Tag bugs

Did we really release 8.04?

The question serves as the subject of the eponymous thread on the ubuntu-devel mailing list. And it's quite valid. I'm really saddened to see the flawed argument put forward by several Ubuntu developers that 8.04 was a right decision. Even today, more than two months since 8.04 was released and some days after 8.04.1 came out, with hundreds of megabytes of updates the problems affecting 8.04 are numerous, major and extremely annoying. We still have a long way to go before reaching parity with the best (viz. OS X), let alone surpassing it. Judging by the responses on that thread, the first step would need to be the end of the state denial as a defence mechanism, acknowledging the fact that the 8.04 release (as well as 8.04.1) were full of show-stopper bugs and reminiscent of an era when desktop linux was infinitely more annoying than it is today and working towards quality (cf. punctuality). A 'release' should translate to 'usable, polished software', not 'alpha quality developer preview software'. 8.04 seemed more like the latter than the former and that needs to change.

Resampling Needed

Those using Firefox 3.0 may have noticed that by default when someone scales the content of a page, the images are resized too, a behaviour long-pioneered by Opera. Those using Firefox 3.0 on linux will be sorry to find out that upscaled images are not resampled using anything but what seems to be nearest neighbour (I haven't checked the code): they are ugly, pixelated and definitely not pleasant to the eye. This is well documented on the Mozilla Bugzilla repository and sadly it may be the case that it's not fixed until Firefox 3.0 final is out. Which is a shame, as many people with higher resolution displays, especially high-resolution laptop displays that sometimes reach approximately 150dpi actually depend on the scaling functionality to be able to read stuff properly. Ironically GTK+ offers pretty decent image scaling functionality and hopefully it's not that hard to make use of it in Firefox in the near future. Here's an illustration of the problem. The picture on the left shows the original (unscaled) content of the ΜΠΛΟΟΓΚΛ hellenic blog search engine. The one in the middle shows the scaled version, as shown in Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 that shipped with Ubuntu 8.04. The one on the right shows a resampled version of the image using the (pretty computationally expensive) lanczos algorithm, which although not probable as a solution it's quite close to the (realistically possible) bilinear resampling for upscaled images of this size. Image Upscaling in Firefox 3.0B5 (Linux) You can follow the progress on this issue on the Mozilla Bug tracking page here.

Injury to Insult.

One of my main annoyances with OS X since 10.0 was Terminal.app. My UNIX background requires a decent terminal application and Terminal.app more or less traditionally embodied everything that can possibly be wrong with a terminal application. Up until Leopard, Apple had paid little attention to it and many people had forsaken it for applications such as iTerm. Sadly I never quite liked iTerm, I don't fancy starting X11 up just for the terminal and so I ended up tolerating Terminal.app and hoping that Apple would fix it in the future. I couldn't --- and still can't --- understand how Gnome and KDE provide so much more powerful terminal applications and Apple, the goliath of usability and design, provides such a ridiculous terminal. Or can I? In Mac OS X Leopard, Apple revamped its terminal application. Unfortunately the revamp is nothing but insulting to those people that are most probably going to be using it the most. One of the longstanding issues with the previous versions was the inability to set the ANSI colours so that coloured text could be legible under dark or light backgrounds. In 10.5 Apple has introduced several 'themes', including a number of dark themes provided by the company, (viz. 'Pro'), that use dark backgrounds. Yet actually using those themes is practically impossible with the OS X default ANSI colours and there's no way to change these colours: they are still hard-coded in the binary. The usual solutions are still there, using InputManagers, SIMBL etc. or giving up on Terminal.app and switching to another terminal application, yet so is my dislike for any of those solutions. Given the work that Apple has clearly put in providing the 'theming' functionality --- including a wholly new configuration system and theme inspector it's quite perplexing why they 'omitted' providing support for setting the ANSI colours given that it's been one of the most commented upon, criticised omissions of this application for the past six years. If anything it seems to me like Apple is taunting its users with such ridiculous 'improvements' and the completely needless attention to detail (e.g. 'live' thumbnails on the terminal inspector!), while it ignores real problems faced by those that make use of its software.