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  BibDesk and the hCite Microformat

  admin 7:06 am on January 26, 2007 | 2 Permalink
  

  This is about building an iTunes store-style interface to the web’s bibliographic information.

  I’ve been pushing along the hCite Microformat process, which will set a standard for HTML publishers to add simple semantic markup to their pages that programs like BibDesk can read as citation metadata.

  In stark contrast to great but complex things like Z39.50, if you can publish a web page, you can serve citation metadata. No need to have servers to support complicated queries, let google do the hard work.

  The progress on the standard has been slow, and so far there is only one beta implementation to help focus the talks – Brian Suda’s X2C XSL stylesheet.

  In the spirit of building momentum, I’ve added support for parsing hCite to a private build of BibDesk. For now, we’re just discussing how to merge it, but soon the feature will show up in nightly builds, and anyone can start testing and getting experience with the emerging standard. I’ll update when it’s available, but until then, here’s a rough screenshot:

  

  Update: this feature is now in the latest nightly builds, but it’s hidden because hCite isn’t final. To see the web group, type defaults write edu.ucsd.cs.mmccrack.bibdesk BDSKShouldShowWebGroup true (all one line) at the command line before running a recent nightly.

   

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• 

  Leopard Tech Talk, Jan 19: LA

  admin 3:10 pm on January 9, 2007 | 4 Permalink
  

  I couldn’t make it to WWDC last year, I’m not at Macworld this week, but I will be making it up to LA on the 19th for the Leopard Tech Talk, to catch up. I’ll probably be there the day before, owing to traffic and an inability to wake up early.

  If any area mac devs are meeting up around then, drop me a note.

  I wonder if we’ll know anything by then about developing for the iPhone.

   
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  iPhone multitouch-screen

  admin 3:01 pm on January 9, 2007 | 0 Permalink
  

  If you’re wondering how well the multitouch-screen will work on the iPhone UI, especially for typing, assuming that Apple really did buy Fingerworks, I can testify that the technology they developed to auto-correct typing on a keyless sensor surface works much better than you would expect. It really is the kind of thing you need to try to believe, and if the iPhone uses that technology, I don’t think we’ll be seeing any “egg freckles” this time.

   
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  Leopard Developer Technologies

  admin 6:36 pm on December 12, 2006 | 0 Permalink
  

  If you’re like me and don’t have a Leopard Preview, and if you haven’t seen the Leopard Developer Application Technologies Overview, you should take a look. There’s some pretty interesting stuff coming down the pipe. I like the Calendar store, which lets any application work with the iCal calendar info in much the same way as AddressBook.framework opens up the Address Book. Maybe we’ll see some enterprising developer add support for travel time in calendar display?

  I also like the Applescript Bridge – an idea whose time came YEARS ago. It’s buried under the section titled “Picking Up the Pace of Cocoa Application Development”. What a major simplification!

  I like that a lot of the new advances in Leopard seem to involve making it easier for apps to work together and share data. My data should belong to me, not to the application I first entered it in. This is as much a usability issue as it is a data safety, vendor lock-in and openness issue.

   
• 

  Burnout

  admin 6:33 pm on December 8, 2006 | 0 Permalink
  

  A great article about Burnout and “Hurry-sickness” from New York magazine – “Where Work is a Religion, Work Burnout is Its Crisis of Faith” Interesting, but thankfully not as relevant now as it would’ve been a year ago.

  One quote I loved (and would love to see proof of:)

  Elevator engineers even have a term for how long it takes—door dwell—before people start jamming their fingers on the door close button, which is usually a placebo, a function already disabled by litigation-conscious building managers

  This reminds me of an idea I had in high school to add a “Go Faster” button to Netscape’s toolbar. It wouldn’t do anything, but it’d give you something to do while waiting for the Cool Site of the Day to load.

  Found via Buzz’s delicious feed.

   
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  Midnight Inbox

  admin 7:45 pm on December 6, 2006 | 1 Permalink
  

  The GTD App Midnight Inbox 1.0 was released recently, and it has a number of interesting features, including automatic harvesting of ‘inbox’ materials like email and desktop files, and reminders to get back to work.

  I also really like the graphics and typefaces in the UI – I really wanted to love this program.

  I tried it a few times during its beta period and never quite understood what was going on. Buggy interaction kept me from experimenting enough to get it. The 1.0 release squashes most of the UI bugs that I was running into, and I got the feeling that I could work with this program. There were two big problems that stopped me from diving in (I didn’t buy it) – no documentation, and speed.

  In large part, the usage model explains itself (it helps to have GTD experience). But it doesn’t completely explain itself, and the lack of basic documentation leaves you without a guide to the program’s subtleties. The small “Introduction” window reads more like advertising than a manual, and that’s all you get. The best you can do is explore by double-clicking everything, and typing away.

  There’s no clear explanation why two kinds of text notes exist, how to deal intelligently with task times, or why you might want to use a sheet to review instead of just going through things yourself.

  Can I drag this there? Can that have sub-items? Can I edit that? What does it mean to make a context active? What’s that moving grey bar in the top part? Your guess is as good as mine.

  I could temporarily forgive the lack of a manual and dig through forums (for example the ‘inboxbeeps’ google group) and emails to figure these things out – if it weren’t for the speed. Maybe progress has moved past my G4 Powerbook and everyone reading this will notice no problems at all, but Inbox was just too slow for me – it had responsiveness failings like delays in creating new actions and notes, delays in recognizing clicks to edit, losing keystrokes while editing a project name, and the killer – a spinning beachball while dragging a project to reorder it.

  So, I think it’s got potential. It definitely follows the GTD system. I loved the super-easy ‘quick note’ feature, accessible from anywhere. If it got a lot faster (or I got a new machine), and then – if it got some real documentation, I’d give it a serious try. But for now, I’m going back to Kinkless.

  Note: (10 minutes later) I just saw a note in the inboxbeeps group that they’re working on docs now, and I’ve forwarded my list of questions to the authors. Hopefully this will be helpful, and then my only remaining criticism will be the speed.

   
• 

  Zoomr, Yellow Tree

  admin 2:55 am on July 19, 2006 | 7 Permalink
  

  I’ve taken to carrying my camera around with me, for practice. It’s lead to an unhealthy obsession with camera bags (of which there is no perfect single choice).

  It’s also lead to maxing out my Flickr account quickly, and I have no cash for a Pro account. So, I thought I’d try the new – Zoomr 2.0, and see what I like about it. Geotagging and Google maps integration is cool, and I like the trackbacks, but to be honest, the interface could be much cleaner. Lots of loud colors and bold text vie for attention with the photos, which should be the real focus of attention on a photo sharing site. At any rate, here’s the first photo I uploaded to Zoomr, something I took while waiting for the 30 bus at UCSD: