Hopefully Apple will take a look at projects like LyX ( http://www.lyx.org ), the ``What You See Is What You Mean'' document processor.
For those who're wondering why Microsoft Office or Open Office aren't ideal --- contrast them with TextEdit.app which:
- is a Cocoa application
- supports all Mac OS X input methods,
- fonts (incl. AAT fonts like Zapfino)
- Unicode
- Services
That last is one of the under-appreciated advantages of Mac OS X. In _any_ Cocoa application (or Carbon app written to support Services) I can:
- Convert case (ALL CAPS to Initial Caps &c.)
- have autocompletion from a user-defined list
- complete a Citation (using Bibdesk)
- typeset a TeX equation and get an in-place.pdf
- sort
- &c.
Unfortunately, Apple, the company with some of the best pen technology and hardware engineering capabilities steadfastly refuses to make a successor to a product which was an excellent ebook reader (and personal digital assistant --- inaugurating the term) --- unfortunately the only pen computing solutions Apple offers are Macs w/ Wacom graphic tablets (I mislike working on one surface and watching what happens on another, and gave up on schlepping a graphics tablet and a laptop around when I got my NCR-3125) or a PowerMac w/ a Wacom Cintiq --- that last is a pretty cool (albeit expensive) solution, but it's uncommon enough not much software specifically takes advantage of it (Alias' Sketchbook was ported to Mac OS X after many requests). Contrast this w/ the situation for Windows Tablet PCs and look at http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html &c.
Think of it as an extension to the iPod line --- the iPod lets one carry all of one's music (as a backup too) and modify the order it plays in --- the iPod Photo adds all of one's images to that --- how about a further upscale unit to allow one to carry all of one's documents?
Even if it did nothing but display a.pdf version (why aren't.pdfs as document previews in bundles a standard for apps these days?) and allowed one to do basic annotation and mark up it'd still be fabulously useful (can you say ebooks? importing annotations from Acrobat and applying them as revisions in Word? extending this functionality to support all Cocoa apps?)
If it's set up to be a Macintosh computer as well, being able to run Mac applications is a huge benison is just icing on the cake, but just basic use (calendaring / scheduling, note-taking, document annotation) in situations where a laptop is inappropriate / inconvenient (meetings, interviews, while walking about), and having the (portable!) equivalent to a Wacom Cintiq whet it's attached to one's Macintosh (look at the program Maxivista for an example of how this could work) is certainly worthwhile.
And of course, it'd be nice to replace my Newton which I still use for contact management (synch w/ iCal and AddressBook.app), note-taking (port the Newton user interface and Notepad) and of course, reading some ebooks (incl..html versions --- port Safari).
William (whose Stylistic has music, hundreds of ebooks, a complete graphic design portfolio _and_ all the tools necessary to update and work on said portfolio --- see http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio.html --- including a copy of TeX, LyX &c.)
But it won't replace the eMac in any case --- the primary virtue of the eMac is its all-in-one design and that one need track only one serial number for a compleat system (mice and keyboards can just about be considered commodity items these days, and interchanged w/o concern for serial # or provenance so long as they work).
The CRT eMac will exist for so long as it can be made cheaper and more robust than any other sort of display technology for an all-in-one.
Instead of a new Mac, I picked up a copy of Phatware's PenOffice, to make my Fujitsu Stylistic even more useful (PenOffice works w/ a wider variety of apps than Windows Pen Services, doesn't lock up like CIC PenX does on my machine after ~15 minutes use, and has a nifty annotation feature for Word.docs) --- unfortunately the only pen computing solutions Apple offers are Macs w/ Wacom graphic tablets (I mislike working on one surface and watching what happens on another, and gave up on schlepping a graphics tablet and a laptop around when I got my NCR-3125) or a PowerMac w/ a Wacom Cintiq --- that last is a pretty cool (albeit expensive) solution, but it's uncommon enough not much software specifically takes advantage of it (Alias' Sketchbook was ported to Mac OS X after many requests). Contrast this w/ the situation for Windows Tablet PCs and look at http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html &c.
Think of it as an extension to the iPod line --- the iPod lets one carry all of one's music (as a backup too) and modify the order it plays in --- the iPod Photo adds all of one's images to that --- how about a further upscale unit to allow one to carry all of one's documents?
