Darkelve

Sometimes I hate working with Windows ... especially file management, Windows Explorer... any improvements for that in Vista?

It's even worse at work... they've locked down almost everything so that you can't set your own wallpaper (well, sort of :ph34r: ) or icons in the task bar... which makes me have to resort to silly hacks like putting my frequently-used applications (outside from those showing up in start menu) in my 'Favorites' in windows explorer... not very fun at all.

Sort of a critical question (hope you forgive me for asking :P ): how can you claim that it's so far behind if Vista isn't even out yet?

Because I've run the beta and I know what the feature set for it is. There's no features (ok, maybe like...2, if that) that are going to be in it that weren't in the beta, they're just trying to fix bugs and make it stable right now.

Aargh... another Apple salesman! They're everywhere!!

methinks you need to buy an apple

Anyway, someone on the Suseforums (see link at bottom of first post), already gave some reasons why this could give problems...

so perhaps this one's just wishful thinking...

Little intro (you can skip this if not interested)

So... I got myself an iPod nano last week. And I'm enjoying it very much.

But I decided, since I'm always carrying around already anyway, why not

take advantage of some of the 'calendar' (ical format) and 'contacts' (vcard format)

features that it has?

The task

So I searched my whole C: partition and mailbox for relevant contacts and their

associated contact information... in order to put it into vcard format and transfer

it to the iPod... and I was thinking "what an incredibly boring and time-consuming

task"...

A possible solution: 'contextual search'

Then I remembered my 'magnetic folders' idea... and I realized that, there is a pattern

to these things... people's contact information normally is in a file, for example :

- file with email address and name

- file with name and phone number

Then, the name can often be "guessed" from the e-mail address itself.

E.g. firstname.lastname@mycompany.com

With an intelligent search engine, and some level of pattern recognition,

the computer should fill out the vcards I want to make *for* me, and/or

put them in my address book.

For example:

- I receive an e-mail from john.doe@company.com, containing telephone number

- I already created a text file some where with notes about John Doe

- I receive more e-mail messages from John Doe, without the contact info

- When cleaning up my mailbox, I delete the original mail containing John Doe's phone number

Now when I want to create a vcard of John do, or put him in my address book, I have several

problems:

- The information I need is spreaded across the entire filesystem

- I lost the telephone number when cleaning up my mailbox

- I still have to manually enter all info into vcard format. That may not be too bad for one or a couple of contacts, but if I have dozens of contacts it's a lot of work...

Sample Implementation

A sample implementation of the solution:

Create a 'contexual search' + action which searches the entire file system,

uses pattern matching to determine phone numbers, e-mail addresses, address

information, ... and exports this information into the desired format, in this case:

vcard. So in fact it tries to auto-fill in the fields for you.

Of course, 'automatic' may also mean 'has errors', so an intermediary step is advised.

One possiblity is to show a special 'view' in e.g. Kontact that shows the suggestions

the tool made. Then you can either approve it, or edit some fields before approving,

or rejecting it (bogus entries).

If this had already been running, I wouldn't have lost John Doe's phone number, since

a big 'feature' of the solution is: 'as soon as there is file activity, and it matches a rule: do something with it'.

And there you go, automatic address book entries by searching through e-mails, files

on the filesystem, and exporting it all to a relevant format, be it vcard or some other

standard format.

Someone sends me e-mail with their phone number in, to my addressbook it goes. Someone

hands me a CD-Rom with a business proposal or presentation, it gets added (after approval).

Never loose sight of your contact again... at least that's the whole idea...

Discussion also running on SuSeforums.net: http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?s=&amp...st&p=128020

I think 'Web 2.0' really means "We didn't get Web 1.0 quite right... so let's try to do it proper this time, and call it 2.0"... the only big difference I see is in the asynchronous stuff, which is extremely useful, but only for certain types of applications.

Not very smart to launch the term when the explosion of the Dot Com bubble is still fresh in peoples memories.

web 2.0, to me, is just a sort of "idea", mainly in my mind it refers to web site design...but then i don't really care...

