|
Monday, August 18. 2008
Notebook is a fairly nice tool for a job I don't need it to do.
It is designed to let you organise notes, web-clipping, email-clippings, images, video and audio into some sort of loose structure as you want. You can add due dates, check boxes etc. to make to do lists.
You can choose to have outlined pages (a bit like nested bullet points but you can open and close the parent level to show the children if you want), to do list pages, simple writing pages and probably with a bit of playing other things too.
It maintains links back to your web clippings, links out to your address book (this assumes you use the Mac Address Book, Mail and either Safari or Camino), and clippings that contain links maintain the links for you so you can follow them.
There are powerful organising tools built in, and very powerful indexing tools that are automatically available. It also ties to Spotlight if you like using Spotlight.
If I was still a student it might be useful, particularly if I had a laptop with a decent mic and audio-recorded lectures (or took downloads of lecture podcasts), plus I had to organise things to write essays, write up practicals and the like.
As well as obvious things like printing the pages, you can easily export to the web from the built-in tools.
For all these reasons it's something to stop and consider using if you're in that position. There is, however, one additional reason to be interested. Notebook is one of the few tools I've seen with built-in support for the Cornell notetaking system. (Ironically the best online resource for this is NOT Cornell!) The Cornell system is one that I came across whilst support dyslexic learners and it is one tool that many dyslexic learners seem to like. Combining this with the ability to record the lecture (also of interest to many dyslexic learners) and with the audio use the tool to insert annotations that you jump straight to that part of the recording, it could be a really good for the tech-savvy dyslexic learner.
Between spotlight, sidenote and RTM I manage all the bits I need. RTM gives me my to do list nicely on my iPhone too... which makes all the difference.
Monday, August 18. 2008
OK, I might be the greatest at something, but this post is really about all the fuss about "The Greatest Olympian."
One obvious, and currently much-touted contender is Michael Phelps who, in case you've been living under a rock, has just won 8 gold medals in 8 days, and become both the leading medal taker and the person with the most olympic medals of all time. It was an amazing performance, absolutely no doubt.
But how about Sir Steve Redgrave? Don't remember him? He "only" won 5 gold medals. One at each of 5 successive Olympics - and in a power and endurance event: rowing. He didn't have the chance to win 8 medals at a games because there is no way to cross train to row in more than one boat and enter multiple events, but to win 5 successive golds at 5 successive games means he was a world-class performer for at least 16 years in one of the more gruelling events in the books. Certainly another amazing performance.
Another contender has to be Jesse Owens. Being black and born in Alabama in 1913, and growing up in Cleveland hardly sounds like the ideal preparation for world quality athletes. You have to wonder how much discrimination he suffered on the way to Berlin. He then went and very much stuck it to Hitler and the idea of the "Master Race" in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 which can't be underestimated. His achievements were such that no less than SEVENTY-TWO years after doing this, if you mention the name most people know who he is and what he did.
Then there are a couple of unlikely contenders that should be mentioned for living up to the Olympic spirit and ideal as well: Eddie the Eagle and Eric the Eel. They were never going to win, but they were brave enough to take part on the biggest stage in world sport and compete. They exemplify the ideal of:
"The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle."
and in many ways far better than any of the three far more successful athletes above - they weren't there to win, they were there to take part, and they did freely and fully.
There are doubtless other contenders: Dick Fosbury who revolutionised the high jump and is STILL on the Olympic website 40 years later.
There are many, many others that deserve a mention too.
I realise that (most) of the names mentioned are really competitive individuals and would probably all like to be considered the greatest. The Olympics does an amazing thing: it brings together just about every sport in the world onto the same stage at the same time and winning Olympic gold is for many competitors in many sports a massive motivation.
Perhaps we should go back to that ideal: the most important thing is not to win, but to take part. For different reasons all of the names here, and many, many more have to count as great Olympians. Let's not squabble about who the greatest is when the standards by which to judge aren't obvious. Lets simply remember them all for their amazing achievements and the ways in which they might serve as role-models for the rest of us.
And whilst we're thinking about role-models there's another one who has to be there: Emma Snowshill. She's just won the Olympic Triathlon. Someone had to of course, but if you have any idea what the triathlon involves: 1500m swim, 40km bike ride, 10km run straight back-to-back would you expect the winner to be someone that, of necessity, competes with an inhaler in her suit just in case she suffers an asthma attack?
