If Apple introduces in a click-wheel (a la iPod), along with a good on-screen UI, I think they can get away with 6 buttons (plus or minus 2).
You see, it's a matter of continuous UI (knobs) vs. discrete UI (buttons). Sometimes continuous UIs are *just* better for certain things. Most of us are used to discrete UI for TVs and such -- but that doesn't mean a continuous UI is unworkable. It just needs to be designed properly, and the best company to design such a UI is probably Apple.
I'll tell you where a discrete UI doesn't work. I have a Sony cassette player in one of my cars that has two buttons for volume control (+ and -). To me, that's a really stupid UI. To change the volume, I have to glance at the player, feel for the buttons, and press the relevant button x number of times to get the volume I want. All this while I'm driving.
A volume knob would have been so much more effortless. I can just turn to get the volume I want quickly, and easily fine-tune it too.
RSS is useful if you hit a lot of webpages every day. It's an efficient way of being alerted to new articles or such. Instead of spending 2 hours loading up websites and glancing at them to see if there's anything new (assuming your memory is that great to start with, otherwise you'd feel a lot of deja vu), RSS readers aggregate all the new items for you to chug through in 5 minutes.
Reading feeds is analoguous to glancing at the headlines when reading the newspaper -- you only read the article if the headline sounds interesting. It cuts down your web surfing time significantly, or if you like, allows you to get more news in the same amount of time.
The major of advantages of RSS are *aggregation* and *push*. Push works if one has the correct expectations of it.
For instance, I have keyword searches on engineeringvillage2.org (a journal search engine) that return results in RSS format. I use it to track new journal publications in my area of research -- very useful for checking up on competitors too.
The only reason I don't use Slashdot's feed is because: 1) It takes a while for it to be updated. (there's a fairly SIGNIFICANT delay between something appearing on the front page and it appearing in the feed) 2) it doesn't have the topic icons (which are great visual cues for filtering out articles of interest)
ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) scanners are fairly pricey (good ones are in the US$400 - US$1000 range, but you can get a cheapie Brother MFC-3240C All-In-One (C$140) that has a 20-page document feeder and then get a slave (e.g. some grad student) to feed in your pages for you.
My Brother MFC-2340C scanner comes with the PaperPort application, which generates PDFs and supports double-sided scanning even though the scanner doesn't support it. (You just flip over the whole stack once you've scanned one side, and start scanning the other side. Paperport knows how to automatically reconcile the pages.)
If you have Acrobat Professional, you can do a Paper Capture(TM) which is basically doing an OCR on the PDF and then storing the recognized words as "keywords" so that the PDF is searchable via Spotlight or other indexing mechanisms.
A document scanner is indeed a very useful piece of equipment -- I use it to scan notes and scrap paper containing rough ideas, often with lots of mathematics. Sometimes writing stuff on paper is just easier than typing in LaTeX...
The eminent computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra also liked to write stuff using pen and paper. His digitized works, called EWDs (after his initials, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra) are available here: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/
Bertrand Russell wrote an essay called "In Praise of Idleness" which argues that creative work arises out of constructive idleness. That's why we have academia.;-)
A Mathematician (M) and an Engineer (E) attend a lecture by a Physicist. The topic concerns Kulza-Klein theories involving physical processes that occur in spaces with dimensions of 11, 12 and even higher. The M is sitting, clearly enjoying the lecture, while the E is frowning and looking generally confused and puzzled. By the end the E has a terrible headache. At the end, the M comments about the wonderful lecture. The E says "How do you understand this stuff?" M: "I just visualize the process." E: "How can you POSSIBLY visualize something that occurs in 11-dimensional space?" M: "Easy, first visualize it in N-dimensional space, then let N go to 11."
Yes, I've tried Qt 4. It's got a slick UI designer... But apart from the fact that Qt has got it's own unique event model (which takes a bit of effort to understand) etc., it's is so geared towards the C++ way of thinking that those of us who are using it through a wrapper like PyQt find it unnatural.
