I love Julius Eckert’s creations. Especially his Quicksilver plugins — I would not use QS without BezelHUD (above)1. Recently, Silverflow went in public beta. I gave it a quick spin before taking the screenshot and hitting return.
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My recent affair with usability brought me to analyze a somewhat subtle aspect of software, especially the user interface design aspect.
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I have recently discovered a passion for design — especially the kind that can be done in software — and so I have been paying a bit more attention to various concepts and ideas pertaining to the field. Today I was called into a meeting to discuss the changes required to make a particular user dialog more… user-friendly. A great time to put theory to practice1.
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Recently, I have come across blog posts where authors and commenters alike were considering that the whole open-source fad is going to cost a lot of programmers a lot of money and quite possibly make it very hard to earn a living by writing code.
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Tonight, thanks to Twitter 0-day information, I managed to snag an invite for beta-testing viewzi.com
Viewzi is a new and highly visual way to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place.
Oh, and it’s bolder, richer, and more fun.
That is certainly true, as the whole interface is very nice and, after a quick-run through the different views offered, the purpose of each becomes immediately obvious. Picture searches, video searches, shopping searches or just plain’ old trying-to-find-some-information searches.
Therein, however, I feel there may be a minor problem. «Continue Reading»
I would not say it was really either a ‘minor’ thing — those happen pretty much every week — but it’s not really mind-blowing either. I spent a couple of evenings changing my theme. While the current layout used as a starting point my old theme, DarnSlick, I feel the number of tweaks and changes, complete with icon redesign where applicable, warrants it that I call it my own. PUREtext is it’s name, aimed at simplicity and clarity to permit focus on content rather than anything else.
Let me know what you don’t like. I keep tweaking things anyway, but I’m more than curious to see what breaks in your browser and what breaks your focus when reading. I have tested in Safari proper, WebKit nightly, Firefox 3ß5 and Opera 9.50. One of the reasons I started changing things was to try and get a fluid theme, so it should scale on most resolutions (granted, it will generally look weird below 1024 x 768, but not broken from what I can tell). More importantly, however, I wanted to do something that will make content self-obvious.
I am probably missing something very important. The description below, taken from the “Stunnix C++ Obfuscator” page on Apple’s Downloads Website
Obfuscate/scramble (make unreadable), watermark or compress C++ or C source code (e.g. for giving out some library in source form) by renaming all names, uglifying strings and integers and stripping comments out. [emphasis added] (link)(screenshot)1
The output supplies more decimal places than we need and uses labels that may not be helpful [...] But, as usual with software, we can ignore distractions and find the results we need.
The above is taken from my Statistics book. It was written as a comment to an illustration of the output of some statistical software. It is the embodiment of what is wrong with software nowadays, why a lot of people still don’t get it and don’t use it.
To continue on my rant about “points of failure” on the Internet, it seems that http://urlTea.com isn’t responding anymore. OpenDNS hints that the domain is not registered with DreamHost anymore.
As a commenter mentioned on my old post on the topic, DreamHost has allegedly shut down url(x), though I do not believe they have something against URL services in particular. Most likely, as Alex King pointed out a while back, some of these services do not have a revenue model, and with arguably lots of traffic, they become hard to maintain.
RandomKitty via Alex King
I wanted to give Twitterrific another shot, but I have really gotten quite friendly with Tweetburner over the last little while, and the former application lets Twitter use tinyurl for your URLs. Until either Twitterrific lets users choose to use Twurl — or maybe Twitter does — I wrote a quick AppleScript to use as a Quicksilver plugin. Invoke the script, give it the URL and it will put into your clipboard the twurled version, which you can paste in Twitterrific (or wherever else you want).
Script is here.
