After releasing the Look And Feel and the Colorizer tool, I’m now working on the upcoming Windowblinds release of Squareness. It’s been a long time since the last Windowblinds release - nearly 7 months now. In the meantime Windowblinds 4.4 was released and new features were made available to skinners.

I have already fixed a bug, which really annoyed me during the past months. In Squareness 1.2 for Windowblinds the “More Programs” section is - at least on my computer - sometimes highlighted with the green activation color that is used everywhere else in Squareness and quite often it is also highlighted with a dark blue color, which looks like shit. Well, black color on dark blue background simply looks like shit though there is nothing brownish in that. If I remember correctly this wasn’t always the case. I think when I released this version, the bug wasn’t there yet. To make it short, I found the bug. I was searching through SkinStudio, to find any new yet unused features and found this start panel highlighting color. And suddenly it works. Funny thing is that Windowblinds behaved totally indeterministic without this color. I thought this to be a bug in Windowblinds. It must have thrown dice each time it loaded.

One other thing I fixed is the horizontal task bar. While looking ok, it was far from perfect. I have played around with it yesterday and today, until I finally understood how it works. Seems like I had a total misconception about it. As I was at it I made it a bit thinner. It’s now only 26 pixels high. I tried to make it thinner than that, but it wouldn’t go all that well with the rest of Squareness. I have still to look into horizontal quick launch buttons , which I do not use, and play the whole game again for the vertical task bar.

I’ve also added XP progress bars. Strangely Windowblinds paints a 3D lighting effect around the normal progress bar out of its own. So you simply cannot have a flat progress bar. No matter what you do, it becomes 3D. The new XP progress bar doesn’t paint anything other that what is specified in the skin. So finally there’s a flat progress bar in the Squareness skin and it looks much better now. The way was very stony partly because it is very poorly documented in SkinStudio. Another problem was with the way I was handling this. I thought I could play around with the horizontal variant and rotate it once it was finished to make the vertical one. The problem is that you have to do both at the same time to make them work. Both have to have the same properties. So when you specify a chunk size of 2 in the horizontal variant, the vertical variant must also have a chunk size of 2. If you don’t follow this scheme, it will all be ignored and the default values will be used.

Also quite annoying is the start panel. I don’t use it all that often, but each time I do, I see how bad it is. The colors are ok, but it’s too big and bulky. I’ll play around with compact start panels soon.

After all this is done or maybe somewhere in between, I’ll extend Colorizer to create subskins. It won’t be able to do it on it’s own. You’ll need SkinStudio for the process. I could develop Colorizer in such a way that it would make the whole subskins itself. That’s not really the problem. The format of the Windowblinds files, which are INI-files with specific sections and properties, is easy to understand. The problem is that the format is copyrighted by Stardock. I have negotiated with Stardock about a “no royalties license” that would allow me to parse and write those files. Unfortunately the negotiation didn’t have the desired outcome. Stardock proposed a contract to me that would allow me to do what I wanted, but this contract has a little hook to it. Anyone working on the Colorizer code would have to sign the contract. While at sight this contract seems to be ok and without any negative effects, it would have hindered me from distributing Colorizer as Open Source. How could I make sure, that everyone looking through the Colorizer code and possibly deriving other applications from it, signs the contract. No way. At first this looked like the end of the Windowblinds part of Colorizer, but now I think that the inclusion of SkinStudio in the process will do the trick.

When I started developing Squareness more than a year ago, SkinStudio looked like one of the most complicated applications to me and I resorted to editing the INI-files by hand with jEdit. In the last couple of days I have changed to SkinStudio again and am quite satisfied with it now. Funny thing, but I think that because I got to know UIS1+, which is the Windowblinds format I use, from the background without embellishments and convenient tools, I can find my way faster through the dungeons of SkinStudio. Back then when I started it was too much at once. Now it all makes more or less sense. That said I don’t mean that there is nothing to be improved in SkinStudio. It surely could be better in terms of usability and comprehensibility. One thing Stardock could do, is improve the documentation. The worst thing is to see “Undefined” or nothing at all in the help window when you click on a property. So it’s often making and proving assertions. And more likely than not the proof will fail. So making a Windowblinds skin is an adventure that tends to get boring if the tenth assertion about something also cannot be proven.