Not that that's Qt's fault -- it is a C++ toolkit after all.
Unfortunately wxWidgets isn't very mature on the Mac OS X platform. I've tried it, and it works well for very simple interfaces, but it's a bit buggy. It's definitely not for production level code.
Qt on the Mac is a lot better -- but considerably more difficult to understand.
Re:Bookmarks are better
on
Lucene in Action
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Quite... I just want to say something:
I think that abandoning bookmarks altogether is a bad idea.
Search, while useful, only works if you can find the exact keywords necessary to bring up a certain page. Search merely complements, rather than replaces, bookmarks.
Looking through my bookmark lists, I see many websites which I would never have known how to search for (they're mostly websites I stumbled upon from other websites). Some of these sites are hard to find because:
1) they don't have enough Statistically Improbable Words. e.g. try searching for software that describes biology of a python.
2) the page doesn't contain words associated with its significance to me (yes, it can happen). e.g. let's say you come across a page that has a nice layout that you want to revisit later -- if you ever forget the keywords on that page, you may never find it again. Whereas if I were to file it under "Nice websites" in my bookmark folder, I'd be able to find it again.
3) I can't remember any of the keywords associated with the page.
4) I forget that I've ever visited those webpages. Some search engines (e.g. a9.com) have histories that you can revisit, but they're no use unless you can classify them. And if you classify them, they're basicallly bookmarks.
I think the reason people dislike bookmarks is because they're a hassle to organize. We need some sort of tool to autoorganize bookmarks.
There two basic requirements: 1) Multiple hierarchy - a bookmark must be able to belong to more than one category. Example of this is GMail's labels -- each email can belong to more than one label.
2) Automatic classification - the proper term for this is automatic taxonomy. This can be accomplished using a Bayesian algorithm (like the one POPmail is using). In fact, DEVONthink already does this.
When a user makes a bookmark, the program should come up with a list of category folders (sorted from likeliest to least likely) to file that bookmark under, and the user must be allowed to select more than one folder.
My phone is a Siemens M50, which came with the cheapest pre-paid package I could find (fido.ca). I didn't know about the voice notes feature until after a month of using it.
In a sense, it's similar to these little credit card sized doohickeys, but having it on your cell just means one less thing to remember to carry with you.
If you only need to store due dates, and have an alarm alert you a day before a paper is due etc., I don't see why a plain old Palm wouldn't work. Even a cheapie cell phone would work. I don't carry a PDA nowadays. I just store all my appointments on my cell phone, which I keep in my pocket.
My cell also has audio recording... so if I need to quickly store an idea or record a snippet, I just record it into the phone's buffer and transcribe it later. Many brilliant spur-of-the-moment ideas were saved this way.
I used to carry a Palm, but it was just too inconvenient to whip out during the winter (have to unzip my winter jacket, wait for the screen to warm up etc.) And any Palm is too big to stuff in my trouser pocket.
If you want a PDA to take notes... ah... now that's different. Nothing beats pen and paper for resolution, speed, and freedom of positioning. No tablet or PDA can beat the resolution of crisp handwritten text. Really.
If you have a good system for note taking, e.g. the Cornell note taking system, you don't need to resort to any digital means for taking notes.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh? What's this then?
IBM XL Fortran (PowerPC)
Well they seemed to have changed their procedures.
http://faq.1and1.com/miscellaneous/1.html
Cancellation can be done online now.
THat's clever....!
Now if it were possible to have something like an Exposé for TV channels.... that'll make channel surfing much easier.
Just a tiled mosaic of all the stuff that's playing and whip to the channel you want with a scroll wheel.
If Apple introduces in a click-wheel (a la iPod), along with a good on-screen UI, I think they can get away with 6 buttons (plus or minus 2).
You see, it's a matter of continuous UI (knobs) vs. discrete UI (buttons). Sometimes continuous UIs are *just* better for certain things. Most of us are used to discrete UI for TVs and such -- but that doesn't mean a continuous UI is unworkable. It just needs to be designed properly, and the best company to design such a UI is probably Apple.