Sunday, August 17. 2008
Aviary is a web2.0-ish collection of tools for image manipulation. The tools, as you might guess given the title of the overall site, are named after birds.
They're flash-driven, which makes them pretty much platform agnostic (although you will definitely need the latest version of Flash Player for your browser).
Currently there are only two tools available, at least for mortals like me, Phoenix and Peacock:
- Phoenix is, roughly speaking, Photoshop-lite-online;
- Peacock is a pattern generator.
The tools pages lists a really long list of additional tools to come, including:
- Raven (an Illustrator-lite-online),
- Hummingbird - a 3D modeller and skinner (Maya/3DSMax-lite-online maybe? Will it do sculpties?!),
- a couple of things that will do audio/music,
- a DTP tool (Owl)
- and a word-processing tool (Penguin)
There will also be tools for sharing and selling content and the like, and there's a (currently quite small) community that will comment on each other's work.
Now, let me be honest. I'm very happy in Photoshop. If I'm going to be doing that sort of work at home I will, 100% of the time, fire up Photoshop rather than reach for Aviary and run Phoenix. However there are things on the list like Horus, (who technically is an Egyptian deity rather than a bird, but at least he has a hawk's head) which is a font editor that I might use, because I don't do enough font editing to make it worth having professional software to do it. Beyond that, Phoenix does, most of the time (and the rest is probably my fault - I've given it about 2 hours effort rather than the hundreds or thousands of hours in Photoshop) really very good picture editing. I would, very happily if away from home and on a machine that doesn't have Photoshop, log myself in to Aviary to use Phoenix for image editing that needed doing.
The really nice touch? Although it's not identical, in many ways if you're a Photoshop user you'll feel at home in Phoenix (I suspect the same is true if you're a GIMP user, can't speak for other bitmap editors) so that my first image in Phoenix took maybe 5% longer to do that it would have in Photoshop and was indistinguishable from a photoshop image. It wasn't hugely complex, but I have since done more complicated work, and I feel comfortable using this tool for that too.
Aviary is currently invite only, and I only have a couple left, although you can sign up to request beta status I think. If you need to do image editing and CS3 is unavailable thanks to price or similar, Aviary might well be a web-tool for you. If, like me, you travel a bit and don't have a laptop, it could well be ideal too.
Thursday, August 14. 2008
Just in case you're not familiar with Gardner and his theory of Multiple Intelligences there are some links and a quick overview:
- Traditional IQ measures are a bad measure of intelligence and learning ability. This is also entertainingly dealt with by Stephen Jay Gould in "The Mismeasure of Man"
- If you look at a range of clinical and rather more scientifically valid measures of ability and learning skill and brain activity/structures you can derive distinct areas of "intelligence" that seem to form sensible groups more or less distinct from each other. These are:
- Bodily-kinaesthetic
- Interpersonal
- Verbal-linguistic
- Logical-Mathematical
- Naturalistic
- Intrapersonal (also called reflective or emotional)
- Spatial
- Musical
There are lots of criticisms of this theory - one obvious one is that many learnt behaviours cross over several of these intelligences: if you learn to play saxophone you use Bodily-Kinaesthetic as well as Musical intelligence for example.
Another is that the "Multiple domain" measures (standard IQ tests) show good correlation between those parts that they measure, suggesting that the separation isn't as good as you might think. (Quite a few of the others are fear-based moaning from special interest groups to be frank, and conservative elements saying "why change things?")
However, I've also been watching the Olympics and thinking about this. There are sports (Diving, Judo, Gymnastics) that suggest strongly they're mostly BK type intelligence. There are sports like shooting which are mostly Spatial (spatial includes hand-eye co-ordination) and sports like Tennis, Hockey etc. which are both. Team sports may add Interpersonal too.
But then there are sports like Sailing which don't sit that comfortably into any obvious category. Is there a missing list for learning to sail? Should every skill fit somewhere into one or more of these intelligences anyway?
If you read in more detail the Bodily-Kinaesthetic includes "big" things - Gymnastics, Judo, etc. knowing where you body is and how it's orientated and moving and small-things like manual dexterity. Do you believe a good gymnast or a good judoka is naturally gifted when it comes to learning how to do craft skills? Will every Judoka retrain as a plumber when their career in Judo is over - Gardner suggests they should be well suited to doing so. I remember enough about brain structure to understand why they're lumped together, but I find myself wondering if they are actually that similar in real application.
