You can subscribe to video podcasts in iTunes, but I kind of prefer having a separate application to do it with...
The best one so far is DTV (mac-only beta right now). The biggest feature this has that iTunes doesn't have is the ability to receive the video podcasts in.torrent form initially, and automatically download the videos via bittorrent.
Unless iTunes provides some kind of automatic caching for the video files, having just a moderate amount of popularity could kill aspiring video podcasters.
Another app is FireANT, which without the bittorrent feature makes me hate it.
DTV also has a built-in directory to find video podcasts, which is pretty cool. They do a good job of making the process easy to use, although their beta is still a little wonky at times.
(I'm the author of CornerClick, a Mac OS X application for assigning actions to screen corners. ($0 cheap!)
Lot's of people here aren't getting it. I can only assume that they are not power-users, or haven't actually tried a good implementation of Fitts' Law.
I tried in my application to: make the corners absolutely unobtrusive when you aren't using them; make the result of clicking a corner easy to figure out without accidentally activating it; make it easy to figure out how to trigger a certain action if you've forgotten how; and make many different actions easily triggered from a single corner.
I think I've done a good job, and the only reason I made CornerClick was because the lack of corner-triggered actions was really frustrating me, knowing that they could be so useful. So first of all, I made it for me to use, and I would consider myself a power-user. I'm a software developer, a computer junkie, and I use my powerbook nearly all-day, nearly every-day. I've followed Apple's slight UI improvements since I first got into macs at Mac OS 7, and I felt some frustration at this area of improvement that I felt they had been ignoring.
Now, some people are pointing out that lots of Mac OS X users using 10.2 or later frequently run into this problem: during mousing around, their cursor strays into a corner set to automatically trigger Exposé. Suddenly, every gaddam window of every application flies around the screen and whatever they were working on is lost in a maze. They use this example to say that using screen corners to trigger anything is a dumb user interface. That certainly doesn't follow. It is certainly a frustration to run into this collusion between automatically triggered corner actions and a disorienting window-navigation system, but for me corner actions are most useful when they are not automatically triggered, and Exposé is for the most part eye-candy novelty that I never use.
Turn off automatic corner activation of Expose. Set your two of your most common applications to the top-left and bottom-left corner using CornerClick (for me, Safari and Mail, respectively). Set the bottom-right corner to "Hide Current Application". Assign secondary applications to right-click each of those corners (for me: Terminal, iChat, Finder). If you want add some others for shift-click, control-click or any other combination you like. Try it out. After a while it becomes second nature to click in the bottom left to check Mail, and then click in the bottom right to hide it when you are done. I find it much easier to navigate to the frequently used applications I have this way than to try using the Dock or the command-tab application switcher. And by easy, I mean I can do it fast and I can do it without thinking about it or having to look (hunt with my eyes) anywhere on screen. This reduces the number of "brain-cycles" I have to spend on useless interface crud just to get the important things I want to do with the computer.
However, like I said, I believe I'm a power-user, and so perhaps most people don't mind the 1/2/3 seconds it will take them to switch between frequently used applications or change tracks in iTunes, or whatever.
Re:What I took from the review...
on
The Escapist
·
· Score: 1
I would recommend the scifi of Iain M. Banks, especially "Use of Weapons", "The Player of Games", or "Consider Phlebas" as good places to start.
"Excession" is great, but you really need to get immersed into the Culture universe a bit first since it can be hard to fathom without the background that the other books give you. (e.g. Nick Hornby).
I'll throw out some other titles in case you haven't read them:
"Ender's Game" - Orson Scott Card (the first couple sequels were pretty good and maybe one or two of the later ones, but it's kind of like a runaway train at this point)
"Jumper" - Steven Gould, also "Wildside". There is a new sequel to Jumper called "Reflex" which I haven't read yet.
"Ringworld" - Larry Niven
Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
you mentioned Hyperion which to me seems fairly fantastical, so here are some fantasy/scifi stuff as well
"Book of The New Sun" series - Gene Wolfe. Very good fantasy/scifi
"Wicked" - Gregory Maguire (a truly imaginative and entertaining fantasy book which you probably knkow is about the wicked witch of the west from the wizard of oz)
"Perdido Street Station" and "The Scar" by China Mieville. also incredibly imaginative and entertaining.
I haven't RTFA yet, but I wanted to link to Piggy Bank, which is a Firefox plugin by the Simile MIT group, which seems to be making a large step forward in bringing the usefulness of the sematic web to the users.
It contains a RDF engine, and allows you to install "screen scrapers" for different sites, plus it knows automatically how to read FOAF and some other ontologies that have spread on the net a little bit. When you see the "Semantic web coin" icon in your status bar, you can click on it and it will extract what semantic information it can about the given page. Using javascript or XSL based screen scrapers makes this a bit like developing for Greasemonkey.
