You are currently browsing the Gibberish Weblog weblog archives for January, 2008.

I’ve been busy being a nerd

Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:09 pm on 1/28/2008

I’m not sure what it is about AppJet. Did it really make it more possible for me to say, truthfully, unto you on this day that I made a web application yesterday? Or does it just make it feel more possible, and I could have done it just as easily with some other batch of technologies? I don’t know for sure, but when I think about writing login code, again, I get all angry, so I suspect the former.

AppJet is itself a web application, one that gives you a single text field in which to write another web application. You do this entirely in JavaScript, using some extras they’ve added to do stuff on the server. JavaScript is my favorite language, and it’s lovely both to see it get the respect it deserves in recent years, and to be able to use it to bang out web sites that do stuff. So far, I’ve made a few things: the first and simplest is MarkdownMe, an insta-service for taking text marked up (um) with Markdown and rendering it as HTML – techs out there should feel free to use this in Greasemonkey or Enso commands, as I’m doing. Another is an ongoing wiki project, which started as my first big AppJet experiment (MarkdownMe was spun off from it) and is becoming a testing ground for some wacky wikis-and-group-forming ideas I’ve got.

And the most recent is The Bucket of Truth, an electronic-wallet app I built solely because dammit, I needed it. It does exactly what’s necessary (except for the parts I haven’t built yet… I guess those are not so necessary) to track my spending against a monthly entertainment budget, and it does it fast, with no damn styling that just borks up my Treo anyway. I totally love it. And I really did write most of it yesterday.

In other nerdy news: as long ago as 1999 I was trying to build a web-based outliner – a simple one, not all mind-mappy or oriented around lengthy text notes, but just like the most basic single-level outlining you can do in a tool like OmniOutliner or Radio or Word’s outline mode. In 1999, JavaScript in the browser just wasn’t quite up to the task. Well, now the tools have matured, and after a 2.5-year break, it’s on again in a big, big way. The goal is to have something up for you to play with before the summer. In contrast to the Bucket, it is suave and handsome. Drop me a line if you want to get early access.

Lastly, Fictionsuit recently changed servers; in the future it’s going to be a testing ground too, for some thoughts I’ve been having about forums. Big, big thoughts. More on that soon.

link here

We had to destroy the caps-lock key to save it

Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 11:08 am on 1/16/2008

Enso is now freeware. If you run Windows (and there have been allegations of a forthcoming Mac version, although Quicksilver is very good), you need to give this a try. You’ll never know how much time and attention you are wasting in your Start menu if you don’t. And don’t worry, you’ll still have access to something Caps Lock-like – it just won’t trip you up if you fat-finger Shift or Tab, ever again.

The theories behind Enso come from the work of the late Jef Raskin, who more or less created the Macintosh interface. After that went the way it went, Jef left Apple and went on to take ideas from the Mac and combine them with ideas from the command-line world, as well as some rather lovely new ideas like quasimodes, into the legendary, commercially failed machine the Canon Cat. (For a taste of why the Cat was loved by its users as well as why it was discontinued, take a look at Raskin’s open-source project Archy. Not very beautiful, indeed forbidding-looking, but run the tutorial video and its power becomes clear.)

The theories are Raskin’s, but the code behind Enso comes from his son Aza and his now-ex-colleagues at Humanized. As you can see from the Humanized website, the mistake of neglecting appearances was not made again in Enso. It is as gorgeous as it is snappy and resourceful. And unlike the first-glance inscrutability of Archy, Enso is simple – it pulls one salient idea, that of “leaping,” from the elder Raskin’s work and snaps it right into Windows as though it’s always been there. (Note that the actual “leaps” from the Cat and Archy are full-text searches, which Enso doesn’t do.)

Aza Raskin and his co-Ensoers are (mostly) now employees of the Mozilla Corporation, specifically of Mozilla Labs. Labs is already getting up to a lot of interesting stuff, and it is about to get a lot more interesting. I hope that Enso development doesn’t completely abate, or that we get something in a similar vein but even more awesome.

(Want more UI thoughts? Here’s a video of Aza Raskin doing a tech talk at Google. If that doesn’t grab you, root around some more in the Humanized weblog. And, I am sorry I was away. To quote Ze Frank, I didn’t forget about you, and I like you.)

link here

Archives

Projects

"How to Speak Gibberish."

The answer is here. I have not edited, and will not edit, the page you find there. Please do not contact me about this subject; emails/comments about "speaking gibberish" will be ignored/deleted.

Contact Mike

Contact me

Colophon

Powered by WordPress

Best viewed in a standards-compliant browser, such as Google Chrome

Syndicate this site (RSS, Atom)

Twitter Updates

    Me, Elsewhere