It's been a while and I've been busy, but I did manage to spend a little time with my Aspire One today.
I realized that the one thing that botheres me more than anything in the (otherwise generally lovely) interface is the URL field. It should not be placed at the top where you risk activating the menu - and to make matters worse, you have to click the field to make it active after clicking the Internet icon.
In my humble opinion it would be wise to have the URL field be opposite of the menus - at the bottom of the screen - and have it slide off screen when it is not used (similar to the top menu). It's not what people are used to, but nor is the sliding menu placement in Moblin, and it would make sense.
Alternatively an icon could activate the URL field and have it slide out below the top menu.
tirsdag den 16. juni 2009
lørdag den 6. juni 2009
M_zone oops!
Looks like the latest updates (I'm running unstable) to Moblin broke the social stream in m_zone. At least clicking on them (both last.fm and twitter posts) makes the graphical interface disappear for a few seconds and then it comes back up. The browser windows in the middle of the screen still work fine, though.
torsdag den 4. juni 2009
Getting started
The main feature, so to speak, of Moblin is the home screen - known as "m_zone". Here you can launch your favourite applications, see your calendar items, to-do list and your recently visited sites. The far right side of the screen is dedicated to social networks, and here you get updates from sites like Last.fm and Twitter. (In case you want to follow my ramblings, you can sign up here.)
There are options for synchronizing your data - such as calendars - with several services, but none of them were familiar to me. I hope to see support for some of the services I currently use (Google's/Plaxo's/Yahoo's services) eventually. Luckily you can get to the data in a browser, but if the calendar etc. won't be used it would be better to have the option to dedicate them to other data.
Generally the m_zone is a great idea. It gives you an overview of what matters to you in a simple and fairly consistent manner, but there is clearly room for improvement. For instance I'd like to be able to dedicate more room to updates from social networks and less room (if any) to recently visited sites. In fact I think that if I want any sites there at all, they should be entirely configurable, so I can have my daily sites ready for clicking rather than what I've happened to visit the most recently.
It would also be good if you could always see the text/user in updates from social networks. It may look slightly less cluttered, but having to hold my mouse over a widget to see what I want to know will kill the functionality for me - resulting in me just logging into the various sites to see updates listed in full.
More impressions to come...
There are options for synchronizing your data - such as calendars - with several services, but none of them were familiar to me. I hope to see support for some of the services I currently use (Google's/Plaxo's/Yahoo's services) eventually. Luckily you can get to the data in a browser, but if the calendar etc. won't be used it would be better to have the option to dedicate them to other data.
Generally the m_zone is a great idea. It gives you an overview of what matters to you in a simple and fairly consistent manner, but there is clearly room for improvement. For instance I'd like to be able to dedicate more room to updates from social networks and less room (if any) to recently visited sites. In fact I think that if I want any sites there at all, they should be entirely configurable, so I can have my daily sites ready for clicking rather than what I've happened to visit the most recently.
It would also be good if you could always see the text/user in updates from social networks. It may look slightly less cluttered, but having to hold my mouse over a widget to see what I want to know will kill the functionality for me - resulting in me just logging into the various sites to see updates listed in full.
More impressions to come...
First impressions
After seeing a few videos on Moblin.org and Youtube, I decided that the interface in Moblin was unique in more ways than one. First of all this was something that gathered your social information in one place whilst being extremely task oriented. Very apropriate for a netbook such as mine. I'd been running Windows XP Home on it, and while it ran OK considering the platform, it's just not my thing. I'm basically a very impatient person and endless swapping and slow response times do not sit well with me. Secondly this was a very strong and consistent look and behaviour for an F/OSS system - which has been one of my main issues with other offerings.
It didn't take me long to grab an image of the Moblin 2.0 beta/preview. I grabbed my trusty Xbox 360 HD DVD-player and hooked it up to the USB port of my Aspire One. Moblin has a nice liveboot feature, where you can actually see if you hardware works as expected. I found that I could log onto my wireless network and things seemed to work generally, so that was the end of Windows on this machine.
The installation is very, very simple, although I believe the formatting choices could be made even friendlier for newcomers. It's very easy to do a complete format and install, though. I'm glad I didn't try mixing it up with several operating systems at a time, even though it is entirely possible.
The system generally works fine, although it has issues waking up from standby. This doesn't matter much, however, as the system shuts down and boots in a matter of seconds, so I've simply started using that instead. Pretty much everything I do is stored in the cloud anyway, so it's not as if I'm dependent on saving states and data locally.
Other minor niggles include the wireless network manager not automatically reconnecting to known good networks, but I'm being told that this is as good as fixed and should be out soon. I'm looking forward to this, even though it's certainly easy and fast to log on as it does save WEP/WPA passwords just fine.
It didn't take me long to grab an image of the Moblin 2.0 beta/preview. I grabbed my trusty Xbox 360 HD DVD-player and hooked it up to the USB port of my Aspire One. Moblin has a nice liveboot feature, where you can actually see if you hardware works as expected. I found that I could log onto my wireless network and things seemed to work generally, so that was the end of Windows on this machine.
The installation is very, very simple, although I believe the formatting choices could be made even friendlier for newcomers. It's very easy to do a complete format and install, though. I'm glad I didn't try mixing it up with several operating systems at a time, even though it is entirely possible.
The system generally works fine, although it has issues waking up from standby. This doesn't matter much, however, as the system shuts down and boots in a matter of seconds, so I've simply started using that instead. Pretty much everything I do is stored in the cloud anyway, so it's not as if I'm dependent on saving states and data locally.
Other minor niggles include the wireless network manager not automatically reconnecting to known good networks, but I'm being told that this is as good as fixed and should be out soon. I'm looking forward to this, even though it's certainly easy and fast to log on as it does save WEP/WPA passwords just fine.
Moblin 2.0
Welcome to my blog about Moblin.
I'll be covering my experiences and thoughts about Moblin, which is an interesting new operating system for small computers and devices (potentially even more in time).
I'd like to get out of the way that I'm writing this due to my enthusiasm about Moblin, but I will point out all the issues I run into in my day to day use of the system.
For the record I am running Moblin on an Acer Aspire One ZG5 at the moment.
Please bear in mind that some of my issues may be relative non-issues. Documentation is scarce and there may be solutions to my problems that I am not yet aware of.
I'll be covering my experiences and thoughts about Moblin, which is an interesting new operating system for small computers and devices (potentially even more in time).
I'd like to get out of the way that I'm writing this due to my enthusiasm about Moblin, but I will point out all the issues I run into in my day to day use of the system.
For the record I am running Moblin on an Acer Aspire One ZG5 at the moment.
Please bear in mind that some of my issues may be relative non-issues. Documentation is scarce and there may be solutions to my problems that I am not yet aware of.
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