Firefox 1.0 PR and Thunderbird 0.8

In the last week Firefox 1.0 Preview Release and Thunderbird 0.8 were released.

The Firefox release was originally planned for July, but has been postponed again and again. Finally it is here. Two new features of Firefox are really neat. The first one I stumbled upon is that the URL bar has a yellow background while visiting a secure site. You don’t need to search for the lock icon in the status bar. This yellow URL bar boldly tells you “You are on a SSL site now”. Very nice.

The second feature is called FastFind. Users of jEdit and other applications will probably know this feature as Hypersearch. As soon as you press CTRL-F a search bar opens at the bottom of the window. At first this is a bit irritating and you catch yourself pressing CTRL-F and muttering “Where’s that f… search dialog” until your eyes find the search bar. But when you get used to it, it’s kind of cool. Nice thing is - the Hypersearch part comes now - that Firefox marks the nearest matching position while you type. So sometimes how can stop typing in the middle because Firefox already marks what you searched.

Another feature which is quite useless to me is Live Bookmarks. You can bookmark an RSS feed and Firefox will change it into some kind of folder that always contains the current contents of the feed. I’m using a real feed aggregator so this is nothing for me. For occasional RSS users this might be quite useful. As Ben Goodger points out this feature is not meant to be a full fledged aggregator. Anyways, sometimes it can be quite useful for aggregator users. Some sites that have RSS feeds available, are quite successful in hiding them. On those sites Firefox might find it in the meta data of a page. In that case you will see a nice RSS icon on the right side of the status bar. Click on that icon, subscribe to the feed, right-click on the feed in the bookmarks menu and copy the feed URL. Would be nice to have another menu item on that icon “Copy feed URL”. That would spare me creating the bookmark.

I was using some of the Thunderbird nightlies, so there wasn’t that much new for me. Thunderbird now includes Forumzilla. I used Forumzilla some time back and it is quite good, if you like to view your feeds in the e-mail application.

One very nice new feature of Thunderbird 0.8 is automatic remote image blocking which can be switched off for individual e-mails. Earlier it was: View all remote images or none. Some of the ads I get I’m actually interested in. So for them I switch off image blocking. The others stay blocked

After a long wait there are finally news from Squareness. The new release - 2.0 -, which was long planned and takes even longer to finish, concentrates on color theme support.

The new tool - Colorizer - allows you to create new themes in no time. You don’t have to deal with theme files and RGB values yourselves. This is all handled by Colorizer. You only have to make your choices and select the colors. The tool contains a preview that shows you how the colors play together. So you shouldn’t be forced to deploy the theme, try it out, change it, deploy it again etc. The current preview doesn’t show all of the colors and it doesn’t show all controls either. This will be taken care of while it moves from the current 0.7 release to 1.0.

The 1.0 release of Colorizer will also add the generation of Windowblinds subskins for the Squareness skin. Colorizer 1.0 will be released together with Squareness for Windowblinds 2.0, which will be updated to use the new features of Windowblinds 4.4

Back to Squareness Look And Feel. Before I began developing the Look And Feel, I have played around with some other Look And Feels like Kunststoff or Metouia. They all have themeing support that is based on the Metal themeing support. This kind of support is good for developers. They can write an own theme class and load it into the Look And Feel. From the perspective of a user who wants to use a Look And Feel with an own color theme on an application he cannot or doesn’t want to change the source of, this kind of support is too poor. Therefore I have come up with a new level of themeing support.

There are two parts in the themeing support of Squareness Look And Feel: theme files and theme packages. Theme files are nothing new. Other applications and most likely also some Look And Feels have used them before. They are simple properties files containing name-value-pairs, where the names are the names of the colors and the values are the RGB values to be used for the specified color names.