Even if it did nothing but display a.pdf version (why aren't.pdfs as document previews in bundles a standard for apps these days?) and allowed one to do basic annotation and mark up it'd still be fabulously useful (can you say ebooks? importing annotations from Acrobat and applying them as revisions in Word?)
Being able to run Mac applications in situations where a laptop is inappropriate / inconvenient (meetings, interviews, while walking about), and having the (portable!) equivalent to a Wacom Cintiq (look at the program Maxivista for an example of how this could work) is just icing on the cake.
And of course, it'd be nice to replace my Newton which I still use for contact management, note-taking and reading some ebooks.
William (whose Stylistic has music, hundreds of ebooks, a complete graphic design portfolio _and_ all the tools necessary to update and work on said portfolio --- see http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio.html --- including a copy of TeX, LyX &c.)
NeXTs were made of a Magnesium alloy formulated to be resistant to catching on fire --- the article in NeXTworld where they did burn one noted the difficulty involved.
That said, the finish (Omni spray-on NeXT black) is water-based, so won't survive any significant heat application (but see the polished Cube at http://www.blackholeinc.com )
Best to use a Dremel or other machine tool and work slowly (with a filter mask).
I've got a G4 at work, and am typing this on my wife's PowerBook G3.
Problems for me w/ a G4 Cube:
- wrong colour (``Paint it black'')
- is there a USB keyboard w/ the same ``feel'' as my old-style NeXT keyboard?
- Mac OS X has scrollbars on the wrong side, monolithic main menu, no pop-up menu, no tear off menus, Services support is inconsistent, Freehand is a Carbon app, while it's antecedent was a native NeXT app
- no support for my NeXTlaserprinter so I'd have to replace that or keep the Cube on the network anyway
- no replacement for TouchType.app
- my serial Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet requires third-party support which is incompatible with at least one app I'd want to run (Fireworks last I checked)
For my part, I still haven't found a machine to displace my NeXT Cube from my desk at home, though my Fujitsu Stylistic is getting pretty close.
I've always thought it a shame that NeXT wasn't able to continue to make up-dated motherboards for it (they did three, the original Motorola 68030 @ 25MHz, an '040 at 25, then the ``Turbo'' '040 @33MHz --- there are a couple of ``Nitro'' processor daughtercards at 40MHz though).
And of course, one could squeeze say 16 small motherboards into it, run a Beowolf Cluster and have a ``hypercube''.
Seriously, it's kind of sad that there's so little being done in the way of nice looking machine designs that an almost 15 year old design still seems current (or timeless?). Most of the nice design work these days seems to be at Apple (heir to the NeXT throne --- I just wish they did something other than the iPod in black) in laptops or Tablet PC systems, esp. those w/ docking options.
Agreed. (But I bought it for myself as a late birthday present before it came out and had to wait an extra week or two for Amazon to ship it).
However, please bear in mind that TLC2e is more of a reference text than a beginner's manual / guide --- it's indispensable for understanding LaTeX's error messages and fairly good for understanding an overview of LaTeX (esp. as an overview of what's on CTAN with the new material in this edition), but to learn it you may want another text (and to understand the internals you'll want to typeset (or download) a copy of the literate source for LaTeX: The Program.
On the bright side, if you wait a little bit you should get a second printing which has a _lot_ of errata fixed (see http://www.latex-project.org for the list).
Looking up ``gnome pen environment handwriting recognition'' takes one to a link http://www.aloha.com/~knowtree/links.html
which has links for xscribble and some research projects --- nothing which I'd recognize as handwriting recognition with deferred option and the ability to draw w/ shape recognition --- is there somewhere else I ought to be looking?
Open slate has a tool which wants one to insert an image from GIMP?!?
I'm not finding an equivalent in Linux to the following tools which I find invaluable on my Fujitstu Stylistic:
- FutureWave SmartSketch --- a drawing program designed for use on a pen tablet (later it morphed into Flash, was acquired by Macromedia and some aspects of it appeared in Freehand)
- Ambient Design's ArtRage --- natural media painting / sketching program, again, w/ a unique UI oriented towards tablet use
- Creaturehouse Expression --- a vector drawing program which is able to use a stroke as the basis for the placement of an object (imagine drawing one flower, then creating an entire gardern with successive strokes wherein each flower is slightly different)
- Phatware's PenOfice --- this has as its basis the Calligrapher recognizer which was used in my Newton MP 100 --- coupling it with Phatpad one has a decent note-taking tool which supports deferred ink recognition and shape recognition
- Adobe Acrobat's annotation capabilities --- it's a lot easier marking up a.pdf w/ a pen than using a mouse --- this could be a lot better if Adobe would support the concept of ``ink'' for this.
