Excellent! Stephen Downes just released a recording of his keynote from David Wiley’s latest ITI shindig at Utah State University. There’s also a PowerPoint version, if you swing that way. Downloading the .mp3 now, so I can drop it onto my iPod for the commute…
UPDATE: I just converted Stephen’s big honking .mp3 file into a handy AudioBook AAC format for use in iTunes or an iPod. It’s about half the size of the .mp3, and supports bookmarking, in case you don’t feel like sitting there for an hour… It also has an album cover….
I’ve been surfing some of the weblogs I subscribe to, poking through their blogrolls for gems I may have missed. I’m amazed at how some weblog designs are so overly complex that it can take me a minute or two of scanning a page just to find the “subscribe” link. One site I looked at had a grand total of 469 hyperlinks on the main page alone. Many were blogroll items, bookmark links etc. But they overwhelm the reader with so much superfluous data that it’s difficult to find the simple single link you’re looking for…
I’ve been reading through the wiki pages for Brian Lamb’s presentation on wikis etc. at David Wiley’s recent ITI conference. Excellent excellent reading. Brian has done an awesome job as usual in gathering supporting resources. Man, if I could just borrow his brain for a while, I’d have my Master’s thesis done ;-) (but that’s another story).
Anyway, Brian linked to a post by Jon Udell: Collaborative Knowledge Gardening - basically on how the role of metadata is effectively shifting, and less formally described strategies are showing the promise of being more effective. He compares tools like Flickr.com, which uses “bags of keywords” to the more conventional strategies of complex taxonomies.
I’ve just been playing around with some Wordpress plugins. There is a cool one that gathers a list of related posts for any post, and displays them when viewing an individual post entry (go ahead and view the page for this entry - look down - see that list?).
I’ve also dropped in plugins to highlight instances of words matching parameters from search engines, to make it easier to find what you were looking for in Google or whatnot.
Just finished the demo of Myst IV: Revelation. Holy crap. It’s the rich environment of the original Myst, combined with interactivity and live 3D rendering from a high-end first-person-shooter. Wow. You start off on a platform over a lake, and the water is actually moving, with waves and ripples, toward a waterfall, where it accelerates and pours over the edge. And the moon is high over your head (and you can actually look up to see it) complete with atmospheric effects and awesome sound effects (and music by Peter Gabriel). It looks and sounds like the pre-rendered snapshot views of Myst, but it’s all dynamic and live. Amazing.
This must be the Big Month Of Changes for me… After switching my weblog from Blosxom to Wordpress, I’m also switching RSS readers from NetNewsWire to Shrook 2. I really like the implementation of smart folders in Shrook, and the way it handles column-display of RSS items is pretty sweet.
It’s also got subscription syncing between multiple computers (subscriptions and read items) so that may come in very handy!
Anyway, I’ll probably post another week-in-the-life-of entries in a week or so.
I just realized something… Of the 3 weblogs we had set up for the “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” session at NMC2004, only the “Centralists” weblog is still alive… Hmmm…
I know, I know… I said I wasn’t planning on switching any time soon… What can I say? I was reading through the Wordpress site, looking at the docs, etc… and thought it looked very compelling. Kinda like MovableType done out in the open.
Anyway… I really liked the layout and functionality of my Blosxom weblog, so I’ll be slowly migrating this Wordpress site to match that.
Sorry for any inconvenience with the move. Google will catch up in a couple days…
I’m not planning on leaving Blosxom any time soon, but if I was to switch (again), I’d move to Wordpress. It’s getting to be a great package, with solid plans and active development.
Assuming I ever decide to switch, there is a HOWTO describing how to get posts from Blosxom (individual .txt files in folders) into Wordpress (MySQL). It involves a custom Blosxom flavour that spits out a standard MovableType export file, which can be read by Wordpress (and many other weblog packages, actually).
Wow. Now I just need to transfer down to Florida State University, and I can get myself a free copy of iTunes, along with the option to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store for just $0.99 per track!
