I purchased my iPhone on release day which was roughly 2 months ago. It exceeded my expectations in every way, and continues to prove itself a worthwhile purchase. The phone has received plenty of press talking about how great it is, but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone talk about one of my favorite features. The pinch zoom is neat and all, but it is not nearly as useful as iPhone Safari’s double tap zoom.
The double tap zoom intelligently zooms in on the block level element that is tapped. With the column format of many websites this works brilliantly. Double tap on the block level element again, and it zooms back out. Double tap on another block level element and it re-zooms to focus on that one. It is fantastic, and part of what makes Safari on iPhone such a viable web browser. I love this feature so much that I really miss it when I browse the web on a PC. This is a feature that can and should be added to traditional browsers.
Another feature of the phone that caught me off guard was the surprisingly adequate built in camera. It has served me very well in situations where I needed to snap a photo of something interesting. At 1600×1200 the photos it takes far exceed the throw away photos I’ve taken with every other phone I’ve owned.
Anyone who knows me, knows I have no will power… At all. Especially when it comes to food, which is why I don’t let myself have too much to eat around the house or it will be gone as soon as I put it on the shelf. I’m the last person who should be allowed into a buffet, because I’m a hazard to my own health. I’m currently suffering from a food hangover, and it isn’t pleasant. I didn’t know this was possible, but I swear that I have a headache brought on by what I ate.
The buffet had a freaking chocolate fountain. What was I supposed to do? What would you do?
On the other hand, this Buffet has never done me wrong:
Quicksilver is one of the most useful and interesting applications I’ve used, and has changed my expectations for computer interfaces. It is a freeware MacOS X only application that I currently use as an application launcher. I haven’t even scratched the surface of it’s potential uses yet, but even for my simplistic tasks it makes a huge difference. It hides in the background, and pops up with a specifiable key combination. Once Quicksilver is activated, one simply begins typing, and Quicksilver uses an autocomplete method to guess what application or file on one’s computer one is looking for. Once found (usually after 2-4 letters) hit enter, then either the application launches, or the file opens.
The crucial thing for me is that Quicksilver pops up with a key combination. Using MacOS X 10.4 means that I already have a great indexed search utility built in with Apple’s Spotlight (which can also function as an application launcher), but it just doesn’t feel as accessible.
I’ve come to enjoy using Quicksilver so much, that I miss it when I’m using Windows. I’ve tried to find an application that mimics Quicksilver, but it doesn’t appear that such an application exists. So far I’ve found a workable solution with Google Desktop. If you have it configured properly, hitting Ctrl twice will pop up the Google Desktop Search bar, and from there it works in a similar fashion to Quicksilver. Something about it doesn’t feel quite as polished as Quicksilver, but it is a very good step in the right direction.
I recently put Windows Vista on my home PC, and it has a built in search index similar to Apple’s Spotlight called Instant Search. I was hopeful that this would be a sufficient replacement for Google Desktop, but I found it to be as difficult to quickly access as Apple’s Spotlight.
Verdict: As of now, it seems that Google Desktop is the best option for a Quicksilver application launcher stand in under Windows. I can finally let the “Programs” section of my Start Menu get as cluttered as I want, because now I can cut straight to the program I want without raising my hands off of the keyboard.
If anyone knows of any more suitable alternatives I’d be happy to hear about them.
Update: Despite my initial opinion of Vista’s Instant Search, I’ve since found the way to quickly access it in the fashion I desired. I just realized that in Vista, after hitting the Windows key (which does the same thing as clicking on the start button) as soon as I start typing the text drops into the search field. This is precisely what I needed it to do to act as an application launcher. I still prefer the way Quicksilver and Google Desktop pop up in the center of the screen, but this is completely sufficient for my needs. Google Desktop is still the only viable option I’m aware of for Windows XP.
The pong shots are amazing enough, but the musical selection emphasizes these feats for what they are. These shots are a triumph of the human spirit, and without a doubt they are an enterprise of Rocky proportions.
Seattle has had some unpleasant weather so far this year. We’ve managed to avoid having nice days for the most part until the past week. Then all of a sudden today it was nearly 90F out. I’m not complaining, as I enjoy decent weather, but where did that come from? According to the forecast we should be back to the mid 60’s tomorrow.
