Thumb navigation and Pointui

It's funny to see the evolution in user interfaces for mobile devices. The evolution from static simples screens to touch screens was a huge step. Allowing a user to write with a plastic pen on a screen was incredible. That evolution allowed the user to do more with his mobile device, at the cost of complexity. There's no doubt that the introduction of the touch-screen and the pen increased the complexity of the user interface. And that's because it allowed the user to do more. It almost mimics the desktop computer nowdays. So, that's a good thing...or not ? In that time it was a great thing....now, we want to be able to the same things but with a simplified interface. That's the most recent evolution: thumb navigation aka "getting rid of the pen and allowing us to use our fingers" :)
I think what drove this evolution was the merge between the phone and the pda. We don't mind using a pen with a PDA. We are used to it. But we are not used to need a pen to use a phone. That's just to much work. I need to access my phone fast and hassle-free. Sometimes I only have one free hand to answer the phone or make a call, it must be able to do it.
Besides all the eye-candy, I think that was the great evolution that iPhone popularized. For me, I don't own an iPhone, but I own a windows mobile 5 device. And this platform hasn't seen any user interface improvements in years. It's almost the same I used several years ago, when I first saw a Pocket PC. So, I have to resort to third-party applications to make my user experience more pleasant.
Pointui is a free application that substitutes wm5 desktop with a thumb-navigation interface with a lot of eye candy, resembling iPhone in many aspects (like scrolling a list). It's not completely finished yet (it's a beta) but for me it's better than using wm5 desktop. You can see a video of what it feels like.

The veredict is: I haven't found many bugs, but there are some things lacking to completely substitute wm 5 interface in day-to-day tasks. Besides that, it's great and fun to use. Did I mention it's free ? :) Go ahead and try it.

Gentoo and Ubuntu 7.10

A few days ago I installed Ubuntu 7.10. I needed something quickly and went for Ubuntu. As you might know I used Gentoo for several years, so this is quite a change...although I haven't decided if I'll keep Ubuntu or install something else.
Before this, I was curious about Sabayon and I'll probably try it in a near future. For those who don't know, Sabayon is a flavor of Gentoo. Sabayon has a nice install with many packages pre-built, so that you don't have to compile everything.
From this, you might think I got tired of compiling software. Maybe a little, but that was never the reason why I liked Gentoo. I liked Gentoo because of portage, the huge repository, good community-based documentation for almost anything, and even having to hack one thing or another... what I don't like is having to wait so much time to install a package.
In comparison to Ubuntu, obviously I can install things much faster but I lose the flexibility that portage gave me. Not the "flexibility" of compiling the software...the flexibility of choosing which version of the software I want (not just the last) and which features I want compiled in the software. In the past I had issues with this in Ubuntu: a package was available in repository, but compiled without a feature I needed. Another thing (related to this) I dislike in Ubuntu is the huge dependency tree that I have to pull when installing some packages. In part that's because in Gentoo I always had several features disabled (like Kde or Gnome integrations if I don't use them) which saved me from installing a bunch of libraries that I didn't need.
Well, for now I'll be using Ubuntu and I already found several good/bad points.

• Something I liked was the hardware detection. It detected everything pretty well, including my webcam, printer and digital camera.
• Boot time is fast, even gnome starts fast (but I prefer Xfce, which is always faster)
• Good collection of GUIs for system configuration.

What I didn't like was some surprising bugs:

• login window sometimes is just a white screen
• my wallpaper disappears sometimes, leaving me with a pale blue background
• flash plugin for firefox is broken (fixed it manually)
• some strange effect in window titles that disappear, under Gnome
• Compiz Fusion is not available under XFCE (I'll try to fix this by hand when I have the time)