The most interesting things happening for pen interfaces on Linux are in Java, things like Denim / Satin from Berkeley's GUIR or DigitalNote or Jarnal, but I'm not seeing anything for ink as digital ink w/ deferred handwriting recognition and shape recognition --- I'd be glad to be proven wrong though.
William (who has wanted a pen slate since reading Niven & Pournell's _The Mote in God's Eye_ back when it first came out)
A.pdf can read quite nicely on a pen slate or TabletPC --- and, can have nice pagination and decent H&J --- I've yet to find an ebook reader which implements running pages long or short or otherwise tweaking typesetting to avoid widows and orphans.
You can make annotations and comments on them and unprinted I Can Carry thousands of them on my pen slate.
that shelf full of the printed ones is heavy.
William
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
on
Upbeat on E-books
·
· Score: 1
Well, I use a pen slate myself.
Fuiitsu Stylistic 2300. the newer ones are much nicer the Electrovaya Scribbler has great battery life.
Read Swiss Family Robinson to my kids from it. The nice thing is it's usable for a lot more. Using it to post this now.
Handles acrobat.pdfs and a lot more It's the sort of thing I've wanted since reading The Mote in God's Eye when I was a kid. Faster than my old Newton MessagePad. Wish the user interface was better
and figured out that many people were trying the beta, not liking it enough to trouble to send feedback and just switching back to the original version.
Unfortunately, after a bit of research, I don't believe the idea would be patentable (except possibly for a design patent after the fact on specific implementations).
A little more background:
- I have tried an informal collaboration w/ an electrical engineer once, but the person never responded when I asked for what address to send some materials to be used in development to.
- I have written to one company, but no response yet --- I appreciate the pointers for other companies to try, and will keep them in mind.
- I did look into learning enough to build it myself, even spent a day downloading USB technical specs, and trying to figure out how much electrical engineering know-how I'd have to put together, but I'm not that great with a soldering iron, and don't have much time to spare from work and family.
If you don't wish to move to the top-left corner of the screen in NeXT/OPENstep you can:
- position it somewhere else
- enable the right-button pop-up menu
- tear off sub-menus and position them strategically
Which is three options more than the monolithic Mac-style menu affords.
The top-left corner is a good position though, since it takes advantage of Fitts' law (once one shifts an app's menu slightly to the left). In-window menus are bad 'cause they lose that advantage.
What's annoying about them? I find the space wasted by the horizontal menu on my 19" monitor on my G4 at work very annoying, but vertical menus, ``just work'' (and have for over ten years of using NeXT/OPENstep).
I agree it'd be nice if one could switch between horizontal and vertical menus --- hard to balance that with ease-of-use / consistency issues though.
William
Re:There was never anything so consistent, stable.
on
10 Years of OpenStep
·
· Score: 1
'cept that it requires a 'net connection 'cause it uses dict.org so doesn't work out well at home on my wife's PowerBook.
I've been using the WordNet front-end which is okay, but different, and the folks at Nisus did a decent thesaurus a while back.
To further exacerbate the problem since there's no default client to secure the Command= key combination some apps make use of it, so one loses the synergy and consistency which NeXTstep afforded.
WorldWideWeb.app and Doom have already been mentioned --- lengthy discussion of the former in the book _Weaving the Web_ by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, check the source for Doom.app and John Carmack's blog to learn how he feels about NeXTstep.
Other things:
- Altsys Virtuoso (this became Macromedia FreeHand)
- Lotus Improv (which lives on as Quantrix or Flexisheet)
- MusicKit
- MiscKit
- Pages by Pages
- TouchType.app
There was never anything so consistent, stable....
on
10 Years of OpenStep
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
and productive out of the box as NeXTstep (says the guy who still uses a NeXT Cube as his main production machine at home).
- Command= in any app to get a definition in Webster.app rocks
- having all of your man pages, the sysadmin refs, and the works of Will Shakespeare and anything else you wish to add in Digital Librarian ensures one can look up what one needs at will.
