Palm, Debian, Grand Central

And yet another Week in Review, number 42 to be exact, so I guess this week is pretty important, you know, with life, the universe, and everything and all that stuff. It wasn’t a particularly strong week or anything, but we still got some interesting stuff to look back upon.

Comparing Windows 7 & Snow Leopard Icons – Last week, Culf of Mac published an article showing off some of Snow Leopard’s beautiful 512×512 icons, revealing some interesting tidbits about them you could only see when the icons are fully maximised. In this article, I compare some of Snow Leopard’s icons to those of Windows 7, and you’ll see while both operating systems have beautiful icons, there are some key differences between the styles of these icons. Note that this article contains some large images, so if you’re on dial-up, you’ve been warned.

Debian: ‘Oh What Tangled Webs We Weave’ – Developer Frans Pop, author of debtree, posted an article showing the evolution in size of the GNOME desktop environment in recent Debian releases. The picture he paints isn’t particularly pretty: the default GNOME install has increased drastically in size over the years.

What Apple Can Learn from Palm – Over the past few days, we’ve seen yet another rollercoaster ride in Apple’s App Store. The fully licensed Commodore 64 emulator, which was rejected earlier this year, was admitted into the App Store yesterday, only to be removed this morning. This tug of war between Apple and its 3rd party developers is getting a bit old, so let’s take a look at a company that treats its 3rd party developers right: Palm.

Microsoft Offers BestBuy Employees Anti-Linux Training – According to a leak from a BestBuy employee, Microsoft is initiating a sort of “Anti-Linux Training” course for the employees, and those who take part in the said training are rewarded with a copy of Windows 7 for only ten dollars. The leaked screenshots of the campaign show Microsoft’s comparison of its own system with an obscure “Linux” and how Windows is better in every way including security, “free downloads”, and software and hardware compatibility.

The Problem with Design and Implementation – I’ve been developing software for quite a few years. One of the issues that seems to come up again and again in my work is this concept of design and implementation. I recall it being a significant part of my education at the University of Waterloo’s Computer Engineering program as well. The message was always the same. Never write code first. First you must design software by writing a design document, flow charts, pseudo-code, timing charts… then it’s merely a trivial matter of implementing it. Make note of the attitude here given towards implementing. The real work is in the design, and it’s just a trivial matter of implementing it. It sounds so simple doesn’t it? Now, how often does this work out in real life?

Palm Rejects First App, More Things Apple Could Learn from Palm – Earlier this week, I detailed a number of things Apple could learn from how Palm handles its phones, operating system, and applications. Today, news broke out of the first application rejection from Palm’s App Catalog, and from this and Palm’s actions surrounding this rejection Apple can again learn a whole lot.

Apple Releases Grand Central Dispatch as Open Source – One of the main new features in Apple’s new Snow Leopard operating system has been released as open source. Apple has released the code of the userland portion of its Grand Central Dispatch technology under the Apache License, version 2. Mac OS X also has kernel support for Grand Central Dispatch, which is also released as open source via the XNU project. While we’re at it, let’s take this opportunity to look into exactly what Grand Central Dispatch is.