As examples, they have screen scrapers for Craig's List Jobs, and they can merge the location (lat/long) information pulled from that along with other info pulled from other sites and display it all on a Googlemap.
It's just getting started, but it seems very cool.
bloglines.com is an excellent replacement for your desktop RSS newsfeed aggregator. Once I started using it, I was hooked. Those desktop aggregators waste RAM, network bandwidth, and constantly bug you when there are new feed items to read. the online replacement is a definite improvement. they also have a notifier popup window via web or downloadable app for your OS if you simply must be informed of new items.
I could keep raving about why it's better, but you should just try it:)
Well actually, mac os classic (<=8 or so) had "Desk Accessories" which originally operated in a similar way. There was a Calculator, a tile puzzle, etc. They were essentially applications that ran within the OS's or the Finder's memory space (i think) and so were quick to access, since originally you could only run one regular Application at a time.
Later when Desk Accessories were no longer needed, Apple had separate Applications that included the same utility functionality: Calculator, Stickies, etc.
So Konfabulator extended/revamped that idea by again introducing a common "runtime" for little useful apps that don't need to be entire separate applications. They improved on it by making the development super easy by using a JavaScript engine for the widget coding.
Apple appears to have then lifted a lot of Konfabulator's innovation for their new Dashboard app.
To say that Konfabulator was completely original isn't quite true, but also to say that Apple is completely ripping them off is also not quite true.
It is a bit too coincident that there have been now two popular third-party utilities that have been duplicated by Apple nearly identically. (Watson as well). The functionality is just so similar. The fact that Dashboard uses JavaScript (rather than e.g. AppleScript!) stinks to high heaven.
I do side with the little guys in these cases, although I think that Apple's implementation will be slightly better in the end...
Can the people mount some kind of lawsuit against the government if they feel they have been disenfranchised? How do you deal with what might be massive election fraud?
...as opposed to having no conclusive evidence of the possibility of cross-seeding. i.e. a little conclusive evidence about something points to a possibility, while no evidence (or unconclusive evidence) means it would be pure speculation.
Hmm, that suggests another programming language to join the ranks of brainfuck etc: the Matrix language.
every line of your code contains 80 non-whitespace characters, most of which do nothing and are just there to look cool when streamed vertically in neon green against a black background. This way, when you scroll through your code, you're in the Matrxi!! Awesome!
The only functional characters in the program are unicode glyphs that you can't find on a normal keyboard, everything else is treated as whitespace -- or rather, Matrix-space -- and actual whitespace characters don't exist, since in the future they have no need of them.
I don't get it. Why do people trust reviews from people they've never met, have no reason to believe, and who are posting "anonymously" on the internet?
I'm a lot more inclined for or against a movie/book/CD if i read a review from somebody I've come to trust a bit because I've found in the past that their opinions hold some merit...
Is there any way to fuzz out the rfid so it no longer works? If there's a fairly cheap way to do it, I see a market for a little device that you can wave over your new jeans (ala the way they currently wipe the little magnetic strip on the CDs/books/etc your buy now).
RFID stuff seems kind of scary, but I have faith in the hackers and geeks to find a way around it. In 6 months we'll be laughing at the simple technique someone has found of rendering them completely useless from long range. Just tune your Belkin TuneCast to a certain frequency or something. Someone suggested spraying the same 70 chemicals everywhere.. who knows.
1984 or Brazil. I just watched Brazil again the other night. Man, it's like someone asked Terry Gilliam to come up with a parody of modern (2004) life.
...is what I tell them. This usually gets through to them. If they are on commission or something they'll get the point and understand that I'm serious.
If you just keep saying "no" "not interested" "no thanks" they know all the responses to those statements to keep you on the line.
Slashdot Mirror
Sweet, gimme a fuligin Torturer's cloak then!
Fuligin: the color that is darker than black
I was always skeptical of the "Don't be evil" motto...
it's possible to asymptotically approach evil without being evil.
You can subscribe to video podcasts in iTunes, but I kind of prefer having a separate application to do it with...
.torrent form initially, and automatically download the videos via bittorrent.
The best one so far is DTV (mac-only beta right now). The biggest feature this has that iTunes doesn't have is the ability to receive the video podcasts in
Unless iTunes provides some kind of automatic caching for the video files, having just a moderate amount of popularity could kill aspiring video podcasters.
Another app is FireANT, which without the bittorrent feature makes me hate it.
DTV also has a built-in directory to find video podcasts, which is pretty cool. They do a good job of making the process easy to use, although their beta is still a little wonky at times.
my predictions ;)
(I'm the author of CornerClick, a Mac OS X application for assigning actions to screen corners. ($0 cheap!)
Lot's of people here aren't getting it. I can only assume that they are not power-users, or haven't actually tried a good implementation of Fitts' Law.