Similarly, should Logical-Mathematical be split out into two. Logical analysis spills over verbal as well as numerical understanding - I know of several people who would score very highly on written logic puzzles (which would normally be in the verbal-linguistic area) and are terrible with numbers, complex calculations and the logic of problem solving in a mathematical/scientific sense.
I should make it clear I don't have good answers here, I'm more asking questions. I should also say that I'm very unconvinced by general IQ tests and whilst I know there are all kinds of problems with using learning styles and MI type concepts, my practical experience suggest they are useful tools to have to hand when considering how to teach a given student. Any thoughts anyone?
Thursday, August 14. 2008
Thanks to Pip for pointing me at You Suck At Photoshop.
It mixes good quick demos of various photoshop techniques with a geek-humour thing where his wife doesn't appreciate him, he gets Skyped for raids in WOW and the like which might grate on your nerves, but if you can bear it there are good nuggets in there for the beginner.
It is low on detail sometimes - there's a fair bit of "grab this tool and play with it until it looks right" and sometimes what you might want is more the knowledge of what it makes it look right, but there are good explanations mixed in too.
If you want to move on past this, particularly for photoshop for Second Life, there are a whole batch of books for game design in Photoshop. My favourite, The Dark Side of Game Texturing, has a lot of good content and good practises too, and ways to make interesting looking textures rather than everything shiny and new (which is there too if you're not sure), although it also has a lot of fairly random stuff that's not that applicable to Second Life (how to make partially transparent textures in Castle Wolfenstein - not so useful here).
Wednesday, August 13. 2008
Over on Dusan Writer's blog the winners of his UI redesign contest have been announced.
Of course I also blogged my own thoughts about the UI and how I think it should be redesigned and mine is (naturally in my possibly biased view) better than any of the other…
However, congratulations to:
- Rheta Shan for her "toolbox" concept which won the day;
- Jacek Antonelli got a big mention for her Inventory window rewrite (which I must admit I would love to have right now and unashamedly borrowed directly into my redesign ideas);
- Roy Cassini for his efforts to make it easier for new users to learn about.
It will be interesting to see if there is any official reaction to this contest and how the redesign of the UI that has sort of started with the "Silver" look in 1.20 will continue.
Sunday, August 10. 2008
This is a really hard film to review. In patches it was excellent, in patches terrible, and overall, sadly, not that good.
The premise is great - the rather despotic Emperor of China wants to live forever. The witch he summons to help him achieve this falls for his chief general which he regards as treason. She curses him and his army, and thus the terracotta army is formed. The conquest of China and the assassins sent by the other kings to try and stop the Emperor becoming that give Jet Li a pretty good martial arts showcase.
Some time after WWII Rick and Evie's son finds the tomb and opens it. Rick and Evie are asked to take something to China that activates the mummy and all hell breaks loose as the mummy returns to a semblance of life and seeks the final thing that will make it immortal and invulnerable (sound familiar?).
The terracotta army, the army of "these are the good undead guys" and their battles are great.
Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li have an incredibly crap stand off. Come on, two of the leading martial arts actors in the world and they get a 30 second scene fighting each other... please! There are some pretty moves in there, but it's still a let down.
Then there's all the bad stuff. The replacement for Rachel Weisz was bad. Her attempts to act as an upper-class Englishwoman were wooden and dull. She might have been trying for reserved and stiff-upper-lip but not being a natural to it, the rather thick façade she put up for it never showed any signs of cracking and so the character never came to life. Consequently I never believed the relationship between Evie and Rick in the way I had in the first two movies.
The bratty son, in some circumstances - such as the tomb robbing archaeology when he finds the terracotta army - could apparently act. This makes the way he acted around his love interest (as if he were 14 rather than 21, and she was his first rather than him "having some experience with women Mum") all the more unbearable. The strained relationship with the father and the redemption of that relationship was tacky and dull, if not hackneyed. Much like the Western went away for a couple of decades, we could do with this story line vanishing too please!
Then there were the "wouldn't it be cool if..." moments of CGI. The yeti would be in this category. They could have told the story differently and completely skipped the yeti. Whilst they looked moderately pretty, why were they there? When Jonathan comes back with reinforcements (one whole extra plane) was it really only so they could have a plane crash and do those special effects without killing him off?
The final insult: Jon leaves China, heading for "somewhere with no mummies." Peru. The audience got it and laughed. Then they put up the line "Mummies were discovered in Peru shortly after." ARGH do you think we're all thick?