- Being able to improve the functionality of _any_ app by installing a Service or an app which provides a Service provides a synergy one doesn't get in Mac OS X where it's hit-or-miss whether or no an app supports Services (Cocoa apps do, Carbon and Java apps have to be specially coded)
- having total control over the screen (you can drag off-screen and hide all but one pixel of the vertical menu, one tile of the Dock)
- The vertical menu makes tear-off sub-menus make sense, which allows effortless customization of one's working environment for a given task w/o inscrutable toolbars
- the pop-up menu means that the menu for the current app is always instantly available --- some commands can even become gestural in one's access to them, e.g., ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuso, right-button-menu click, down a bit and straight over and release
I could go on, and I have, check my rants on groups.google.com in comp.sys.next/mac.advocacy
I've got a little bit more on my site, http://members.aol.com/willadams look for my nascent gnustep pages, or the NeXT brochure in my portfolio
Or of course, visit http://www.gnustep.org or http://www.stepwise.com for some good programming info
Yes, I've actually pretty much switched to a Fujitsu Stylistic myself (replacing my NeXT Cube, ThinkPad, docking station and Newton MessagePad).
The problems are:
- battery life - weeks on the Newton, hours on the Stylistic
- no really good note-taking program unless one has a system w/ at least Windows 2000 so that one can rune OneNote (but then, no ink) --- best I've found is IBM InkManager for the CrossPad
- size, won't fit in a pocket
- non-optimal interface for the pen (I really miss PenPoint)
Good points:
- colour
- larger screen (trade off on not fitting in a pocket)
- essentially unlimited storage (dropped in a 20GB HD;)
- faster
- more software, better graphics tools (I've got Creaturehouse Expression, Macromedia FreeHand, Adobe Photoshop, FutureWave SmartSketch and Ambient Design's ArtRage TeX (using Dirk Stuve's WinTeXShell editor / frontend) and some others)
Slashdot Mirror
Show me a .html / web standard / browser which will allow one to display everything in .pdf which is at:
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio.html
or
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase
William
See Alain Cottrell's ``Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient'':
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
Painting a document visually is a bad idea --- semantic markup is a far better idea, and which can be leveraged for more.
LyX makes LaTeX accessible to the average Joe --- go take a look.
William
Agreed.
.pdf
Hopefully Apple will take a look at projects like LyX ( http://www.lyx.org ), the ``What You See Is What You Mean'' document processor.
For those who're wondering why Microsoft Office or Open Office aren't ideal --- contrast them with TextEdit.app which:
- is a Cocoa application
- supports all Mac OS X input methods,
- fonts (incl. AAT fonts like Zapfino)
- Unicode
- Services
That last is one of the under-appreciated advantages of Mac OS X. In _any_ Cocoa application (or Carbon app written to support Services) I can:
- Convert case (ALL CAPS to Initial Caps &c.)
- have autocompletion from a user-defined list
- complete a Citation (using Bibdesk)
- typeset a TeX equation and get an in-place
- sort
- &c.
William
Unfortunately, Apple, the company with some of the best pen technology and hardware engineering capabilities steadfastly refuses to make a successor to a product which was an excellent ebook reader (and personal digital assistant --- inaugurating the term) --- unfortunately the only pen computing solutions Apple offers are Macs w/ Wacom graphic tablets (I mislike working on one surface and watching what happens on another, and gave up on schlepping a graphics tablet and a laptop around when I got my NCR-3125) or a PowerMac w/ a Wacom Cintiq --- that last is a pretty cool (albeit expensive) solution, but it's uncommon enough not much software specifically takes advantage of it (Alias' Sketchbook was ported to Mac OS X after many requests). Contrast this w/ the situation for Windows Tablet PCs and look at http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html &c.
.pdf version (why aren't .pdfs as document previews in bundles a standard for apps these days?) and allowed one to do basic annotation and mark up it'd still be fabulously useful (can you say ebooks? importing annotations from Acrobat and applying them as revisions in Word? extending this functionality to support all Cocoa apps?)
.html versions --- port Safari).
Think of it as an extension to the iPod line --- the iPod lets one carry all of one's music (as a backup too) and modify the order it plays in --- the iPod Photo adds all of one's images to that --- how about a further upscale unit to allow one to carry all of one's documents?