None. Vista is so far behind both Linux and OS X it's almost laughable.

Sort of a critical question (hope you forgive me for asking :P ): how can you claim that it's so far behind if Vista isn't even out yet?

Yes, I would also like it to boot faster... seconds, if possible, not (a whole) minute(s)...

I know... I spent half of the week browsing the Apple.com website and store.

I wish I was rich... then I'd get a MacBook Pro and iMac <sob>

The main thing I want my desktop to do, is save me time when doing my daily tasks.

OS X has a very nice tool for that sort of thing, called Automator - check it out ;)

Same here... plus most 'fair' music download services (independent artists etc.) use mp3.

I'd use OGG if I could, but at the moment it's just not practical. Ipod4Linux I'd rather avoid ATM... too risky.

If anyone knows the adventure game 'Paradise' though (from creator of Syberia games), I saw that the sound (voice) files were in .ogg format, probably in major part because it's royalty free.

I prefer ogg, the quality of the sound is often less...murky. Unfortunately, my little black iPod only plays mp3 format...and so, I was forced to convert various ogg files to mp3.

I'm thinking Vista will have a very hard time winning peoples hearts over... and their wallets. Plus, after it has been launched, it has to be supported as well.

What I am wondering is, can Microsoft split up its programmers among those supporting Vista, and working on a new OS, and still keep up with the level of innovation going on in alternative operating systems? Especially since they've got a lot less room to 'experiment'.

If Boot Camp will be able to run Vista reliably as well... it's an interesting time in the OS space now, with all of these big and smaller players on the stage, that's for sure.

Speaking about Boot Camp again, if I were at Apple, I'd seriously invest some resources looking into things like fast booting, or virtualization if that's possible without any loss of functionality. So you are in OSX and you could, like, say, boot into Windows and 5 seconds later you are there. I'm wondering if no kind of trick could be used for this, like suspending a Windows session to disk as laptops like to do, then 'awakening' it when the user switches the OS and suspend the Apple OSX to disk. Something like that.

The main thing I want my desktop to do, is save me time when doing my daily tasks. In that respect, Windows XP is really the worst of the bunch for me... never really realized before what a mess it often is... the only saving grace it has, is that there are so many time-saving programs for it, but the OS itself is actually not very productive, which IMO especially shows in file management and exploration.

None. Vista is so far behind both Linux and OS X it's almost laughable. I've installed the public beta they had out, believe me, there's nothing new there for anyone who's used either OS X or Linux with the XGL/Compiz combination. Even the X composite extension does most of what Vista does, visually. All the underpinnings have been in other OS's for some time.

I'm always interested in what major OS-companies are doing with the OS and desktop. So I was very happy to see a video with a Leopard 'preview' in it on Apple's website:

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/aug_...vent/index.html

OS Part is right after they talk about the Mac Pro and then Xserve ( r ).

Also here is a Leopard Sneak Peak: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/

What do you think about it?

Personally it looks really cool to me, but as with every

technology, it has to prove its worth first.

The seeming innovations in the OS and desktop, combined with Boot Camp, however, make

me *very* seriously considering getting a Mac desktop or notebook.

In your opinion:

- How does Linux hold up to this?

- What should Linux, as a desktop OS contender, be doing to catch up or surpass in certain areas?

- What role do you think Vista will play in all of this?

Pretty funny moments in the video as well... you might get a good laugh from it at some points.

Darkelve

P.S. Also discussed at SuSe forums dot net: http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?act=ST...t=0#entry127587

Having had more of a think, it would be handy if Linux could run photoshop,illustrator and microsoft office (although OpenOffice does most of the MS stuff OK) natively. It would make my life easier!

Take a look here:

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/toplists/

Illustrator, no luck I'm afraid...

I think he meant '3D simulation' though... like the rotating cubes in XGL... which are probably very handy for a lot of people.

