A very long time ago, computers didn’t have mice, icons or fancy graphics. Instead of an Operating System with a Graphical User Interface, there was the Command Line Interface. With it, you would issue commands to your computer in a text only environment that is not seen so often these days.

If you have ever advertised at Google Adwords, you probably experienced a keyword guessing process.

So, the last two days I’ve been hard at work coding on the 0.2 structure and user interface, the application layout is a lot simpler and I’ve completely decoupled the user interface from the core functionality, so you’ll be able to use wine-doors on the command line or qt or whatever, osx is being looked into and if you’d like to help out please get in touch. So this is a first look at 0.2, and it wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory screen shot. So here you go…

Imagine forgetting about gimp's interface and just using it. This alternative interaction for the Gnu Image Manipulation Program would allow for custom, and dynamic gestures to be created for all aspects of it's interface, similar to the way in which a command line interface is habit forming.

Like all Linux distributions, Ubuntu 10.10, aka, Maverick Meerkat, the latest version of the popular Linux distribution, ships with a firewall installed. The firewall is actually embedded in the kernel. In Ubuntu, the firewall’s original command line interface has been replaced by ufw, a more user-friendly command line script.

I thought it would be useful to break away from all the GUI-goodness and offer up a few command line tips and tricks. Why? No matter how powerful, user-friendly, and modern the Linux desktop becomes, there may come a time when you want to step up your game and get down and dirty with the command line interface.

Novell distinguished engineer James Bottomley believes Linux desktop environments need a dose of open source ingenuity rather than ape ideas from Windows and OS X. Bottomley, who also wears the hat of Director of the Linux Foundation and chair of its technical advisory board, says the next challenge for Linux as a whole is to take the lead in interface advancements.

Computer working environments are pretty similar to the species on this planet. One can see ancient species, that have survived millions of years, living along some fairly-recent ones like humans.

The first time I played with Zenity, I recognized several potential uses for it. While I'm pretty comfortable with interacting with computers with a command line interface, I know many people are not. Zenity creates GUI widgets from a simple command line and can be used from any shell script.