Even if it did nothing but display a
If it's set up to be a Macintosh computer as well, being able to run Mac applications is a huge benison is just icing on the cake, but just basic use (calendaring / scheduling, note-taking, document annotation) in situations where a laptop is inappropriate / inconvenient (meetings, interviews, while walking about), and having the (portable!) equivalent to a Wacom Cintiq whet it's attached to one's Macintosh (look at the program Maxivista for an example of how this could work) is certainly worthwhile.
And of course, it'd be nice to replace my Newton which I still use for contact management (synch w/ iCal and AddressBook.app), note-taking (port the Newton user interface and Notepad) and of course, reading some ebooks (incl.
William
(whose Stylistic has music, hundreds of ebooks, a complete graphic design portfolio _and_ all the tools necessary to update and work on said portfolio --- see http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio.html --- including a copy of TeX, LyX &c.)
Well there was Go Corp.'s PenPoint which was done in by MS manipulation of themarket and pre-annouucement of Pen Windows.
See Jerry Kaplan's StartUp for the backstory.
William
(who is writing this out on a Fujitsu Stylistic)
But it won't replace the eMac in any case --- the primary virtue of the eMac is its all-in-one design and that one need track only one serial number for a compleat system (mice and keyboards can just about be considered commodity items these days, and interchanged w/o concern for serial # or provenance so long as they work).
The CRT eMac will exist for so long as it can be made cheaper and more robust than any other sort of display technology for an all-in-one.
William
Instead of a new Mac, I picked up a copy of Phatware's PenOffice, to make my Fujitsu Stylistic even more useful (PenOffice works w/ a wider variety of apps than Windows Pen Services, doesn't lock up like CIC PenX does on my machine after ~15 minutes use, and has a nifty annotation feature for Word .docs) --- unfortunately the only pen computing solutions Apple offers are Macs w/ Wacom graphic tablets (I mislike working on one surface and watching what happens on another, and gave up on schlepping a graphics tablet and a laptop around when I got my NCR-3125) or a PowerMac w/ a Wacom Cintiq --- that last is a pretty cool (albeit expensive) solution, but it's uncommon enough not much software specifically takes advantage of it (Alias' Sketchbook was ported to Mac OS X after many requests). Contrast this w/ the situation for Windows Tablet PCs and look at http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html &c.
.pdf version (why aren't .pdfs as document previews in bundles a standard for apps these days?) and allowed one to do basic annotation and mark up it'd still be fabulously useful (can you say ebooks? importing annotations from Acrobat and applying them as revisions in Word?)
Think of it as an extension to the iPod line --- the iPod lets one carry all of one's music (as a backup too) and modify the order it plays in --- the iPod Photo adds all of one's images to that --- how about a further upscale unit to allow one to carry all of one's documents?
Even if it did nothing but display a
Being able to run Mac applications in situations where a laptop is inappropriate / inconvenient (meetings, interviews, while walking about), and having the (portable!) equivalent to a Wacom Cintiq (look at the program Maxivista for an example of how this could work) is just icing on the cake.
And of course, it'd be nice to replace my Newton which I still use for contact management, note-taking and reading some ebooks.
William
(whose Stylistic has music, hundreds of ebooks, a complete graphic design portfolio _and_ all the tools necessary to update and work on said portfolio --- see http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio.html --- including a copy of TeX, LyX &c.)
NeXTs were made of a Magnesium alloy formulated to be resistant to catching on fire --- the article in NeXTworld where they did burn one noted the difficulty involved.
That said, the finish (Omni spray-on NeXT black) is water-based, so won't survive any significant heat application (but see the polished Cube at http://www.blackholeinc.com )
Best to use a Dremel or other machine tool and work slowly (with a filter mask).
William
I've got a G4 at work, and am typing this on my wife's PowerBook G3.
Problems for me w/ a G4 Cube:
- wrong colour (``Paint it black'')
- is there a USB keyboard w/ the same ``feel'' as my old-style NeXT keyboard?
- Mac OS X has scrollbars on the wrong side, monolithic main menu, no pop-up menu, no tear off menus, Services support is inconsistent, Freehand is a Carbon app, while it's antecedent was a native NeXT app
- no support for my NeXTlaserprinter so I'd have to replace that or keep the Cube on the network anyway
- no replacement for TouchType.app
- my serial Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet requires third-party support which is incompatible with at least one app I'd want to run (Fireworks last I checked)
William
For my part, I still haven't found a machine to displace my NeXT Cube from my desk at home, though my Fujitsu Stylistic is getting pretty close.
