Microsoft revealed the new and revamped UI for the X-Box 360 last week on E3 and it was about time.

The current dashboard although not being too bad, has a few problems which sucessive update haven’t fixed, such as  too much information on screen, a bit of lag, hard to navigate in so much content (you have videos, games, addons, music,etc) and some areas were simply over-complicated.

Old Xbox Layout:

New Layout below:

With this aproach I think Microsoft is going the “Apple way” and going for a more simple, less complicated but coese design. On the other hand, with Sony releasing it’s “Home” pseudo-Second Live world/dashboard and given the Wii’s success with the Mii’s, Microsoft felt the need to introduce some sort of Avatars into the console.

Joystiq has posted a video walkthrough of the new Dashboard and Xbox Focus has detailed information on the new features. Now it’s all about waiting for the next system-update and experience the new dashboard hands-on.

After installing Leopard on my Mac I decided to install the annoying RMagick and it’s dependences because I use it quite alot in my web apps for resizing images, cropping and so on. (Leopard already came with Ruby installed, woohoo!)

Unfortunately it’s still a game of luck, pacience and preseverance. Luckily I followed the tutorial at onRails.org and managed to get things running after some time installing everything by hand from the source.

Reading Fred Oliveira’s post on desktop experiences made me think about all those little gems we have installed on our computer (or could have) and deserve more attention.

One of those applications on my Mac that I simply adore and is not related to work is Delicious Library. You see, it’s simply fantastic.

Delicious Library lets me organize all my stuff, like books, video-games, videos, comics and I can later browse, sort, and search through all that information in lists or digital shelves. This is the best part, It’s simply amazing to see, for example all my comic covers organized by series in a wooden background. :)

Adding information is also easy since I can use the iSight camera from my Macbook to scan the barcode at the back of the book or just simply search using the ISBN or title, it doesn’t matter because Delicious Library uses the Amazon API to search and give you recommendations based on it’s database. You can even sync the library with the iPod or print a color catalog.

It’s the kind of experience that I find very difficult to mimic on a web application but works flawless and smooth on desktop, there’s a “gratification” as Fred stated that you can’t (yet) get on the web because of responsiveness and other problems.

Fortunately there’s efforts being made to diminish the gap between desktop and web environments, let’s see what Apollo, Silverlight and Firefox 3 will hold for us.

What about you, what’s the desktop app which you can’t live without? What application makes you all happy to boot up the computer or make your life easier. Tell us about it.