What an amazing stroke of contractual genius on the part of FSU, making these otherwise unavailable tools available for their students. Oh. Wait a minute… Looks like Apple must have signed similar deals with The Rest Of The World, because I just found both iTunes (whoah - even with a download link) and the iTMS available for the rest of us as well! Looks like I won’t have to sell the house and pack up the family to move to Florida after all…
Wow. This looks awesome. iLingo Language translation application. It comes with something like 450 phrases in a bunch of languages, and uses the iPod Notes feature to provide a handy translator. It even somehow links to audio versions of phrases. Could be handy if walking in a foreign country, and really need to pronounce “Please, sir, where may I find a toilet?” in a hurry…
I said I’d write up my thoughts on spending one week with OmniWeb 5. Before starting, here’s the Coles Notes version: I bought the upgrade license, and have switched to using OmniWeb 5 (almost) 100% (see below for reasons why it’s not at a full 100% yet). Here goes:
Things I love about OmniWeb 5
The tab implementation freaking ROCKS. - almost exactly what I mocked up in January 2003, with the added bonus of page thumbnails… And the thumbnails are absolutely amazing and gorgeous. Can glance at 10 thumbnails and see exactly where I need to go next… And, it shows the status of pages loading in the background (shows a green checkmark on pages when they’ve finished loading)
Saving the workspace as you work - so if you quit, or the browser crashes, all tabs are restored right where you left off the next time you launch (even remembering scroll position).
Textarea form elements on web pages have this cool widget where you can get a larger sheet for more effective text entry - with an “Import from File” button. Awesome if you fill out a lot of forms (like, say while developing a web app…)
Site Preferences - override application prefs on a per-site basis
View: View in Source Editor! You can edit the HTML for a page in a source editor, and REDISPLAY THE EDITS LIVE, without having access to the page’s server. Awesome for debugging stuff.
Ad blocking is awesome. And it’s highly customizable, too. Be gone, annoying flashing banner ads! Related to this is the ability to control animation of GIFs on a page - I’ve got mine set to allow animation for no more than 20 seconds.
URL Shortcuts. You can add shortcuts for any URL, and as an added bonus, you can add parameters for pages that accept them (like search engines, etc…). Slashdot is just “slash” now. No waiting for autocomplete… I worked up a shortcut that allows me to search CAREO from the navigation bar (like Alan’s shiny new MLX Firefox plugin)
Regular expressions in the Find utility. Holy crap! Not that I’m a RegEx expert or anything, but any app that cares enough to put that kind of functionality at my fingertips deserves some serious kudos.
The “Page Info” panel. Every bit of detail of every single part of a page is available in a report. Files grouped by type (images, style sheets, scripts, frames, etc…) with full stats (file size, last modified date, expiry date of cache…). And, the ability to display each individual item, or save it separately, or view the source for it. Wow. Awesome for debugging websites…
Things I’m Ambivalent About
RSS implementation. Thought I’d love it. Thought it would be the greatest thing since sliced bread. But it’s just nowhere near NetNewsWire, only showing titles of items in a feed, and not tracking read/unread state.
Bookmarks. Maybe I just haven’t given it enough time, but it doesn’t seem dramatically better than Safari’s bookmark implementation (and has a wrinkle that you can’t drag a page’s URL proxy from the address bar into the in-browser-window bookmarks display - you get the bookmarks:/ URL instead. There’s a workaround, but that’s not the point…
Shared Bookmarks - not really useful unless everyone on your LAN is using OmniWeb 5 - I’m the only one I’m aware of here…
Multiple Workspaces - thought I’d really use these, but opening bookmark folders in tabs within the current default workspace works better for me.
Bookmarks syncing - I’ve been a huge fan of this with Safari, so it’s not groundbreaking, but it’s great to know it’s there.
Things I’m Not a Great Fan Of
Out of date WebCore. Doesn’t work with GMail (that’s the one thing I keep Safari running on a second machine for…)
The “Save Window Size” command works great for single-display systems, but if I have a window on my secondary display while at work (on an external monitor plugged into my TiBook), and set the window to prefer that screen by “Saving Window Size” on it, then when I go home (without the external monitor), the window tries to open on the external monitor anyway. I can grab the edge of the title bar and drag it back on to the only screen, but it’s a huge pain. It would be cool if the app was smart enough to realize the number of screens, and relative position thereof while saving size…
The Navigation Bar. Separate Stop and Reload buttons are redundant - and waste space on the nav bar. I can only do one or the other, never both… Also, I really miss Safari’s progress-bar-under-location-field display. It’s just so handy to be able to know that a page is about half loading by seeing a blue bar in my peripheral vision - without having to look up from what I’m reading, and without having to open an Activity Viewer. It’s nice to have the Activity Viewer, but it shouldn’t be the primary way to display page status.
No way to export my bookmarks. It will import them fine. Great. Now what? It will read my Safari bookmarks (but not write to them). I’ve been using Safari Bookmark Exporter to export my Safari bookmarks to every browser on my system. Can’t do that anymore, since bookmarks will be going into my OmniWeb bookmarks file, which is in a different format…
Anyway, I’m sure it’s far from a complete list, in each of the 3 categories. Bottom line is, I love OmniWeb 5, and plan to be a long time user.