I'll tell you where a discrete UI doesn't work. I have a Sony cassette player in one of my cars that has two buttons for volume control (+ and -). To me, that's a really stupid UI. To change the volume, I have to glance at the player, feel for the buttons, and press the relevant button x number of times to get the volume I want. All this while I'm driving.
A volume knob would have been so much more effortless. I can just turn to get the volume I want quickly, and easily fine-tune it too.
RSS is useful if you hit a lot of webpages every day. It's an efficient way of being alerted to new articles or such. Instead of spending 2 hours loading up websites and glancing at them to see if there's anything new (assuming your memory is that great to start with, otherwise you'd feel a lot of deja vu), RSS readers aggregate all the new items for you to chug through in 5 minutes.
Reading feeds is analoguous to glancing at the headlines when reading the newspaper -- you only read the article if the headline sounds interesting. It cuts down your web surfing time significantly, or if you like, allows you to get more news in the same amount of time.
The major of advantages of RSS are *aggregation* and *push*. Push works if one has the correct expectations of it.
For instance, I have keyword searches on engineeringvillage2.org (a journal search engine) that return results in RSS format. I use it to track new journal publications in my area of research -- very useful for checking up on competitors too.
The only reason I don't use Slashdot's feed is because:
1) It takes a while for it to be updated. (there's a fairly SIGNIFICANT delay between something appearing on the front page and it appearing in the feed)
2) it doesn't have the topic icons (which are great visual cues for filtering out articles of interest)
I'm afraid you are way off in your history.
History of Canada
This is one funny corpus of emotions...
http://www.emotioneric.com/
Before anyone asks, COTS = Commercial Off the Shelf
At least that's what Google says.
Timeo danao et dona ferentes?
It isn't that hard to release an audio book in all 3 formats.
A mosquito was heard to complain
That a chemist had poisoned his brain
The cause of his sorrow
Was paradichloro
Diphenyltrichloroethane
Heh heh... from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
I thought Alone in the Dark (the first one) was pretty scary....
I don't see why it can't be done though.
IPython does autocompletion for Python methods and attributes on the command line.
ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) scanners are fairly pricey (good ones are in the US$400 - US$1000 range, but you can get a cheapie Brother MFC-3240C All-In-One (C$140) that has a 20-page document feeder and then get a slave (e.g. some grad student) to feed in your pages for you.
My Brother MFC-2340C scanner comes with the PaperPort application, which generates PDFs and supports double-sided scanning even though the scanner doesn't support it. (You just flip over the whole stack once you've scanned one side, and start scanning the other side. Paperport knows how to automatically reconcile the pages.)
If you have Acrobat Professional, you can do a Paper Capture(TM) which is basically doing an OCR on the PDF and then storing the recognized words as "keywords" so that the PDF is searchable via Spotlight or other indexing mechanisms.
A document scanner is indeed a very useful piece of equipment -- I use it to scan notes and scrap paper containing rough ideas, often with lots of mathematics. Sometimes writing stuff on paper is just easier than typing in LaTeX...
The eminent computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra also liked to write stuff using pen and paper. His digitized works, called EWDs (after his initials, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra) are available here:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/
Yes, this was an issue but it was resolved.
Apple fixed this in one of the recent Software Updates. It was mentioned in the release notes.
Ooops wrong article. The article I meant to refer to is "Useless Knowledge", which happens to be in the same book. (full text unavailable)
Bertrand Russell wrote an essay called "In Praise of Idleness" which argues that creative work arises out of constructive idleness. That's why we have academia. ;-)
Full text here:
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
This reminds me of an old joke:
A Mathematician (M) and an Engineer (E) attend a lecture by a
Physicist. The topic concerns Kulza-Klein theories involving physical
processes that occur in spaces with dimensions of 11, 12 and even
higher. The M is sitting, clearly enjoying the lecture, while the E
is frowning and looking generally confused and puzzled. By the end
the E has a terrible headache. At the end, the M comments about the
wonderful lecture. The E says "How do you understand this stuff?"
