Installing Oracle 10g r2 on Solaris 5.11 is painless except before you ./runInstaller you have to edit the ./install/oraparam.ini and change line 42 to something like:

Solaris=5.8,5.9,5.10,5.11

Then it will pass the first check and continue with install.

1. Eclipse 3.3 (IDE, Java and generic)

I've been dipping into various versions of Eclipse for Java development for years. Its plugin architecture is brilliant (see below). Out of the box it handles Java development as sweetly as any "Professional" edition out there. It also has a built-in editor for Ant build files (an XML dialect) which I'm finding particularly handy right now. One feature I really appreciate is the ability to create a "generic" project that basically just lists all the files in a directory, regardless of what type of file they are. Very handy for my current work which involves a series of versioned directories containing  various flavors of text files. Which brings me to:

2. Afae Plugin for Eclipse

"Afae" stands for "Another Freebooter's All-purpose Editor". It doesn't appear to be under active development and has stalled at version 0.9, but don't let that stop you from using it. It adds a TextMate-flavored text editor to Eclipse that allows me to edit .sh, .bat, .sql, and other types of files in syntax-colored goodness. It has a bunch of other features that I'm not using (such as a "post to blog" button on the toolbar?) but I've found the text editing to be solid.

3. DiffMerge

I've mentioned this before. Since then it is up to version 3.1 but it is still free, and although other file comparison tools probably have more features, I've grown to like this one.

4. AstroGrep

I have long ago given up on making Windows Search find anything on my file system. How I long for the File Manager applet in FoxPro for DOS 2.0. That thing was fast. AstroGrep is a GREP utility for Windows, with a simple UI on top. It's fast, and I can search the contents of text file with regular expressions. On my latest project I have found it invaluable.

Those of you curious about what I've been up to lately regarding my working day may be interested in perusing my office bookshelf.

This is a lot of fun.

In other news, I've un-installed Office 2007 (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and reinstalled the 2003 versions. Ah, it feels so good to go back. So much snappier.

As far as I can tell, it's the 'eee's after the dollar sign.

I used WinMerge for a while, but the other day I needed to do the file comparison thing and I found that on my laptop, not only had I not installed WinMerge, I didn't have an installer conveniently located in my c:\downloads folder either.

Since I regularly read Eric Sink's Blog, I knew about DiffMerge, and so I gave it a try.

It's excellent. It blows WinMerge out of the water. Recommended.

Unfortunately my copy of Expression Web appears to be missing the third checkbox in the CSS options dialog, shown below:

Can anyone tell me where to find it?

Previously I covered the design of some standard controls for virtual hardware. Now let's put them together into a mockup of a software synthesiser. I chose to revise Arturia's CS-80V because it's the greatest synth ever. Here's the controls for one voice module:

(Click on the image to zoom)

Things to note:

• The toggle buttons that enable the high and low pass filters on the voice are colored green, to match the filter level sliders.
• The current input focus is located on the VCF initial level (IL) slider, indicated by the red dot. If you pressed the TAB key at this point, the dot would move to the attack level (AL) slider.
• The range of the PWM percentage slider is 60-90%, reflected in the displayed value of the control. At its minimum setting, the slide shows a value of 60.
• Likewise, the VCA sustain (S) slider shows a maximum setting of "10", while the release slider is the default 0-99.

That's all I planned to say for now on this topic. If I think of anything else I'll continue the series. Thanks for reading.

Postscript: I implemented the mock-ups using Visual FoxPro 9.0. The controls are more-or-less fully functional (even if the control panel itself doesn't do anything!) If you would like to experiment with the controls, you can download the VCX library  here.

Last time I looked at the design of a value slider control. Another useful control that should be made a standard UI component in virtual hardware is the toggle button. This should be substituted for situations where checkboxes and option buttons (radio buttons) are space-consuming or aesthetically displeasing:

Toggle buttons can be clicked to switch between "on" and "off" states. If you group two or more of them together, you can use them to switch between many options. This design allows for color to be used to highlight contols that are related in function, and it shoulb be obvious what state the control is in and whether or not you can change the value.

