michael-mccracken.net

Yojimbo, hit and miss

A few people have commented about Yojimbo, including Brent, who gives it a place in his dock. His post has some good points in the comments thread. I’ve already paid for VoodooPad, and put a lot of my brain in there, so I’m not moving my notes anywhere soon. This is a good point to note if you’re thinking of wading into the note-taking app market - if I can’t move my data into your app, it’s unlikely that I”m going to bother using it.

It’s nice to see a real app shipped using Core Data - although the data model appears to be pretty simple. I wonder if they hit any snags developing it? I’d be interested to hear what kind of effort they put into it.

I have a couple of quick nits to pick, in case anyone cares: If you have a three-pane interface, the detail pane has to scroll when I hit the space bar. Especially if it displays web content. Let me say that more clearly: If you display web content, use different key shortcuts than Safari at your own risk.

There’s a useful info inspector for the items, but Cmd-i doesn’t bring it up - it is still trying to italicize something, even if I’m not selecting text. An issue of fit-and-finish I was surprised to see in a BareBones app.

Finally, it’s simple and elegant - it gets the important things right, but I don’t know if it’s really solving a problem that many people have - casual users can store passwords and bookmarks already, and serious researchers have more powerful tools. Maybe the biggest missed opportunity is that a having a single place for all of this data would be a great start towards making it available to other programs, which I think is where the next big leap in computing experience is - think a combination of the iLife media browsers and bookmark/note taking apps, along with a bit of Onlife. That’s what I think the future tastes like…

Previously:
PLDI Papers I’m interested in, part one

I mentioned that I’d post about some of the papers I found interesting from this year’s PLDI conference. Disclaimer: for the most part this is based on reading the abstracts only, so this shouldn’t be considered a thorough review.

Session one is Transactions. I will probably look through these, especially the first paper, “The Atomos Transactional [...]

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PLDI 2006 Papers
January 23, 2006

The technical program for PLDI 2006 is out now - there are certainly a lot of interesting papers in there. I’m looking through them now and will probably comment on a few of the ones I think are cool in another post.

PLDI is traditionally a very competitive conference with an emphasis on experimental results, [...]

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On Reviewing
January 19, 2006

Like most students, I’ve been asked to review papers in my area (and a few that were pretty far outside it), and I always try to do a good job - this is definitely a golden-rule situation. If I don’t take it seriously, I am absolutely convinced that karma will get me in the end, [...]

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