Microsoft revealed the new and revamped UI for the X-Box 360 last week on E3 and it was about time.

The current dashboard although not being too bad, has a few problems which sucessive update haven’t fixed, such as  too much information on screen, a bit of lag, hard to navigate in so much content (you have videos, games, addons, music,etc) and some areas were simply over-complicated.

Old Xbox Layout:

New Layout below:

With this aproach I think Microsoft is going the “Apple way” and going for a more simple, less complicated but coese design. On the other hand, with Sony releasing it’s “Home” pseudo-Second Live world/dashboard and given the Wii’s success with the Mii’s, Microsoft felt the need to introduce some sort of Avatars into the console.

Joystiq has posted a video walkthrough of the new Dashboard and Xbox Focus has detailed information on the new features. Now it’s all about waiting for the next system-update and experience the new dashboard hands-on.

After installing Leopard on my Mac I decided to install the annoying RMagick and it’s dependences because I use it quite alot in my web apps for resizing images, cropping and so on. (Leopard already came with Ruby installed, woohoo!)

Unfortunately it’s still a game of luck, pacience and preseverance. Luckily I followed the tutorial at onRails.org and managed to get things running after some time installing everything by hand from the source.

Reading Fred Oliveira’s post on desktop experiences made me think about all those little gems we have installed on our computer (or could have) and deserve more attention.

One of those applications on my Mac that I simply adore and is not related to work is Delicious Library. You see, it’s simply fantastic.

Delicious Library lets me organize all my stuff, like books, video-games, videos, comics and I can later browse, sort, and search through all that information in lists or digital shelves. This is the best part, It’s simply amazing to see, for example all my comic covers organized by series in a wooden background. :)

Adding information is also easy since I can use the iSight camera from my Macbook to scan the barcode at the back of the book or just simply search using the ISBN or title, it doesn’t matter because Delicious Library uses the Amazon API to search and give you recommendations based on it’s database. You can even sync the library with the iPod or print a color catalog.

It’s the kind of experience that I find very difficult to mimic on a web application but works flawless and smooth on desktop, there’s a “gratification” as Fred stated that you can’t (yet) get on the web because of responsiveness and other problems.

Fortunately there’s efforts being made to diminish the gap between desktop and web environments, let’s see what Apollo, Silverlight and Firefox 3 will hold for us.

What about you, what’s the desktop app which you can’t live without? What application makes you all happy to boot up the computer or make your life easier. Tell us about it.

I’m posting this on the new version of Reinventar, the redesign is more or less finished and all the essential stuff are here (but expect some tweaking in the next days).
I think it’s more clean and some visual bugs are now gone, although I would like to hear from you and know what you think.

Someone sent my this handy guide to keep near you Apple computer or in the bag of your new Macbook, with only small 8 pages you have all the steps necessary to reanimate your Mac from not booting up or at least to copy all necessary data to another hard-drive. :|
Actually this could have been handy a few days ago when my Macbook Pro suddendly died on my hands and with no more options I had to return it to the store for repairing (whatever the problem it has).

This of course made things more difficult for me since I have a presentation scheduled for next week at Takeoff 2007 and alot of my files on weSpendmoney were on the hard-drive (not to mention other stuff).

Good thing I have a plan B for the conference that doesn’t envolve juggling, stand-up comedy or flying monkeys.

On another note, if you happen to be in Lisbon I recommend you visit BDMania, which is in my opinion one of the best places to get international comic books or other interesting/rare merchandise.

Spider-Man 3 is coming and it’s shaping up to be fantastic, in the meantime, here’s some juicy content from the extended fight scene with Doc Octupus on the train from the second movie on Youtube.

Posters for the upcoming Transformer’s film are up at SuperHeroHype.

What a busy week, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. That’s because I’ve been writing some beginners stuff over at “ruby in portuguese” and an article or two for the online magazine “Programar”.

But apart from that there was a lot of activity in the web in the last week or two.
Apple for example, has updated the MacBook Pro with Core 2 Duo processors and more memory making it my Christmas dream present (yeah!), the Ipod Shuffle was also remastered and is out on stores (so small isn’t it?) as well as the upgraded RED edition of the Ipod Nano (with 8GB), part of the money goes to fighting aids so that’s good news too.

I was also happy to know that my favorite web browser has reached version 2.0, yes I’m talking about Firefox. Among the updates there’s a new look (great looking icons) and a built-in spell-checker, SilentBits wrote a comprehensive review of what’s new and some tweaks in this article.
In the meantime, Wordpress (which powers this site) was also updated to version 2.05 Ronan with many security fixes (see the list at Mark’s Site)so everyone join the wagon.

The cherry in the cake was of course the new Gmail mobile app which makes reading and downloading mails in the cellphone easier and faster. I was impressed but prices for gprs are still very expensive here in Portugal (shame!).

Let’s see what this week will bring.