Theme packages are zip files that bundle one or more theme files and a special file named themeselector.slfts. The special file is the one which makes the difference though it contains only a single line currentTheme=themefilename. Just place the theme package into the classpath of an application that uses Squareness Look And Feel. Squareness Look And Feel will find themeselector.slfts and will automatically load the specified theme file. I place both squareness.jar and themeselector.slfts into my jre/lib/ext directory. A peculiarity of this directory is that all files and folders that reside in it are automatically added to the classpath of any application which is started by this JRE. I think this is the most simple way to bring themeing support of Look And Feels to the end users.

As I am into talking about Squareness now, let’s add this small bit: I know I have promised to release a skin for Firefox. It is long overdue, but I have great hopes to get it finished this year. As soon as Squareness for Windowblinds 2.0 is out, I should have enough time to finish it.

Yesterday I got carried away with talking about the dream and fear of robots. I actually forgot to talk about the thing because of which I started writing the blog entry. I will make up for that now.

The thing that really annoyed me about “I, Robot” was the very unsubtle product placements. Ok there is nothing to say against product placement. It adds some more money in the wallets of the movie makers and is generally harmless. Product placement that is done well, is very subtle. At its best you don’t recognize it. You simply go to the next shop the next day and simply buy the product you saw in the movie ;) . In this movie the product placements are plainly visible. First Will Smith hears loud music that comes out from an - as to the time the movie plays in - outdated JVC HIFI system. Then he unwraps his new Converse shoes and tells us how those shoes from 2004 are the best. Hey (This Hey is officially dedicated to Kai Rüstmann :) ), I had my load of ads before the movie. I go to the cinema to watch a movie without pauses for ads. I even paid for watching this. That was really annoying. I sure won’t buy any Converse shoes in the next several years or so, no matter how good they really are. After this Converse ad and some actual movie content, Will Smith gets into his Audi. We won’t see this model very soon on the market. It can drive alone in its autopilot mode or can be driven manually by those who are wary of self driving cars. This all you see in the first 10 minutes. The products and the logos of the companies are re-shown several times through the movie.

But the most astonishing appearance concerning product placement is “U.S. Robotics”. I wondered if “U.S. Robotics” actually paid for this. Apparently they must have. On their sites ( http://www.usr.com/ ) ) they have links to some “I, Robot” competitions. I don’t think this was a wise move. In the movie USR is the center of the evil. It’s the company which developed the computer that wants to enslave the humans. Will this movie motivate you to buy a router by USR? Maybe the router has an uplink to USR and will do some weird stuff with your personal data as soon as it gets the special order. Watch the red light :) . Maybe it’s because USR isn’t top notch anymore - if it ever was. So attracting attention is all, even if it makes them shine in a bad light.

Yesterday I was to the movies again. Hmm, spending much time in cinemas lately. Anyways, the film I watched was “I, Robot”. I was warned that the German dubbing is horrible and some jokes aren’t as good as in the original English version. Unfortunately the cinema in Hamburg where you can watch the movies in their original undubbed version, didn’t have it on its list anymore. Well, so I had to watch the German version, which wasn’t all that bad.

The movie is a nice solid action film without any surprises. The photography is done quite well. The last fighting scene is especially nice. Reminds me of scenes below Isengard in the LOTR movies.

Besides being an action film it’s also a science fiction movie and is based on stories by Isaac Asimov. Don’t know if Asimov actually wrote the story as it is told here or if only his robot laws and other parts of his stories were an inspiration to the film makers.

I somehow don’t like Asimov’s robot stories. Someday in the past I lent one fat book full of robot stories by Asimov. I fell asleep really fast and came to the conclusion that I should read something more gripping. Well, maybe only the first story was boring, but I didn’t try to find a better one in that book. I gave up on it. I don’t want to say that Asimov’s writings are all boring. I read the Foundation Trilogy and a good deal of those other books that are connected with it. That was really some gripping bulk of books, but those robot stories: no.

The funny thing with robots is that for over a hundred years now people dream about robots and fear them at the same time. They dream about robots who will do all the tedious work they don’t want to do. They dream of robots who will execute their commands and will ever be nice to them. At the same time they fear robots who will grow more intelligent that any human being. Robots who will take over the command over the earth and to whom all human beings will be slaves. So it’s a longing for the new that is intermingled with the fear of the new.

Another funny point is, that for a long time now, scientists in this field tell us, that soon there will be intelligent robots who will be capable of doing any work. They build robots which recognize walls and don’t bump against them hopelessly. They build robots which fight one against another. That’s all fun and nice , but there is not a glimmer of intelligence in those robots. The only one intelligent in this whole play are their makers, who come up with cool algorithms that make the robots look intelligent. Maybe, maybe that’s the natural border. The “Till here and no further”. I really doubt there will ever be really intelligent robots. As better algorithms are developed, new robots will be build and maybe sometime they will have housekeeping qualities, but nothing more.

That said, I’m not telling you, that you will never be killed by a robot. To build a robot that will kill you is maybe as trivial as taking a gun and shooting yourself a nice round hole in your head. It’s a fairly simple algorithm:

• Take a gun into your right hand (some picture recognition work has to be done for this to prevent the robot from mistaking a banana for a gun)
• Seek your target (Some more picture recognition)
• Push the lever while aiming at your target.

That was wicked. You hoped you could go to bed, have some nice dreams about housekeeping robots and forget all your robot nightmares. No way!

Yesterday the 18. Fantasy Filmfest ended. It was the third I attended at. Funny thing about this movie festival is that you will find very few fantasy movies here. So if you are a fan of “The Lord Of The Rings” and other such films and expect to see something of this sort, you’ll be disappointed. It’s very much a horror and thriller festival. You’ll also find some science fiction and samurai movies, but horror and thriller is the main stream here. This said, the movies themselves are not mainstream. In Germany the mainstream films come all nicely dubbed. The movies on the Fantasy Filmfest are not dubbed. So it’s quite normal to watch a Hungarian or Korean movie with English subtitles. Most of those movies won’t make it into mainstream cinema since they show too much violence or are too nasty for the typical cinema visitor. Some of them will do it, but in a defused version.

This year I watched 8 movies on which I will now relate somewhat.

