releases has no real impact to me but today i switched to Ubuntu Karmic Koala which is another fine Ubuntu release - and that rocks me
Over GetDeb.net i explored various interesting image utilies (most of them i'd like to see as a GIMP plugin):
Seam Carving GUI ...a utility for content aware image resizing very simliar to the Liquid Rescale plugin for GIMP (inluded in the package GIMP-plugin-registry). Seam Carving GUI is available for MacOS X and Windows too.
Tintii ...is a coloring utility - available for Photoshop too but not for GIMP
Smilla Enlarger ...raster image enlarger that uses smart curves algorithms to avoid pixelization and blurring artifacts. Smilla Enlarger is available for MacOS X and Windows too.
Just a month after the first Blender 2.49 update a secound update is available. Blender 2.49b brings quite a lot of fixes to the open source 3d suite. All improvements listed at the release log page. Deb packages for Ubuntu are available at GetDeb.net.
BTW: At the Siggraph 2009, the world biggest event about 3D, a Blender 2.5 preview was presented by the Blender Foundation. A preview of Blender 2.5 is available online too.
A first view of possible interface changes of Firefox 4 are available. May they look very simliar to Safari 4 and Opera 10 but i really like these first steps: I do not know why they choose the ugly Vista screen first but may there is the userbase of the future.
Pavel Kanzelsberger, the developer of the image editor Pixel, wrote at his blog again that the release of the Pixel 1.0 comes closer. He presented a distributor for it too. This isn't the first message about a final release and after so much announcements it isn't save if this will really happend.
After the last security updates 8.1.3 and 8.1.4 now the new Adobe Reader 9.1 is available for Linux too. Like ever it isn't the fast PDF viewer for daily usage (like Envince) but it is the best PDF viewer for prepress.
You love professional open source graphics software? Then support the Libr Graphics Meeting 2009.
At this event developers and users can get together to share ideas and visions. This time it took place from 6-9 May in Montreal (Canada). Your donation is needed to make it possible developers of important projects can be there.
[/img]Last year at the Ubucon'08 i'm getting involved designing a new flyer for Ubuntu Germany. After Julius Bloch poked us again and again, end of last year Thomas Keup and me was thinking about the message. Based on the workshop of the Ubucon'08 and our brainstorming Thomas created a really cool text for it. And so it was now on me creating a really cool design that fits to this superb text.