May 2004 - Posts
You can browse my article - an almost-live report from TechEd 2003 in Barcelona. It's written in Polish, but there is a lot of photos, so you can look a bit. It was written for hardware geeks website, so there is some photos of equipment presented by exhibitors, but other pictures should be more interesting.
And I'm not going this year :( unless I find some last-minute sponsor. It is way too expensive for an individual...
Stupid me. That's how it is when one leaves his duties to the last moment.
For last few days I was translating a manual of FrontRage's GoldMine from English to Polish. That was a real marathon. Since last friday I translated:
- 241 pages
- 39 743 words
- 305 214 characters
My keystroke statistic tool show that since friday i did 467 639 keystrokes. Definitely, for last 24 hours I had a very high typos-and-corections ratio, and I did some other typing (emails, blogging etc.).
It took 9740 minutes, which gives over 162 hours. 162 / 24 = 6 days 18 hours. Since I started working, it is 7 days 5 hours. So it looks i slept 9 hours during this week. Maybe Word's time count is not so accurate, maybe it was 15 hours. But I definitely feel that in my head and bones.
Enough statistics, time to go to sleep. I hope somebody will wake me up at monday morning ;)
PS. I'm not so badly organized. Family matters didn't let me start this project sooner. Thanks to everybody who supported me during last week. Last minute info: It appears that translation is 'flawless'. I'm surprised - I expected a list of corrections to make. That is a GOOD THING!
Few days ago Joe Beda posted a screenshot and description of his WinHEC demo. This is awesome, I really like it. But I have some questions, too.
I see great potential here. My friends talk about Avalon 3D in terms of windows manager and operating system interface (floating windows, animated effects etc.). Now, this is something very different, an actual use of those techniques inside a living application. It's one step to 3D interfaces we know from Sci-Fi movies. Is that future of UI?
I wonder if that kind of user interface would be efficient for users. Did anybody make any usability tests on 3D interfaces, in typical applications? How 3D views could be used in software like word processors, spreadsheets, accounting software? I think we have to be very careful when determinig whether to use that capabilities or not.
There is so much to learn for everybody. If developers can do crappy UI with 2D, we could expect a real flood of overdesigned (and poorly designed) 3D apps, loosing what is the most important in Windows UI: similiarity of applications. We can see it now with flash websites: many of them force users to learn navigation from scratch. I can imagine great applications, though, ex. for real estate agencies. RSS aggregators could surely benefit here: for many users form of real 'virtual bookshelf' could be appealing. 3D gives us many interesting ways to visually categorize information. Embedded systems could visualize state of equipment controlled by them. Desktop games, file system visualization, even email applications. While it is tempting, we have to remember that form cannot be more important than matter. We have to find a right balance. Fortunately we still have enough time to master those decisions - Longhorn is still few years ahead. Let's try.
So, this is it. I finally got a blog. What would become of it? Only time will tell. I hope that I'll find enough time to update it at least daily. What you'll find here? Mostly, I'll be writing here about software development - my pesonal opinions, anecdotes from daily work, links to interesting things I'll find on the web. And some code. Well, sometimes :) Would somebody want to read something like that? Again, time will tell. One last remark: I am not an English speaker. I come from Poland and my native language is Polish. If you see that I wrote something that is gibberish or not understandable - let me know in comment or by email. I want to make my entries available to people from all over the world, so I have to stretch my poor English-writing abilities to maximum. Hope nobody will get offended in that process...
More Posts
« Previous page