Gnome's excellent clock · Sep 1, 08:18 PM
When you have to know the time abroad, there are usually lots of fancy clock apps up for grabs with a range of features. When you don’t need to know, they are mostly too fancy to see regular use. So I really wanted to keep an eye on the time in Japan, and sought a clock for my Gnome desktop (Fedora 9). I was in for a surprise.
What I found was lots of clocks that were several years old and were not available for a quick install with yum. At first I was disappointed until I realised that the best looking of them had been merged into the Gnome desktop – in fact it was already installed. A few clicks and I was able to view the world times of my choice, and even the weather in characteristic minimal clean presentation.
I’ve recently been working 50-50 between Windows and Linux. I’m finding more pleasing things about the Gnome desktop experience than my Windows one. There are some things that Windows does well, like being able to run Windows-only third party tools or software. This is hardly a design feature of Windows though.
Pretty much all the basics are reasonably intuitive on the Gnome desktop. For example plugging in and safely removing a USB memory stick. Plug it in, it appears; use it like any other folder; right click on the desktop icon and it can be unmounted. If writing is still in progress you get a warning to leave it in place, and a notification when the writing is finished. Compare the windows experience where the device appears as a drive letter – F:? Often the same device can appear several times, and to remove is safely you have to find the often hidden tiny taskbar icon, click on it and choose one of the drives to ‘safely remove’.
Another good example is multi screen working. While Gnome users have taken multiple desktops for granted for a long time, on Windows it’s still a clunky experience. Hard to believe but you have to get productivity tweaks as third party applications, without them the easiest way to move a fullscreen window from one monitor to the other is to un-maximise it, drag it across and re-max it. A process as awkward as it sounds and a real productivity killer.
There are plenty of other gripes – like the RF kill switch popup which looks like it was knocked up in five minutes with Visual Basic by a work experience kid. That’s a bit unfair – someone with youth and enthusiasm could have made a much better job of it. There is bizarre and unpredictable hibernate / suspend behaviour… fonts that look pants with or without ClearType™ automatic tuning. And finally the joys of using a mix of ‘enterprise’ applications ranging from bastardized Eclipse installations to native Windows programs with icons that look like they came straight out of Windows 3.11
To get back to the clock… on Windows the default clock in the corner of the screen can barely pop up the date. With third party software it can manage a month of calendar. And if you’re thinking it sounds like I’m talking about Windows XP Professional and not the latest Vista – that’s right, apparently Vista is too much like hard work for the average IT department to support…