My Thoughts

I just found a project that aims to provide complete themes for gnome desktop (i.e. GDM, GTK, Metacity, Emerald, Icons and wallpaper) which are very cool the project is called Bisigi whatever that means!

any way there is like 10 complete sets at the moment but there is more to come to install on ubuntu 9.04 you need the following:

1 – Add the key for the repository

Open a terminal and do:

2 – Add the repository

Add those lines at the end of your sources.list (always in a terminal):
sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

• pour jaunty (9.04)
• pour intrepid (8.10)
• pour hardy (8.04)

3 - Install Themes

Then open a terminal and do: (this command install all themes. If you want to install only one theme, go look here)
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install zgegblog-themes
or click on apt://zgegblog-themes

All the problems in software development starts with at least one of the following:

• Low budget.
• Limited time.
• Limited resources.
• Skipping research and design phase.

Now one of the above will be more than enough to blow up your project for instance lets take a look at the research and design phase if you skipped the research phase you might end up re inventing the wheel and developing a workflow engine while you can use one of the already existing Open Source frame work such as OS workflow which has a dedicated team for developing it and test it, and also it is wildly used and have a good community that you can get help from and last but not least saving much time which will be more useful if used it to focus on your project requirements…etc.

In SWING application the user experience could define the success or the faulier in of your project, is this true? well not necessarily as it depends on the type of your application, the type of users , and as far as I know people don’t pay more for good look(in applications of course)! but a good design does not include only nice looks it also has re usability, extensibility and maintainability  for your application, finally having a good look for your application will promote it…

having sayed this lets look at the dos and don’ts in GUI development:

• Avoid heavily saturated colours, as it will make it even harder to look at the screen!
• Always use native fonts of your OS like Serif and do not manipulate fonts decoration as it could look nice on your machine but it will be very ugly on others machines!
• When using icons try to have them all from the same Icon set or at least match them in a proper way!
• Avoid nested borders and favour using separators.
• Align your components horizontally and vertically.
• Give information when needed.
• Make validation when needed.

For bidirectional applications you have more to care about like:

• Planning to have a mechanism for loading and using multiple translations.
• Providing a mechanism to have your layout flipped according to the language direction.
• using the right UI components that will help you accomplish your task.

Next we will be focusing on bidirectional development and providing some tricks to do this.

Today’s applications are getting more and more complicated and user experience is the main focus to have a successful product, And we all know the huge boost in user experience that web 2.0 has made with it is splashy interfaces and AJAX functionality, but what if the application is not web-enabled what if it is SWING application? is it possible to develop such an application with a good user experience? hopefully this is what I am going to highlight in this series of posts…

My plan is to make the posts in this series on a regular basis but lets leave this to my quality time…

The main aspects am going to talk about are:

• Main features that will enhance a user experience.
• Design Challenges Architects encounter while developing such applications.
• Best practices in making a successful UI interfaces.
• Making flexible bidirectional SWING application.
• Making translatable SWING application.
• Data validation on spot or on submit!
• Data binding between UI Components and application backend beans.
• Theming SWING applications.

This and maybe other subjects will be covered in this series Insha’ Allah.

Till then

Hello All!
It has been a while and I was very busy, I moved to new company and there were too littile time for anything to be done…

anyways I am back with a new theme for both the website and the blog it is really simple an relaxing .

Now hopefully in the near future I’ll get back to bloging and Open Source development… till thenI wish that you will all enjoy my new theme .

c ya!

I have received a mail from a launchpad user that informs me about adding rmconverter to the Arch linux repository…

You can find the package here, also it worth mentioning that it was accepted in the medibuntu repositories and the package can be found here.

Real media converter is meeting a very good success it has been released on 1/1/09 and has a total downloads of 1741 more about real media converter can be found here also it can be downloaded from here.