Addendum: The original The Mummy was on TV earlier today. I watched it. It was so much better. Some of that was no bratty son and the fact that it was Rachel Weisz as Evie. Some of it was that the urge to introduce "wouldn't it be cool if..." moments had been stamped on - perhaps they didn't quite trust Sommers, perhaps he had a stronger person to stand up to him about it. But there were smaller touches too - Rick and Benny have a fun side-relationship that was absent.
The other big thing - both this movie and the original Mummy have elements of sacrifice - people risking everything to save the world, and giving their lives to help others achieve that end. But, in the original movie however corny it was, that sacrifice was acknowledged. In the later one, one character was overjoyed to make the "sacrifice" (which makes you wonder how much of a sacrifice it was) and the the other who significantly sacrificed was glossed over. Not good screenwriters, sacrifice ought to be acknowledged, certainly in a story like this where it is ONLY by sacrifice that the bad guy is defeated. You can't sweep that piece of the story aside on a whim.
Thursday, August 7. 2008
Before you read the rest of this, I should say I loved The X Files when it first came out. Sometime in the run, as the series mythology got more and more impossible to follow I lost the will to watch it. Sometime, about the time Mulder was replaced, I more or less stopped watching it.
On that proviso, there is back-story I don't know and that they might have messed up if your a completest nerd, but which didn't bother me in the slightest.
This story was much more like one of the early season stories, just told later on. There was a real-world thriller-type mystery and a layer of "is there something spooky going on?" to add to it. In fact, although it might have been tricky, you could probably have made it as a two-part show and slipped it in to season 2 and apart from the back-story bits it would have worked very well.
There's quite a lot of back-story too: Mulder and Scully's relationship, jobs, Mulder being hunted by the FBI and so on. But it's all handled smoothly, the revelations are worked in well to the pacing of the rest of the story and the characters are plausible as a decade on developments of their former selves.
The music, when it started up, caused goosebumps for two of us. And really, whilst it could have been a TV movie or a part of a new series, that feeling of comfortably watching brilliant TV in a movie, even if quite large parts of the story are pretty disturbing, and that feeling that it was back to The X Files at its height, but 20 years on is really high praise.
It should be said that all of the main characters perform very solidly, in fact all of the acting all round it pretty good - except that, unlike her backstory, it's obvious when Billy Connolly and Gillian Anderson are talking to each other, that she's been living in Scotland for a while! But, that aside, well worth the time and the money.
Sunday, August 3. 2008
One of the things that gets overlooked in all the Web 2.0 excitement is the choices we have available to us these days.
Ten years ago you more or less had to use Word, Excel, etc. Wordperfect was still just about around but dying. To create web-content you either had to be a geek and learn HTML, or be able and willing to suffer the bad HTML that MS products generate or splash out on Dreamweaver or similar.
But, with a very few exceptions, there was only one choice of how to do any single task.
These days there are more choices for just about everything, and there are good free choices for most of the big applications too. Do you really need MS-Office when there's Neo-Office and Open-Office that both do the same job, in a similar way for free? You can write collaboratively in Google Docs and Google Pages too, or even more collaboratively and potentially openly on a wiki or similar. If you want to blog, do you go with Livejournal, WordPress, Blogger or one of the more minority ones (like Serendipity that powers this blog)? Are you one of the relatively rare folks that pays to blog? Once you've chosen your host do you use Flock which is crammed with tools to make cross-connecting your social networking sites easier, another browser, a tool such as Mars Edit or X-Journal that sits on your desktop and communicates when it's all done or some other way? Blog from email, iPhone, Twitter, Plurk... etc.
Do you get an email with your ISP (I know I do and I hardly ever use it)? Do you use gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail or something else? Do you, like me, also maintain a mobileme account (formerly .mac) and actually pay for it?
Do you like IE, FF, Safari, Opera, Camino, Shiira, Fluid SSBs, Mosaic SSBs, Flock or something else as your preferred browser whilst we're at it? Despite the various myths that the adherents to one or the other will tell you all the browsers, basically, do the job of showing webpages (it is true that IE does this less well than others where CSS is involved). Most offer those of us that like tabs choices to allow this, but not everyone likes tabs. The rest of the choice for which browser you use is not really defined by technical differences, much like choices of blogging host isn't really defined by technical differences, it's defined by your choices. Do you want 10,000 plug-ins to make particular jobs easier? Firefox is for you. Do you like faster to start, leaner applications? SSBs or Camino might be for you. Do you want something that integrates tightly with your Mac OS - Safari is the way to go.