I've always thought it a shame that NeXT wasn't able to continue to make up-dated motherboards for it (they did three, the original Motorola 68030 @ 25MHz, an '040 at 25, then the ``Turbo'' '040 @33MHz --- there are a couple of ``Nitro'' processor daughtercards at 40MHz though).
And of course, one could squeeze say 16 small motherboards into it, run a Beowolf Cluster and have a ``hypercube''.
Seriously, it's kind of sad that there's so little being done in the way of nice looking machine designs that an almost 15 year old design still seems current (or timeless?). Most of the nice design work these days seems to be at Apple (heir to the NeXT throne --- I just wish they did something other than the iPod in black) in laptops or Tablet PC systems, esp. those w/ docking options.
William
Correct, but to nitpick there's also the LaTeX Graphics Companion (not recently updated) and the LaTeX Web Companion in the series.
William
(who really should buy the rest of the books in the series)
Agreed. (But I bought it for myself as a late birthday present before it came out and had to wait an extra week or two for Amazon to ship it).
However, please bear in mind that TLC2e is more of a reference text than a beginner's manual / guide --- it's indispensable for understanding LaTeX's error messages and fairly good for understanding an overview of LaTeX (esp. as an overview of what's on CTAN with the new material in this edition), but to learn it you may want another text (and to understand the internals you'll want to typeset (or download) a copy of the literate source for LaTeX: The Program.
On the bright side, if you wait a little bit you should get a second printing which has a _lot_ of errata fixed (see http://www.latex-project.org for the list).
William
?!?
Where is this?
Looking up ``gnome pen environment handwriting recognition'' takes one to a link http://www.aloha.com/~knowtree/links.html
which has links for xscribble and some research projects --- nothing which I'd recognize as handwriting recognition with deferred option and the ability to draw w/ shape recognition --- is there somewhere else I ought to be looking?
Open slate has a tool which wants one to insert an image from GIMP?!?
William
I'm not finding an equivalent in Linux to the following tools which I find invaluable on my Fujitstu Stylistic:
.pdf w/ a pen than using a mouse --- this could be a lot better if Adobe would support the concept of ``ink'' for this.
- FutureWave SmartSketch --- a drawing program designed for use on a pen tablet (later it morphed into Flash, was acquired by Macromedia and some aspects of it appeared in Freehand)
- Ambient Design's ArtRage --- natural media painting / sketching program, again, w/ a unique UI oriented towards tablet use
- Creaturehouse Expression --- a vector drawing program which is able to use a stroke as the basis for the placement of an object (imagine drawing one flower, then creating an entire gardern with successive strokes wherein each flower is slightly different)
- Phatware's PenOfice --- this has as its basis the Calligrapher recognizer which was used in my Newton MP 100 --- coupling it with Phatpad one has a decent note-taking tool which supports deferred ink recognition and shape recognition
- Adobe Acrobat's annotation capabilities --- it's a lot easier marking up a
The most interesting things happening for pen interfaces on Linux are in Java, things like Denim / Satin from Berkeley's GUIR or DigitalNote or Jarnal, but I'm not seeing anything for ink as digital ink w/ deferred handwriting recognition and shape recognition --- I'd be glad to be proven wrong though.
William
(who has wanted a pen slate since reading Niven & Pournell's _The Mote in God's Eye_ back when it first came out)
A .pdf can read quite nicely on a pen slate or TabletPC --- and, can have nice pagination and decent H&J --- I've yet to find an ebook reader which implements running pages long or short or otherwise tweaking typesetting to avoid widows and orphans.
William
They're Searchable .
You can make annotations and comments on them and unprinted I Can Carry thousands of them on my pen slate.
that shelf full of the printed ones is heavy.
William
Well, I use a pen slate myself.
.pdfs and a lot more It's the sort of thing I've wanted since reading The Mote in God's Eye when I was a kid. Faster than my old Newton MessagePad. Wish the user interface was better
Fuiitsu Stylistic 2300. the newer ones are much nicer the Electrovaya Scribbler has great battery life.
Read Swiss Family Robinson to my kids from it. The nice thing is it's usable for a lot more. Using it to post this now.
Handles acrobat
William
and figured out that many people were trying the beta, not liking it enough to trouble to send feedback and just switching back to the original version.
William
Unfortunately, after a bit of research, I don't believe the idea would be patentable (except possibly for a design patent after the fact on specific implementations).
