Acts of Volition

More and more of the software I’ve been using lately has been open source. With this shift comes a different approach to releasing updates and to version numbering. Following the “release early, release often” mantra canonized by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, many major open source …

I’ve put together a version of Chris Cook’s Luna Blue Firebird theme for Mozilla Thunderbird, the new Mozilla email client application.  •  Luna Blue for Mozilla Thunderbird Preview Image  •  We’ve borrowed heavily from Chris’ Firebird themes, so he deserves much of the credit.  •  This is a rough …

Regular readers will know that I work at the web development firm, silverorange. Several of us have weblogs of our own (Acts of Volition, CEOBlues.com, and newrecruit.org). We’ve now setup a weblog and site for our side-projects called silverorange labs.  •  As the introductory post explains, the …

I hate skins and I love native GUI widgets. Microsoft and Apple had a relatively strong set of user interface controls that people are familiar with. Yet loads of developers seem keen on reinventing these devices from scatch. Media players seem to be particularly bad at this. Microsoft’s own …

I use a lot of web browsers. I have six different browsers installed on my primary computer, and maybe ten more on other testing machines.  •  Of all of these, there is one primary browser. When I click on a link in an email or instant message, my primary browser will open it.  •  Years ago …