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November 1997
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Your article on network user interfaces ("Good-Bye, GUI -- Hello, NUI," August) left out one important NUI. Silicon Graphics' Indigo Magic has had for about a year now many of the features other vendors will be implementing in the "near future," such as URLs directly on the desktop
, a network clipboard, and a file manager that can show FTP sites or other URLs directly and lets you drag and drop a page to a local file.
Kristoffer Lawson
setok@fishpool.com
Here's another interface you might want to check out: the KDE (as in Kool Desktop Environment) project for X Window -- but mostly Linux -- systems. Based on the Qt widget set by Troll Tech, KDE is a free GUI/NUI under
going development by a team of programmers around the world. At the heart of KDE is Kfm, the file manager. It's network-oriented and can view any file tree that can be described in URL format. It can already render most HTML, and the next major version, Kfm II, will also function as a Web browser (it will even support frames). There are other applications in KDE, too, including simple editors, a font browser, and a sound player. At the moment, the software is still in alpha phase, but it's remarkably stable, and I use it virtually full-time now. If you want to read more, go to
http://www.kde.org/
.
John McNulty
john@vogue.demon.co.uk
Matthew Wilson more...
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