• The first one I saw was the opening movie Kontroll. Kontroll is a Hungarian film that takes place in the tunnels of the metro of Budapest. It’s main actors are ticket inspectors. The movie shows their work and the rivalries among them. To give the film a bit more tension, there is also a serial killer, who shoves his victims in front of driving metros. That’s not really much of a plot, but nevertheless the movie is very cool and gripping.
• The second movie - Sword In The Moon - was a real disappointment. It tries to challenge movies such as “Tiger and Dragon” and “Hero” and fails totally. There are some interesting sword fights, but nothing as nice and beautiful as seen in “Tiger and Dragon” or “Hero”. The plot is also not very original.
• The Big Empty was a surprise. I had only bought the ticket to this movie, because “Freeze Frame”, the movie I wanted to watch originally, was canceled and replaced by this one. The description of the movie didn’t give a promising outlook on it. “Oh well, another cowboys meet the aliens movie” was all I could think. But surprisingly the movie is very cool. It lives from the scenes. While the general plot is very simple, the individual scenes make up for the story.
• No Fantasy Filmfest without a new groundbreaking movie. Haute Tension takes that place this year. It’s very nasty and shows a lot of violence. It’s a French movie. Generally I don’t like French movies. Mostly they are overdone. Too much sex, too artificial and so on. In a way this one is no exception. It’s really absurdly violent and bloody. But here it’s a strength. This movie gave me really the creeps. It contains a creative selection of tools and weapons with which the victims are killed: knives, a cupboard, firearms, a pole wrapped up in a barbed wire fence and a circular saw. The title made be suspicious “High tension? We’ll see, how boring this’ll get.” But the movie really generates a high tension and earns its title
• Trespassing is a classic creepy movie. A myth, a deserted house and a gang of youths trying to pretend that they don’t believe in the whole shit of a myth. Well, there’s also a guy with a dog mask. Though this movie is nothing out of the ordinary, it is well done and plays well with its elements
• Saw is the best movie I saw on this year’s Fantasy Filmfest. The plot is comparable to the one of “Seven”. But while in “Seven” the victims cannot do anything against their death, the ones in “Saw” always get a chance to prevent their death. But those ways are horrible. One woman for example wakes up wearing a weird mask with a timer. As soon as the timer runs out the mask will open. To both halves of the masks her two jaws are connected. So the opening of the mask will open her jaws really wide and crush her head. Her only way to get out is to find the key to the lock of the mask. The key is inside the belly of some guy who isn’t dead yet but somehow comatose. The woman gets a knife as her only means to get to the key. There are some of such scenes in this movie. The motive for killing people this way is similarly philosophical as the one of the killer in “Seven” : “They don’t acknowledge the talents they were given”. Very nasty thing this one with a totally surprising finish.
• Kaena The Prophecy is a French animation film. While technologically quite interesting, the plot is totally boring. Well OK, some gags are really good, but that’s it. From the technological viewpoint, I’ve to admit, that it is done quite well. The fluid species - or whatever you want to call it - is very well done. Their form changes are really cool. When not looking like some water in a cup, they look like the aliens in the “Alien” movies. An added bonus in this film are the known speakers. Kaena for example is spoken by Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane in “Spider Man”).
• The last and worst movie was Open Water. A guy goes on vacation with his girlfriend. They are really stressed and want to have some fun and forget their jobs for a while. Some day they go on a diving excursion. They get shipped out into the ocean - hence the title Open Water - jump into the water and dive around in their diving suits. After doing some photos and fooling around with some fishes they surface again into a sunny day and cannot see their boat anywhere. They have left them alone. As it’s open water, there is no shore visible anywhere. Now there isn’t much going on in the movie after the first shock. The both get thirsty and hungry and not long afterwards aggressive “It’s all your fault. I wanted to go skiing”. Then they meet some sharks. One of the sharks takes a bite of his leg. After some more time he gets eaten by the sharks. And some more time after that, she becomes the second course in the meal of the sharks. Very funny. At the end of the movie a shark is taken apart on a boat. The guy doing the work finds the camera of the two unfortunate tourists.

Conclusion: As always there’s been crap in between the pearls, but the pearls were shiny enough to make up for the crap. Looking forward to Fantasy Filmfest 2005

The “Seattle Times” reports that Bill Gates will very likely start blogging soon.

Now I wonder what it will mean to the blogging scene if Gates makes this threat real. Oh ok, you see I’m a bit negative about this. But why, you will ask. I’ll tell you.

Before Bill Gates discovered the Internet it was a nice and cozy place for scientists, hackers and other nerds. Now the Internet is a big monster with viruses, trojans and spam and the one browser that dominates it: Internet Explorer. While I don’t think that it would have prevented the Internet to grow if Bill Gates hadn’t discovered it, I think that all those security holes in Microsoft’s Internet products motivate virus programmers to write new viruses. You do have a choice between several browsers and e-mail-clients, but most of the after Bill-Gates-discovered-the-Internet time Internet users, don’t care about security or don’t know what they are doing (“Weird, every time I turn on my computer it shuts down by itself. Something must have got broken in there.” - “You’ve got a virus!” - “Really? How did it get in there? Please, make it go away!!”). I wouldn’t mind all those Internet Explorer and Outlook users to bomb themselves away if it wouldn’t affect the performance of the net that much.

One other bad thing about Internet Explorer is that it is at least partly not conformant to standards. There are sites out there that only run on Internet Explorer and sadly I have to access some of them from time to time - such as “Windows Update”. And as a developer you have to take care that the sites you develop can be viewed in Internet Explorer because although it is painfully outdated and some standards are just not implemented in it, most people and therewith many potential customers of a web site still use it.

