GNOME – Bitstream Vera Fonts

Seems that the Gnome Project has made Vera Fonts widely available now. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to install these (copy the local.conf to /etc/fonts, and copy the .ttf files into ~/fonts before running fc-cache)
I restarted Galeon and kmail to see what it looked like and initially I didn’t like the look of them. I’m still not sure about Kmail, but in the browser they might look ok. I think they look a bit “wide” or something. Time will tell, and I’ll post about this again tomorrow!

Good weekend?

This is just a ping so you know I’m alive. It was a bank holiday weekend here in Ireland so the whole country basically goes gaga for a few days. I haven’t been online since Thursday (5 minutes in an Internet Cafe in Kilkenny doesn’t count!) but a lot’s happened since.
I Smartyised the b2rdf xml feed. It’s not live here yet, but it will be soon. I think I should create a seperate templates folder for xml stuff, as users really don’t have any need to edit those files.
I thought about a rewrite of b2 yesterday. In a reply to another query I laid out some of my plans here on the b2 forums.

TransluXent: Translucent Windows for X

TransluXent: Translucent Windows for X

TransluXent is an implementation of an X Server which uses OpenGL for what would be the graphics card driver. As such it can easily offer translucent windows.

What I find interesting is the fact they used OpenGL as the backend “hardware” of the project. This abstracts the GUI completely from the underlying physical hardware and as long as there’s an OpenGL driver for a particular graphics card X could be made to run in exotic places and do strange things. Commercial OpenGL support for a lot of hardware is probably better than support for X so this is a boon!
My first thought was of a 3D GUI, where you traverse a 3D environment. Your applications live in different parts of the space. Loading an application like Open Office would be represented by a slowly advancing application. The app gets bigger and bigger as it loads (remember, this is in OpenGL, doing this in a decent card won’t hurt the CPU performance!) and finally appears to “snap” into place in front of you!
Keyboard shortcuts are simply a “run mode” or zoom. Would virtual desktops exist? Maybe virtual “application groups” instead.
Enough of that, I await the flaming comments from usability geeks that will surely descend upon me once I post this! *grin*