Usability

Those that have followed my writings (even from the WebCMSForum days) know I've spent about the past year or two dealing with an aging  PC.  Even the wife, who doesn't always appreciate the geek part of her husband, says it is time for a computer upgrade.  When she says it's time, you know the deadline is near to order up a new computer.

For the past several years I've configured my home PCs with a dual-boot of Windows/Linux.  While there are some things I don't like about Apple's propriety hardware for it's OS, the need for something different has me considering purchasing a Mac.  However, as I posted at the Open Source Community, I've started to wonder if over time the desktops for Linux and the Mac won't be that much different from one another.

KDE 4.0: Why I likely won't get a Mac -

Desktop Linux has an article and shapshots out on the first alpha version of KDE 4.0. The article is titled, KDE 4.0 alpha arrives!.

Features in this alpha version of KDE include:

• A new visual appearance through Oxygen (think Aqua)

In case you missed the news, the Website for FCKeditor is now using the Drupal content management system (CMS). FCKeditor is a HTML text editor with a WYSIWYG interface and is commonly utilized in Web-based applications. The following was posted at the FCKeditor site:

We're proud to announce that, from today, the FCKeditor web site is running over Drupal, one of the best Open Source CMSs out there. After a long research, Drupal has proved to be the best solution to handle our half a million page views monthly, with flexibility and reliability.

I'm working on an ecommerce site using osCommerce to enable the shopping cart functionality for my client's online store. This is the first time I've used osCommerce so I'm still working on improving my comfort level with the application. osCommerce is open source and released under the GNU General Public License. According to the osCommerce site:

A sleepless night for Earl Miles late last week provided the Drupal community a replacement to his Dashboard module. Earl Miles announced a successor to Dashboard at his site, Angry Donuts. The new module is the Panels module and I expect we'll be seeing it used a lot by Drupal's users, especially newcomers of Drupal and those less inclined to dig into the PHP code.

Dashboard the previous module, allowed Drupal developers an easy way to implement "simple" two-column layouts of content (called nodes in Drupal) that are not sidebars. While you can put blocks about anywhere in Drupal, the core doesn't offer an easy way to put content outside the "main body". While dashboard overcame the "single column" for content obstacle, it required knowledge of PHP to implement.