I just started playing with this, and already I love it: Zotero. It’s like a bookmark manager crossed with a note-taking program crossed with BibTeX. Zotero is an extension that runs inside Firefox 2.0 — click the icon, and it captures a complete bibliographic record of the page you’re looking at, and saves a copy.…
I just returned from a short vacation with a little business mixed in. On the third day of my trip, I realized I needed to check my email. My hotel had free in-room Ethernet connections, but I hadn’t thought to bring my laptop with me. No problem, I thought, since the hotel also had one…
Slashdot: War Declared on Caps Lock Key A good idea. And while we’re at it, let’s dump those silly Ctrl and Alt keys. Who uses them? F1 – F12 can certainly be abandoned, as well as that triumvirate of uselessness, Print Screen / Scroll Lock / Pause. Don’t get me started on Microsoft’s “Windows” and…
Office 2003 uses a table of 1500 colors to render the user interface. That’s 1500 different colors designers have to choose for each color scheme. Overkill? Probably. But it says something about commercial software that sets it apart from most open-source software. Despite the greater theme/skin-ability of KDE, Gnome, and friends, open-source GUIs tend to…
When I was a kid, I took piano lessons. Every day, after I couldn’t put it off any longer, I would sit down and practice a piece of music. Whenever I made a mistake, I would stop, go back to a point just before the mistake, and start again. The problem with this technique was…
Another blog named Digital Digressions (nuts, and it looks like she used it first, too) points to a video demo of a touch screen with multiple contact points. This is the interface I want! Everything on the screen responds to touch. You can move things around, zoom or resize, stretch, pull, and “play” with objects…
I really like the idea of Zooming Interfaces. I think they provide a better solution to having multiple documents/objects on the screen than the current overlapping-window pattern. The demo linked above has some pretty severe limitations, but even so I found it easier and more enjoyable to explore than a web site with a comparable…
Quiet A.I. I think this will be the way A.I. ultimately sneaks in to everyday life. It’s already happening on the web. But this response on kuro5hin is a fair warning. Choose carefully what you feed your digital “children”!
To clarify for some respondants to Voted Off the Planet: As far as I know, the decision to remove my blog from Planet Lisp was not made collectively by readers but solely by the site’s maintainer. As is apparent from comments on the announcement, some people approved of the decision and some did not, but…
Christian Neukirchen (A.K.A. Anarchaia) pointed out a Mac OS X app called WriteRoom (there’s a Windows twin called Dark Room). It’s a full-screen text editor with absolutely no word processing features. No bold, no italic, no paragraph formatting, just text. As the introduction says: Walk into WriteRoom and your busy computer life fades away. The…