2007-08-28
I think I've tried just about every web browser available for the Mac. The included Safari 2 didn't feel quite right, Firefox was too slow and a memory hog, Flock, Shiira and some others just didn't really fit what I was looking for. Camino was nice and light, and better integrated with the Mac than Firefox, but I was missing a good search box and it felt a little too limited in features. Now I'm using the Safari 3 beta and couldn't be happier. There are lots of little things that just feel "right" and it fits with the Mac OS nicely. After downloading an application you are warned that it contains an app, and if you approve the DMG file is mounted so you can run or install the app. But, the one thing that seems simple, but I've felt missing in browsers for a while is the tab management. On Linux I used Epiphany which has supported rearranging tabs for a while, and Firefox now supports it, but Safari gets one more thing right: dragging tabs between windows. So far I haven't seen another browser do this, but in Safari you can drag a tab up or down to detach it from the current window and either drag it to a different window, or out into a new window. It's not a feature I use constantly, but I do really like being able to keep my tabs organized in a logical manner instead of having a random assortment of tabs all open in the same window. Thanks Apple for getting this right.
2007-08-05
To make the output of the "svn diff" command more readable here's a small script to pipe the output to the Pygments library to colorize the command line output:
#!/bin/bash svn diff "$@" | pygmentize -ldiff
Categories: Tech
2007-05-02
For April 1st ThinkGeek presented us with this wonderful device:
However, this product was created by another industrial design company that has a lot of extremely creative products, such as this phone with rotation aware clock display:
Unfortunately many of their products are only produced in small runs, so availability is limited. However, it's worth browsing their industrial design catalog to see some of the cool ideas.
Categories: Tech
2007-05-01
A week ago I started my new job at YouTube. Most people here use Macs so I got a nice shiny new MacBook Pro to work on. I've been using Linux (Debian and Ubuntu) almost exclusively for about 4 years now and Windows before that, so I've been quickly getting up to speed on using my new Mac.
One of my first major annoyances was that some form controls weren't keyboard navigable. Filling out web forms was frustrating since hitting Tab would skip past drop-down fields, and when dialogs popped up and I didn't want to respond with the default button I had to switch over to the mouse instead of just tabbing to the right one.
Fortunately I found these instructions on changing this behavior. Now I can use the keyboard to quickly navigate these inputs.
More on my Mac switch to come.
2007-02-03
I've built an Ubuntu Edgy package for Germanium. It may work on Dapper, or Debian versions, but I haven't tested it on any of those yet. I think the dependencies should be covered, but if you find any problems you can open a ticket.
- Download:
- germanium_0.2.0-0ubuntu1_all.deb
2007-02-02
Germanium 0.2.0 features better GNOME integration including mime handling for .emp files and a GConf schema, keyboard shortcuts, as well as album art display, and optionally saving album art with the tracks.
- Download:
- emusic-gnome-0.2.0.tar.gz
Darcs:
darcs get --tag=0.2.0 http://projects.matt-good.net/darcs/emusic-gnome/
2006-10-16
Trac has been nominated in the Linux User Awards for "Best Linux/OSS Developer Tool". Launchpad and Mono are the other nominations in this category, so we're among some pretty big competition. The Trac community has grown tremendously in the past year, so it's nice to see that it's so highly regarded.
2004-05-08
I decided to try writing an entire post in Dasher just to see how easy it was to use. Dasher is an alternative way to enter text on the computer. It is mainly geared towards use in small devices where a keyboard would take too much space, or for people with a disability which prevents them from using a keyboard. The Dasher program included with Gnome 2.6 consists of a text box at the top showing what you have typed and the Dasher input area at the bottom. Dasher is controlled simply by moving the mouse cursor. Letters appear on the right side of the screen in colored boxes. These boxes are scaled in proportion to the how likely you are to choose them.
Typing in Dasher feels a bit like playing a video game. As you move the mouse, you sort of steer towards the letters you want to type. The boxes containing the letters grow as you move towards them and boxes for following letters appear inside the existing ones. Since Dasher uses a language model to predict the probability of each subsequent letter, the word you intend to type begins to appear on the right side of the screen. This feature seems to work quite well since it doesn't just look for any word that begins with the letters you have typed,but it also considers the context of the sentence you are writing. Dasher even seems to learn as you type. For example, the first time I wrote the word "Dasher" it took a little tricky maneuvering, but the subsequent times it became much easier to type.
Dasher even helps you spell words since the letters for the correct spelling will appear much larger. However, I don't knowhow quickly Dasher would learn an incorrect spelling that would throw it off in the future. Once you get used to the navigation in Dasher it feels quite natural and you can turn up the speed it moves at to type at a quite reasonable pace.
Of course, Dasher is not without problems. The most frustrating one is that it will freeze up periodically on my computer. I have an Athlon XP 2000+, so it's much faster than the handheld systems the software is supposed to be usable on. I'll have to look into this to see what's going on.
Also, it would be useful to have Dasher operate in a way that it could be used to input text directly into any program. Users can copy text from Dasher into another program, but if text could be input directly into a word processor the user would be able to take advantage of other features such as the real-time spell checking.
I should also note that Dasher includes training text for a variety of languages, so users that don't speak English will be able to take full advantage of the software right away without taking time to train it themselves. I may try training it on Python, or HTML to see how easily it adapts. Although I had never written anything in Dasher before writing this post, I can already type fairly fast in it, but it would probably be quite difficult to code in it since my thoughts don't really tend to flow as linearly when I'm programming and Dasher isn't particularly well suited towards jumping around and editing text. However, I will admit that it was much more fun writing this post in Dasher than it would be typing it out normally. It feels kind of like the computer is reading your mind when you can see the words you were thinking of appear on the screen before you even begin to enter them.
Categories: Tech