I used the good weather as an excuse to accidentally get drunk on a Tuesday afternoon. Oops.
I used to love wearing watches. They were functional, and I liked the look. The problem is that now that I carry a mobile phone at all times they no longer provide me with anything I need. A mobile phone keeps accurate time, knows what day and month it is, and automatically adjusts for things like local time zone and day light savings time. A standard watch on the other hand requires manual intervention to provide any of those features.
I find that it is becoming increasingly rare that I actually wear a watch. It’s sad. I miss having a need for you watch collection.
No one will care about this post. At all. Please stop reading now.
For a long time, everything found on this site was created by me. It was a fun project I did while I had some down time during graduate school to remind me about web development. It looked okay and I didn’t hate it, but it was just a real pain to maintain. I had put nearly all of my efforts into the front end user experience, as I figured it wasn’t that big of a deal that it wouldn’t be user friendly for me. As a result I just didn’t update it very often. Wordpress streamlines everything for me, which makes it a lot easier to post.
Perhaps equally important is that the comment system on my original site was not very robust. I didn’t spend the time or effort to harden it against automated spam bots. As a result, every day I received something around 100 comments full of links to garbage. I had always prevented html comments by converting all of the special characters into html characters so it was impossible to post links and what not. The automated spam bots didn’t check to see if what they were posting worked, they just posted garbage. Their posts often ended up being full of 20 or 30 lines that looked like this: <a href=”http://garbagesite.com” alt=”get a hot date tonight”>http://garbagesite.com</a>.
To combat this, I just stopped accepting posts that had anything resembling links in them. This cut the spam down a lot at first. Then all of a sudden they seemed to get wise to this and started just posting posts with no intelligible content in them at all. It clearly had no benefit for them as it didn’t even include links people could copy and paste, or Google could pick up. It was just noise more or less. Why would they do this? At this point it became impossible for me to filter for garbage with out a significantly improved filtering system, and I just didn’t have the motivation to deal with it given that I hadn’t received a real comment from someone I knew in nearly a year. So I killed the ability to post comments on my old site.
Now that I’m using Wordpress I can allow comments again, as well as post easily. Let’s see if I actually do that.
Today I discoverd that it is possible to keep flying squirrels as pets. This was news to me. I think I would like to get one.
I haven’t had any sort of pet since I was a child, but I’ve toyed with the idea from time to time. I thought I wanted a dog, but I don’t like the idea of leaving an animal roaming around my home while I’m gone every day. These guys are small enough that they can enjoy life in a cage while I’m away, and they will spend most of that time sleeping as they are nocturnal animals.
A potential plus or minus depending on how you look at it is that these guys live from 10 to 12 years. If it turns out that this guy isn’t for me, we get to spend the next decade giving each other cold looks. When I was a kid, my little sister had a pet cockatiel. That bird was vicious. It hated everyone except my father. He it loved. Those birds live roughly 17 years. That’s a long time to care for a pet that hates you. Some time after both my sister and I were away at college, my parents gave that bird away to another home. I’m not sure exactally how old that bird would be now, but there is a chance it is still out there somewhere hating me. That troubles me.
Given that the idea of getting a pet flying squirrel only occured to me today, I’m going to think on it a while before I make a decade changing decision. As of right now, I think I’m going to get one and name it either Franklin or Marta depending on sex.
Update (7/8/2007): What the F was I thinking? Like I was ever going to get a pet. Come on.
When I first heard it, I hated the word blog. I refused to acknowledge it. I laughed at those who used it, and especially those who called themselves bloggers. I don’t know when exactally I changed my mind about the word, but at some point it just stopped seeming stupid to me.
The idea of blogging is something I’ve been familiar with since before it had a word, and I’ve never been particularly opposed to the idea. I guess giving it a word is appropriate, but in the future it would be better if some care was taken to create words that didn’t sound so inane. That said, the concept has a word now and it is pointless to struggle against it.
I’ve given in, and admited my self-indulgent posts about topics and ideas that matter to no one but myself comprise what is obviously a blog. I’ve been doing this longer than the word existed, but it is hard to deny that what I’ve been doing is blogging.
Quicksilver
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