Is this a Web 2.0 phenomenon? The content is becoming increasingly divorced from platform, access tool and so forth so it becomes technically easier to make different ways of doing the same thing. Perhaps it is tied in. Perhaps it's less direct than that: more and more people use computers. More and more they are finding that they don't want to work the way the computer insists (or rather insisted) they should and so they are on the look out for something that does the job they want without the hassle of trying to force their head around an alien way of thinking. I can, for instance, say that I don't like Flock. I can give you reasons why I don't like (or I could have done when I gave it up as a bad lot) but that doesn't mean Flock isn't a perfectly usable browser. It means Flock and I don't work the same way and so I'll use something else through personal choice. Those exact same choices might make it the ideal browser for you, and if so, more power to you. Certainly more power and more choice to us, which has to be a good thing, right?
Monday, July 28. 2008
In an odd way this film reminds me of Gone Baby Gone.
It's not as gritty and real as GBG was, but it is certainly dark, gritty and uncomfortable. But it's also a movie about moral choices. Much like GBG you know what the choices are, and the characters know what the outcome of their choices are, well except The Joker we assume, and the choices are fairly uncomfortable, resulting in deaths, being branded an outlaw and so forth.
The movie is also very violent, there are many deaths, but also fight scenes where Batman deliberately goes out of his way to not kill his targets because they're doing what they think is right on insufficient information and are about to kill innocents. There are a lot of large, long fight scenes, including fights with dogs on a couple of occasions which I suspect the stunt crew didn't like so much. There's a long chase scene too, which is nowhere near as spectacular as the chase in whichever of The Matrix movies it was in, but which is still pretty impressive.
Although it is dark and fairly grim, there are a number of moments of light relief, mostly provided by the British actors (Michael Caine, Christian Bale and Gary Oldman of course), although not only by them. Christian Bale continues to impress as both Batman and as the playboy Bruce Wayne. Heath Ledger - well if he hadn't died he might not have been talked about for an Oscar because Batman is a bit of genre movie, but actually it's a pretty wonderful performance that probably deserves consideration for the Oscars.
As you might notice, this is short on plot details - because if you're a Batman fan you'll have few surprises when you see the show, but if you're not any place you think of starting turns into spoilers.
One thing I would say, this film felt like it was 3 hours long, when it's only about 2h15. There are at least two places before the end where, if I hadn't been warned it was going to happen, I'd have thought the film was wrapping up. It's an odd pacing for a mainstream movie, but it does work fairly well, and there is a feeling of closure of story lines that might not have been there otherwise.
Sunday, July 27. 2008
I wrote about the Google Generation and deeper learning recently.
A new report for the British Library starts from the title that: Pioneering research shows ‘Google Generation’ is a myth which I discovered in a suitably Google Generation way when someone shared it on Diigo ( Jonathan Tepper thank you).
The executive brief says:
- All age groups revealed to share so-called ‘Google Generation' traits
- New study argues that libraries will have to adapt to the digital mindset
- Young people seemingly lacking in information skills; strong message to the government and society at large
However if you read the 35 page download of the full report the situation isn't quite as clear.
It appears that everyone is becoming more demanding that the information is easy to find, although the research that says people spend 4 minutes looking at e-books and 8 minutes looking at e-journals suggests they are prepared to spend longer than that "magic 10 seconds" you hear the web designers talk about.
However age still makes a big difference in how you act when hunting for information, and rather supporting my earlier assertion about deeper learning there is some evidence that the younger you are the less good your ability to critically evaluate what you find seems to be. After about two seconds thought this doesn't necessarily surprise me, and I wonder how different it would be if this research had been done 30 years ago. People in their fifties routinely using the British Library are almost certainly not representative of the general population - they form a group of people with long term research skills who are still involved in information research. They've got 30-40 years experience and practise on the Google Generation, is this what makes their analysis and evaluation skills superior, or is there a generational difference?
One place that they identify a striking, but diminishing, generational difference is the willingness to engage in online library searching in the traditional ways. When I was an undergraduate, and to a lesser extent a postgraduate student, finding sources of data meant either physically or increasingly over the time scale electronically accessing various databases (including ones in books!) such as the Science Citation Index, MedLine etc. Those of us old enough to remember having to do this in books are tolerant of doing it electronically. The Google Generation expects (not entirely unreasonably) to be able to search from Google to find the information.