I tried in my application to: make the corners absolutely unobtrusive when you aren't using them; make the result of clicking a corner easy to figure out without accidentally activating it; make it easy to figure out how to trigger a certain action if you've forgotten how; and make many different actions easily triggered from a single corner.
I think I've done a good job, and the only reason I made CornerClick was because the lack of corner-triggered actions was really frustrating me, knowing that they could be so useful. So first of all, I made it for me to use, and I would consider myself a power-user. I'm a software developer, a computer junkie, and I use my powerbook nearly all-day, nearly every-day. I've followed Apple's slight UI improvements since I first got into macs at Mac OS 7, and I felt some frustration at this area of improvement that I felt they had been ignoring.
Now, some people are pointing out that lots of Mac OS X users using 10.2 or later frequently run into this problem: during mousing around, their cursor strays into a corner set to automatically trigger Exposé. Suddenly, every gaddam window of every application flies around the screen and whatever they were working on is lost in a maze. They use this example to say that using screen corners to trigger anything is a dumb user interface. That certainly doesn't follow. It is certainly a frustration to run into this collusion between automatically triggered corner actions and a disorienting window-navigation system, but for me corner actions are most useful when they are not automatically triggered, and Exposé is for the most part eye-candy novelty that I never use.
Turn off automatic corner activation of Expose. Set your two of your most common applications to the top-left and bottom-left corner using CornerClick (for me, Safari and Mail, respectively). Set the bottom-right corner to "Hide Current Application". Assign secondary applications to right-click each of those corners (for me: Terminal, iChat, Finder). If you want add some others for shift-click, control-click or any other combination you like. Try it out. After a while it becomes second nature to click in the bottom left to check Mail, and then click in the bottom right to hide it when you are done. I find it much easier to navigate to the frequently used applications I have this way than to try using the Dock or the command-tab application switcher. And by easy, I mean I can do it fast and I can do it without thinking about it or having to look (hunt with my eyes) anywhere on screen. This reduces the number of "brain-cycles" I have to spend on useless interface crud just to get the important things I want to do with the computer.
However, like I said, I believe I'm a power-user, and so perhaps most people don't mind the 1/2/3 seconds it will take them to switch between frequently used applications or change tracks in iTunes, or whatever.
I would recommend the scifi of Iain M. Banks, especially "Use of Weapons", "The Player of Games", or "Consider Phlebas" as good places to start.
"Excession" is great, but you really need to get immersed into the Culture universe a bit first since it can be hard to fathom without the background that the other books give you. (e.g. Nick Hornby).
I'll throw out some other titles in case you haven't read them:
"Ender's Game" - Orson Scott Card (the first couple sequels were pretty good and maybe one or two of the later ones, but it's kind of like a runaway train at this point)
"Jumper" - Steven Gould, also "Wildside". There is a new sequel to Jumper called "Reflex" which I haven't read yet.
"Ringworld" - Larry Niven
Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
you mentioned Hyperion which to me seems fairly fantastical, so here are some fantasy/scifi stuff as well
"Book of The New Sun" series - Gene Wolfe. Very good fantasy/scifi
"Wicked" - Gregory Maguire (a truly imaginative and entertaining fantasy book which you probably knkow is about the wicked witch of the west from the wizard of oz)
"Perdido Street Station" and "The Scar" by China Mieville. also incredibly imaginative and entertaining.
enjoy.
I haven't RTFA yet, but I wanted to link to Piggy Bank, which is a Firefox plugin by the Simile MIT group, which seems to be making a large step forward in bringing the usefulness of the sematic web to the users.
It contains a RDF engine, and allows you to install "screen scrapers" for different sites, plus it knows automatically how to read FOAF and some other ontologies that have spread on the net a little bit. When you see the "Semantic web coin" icon in your status bar, you can click on it and it will extract what semantic information it can about the given page. Using javascript or XSL based screen scrapers makes this a bit like developing for Greasemonkey.
As examples, they have screen scrapers for Craig's List Jobs, and they can merge the location (lat/long) information pulled from that along with other info pulled from other sites and display it all on a Googlemap.
It's just getting started, but it seems very cool.
as i posted on my blog after Google Maps came out, here's my Google world takeover timeline:
present: images.google.com, local.google.com, gmail.google.com, maps.google.com, news.google.com, blogger.com, et al
2006-2007: dating.google.com, jobs.google.com, groceries.google.com, voice.google.com, tv.google.com
2008-2009: dna.google.com, wherearemykeys.google.com, INeedToPerformAnEmergencyTracheotomyOnMyselfHowDoI DoThat.google.com
2010-2011: brain.google.com, LSD-over-IP.google.com, RealPhysicalSexSomehowContainedEntirelyInAURL.goog le.com, peaceOnEarth.google.com
2012-END: maps.hyperspace.google.com, quarks.google.com, beamMeUp.google.com, tomorrow.news.google.com, singularity.google.com
yes...
i nearly died laughing the other day. i'm a mac and unix guy, but received a win xp box in order to do some integration for our product.
i plug in the brand-new Dell and turn it on. after I do some configuration, up pops the windows desktop.