So now back to where we started. Bill Gates discovers blogging. Do you think Bill Gates will use “Movable Type” or “Bloggar”? I doubt it. More likely Microsoft will come up with an own blogging application that is deeply intertwined with Windows and most likely you won’t be able to read blogs created with it without using some obscure totally insecure application from Microsoft.

But who cares about some mummy-I’m-writing-about-my-last-vacation-with-ms-blogsnot blogs. None. Although maybe we should care about what Bill Gates will be writing about. Maybe he’ll warn us about new plans early enough for those who don’t like them to escape them.

Last week saw two highly anticipated releases - well at least highly anticipated by Mozilla geeks.

Firefox 0.9 was the first of the two releases. This release was long overdue. It was postponed several times due to heavy bugs (One of those bugs caused the Firefox installer to delete system files on computers running with Windows XP). But now all the severe bugs are fixed and Firefox is again in a usable state.

One of the big new features is the new handling of extensions. Extensions can now be uninstalled and there is an update feature that checks for new releases of the installed extensions. There is also a new default theme with new icons. Well, it’s usable but every time I see it I say to myself that I have to finish that Squareness-Theme for Firefox - well, eventually I will do it. Damn, a day consists only of 24 hours, of which I have to sleep at least 7 hours to be able to go to work the next morning.

The release of Thunderbird 0.7 was quite surprising. First it was “No, we won’t release it yet. There’ll be another release candidate” and then out of nowhere - a day after the release of Firefox 0.9 - there was Thunderbird 0.7. First I thought it was a mistake, that someone posted the release candidate and just got the descriptions wrong. But no, it was the real and final 0.7.

The biggest feature for me is the addition of the GUI for the management of multiple personalities per account. I had to edit the preferences file with a text editor to add personalities before, but now it’s very comfortable and not as error-prone as before.

I think I’m somehow a version number fetishist. Somehow it makes me happy to install new versions of the applications I like the most and to see that they still - maybe even better than before - work. And Firefox 0.9 and Thunderbird 0.7 work flawlessly up to now.

Ah well, Firefox 1.0b is planned to be released in July. So it won’t be long before I can install a new version. Life is beautiful :)

NumericalChameleon is the first application I know that comes bundled with Squareness Look And Feel. NumericalChameleon explicitly allows you to change the look and feel it uses. Here Squareness Look And Feel is one of the options to choose from.

That’s a great success for Squareness and a chance for its fame to grow.

NumericalChameleon is a unit converter, but unlike other unit converters that suffice themselves by converting a handful of units, NumericalChameleon can convert more than 3200 units.

I watched “Van Helsing” last Saturday. The movie itself is quite boring. It’s rather childish and the actors aren’t convincing. There are some disgusting scenes that motivate you to vomit your lunch or whatever you have eaten before going to the movie, but there is nothing special. And it’s not really shocking. Comparing “Van Helsing” to great films of the same genre like “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and “Dance of the Vampires” I can only say that “Van Helsing” is just a piece of crap

But the movie has some nice if not revolutionary effects. Especially the creatures - mostly werewolfs - got my attention. At some point in the movie I began to think “Damn, they move like the creatures in Black & White”. “Black & White” is a nice game developed by Lionhead some years ago - the current company of Peter Moyneux, one of the founders of the famous Bullfrog company, which developed Populous some decades ago. In “Black & White” you are a god - Yes, you played a god back in Populous, too. So the perspective hasn’t changed that much - who more or less indirectly steers a creature of one’s one choice. The creature is partly somehow like a Tamagotchie to you. You have to give it something to eat, you have to praise it and to punish it depending on whether it is doing good or not. Besides that you have to master various tasks, which in the end target towards having many and happy worshipers.

But I’m getting sidetracked here. The point is, that the movement of the creatures somehow reminded me of the movement of the creatures in “Black & White&. There is something specific in it that I cannot describe. Maybe it’s because it looks somehow cool but also somehow unrealistic at the same time.

So the conclusion after watching “Van Helsing” is “I have to find time to play Black & White again.”