A little more background:
- I have tried an informal collaboration w/ an electrical engineer once, but the person never responded when I asked for what address to send some materials to be used in development to.
- I have written to one company, but no response yet --- I appreciate the pointers for other companies to try, and will keep them in mind.
- I did look into learning enough to build it myself, even spent a day downloading USB technical specs, and trying to figure out how much electrical engineering know-how I'd have to put together, but I'm not that great with a soldering iron, and don't have much time to spare from work and family.
William
If you don't wish to move to the top-left corner of the screen in NeXT/OPENstep you can:
- position it somewhere else
- enable the right-button pop-up menu
- tear off sub-menus and position them strategically
Which is three options more than the monolithic Mac-style menu affords.
The top-left corner is a good position though, since it takes advantage of Fitts' law (once one shifts an app's menu slightly to the left). In-window menus are bad 'cause they lose that advantage.
William
What's annoying about them? I find the space wasted by the horizontal menu on my 19" monitor on my G4 at work very annoying, but vertical menus, ``just work'' (and have for over ten years of using NeXT/OPENstep).
I agree it'd be nice if one could switch between horizontal and vertical menus --- hard to balance that with ease-of-use / consistency issues though.
William
'cept that it requires a 'net connection 'cause it uses dict.org so doesn't work out well at home on my wife's PowerBook.
I've been using the WordNet front-end which is okay, but different, and the folks at Nisus did a decent thesaurus a while back.
To further exacerbate the problem since there's no default client to secure the Command= key combination some apps make use of it, so one loses the synergy and consistency which NeXTstep afforded.
William
WorldWideWeb.app and Doom have already been mentioned --- lengthy discussion of the former in the book _Weaving the Web_ by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, check the source for Doom.app and John Carmack's blog to learn how he feels about NeXTstep.
Other things:
- Altsys Virtuoso (this became Macromedia FreeHand)
- Lotus Improv (which lives on as Quantrix or Flexisheet)
- MusicKit
- MiscKit
- Pages by Pages
- TouchType.app
Other more recent developments:
- Cenon - http://www.cenon.info
- GNUmail
- ProjectCenter
- GORM
William
and productive out of the box as NeXTstep (says the guy who still uses a NeXT Cube as his main production machine at home).
- Command= in any app to get a definition in Webster.app rocks
- having all of your man pages, the sysadmin refs, and the works of Will Shakespeare and anything else you wish to add in Digital Librarian ensures one can look up what one needs at will.
- Being able to improve the functionality of _any_ app by installing a Service or an app which provides a Service provides a synergy one doesn't get in Mac OS X where it's hit-or-miss whether or no an app supports Services (Cocoa apps do, Carbon and Java apps have to be specially coded)
- having total control over the screen (you can drag off-screen and hide all but one pixel of the vertical menu, one tile of the Dock)
- The vertical menu makes tear-off sub-menus make sense, which allows effortless customization of one's working environment for a given task w/o inscrutable toolbars
- the pop-up menu means that the menu for the current app is always instantly available --- some commands can even become gestural in one's access to them, e.g., ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuso, right-button-menu click, down a bit and straight over and release
I could go on, and I have, check my rants on groups.google.com in comp.sys.next/mac.advocacy
I've got a little bit more on my site, http://members.aol.com/willadams look for my nascent gnustep pages, or the NeXT brochure in my portfolio
Or of course, visit http://www.gnustep.org or http://www.stepwise.com for some good programming info
William
Yes, I've actually pretty much switched to a Fujitsu Stylistic myself (replacing my NeXT Cube, ThinkPad, docking station and Newton MessagePad).
;)
The problems are:
- battery life - weeks on the Newton, hours on the Stylistic
- no really good note-taking program unless one has a system w/ at least Windows 2000 so that one can rune OneNote (but then, no ink) --- best I've found is IBM InkManager for the CrossPad
- size, won't fit in a pocket
- non-optimal interface for the pen (I really miss PenPoint)
Good points:
- colour
- larger screen (trade off on not fitting in a pocket)
- essentially unlimited storage (dropped in a 20GB HD
- faster
- more software, better graphics tools (I've got Creaturehouse Expression, Macromedia FreeHand, Adobe Photoshop, FutureWave SmartSketch and Ambient Design's ArtRage TeX (using Dirk Stuve's WinTeXShell editor / frontend) and some others)
William