Immediately, before I click anything or do anything, a little bubble pops up from the toolbar tray and tells me "Your security is at risk!"
I was like, Frickety heck? I was secure before I turned it on.
bloglines.com is an excellent replacement for your desktop RSS newsfeed aggregator. Once I started using it, I was hooked. Those desktop aggregators waste RAM, network bandwidth, and constantly bug you when there are new feed items to read. the online replacement is a definite improvement. they also have a notifier popup window via web or downloadable app for your OS if you simply must be informed of new items.
:)
I could keep raving about why it's better, but you should just try it
Well actually, mac os classic (<=8 or so) had "Desk Accessories" which originally operated in a similar way. There was a Calculator, a tile puzzle, etc. They were essentially applications that ran within the OS's or the Finder's memory space (i think) and so were quick to access, since originally you could only run one regular Application at a time.
Later when Desk Accessories were no longer needed, Apple had separate Applications that included the same utility functionality: Calculator, Stickies, etc.
So Konfabulator extended/revamped that idea by again introducing a common "runtime" for little useful apps that don't need to be entire separate applications. They improved on it by making the development super easy by using a JavaScript engine for the widget coding.
Apple appears to have then lifted a lot of Konfabulator's innovation for their new Dashboard app.
To say that Konfabulator was completely original isn't quite true, but also to say that Apple is completely ripping them off is also not quite true.
It is a bit too coincident that there have been now two popular third-party utilities that have been duplicated by Apple nearly identically. (Watson as well). The functionality is just so similar. The fact that Dashboard uses JavaScript (rather than e.g. AppleScript!) stinks to high heaven.
I do side with the little guys in these cases, although I think that Apple's implementation will be slightly better in the end...
i think you should mount it on your shoulders above your head, and then you can walk around town and threaten to focus on people.
Your tax dollars at work.
You government employees, always wasting your time posting on slashdot...
Can the people mount some kind of lawsuit against the government if they feel they have been disenfranchised? How do you deal with what might be massive election fraud?
...as opposed to having no conclusive evidence of the possibility of cross-seeding. i.e. a little conclusive evidence about something points to a possibility, while no evidence (or unconclusive evidence) means it would be pure speculation.
i guess
and in the spirit of more Parker & Stone indecency:
Princess!
(use password triotest/triotest)
I would like to testify in the defense of the previous poster who --
BZZZZZZT!!
The word "testify" derives from "TESTICLE" and you will now be fined and pummeled and made a spectacle of forthwith!
- FCC of the Victorian States of America
Hmm, that suggests another programming language to join the ranks of brainfuck etc: the Matrix language.
every line of your code contains 80 non-whitespace characters, most of which do nothing and are just there to look cool when streamed vertically in neon green against a black background. This way, when you scroll through your code, you're in the Matrxi!! Awesome!
The only functional characters in the program are unicode glyphs that you can't find on a normal keyboard, everything else is treated as whitespace -- or rather, Matrix-space -- and actual whitespace characters don't exist, since in the future they have no need of them.
I don't get it. Why do people trust reviews from people they've never met, have no reason to believe, and who are posting "anonymously" on the internet?
I'm a lot more inclined for or against a movie/book/CD if i read a review from somebody I've come to trust a bit because I've found in the past that their opinions hold some merit...
Is there any way to fuzz out the rfid so it no longer works? If there's a fairly cheap way to do it, I see a market for a little device that you can wave over your new jeans (ala the way they currently wipe the little magnetic strip on the CDs/books/etc your buy now).
RFID stuff seems kind of scary, but I have faith in the hackers and geeks to find a way around it. In 6 months we'll be laughing at the simple technique someone has found of rendering them completely useless from long range. Just tune your Belkin TuneCast to a certain frequency or something. Someone suggested spraying the same 70 chemicals everywhere.. who knows.
1984 or Brazil. I just watched Brazil again the other night. Man, it's like someone asked Terry Gilliam to come up with a parody of modern (2004) life.
Here in Cali, it would be Governator/Taxpayer
Amen brotha. the 2nd and 3rd bugs are the ones that have been bugging me for too long.
Actually...
Joe Luddite will stick it in his computer to copy it for a friend and find out that he can't copy it. Friend will go home and double-click on Kazaa...
...is what I tell them. This usually gets through to them. If they are on commission or something they'll get the point and understand that I'm serious.
If you just keep saying "no" "not interested" "no thanks" they know all the responses to those statements to keep you on the line.