I don't think 3D will ever really be useful on a desktop system as we know it. Our displays are 2D, therefore the most efficient way to display information is in 2D. It's quite a pain to work in 3D on a computer...I'd hate to have to do it every time I boot up. You'd need a true 3D display and 3D input devices for that to really work.

Is there a way to start from an existing distro, make modifications (iconset, menu settings, installed applications, shortcuts, scripts, ...) and then save that as a new 'customized distro' ?

I raise you $20 with a prior-art card! :P

Quick - patent this idea!

Okay, now I think I know why this is...

ipod uses its own music database, so songs have to be saved in that format. You can't just copy a bunch of mp3's onto the disk (I think), you have to import them so the music database gets properly populated... at least I think it's like that... same with images I believe?.

Strangely enough you can copy text files to it and that'll work like expected.

I like it so far, after one day of intensive (constant :P) use.

Sounds fairly useless to me.

Anyway I don't have an i-pod, so maybe I don't get it.

Hey, I can't find an RPM package for kreplace... any possibility this could be done with the usual bash commands (cp, mv, rn, ...)? Or would that be too difficult?

Any comments about things concerning menus, window management, user switching, multitasking, multimedia capabilities, workflows, ... ?

Anything concrete that you thought "damn! This shouldn't be this hard!" or "If only I could do it THIS way"...

Disclaimer: jokes are fine in this thread, but this is not a joke thread. I would like to avoid having 20 replies saying 'to cook my dinner'.

How do you use your computer? What functionality rules/sucks? What bothers you in the operating systems you use? If you could have your computer do anything for you, to do something or make it more efficient doing something, what would you wish for?

Not a prob....

I just wanted to check you are still interested and that it is providing the functionality before I do any UI programming.

I'm still interested. It just doesn't ever seem to work out! (getting to try it out, no the script itself). I'm starting to feel guilty about it.

I'm currently at my job, and in the evening there's supper with my grandparents, but I just wanted to say that I *do* appreciate you taking the time and effort to write out these scripts, Gowator.

Hi sorry I still haven't gotten to try it... installing software on SuSe is pure hell at the moment... ZMD goes berserk on me and SMART is useful but I still need to learn my way around... I WILL try it, I took some to try it, but not today anymore... I'm sick of all the problems with updates & installations... enough for today.

1. What is "kat" ?

2. I haven't tried the others yet, still have to install Kreplace. But I'm going to try the simpler ones first before I try the last. Some practice certainly can't hurt, I think.

3.

We have system sounds and icons, backgrounds etc. etc. etc. these can be part of a theme so they are not only a subdir of your user directory but also owned by you or system icons etc... imagine the mess all the system icons suddenly being moved!

 

To this end I see you have types (docs, audio, pictures etc.) and you have directories for them....

No, I'm still assuming everything outside of /home/user/ should be excluded... unless you specifically *enable* inclusion of certain directories outside of this like, say, /var/www/html

Me neither. Well, I was supposed to get it today, but I missed delivery, so it'll be tomorrow.

But it's supposed to be useful... so I'm glad Amarok, which I'm using anyway, claims to have it. It also has something to do with some service running in the background I believe...

Oh, another example...

For my job I manage our corporate website, and I get a lot of word and PDF-files e-mailed to me daily... what I do each month is create a folder structure something like "/current/month/province/sender/" and dump the attachments in there. For example:

/current/august/california/tom/pdf/ (if PDF file)

/current/august/california/tom/word/ (if word document)

If I could create a rule using the information present in the e-mail (or Lotus Notes database), then I could get this done for me automatically! I would never have to mess with these folder things again; as soon as the filesystem is updated (e.g. I opened the e-mail), it gets copied to the proper location. It might even be possible to create 'dynamic favorites/bookmarks' this way. For example, this month '/current/august/' is in my Favorites in Windoze Explorer. Next month it'll be /current/september ... indeed.

Pretty icon on desktop, like you would for USB stick? Synching from&to ipod? ...

I think ?