499 words
Having been mostly offline recently and a whopping 250 unread posts in NetNewsWire, just a few unrelated little remarks.
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I saw someone use one of those tablet-style computers. somehow you can take off the keyboard and simply scribble on the screen. While I don't think that this will be a good way to take notes, it's a nice way to use a computer together (to view things) because the screen can be flat on the table.
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In the YAMM department: Comments on Markdown. While I don't doubt the technical merits of the script and am not particularly fond of HTML, I remain sceptical about having yet another format to store my texts in. To me this sounds like it will require additional conversion efforts should I want to move my texts to a system that doesn't support the script out of the box. (Of course the same can be said about HTML…)
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I haven't read John Gruber's apology for markdown yet, though. There might be compelling reasons in there.
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Why exactly does iChat 2.1 still have two distinct contact lists for Rendezvous and AIM?
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Mark Pilgrim has a few funny pieces up recently:
don’t care how well-structured and semantic your markup is; if it doesn’t look good on screen, you’re discriminating against people who can’t afford screen readers, and that ain’t right.
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I found the number
6JLNZTV9GP6WZGT in the cap of a Coke bottle. Seems to be uningenious some rip off of that iTunes/Pepsi thing. With the added benefit of being limited to one platform. So, on a first-come first-served basis, I'll trade that code for an iTunes code or simply the promise to get a cool song for it and posting the title as a comment…
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Why does the Script Menu in OS X sometimes take ages to open?
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This Quicksilver thing, however, may make it superfluous. Looks promising, though not quite refined yet. What I find particularly well done is the asynchronous loading of icons. Note to Apple's Finder team – hire the guy who did this.
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What I'd quite like for applications like this is a simple API to write my own plugin to add things to the library of available items. Like my BibTeX database, say. It would also be nice to pass parameters to command, so I could do Google or arXiv queries.
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To top off my visit here, I wanted to go and see the von Bondies tonight in San Francisco. Again. – they must have been around in the opening sessions of this very experience as well. The concert was going to take place pretty close to where our motel was, i.e. in the same lovely neighbourhood – but unfortunately it was sold out. No gig for me then, unfortunately.
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There are already a few replies incoming concerning my previous travel posts. Most notably Dave's roundup. Containing fast food hints for his region. Might be helpful in case I'm hungry when changing planes in Chicago later today.
March 27, 2004, 17:54
re:Markdown. I started to use Textile in MovableType but some of the tricks to avoid problems with XHTML strict were kinda cumbersome — handling of blockquotes and so forth. There were a few niggles here and there, and I find this new script effortless.
You’re right about conversion to another CMS, but since the script can be used as a ‘service’, in OS X, it should be possible to store entries to overcome this eventuality. I think it sounds straight-forward, and I agree that it would be alot of work after a couple of years worth of stuff. I suppose it comes down to an adoption among a broad range of systems, and that it remains persistent.
March 28, 2004, 15:00
Well, most things computer related aren’t very difficult and ‘straightforward’ in some way.
But doing all those ‘straightforward’ things can be very tiring and even nerve-wrecking if there is software around that makes things harder.
The thought of having entries in both HTML and some other formats in MT gives me a bad feeling - so I’d need to convert everything now. Which I won’t do. Besides, I suppose that I use some strange HTML at times which might make a potentially automatic conversion choke… and then I have to worry again about how to fix all that.
March 30, 2004, 17:02
Re: Quicksilver API for bibtex database.
I really want this too. I asked the LaunchBar people about it a while back and they said they had it planned, but you know how that goes. Hopefully some competition in the launcher space will be good.
You can bet that as soon as an API for these shows up, I’ll be thinking of ways to support it in BibDesk.
March 31, 2004, 20:43
Michael,
that sounds great. Having support from application authors will certainly encourage the launchbar people.
I saw there was a new beta version of LaunchBar out today. It seems to be going much more towards interfacing with other applications (iTunes, Unix commands, AppleScripts). So getting an API for this may not be too faint a hope.
These are exciting days for quick launch utilities on the Mac. Just gives us a couple of tough choices as well.
March 31, 2004, 21:40
One little thing both of those launchers still lack, IMO, is the ability to select an application and open its application bundle in a single step.
For the curious ones among us, this (and the fact that the f*cking Finder defaults to icon view to show the ‘Contents’ folder) is still a very annoying procedure.
March 31, 2004, 21:54