Next, we'll put it all together in a mock-up of the CS-80 voice control panel.

A modest proposal: Virtual audio hardware manufacturers should define and agree to use some additional standard controls for their user interfaces instead of inventing their own widgets. It's Anarchy in the UI out there... the causes for it are reasonable: 1) the standard dialog controls specified by OS vendors such as Apple  and Microsoft are boring, incapable, or not compact enough; 2) they are trying to distinguish their products from others; 3) their intent is to make their software mimic the UI of the original hardware that they are modelling.

This discussion is an attempt to address reason #1. I think reason #2 is not valid. Guys, make your products excellent and usable, and believe me, you'll be distinguished from those that don't. One way of making your products usable is to use standard controls in your editing interfaces!

Arturia's CS-80V is a case in point for reason #3. The software mimics the original front panel of the Yamaha CS-80 synthesiser religiously, and looks great. Except when you try to edit a patch, and then it's horrible.

There's a fourth reason: multi-platform support. It is very hard to use standard UI widgets when you are also trying to write software for Macintosh, Windows, and perhaps Linux as well. Much easier to roll-your-own controls. That's no excuse to ignore standard behavior, though.

I think there is room for a middle ground, where virtual hardware interfaces can be designed to look good, resemble the source hardware where appropriate, but use standard controls to improve usability. All we need is a couple more standard controls: a Value Slider, and a Toggle Button. In this post I'm going to look at how a Value Slider control could express the principles of UI I established last time. Later on I'll look at the toggle button.

The Value Slider

Sliders already exist in most standard GUI toolkits, but they are not ubiquitous, and I don't want to be constrained by their default specified appearance. So here's ours:

It consists of four main visual components: a perimeter rectangle; a colored bar proportional to the value of the control; a handle widget to grab with the mouse pointer to set the value; and a label that displays the value in text form.

When the slider is adjusted with the mouse, I recommend that a tooltip or similar metaphor is used to display a more precise value (see above).

So the control expresses its value in three increasing levels of detail: 1) the size of the colored bar; 2) the value displayed in the control, and 3) the more precise value displayed in the tooltip.

Color and Clarity
We've got some flexibility here. We can decide not to show the text representation of the value if we like, or move the text display to the other end of the control when the handle would otherwise obscure it:

We can use color to relate and distinguish controls. We are also not limited to a horizontal orientation:

Here I am using the red and green color to distinguish between the level of high-pass filtering applied, and the amount of resonance in the filter circuit.

The slider on the right is an experiment to see how it handles the concept of +/- deviations from a center value. This is an important type of value editing in virtual audio hardware and our control should be able to express it clearly.

State
Typically, UI controls can be in one of a number of states: Enabled and editable; Disabled; and Read-Only. Our control should express its state visually:

The difference between disabled and read-only is subtle. Both states are not editable, and the control should express this fact clearly so that a user is alerted to it and doesn't attempt to change the value. However a read-only control is allowed to receive the keyboard focus (more on this below), whereas a disabled control will not.

Scalability
One problem common to many applications, not just virtual hardware implementations, is that high-resolution displays tend to make everything look smaller on the screen, unless they've been explicitly written to deal with this problem. Our value slider control should be designed in such a way that it can be scaled easily:

Behavior
Controls should not respond to mouse-wheel events unless they have the focus. That really needs to be engraved on stone tablets and placed in the temple of the whatever, high atop the thing. Take the following as an example: You're in Cakewalk SONAR 6.0, scrolling down the list of tracks, and an input trim control scrolls up underneath the mouse pointer. Suddenly, you're scrolling the value of the input trim control instead of the track list. (Note: they fixed this in 6.2)

On the other hand, if you click on a control, you should be able to use the mouse wheel to change the value. The control has to have an understanding of focus. Once a control has focus, you should be able to use the keyboard to change the value also. I suggest the + and - keys.

Precision
Some values need precise editing. In situations where dragging the slider does not allow for the necessary level of precision, you should be able to double-click the control to get to an editor:

Next up, I'm going to talk about the second proposed standard control, the toggle button. Should be simpler.