Modify Colors
Posts in 2008 December 12
I recently lost a hard drive to what is (as far as I can tell) a major design flaw in the Dell XPS M1530, which means that almost any pressure you put on the palm rest gets transferred to the hard drive). As long as I was getting a new hard drive and reinstalling Ubuntu, I thought why not upgrade to the latest version? I got out the restore DVD I burnt when I got the computer and reinstalled from that disc. Then, I upgraded to Intrepid Ibex.
The upgrade process went relatively smoothly, but ever since upgrading, applications were crashing more often, there were some wierd bugs (audio was haivng trouble and choosing print in GMail crashed Firefox), and the computer seemed to be generally not working very well. Eventually, I got fed up with it and installed Ubuntu 8.04 again, which worked perfectly.
The thing to remember is that issues can be very hardware specific, so making general assumptions based on one case is usually a bad idea. Here, though, 8.04 runs fine, but the later version, 8.10, does not. That is a problem. It is still true that variations in hardware can make a difference, but a computer sold with Ubuntu, should not have issues being upgraded to the latest version.
More and more, the idea of a six month release cycle is seeming like a bad one. Having a fixed and constant schedule is great, but expecting a stable release with major new features might be a little much. I have nothing against quick releases, but until I am convinced that quality is not sacrified, I would love to see a different schedule.
Appcelerator Titanium: Like AIR, But Better
A while ago Adobe released Adobe AIR. AIR was a way of running web applications on your desktop, even when you don’t have an internet connection. The great thing about AIR was that it was cross-platform, so, in theory, you could run any AIR application on Windows, OS X, or Linux. The problem was, that never really worked. Only a few applications really ran right on Linux. In fact, the Linux client never even came out of beta. Worse, AIR was not open-source. Normally, I would not be that bothered by an application being closed-source, but for a technology that could conceivably be running all of our applications, open-source would be far preferable.
Finally, it looks like the right thing has come along: Appcelerator Titanium. Appcelerator Titanium claims to be “the first open platform for building rich desktop applications.” Basically it lets you write desktop applications in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, just as if you were writing a web application. Like Adobe AIR, though, you don’t need an internet connection to run Titanium applications.
Appcelerator Titanium is a promising replacement for Adobe AIR that, in the long term, would be a far superior option, since it would not take us down a route of closed systems controlling our applications, our data, and our computers, but instead allow for an open way to develop great web applications that run on any desktop, no matter the OS.
Appcelerator Titanium can be downloaded now for OS X or Windows. The Linux version will be coming soon.