M: "I just visualize the process."
E: "How can you POSSIBLY visualize something that occurs in
11-dimensional space?"
M: "Easy, first visualize it in N-dimensional space, then let N go to 11."
Yes, I've tried Qt 4.
It's got a slick UI designer...
But apart from the fact that Qt has got it's own unique event model (which takes a bit of effort to understand) etc., it's is so geared towards the C++ way of thinking that those of us who are using it through a wrapper like PyQt find it unnatural.
Not that that's Qt's fault -- it is a C++ toolkit after all.
You could be right... I need to revisit wxWidgets (and esp. wxPython).
Is there some tool that you can use to mount a zip file as a VFS? You know, like the way XP opens ZIP files like any other folder.
Unfortunately wxWidgets isn't very mature on the Mac OS X platform. I've tried it, and it works well for very simple interfaces, but it's a bit buggy. It's definitely not for production level code.
Qt on the Mac is a lot better -- but considerably more difficult to understand.
Quite... I just want to say something:
I think that abandoning bookmarks altogether is a bad idea.
Search, while useful, only works if you can find the exact keywords necessary to bring up a certain page. Search merely complements, rather than replaces, bookmarks.
Looking through my bookmark lists, I see many websites which I would never have known how to search for (they're mostly websites I stumbled upon from other websites). Some of these sites are hard to find because:
1) they don't have enough Statistically Improbable Words. e.g. try searching for software that describes biology of a python.
2) the page doesn't contain words associated with its significance to me (yes, it can happen). e.g. let's say you come across a page that has a nice layout that you want to revisit later -- if you ever forget the keywords on that page, you may never find it again. Whereas if I were to file it under "Nice websites" in my bookmark folder, I'd be able to find it again.
3) I can't remember any of the keywords associated with the page.
4) I forget that I've ever visited those webpages. Some search engines (e.g. a9.com) have histories that you can revisit, but they're no use unless you can classify them. And if you classify them, they're basicallly bookmarks.
I think the reason people dislike bookmarks is because they're a hassle to organize. We need some sort of tool to autoorganize bookmarks.
There two basic requirements:
1) Multiple hierarchy - a bookmark must be able to belong to more than one category. Example of this is GMail's labels -- each email can belong to more than one label.
2) Automatic classification - the proper term for this is automatic taxonomy. This can be accomplished using a Bayesian algorithm (like the one POPmail is using). In fact, DEVONthink already does this.
When a user makes a bookmark, the program should come up with a list of category folders (sorted from likeliest to least likely) to file that bookmark under, and the user must be allowed to select more than one folder.
My phone is a Siemens M50, which came with the cheapest pre-paid package I could find (fido.ca). I didn't know about the voice notes feature until after a month of using it.
In a sense, it's similar to these little credit card sized doohickeys, but having it on your cell just means one less thing to remember to carry with you.
If you only need to store due dates, and have an alarm alert you a day before a paper is due etc., I don't see why a plain old Palm wouldn't work. Even a cheapie cell phone would work. I don't carry a PDA nowadays. I just store all my appointments on my cell phone, which I keep in my pocket.
My cell also has audio recording... so if I need to quickly store an idea or record a snippet, I just record it into the phone's buffer and transcribe it later. Many brilliant spur-of-the-moment ideas were saved this way.
I used to carry a Palm, but it was just too inconvenient to whip out during the winter (have to unzip my winter jacket, wait for the screen to warm up etc.) And any Palm is too big to stuff in my trouser pocket.
If you want a PDA to take notes... ah... now that's different. Nothing beats pen and paper for resolution, speed, and freedom of positioning. No tablet or PDA can beat the resolution of crisp handwritten text. Really.
If you have a good system for note taking, e.g. the Cornell note taking system, you don't need to resort to any digital means for taking notes.
If your handwriting is bad, improve it.