These are all entries bearing the tag software.
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Egg of P'an Ku
My latest project, which has been in development intermittently for a couple of months at this point, is being released today. Called Egg of P'an Ku, it is a virtual tabletop application for playing Legend of the Five Rings online against other people.
There have been other applications like this for L5R. Unfortunately, they are all old and unsupported, and with somewhat lacking interfaces and capabilities. Furthermore, their developers seem to mostly have dropped off the face of the earth. Egg of P'an Ku is intended to remedy this. It has a sleek interface with native look through wxWidgets, supports an arbitrary number of players, and is cheatproof—only the server has perfect information about the game state. To prevent it from becoming orphaned, it is free/open source software. It is portable (once a few details have been taken care of), written in Python.
For more information, screenshots and downloads, visit the Egg of P'an Ku website.
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Shutdown Philosophy
One of the core guidelines of computer usability is this: Always let the user undo his actions, if possible. There are many good reasons for this. People make mistakes, and the more lenient we can be with that, the better. It lets users experiment and explore your interface and get used to it without fearing permanent data loss. Yet, today I ran into something that I couldn't undo: Shutting down the computer.
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User Interfaces: What's so hard, anyway?
It's often said that engineers should not be designing user interfaces, and there's a certain wisdom to it. I've seen a lot of interfaces that were clearly designed by someone who has no real idea of what makes an interface useable, but nevertheless probably finds it entirely adequate because he knows exactly what everything does. I find myself compelled to ask: Just what is so hard about UI design?