I've been poking around for a decent way to implement text formatting without requiring folks to know HTML. This is for use in our Workshops management app, as well as the Discussion/Review component of CAREO (and coming soon for APOLLO).
At the bare minimum, I'd like to at least translate linefeeds into br and p tags, but ideally I want to support Textile and/or Wiki formatting.
I've just bundled up the ALOHA application (version 1.3) as a MacOSX bundle, so you don't have to go through Java Web Start to fire it up. The other added bonus is that it looks more like a "native" application, using the real live menu bar and everything!
Here's a link to the disk image containing the application. The bundling was absolutely trival. Just fire up Jar Bundler, feed it the .jar(s) and configure it a bit. Done.
King Chung Huang and Mike Mattson are presenting at the NMC online conference on Wednesday. The presentation just went live, and it's an excellent overview of some of the thinking behind APOLLO (the next version of the CAREO software).
A brief description of the fundamental conceptual shifts we've made, including "Object At Center", is provided, and King even touches a bit on some of the technical details (with cool sounding object class names, too).
I'm one of those people who firmly believe that metadata is important, but only if it is relatively invisible. It needs to be there, but can't get in the way. I've been thinking quite a lot about this lately, especially since we're working on APOLLO (well, ok... it's mostly King working on it, but I still get to think about this stuff ;-)
One application that really demonstrates this principle quite well is iPhoto. I've got 2868 images in my iPhoto library, and each one has several bits of metadata associated with it. Creation date. File size. Dimensions. Resolution. Title. Keywords. Comments. Great stuff, in that none of it is really necessary (except, perhaps for the ones that are tied directly to the original image file).
I'm quite liking Doxygen. Feels like Javadoc done right. I never liked having to manually feed files to javadoc, but Doxygen has a handy dandy UI to recursively feed it directories and files, and has all kinds of pattern matching and filtering at the file level. Cool.
There's even a MacOSX package that includes the command line and GUI wrapper.
The output isn't bad, either. I've only run it on a few apps now, and they are rather lacking in documentation (well, consistent documentation, anyway ;-).
I was just trawling the apache access logs on commons.ucalgary.ca, trying to see how the new website is behaving, and came across this gem in the search query section of awstats:
Looking more closely, the query came from Yahoo! Search, on the third page of results (it's not showing up now, though...). I wonder if the polite plea at the end of the query really helped? For some reason, I picture this person trapped in a spider web somewhere...
Tim Bray is right on with this (and welcome back to North America, Tim!).
People don't want to have to muck around with 15 fields and widgets in a search form. How on earth would I know if the term I'm looking for is in the Title, Creator, Description, URL, whatever field? Unless I already knew what I was looking for, in which case I probably wouldn't be using a search engine...
I'm popping up for air, and seeing that a whole lot of stuff has been going on...
I've been under a heavy load of artificial urgency - and just recently realized that things are actually progressing quite well despite it all. Lately, I'm finding it harder and harder to keep this artificial urgency in perspective - things seem so darned important and demand immediate attention. Whether they deserve it or not - that filter has apparently been disabled. I wonder if there's some kind of Bayesian filter for external (meaning "outside of my skull") demands ;-) A friend pointed out that I've been in a dark, dark place lately. Time to fix that.
Yesterday, something extremely cool happened. Evan was sitting at the desk in my home office. He grabbed a marker, and started doodling on the pad of paper that was sorta nearby. Coolest. Thing. Ever. His first drawing. Now, he's going nuts on his blackboard at home, and drawing all over his easel.
If only we can convince him to keep the doodling on designated areas...
Just be glad I didn't inflict the video on you... ;-)
We're in the midst of reworking the Learning Commons website, and one of the changes is dropping to static files for most of the site (rather than the dynamically generated site we use now). One major thing we change by doing this is the software to search the site.
I've just installed ht://Dig on commons, and it seems to work quite well. I had to compile from source, which I couldn't do on commons itself for some reason (no dev. tools installed on MacOSX Server 10.3?) - I compiled on my TiBook and moved the binaries etc. to commons after testing that it worked.
Doh. I just fired up iTunes, and my tunes were gone. The tracks are still all on my hard drive, but the playlists and songs in iTunes are missing in action. I've been using iTunes since before it was iTunes (I was a registered owner of SoundJam MP, which was purchased from Casady & Greene by Apple to become iTunes 1.0). This is the first time I've lost data in any of my SoundJam/iTunes libraries, in something like 8 years (roughly 8 major OS updates, over several computers).
An image is worth a thousand words. This is the single reason why Garage Band is so cool:
Garage Band isn't great because of new technology, or ease of use, or interface design (perhaps in spite of wood grain...). It's great because it gives me a chance/reason to break of the rut of being just a consumer of music. I can dabble on the creative side, even though I couldn't play in instrument to save my life.