A few months ago, i discovered an awesome game called Frets on Fire, a Guitar Hero© like game, but with some interesting features, like convert any music you want, or possibility to write mods.

OK, so the next step was discovering how to run it on Linux, but, surprisingly it had versions for Windows©, MAC© and Linux©! Great i thought, but i need to play on keyboard, this sucks, i want to play with that toy guitar and feel like the greatest stars. Googling about it i discovered that could work with guitars for PS2© / PS3© / Xbox©.

The roadmap

So, first thing was to install and run the game: it was pretty straight. Playing with keyboard works nice, but it's not the same experience.

Second, buy the guitar and some adapter (PS2/3 -> USB) : there is a lot out there.

When the assets arrived, i was wondering if it would really work. I readed about using joysticks in Ubuntu, and it seemed to be pretty simple:

1. Install a utility called "joystick" typing "sudo apt-get install joystick" or using synaptics
2. Use the commands "jstest" to test and "jscal" to calibrate.
3. Plugged in the adpater and searched for it in /dev/input/js0: it was there!
   

Right after, typed "jscal --normal js0" to calibrate the joystick-guitar and it was done!

Well, with Windows, you would need to search for the driver over thousands and be able to install it if you're a heavy user. The other steps remains almost the same.

Resuming:

Linux:
Plug in the adapter, install the driver ("joystick" program that we've apt-get before) start the game and play!

Windows:
Plug in the adapter, wait for windows install the required drivers, search and download the correct driver (does not came with guitars), calibrate it and then play!

Of course, Windows was not so hard again, but the irony here is, over and over again, that Linux was a little bit easier to handle. Although the explanation seems complicated, it was there just to you understand how i did it, but when resuming you can see how simple it is.

Linux, can i plug n play now? of course dear master...

I've recently won an ipod like gadget, and decided to just plug-in (on my notebook with Ubuntu© 8.04) to see what happens. Using Windows©, it would be necessary to install drivers first with the player unplugged, then plug in and install software to use it in many ways it's possible. I confess that i believed this could work for the first time with some tricks like Windows on my Ubuntu, but i got surprised when Music Player (i didn't know it was installed) just poped up to my screen ready to use - here you read use as copy/play/browse files and resources. Although it's not so difficult in Windows too, it's a little harder, and this was the stronger argument from Windows users over the years while Linux© had been growing. Microsoft© always was reference in usability, but i think they have some work to do until they reach the advances Linux distros  has been developing. Who's hard to use now?

In 2003 Mozilla web browser was launched; and before that Internet Explorer was the most successful and popular browser, reaching near 84% of the internet users in the world. In that year the changes began.
Today, we have a space-run to the user preference where IE, Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, Netscape, Opera and others take place. IE is still on charge, but with only 53% of the users (22% on IE7 only). Firefox, the great challenger comes in his tail with 37% of the user preference. And so we have the others competitors, sharing the 20% remaining.

Not only the browsers was diversified during this late years, but the launch plataforms too. WinXP is still the most popular OS with almost 73% of users, but Linux and Mac ones are about 4% each one. Windows Vista had a slowly start and today only 8.4% of internet users are using it.

We had a great migration in the display resolution from 2002 to now. There was, in that year, only 38% of screens in 1024x768, but now they are more than 50%. Higher ones are too many also, about a quarter of all users.

Considering the increase of the portable plataforms as internet users, this numbers are too representative and, as Web designers and developers, a good start in thinking about the technologies we will plan or build in a so diversified universe.

Based on W3Schools Browser Information

For those like me who lives in the web programming universe, terms like user experience, usability, Javascript™ frameworks and RIA - Rich Internet Applications - are no news. But when the subject goes towards making it all work together, well news are always welcome. RIA is the natural step for web programming and some great companies already have they vision of the way it should be: Adobe® comes with AIR™ - a mix of well-known flavours (Flash™, Ajax, XML, Flex™, ActionScript™) all mixed-up with some desktop appeal. Microsoft® couldn't be different: Silverlight™ uses a similar recipe, but with that Microsoft touch everybody knows. In the middle of this Mozilla® Group tried a different approach: instead of bring a shiny new plug-in/tool/API they put Gecko to shine with Prism - at my sight, is the simplest but most elegant solution until now - where already well-known web technology and desktop get working together. And last but not least comes Sun with JavaFX, bringing more richness to his Java blend.

At the Javascript corner, major frameworks are following these tendencies. ExtJS, jQuery, Prototype, Yahoo! UI and Dojo Toolkit: all offer - or plan - some richness supporting the solutions like Adobe AIR™ or implementing a whole bunch of DHTML widgets. This last offers a good starting point (and some kindly moments of self-frustration while learning), since make use of already wide spread and well supported technology in modern browsers.

The future is undoubtedly rich. Good news are coming but how fast it will come, only time will tell...

Asked about Web 3.0, Google CEO Eric Schmidt make a joke: "Web 2.0 is a marketing term", but later launched a great definition of Web 3.0. See more about: