Even without the Samsung OSG support these days, the Enlightenment project continues making nice progress.
Enlightenment DR 0.24.2 was released today and with it comes several fixes, much faster thumbnail loading for pager, fixed the preloading of icons, various BSD fixes, and a variety of other fixes.
Enlightenment keeps on trucking.
Enlightenment is the window manager/pseudo desktop environment that I keep wanting to like, but every time I try it I just can’t get into it. It almost feels like an alternate timeline of development where computing kept the culture of the late 90’s but continued to develop software into more mature and capable forms.
I suppose this really points out an interesting feature of computing: technology changes so quickly that no set of ideas or cultural values are ever explored. There is always the new shiny to chase, and we have reinvented many ideas and concepts over the last 70 years or so. Virtualization comes to mind, as well as managed languages. Both features were present on the Apollo mission computers, and then seemingly forgotten about until several decades later.
Maybe I’m just getting old enough to notice. Oh well…
FortranMan,
Well after a certain point it all starts blurring together like nothing matters. I’m always interested in technology, but I think I was more passionate about specific technologies when I was younger. It makes me wonder if technological revolutions are inherently subject to diminishing returns. We’ll always be able to cover more ground (given enough resources), but it seems unlikely that we can match the rate of technological progress in the past when there were low hanging fruit to be picked.
I feel like we could do a better job of many tasks in computing, but don’t because of short-term distraction. Improvements to computer languages may be an indication here. We are making progress, but it always feels like the old “three steps forward, two steps back” kind of deal. I suppose it will stay this way for some time. It reminds me of an under-damped harmonic oscillator.
Part of the problem in language design is that people spent decades either solving the wrong problems, or solving them in ways inapplicable to systems programming, which meant you had to give up all the language advances to hit a performance target. The recent rise in systems languages that are not derived from C is a good sign.