The PSP-OSS project got some good blog coverage recently. While I don’t think Sony’s UI is all that bad, the screenshots that have been published on the projects blog look very promising. I guess this shall will be a must have for every customization fan. The project is scheduled for release on December 23, 2005, so if you expect to find a PSP under your christmas tree, it might be just in time.
Nice move: Novell anounced the launch of the Better Desktop initiative as part of the openSUSE project. A serious amount of Novell’s usability research, including 200 movies of people using various desktop software, is going to be released in the public domain. For most developers it is very difficult to predict how an ordinary user will use their software, so these studies might be very helpful for the open source movement to build more usable applications.
I love structuring my ideas and thoughts with mind maps. Freemind is a great freeware tool to build mind maps at the computer. Now it looks like there is a serious contender: IHMC Cmap Tools is a software to construct, navigate, share and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. I have not tried it so far, but it seems to add collaborative features to the mind map/concept map idea, which might come in handy when several persons are working on a project. It’s on my long list of software to check out. If anyone has tried it already, feel free to comment on this post.