This prompts a strong recommendation that libraries need to open up their databases and collections to Google and the other search engines to be indexed and so to be directly available from a routine if low precision search rather than attempting to hide the information away and hoard it like a secret and require slower, more precise searches to reveal the data. However, there is a big gap between perceived and tested information literacy, particularly in the younger users. There is a need to put information literacy into the educational and political arena as an increasingly important element of our life skills.
Sunday, July 27. 2008
 I blogged, about 6 weeks ago, about Sidenote. I have to say my love affair with it is still going well. Whether I copy a conversation into it until I can come back, or a notecard that someone drops that I want to read later, or jot notes about positions, sizes of the parts of Hadrian's Wall or whatever, it's there, it's easy to find, it's easy to make new notes and so on and to manage your notes quickly and easily too.
I use it quite like a more detailed to-do list. I'll have an item on Remember The Milk that says "build Hadrian's Wall" and whilst I could do long notes, I'll have the details of the build in Sidenote so it's easy to flick in and out of them whilst building in Second Life. It's great.
Speaking of Remember The Milk it gives you a nice Web 2.0 type to-do list. This one isn't Mac only mind, being online. I tend to use direct from my Mac in an RTM SSB to create new tasks and check and complete lists whilst at the computer, but there are, it appears 6 ways to add things to it, including emailing a fairly "English" email to automatically file your new to-do items. You can also get a QuickSilver plug-in and even dashboard widgets. What makes this probably more attractive is that there's iCal and gCal integration, so you get all of those tools to hand and even more attractive (as long as you're willing to part with some cash) there are versions optimised for iPhone, BlackBerry etc. so you can quickly and easily access your to do list on the go - both to add and complete tasks.
 Speaking of QuickSilver, I was recently pointed in the direction of Butler, a tool that someone suggested was better than QuickSilver. You can see the Butler additions to the menu bar: the search bar and the two icons to the right of it are from Butler. I have to say that after only a couple of days Butler went from my menu bar because I never used it. The search bar was nice, but for the rest it proved a pain to move the mouse up there, click the icon, drill down to find what was going on and then click it. QuickSilver's quick-invoke, start typing the word and get a list of options to come up with some smart sorting by frequency in there is absent. The ability to assign hotkeys to bring up an application is there, which I do use, but the general flexibility of QS is absent - it takes a lot more time and effort to drill down through ALL my applications or sort through ALL my address book which Butler requires than to type a few letters in QS to my mind. Butler adds a possibly attractive quick-store bookmark tool. The downside? You can only add new bookmarks from Safari. Oops.
The two magnifying glass icons a bit further to the right are tools to search google from the menu bar, although they work a bit more like Spotlight. The one on the black disk is Google Buddy, which is a pay-for and less well featured tool. The other (with the mini-spotlight like icon) is Monocle. Monocle has the right price (it's freeware). It's easy to add a keyboard shortcut to evoke it (so I have Apple-Space for QS, Alt-Space for Monocle, Apple-Alt-Space for Spotlight) and then you're typing into the search bar. It pops off and opens your default browser with the results. What's especially nice about it? Well you can add your own search engines quickly and easily (so I've got Google, Google Images and Wikipedia) and you can assign them a quick-key to force the search the right way. :g will make it a google search, :w a wikipedia search, :i a google images search. That's truly blissful because you head to the right place straight away. Adding new search engines (I've just added dictionary.com) takes moments (maybe 20 seconds) and they're there on a letter to call within that time too.
In this day and age there are a plethora of tools - and I've listed the ones I don't like as well as the ones I do because the way I work and the way you work might well be different.
Sidenote has certainly acted as a lovely productivity tool (and I know Stickies is there, but I never liked Stickies, this is far neater - those who have seen my desk, stop those hysterics now!), QS still reigns supreme for keyboard access to things for me, and I rather think monocle is going to make a difference too.
Friday, July 25. 2008
As I've previously commented, there's been a competition about redesigning the Second Life interface that is, in fact still running at the moment.
I was too busy, or perhaps too lazy, to actually enter, but I've had a think about what I'd like.
First up, almost inevitably is to redesign the menus. I'm not going to go into a huge amount of details about that at the moment, it could become a major essay very, very quickly.
Suffice it to say I'd have File, Edit, Help: that's a fairly standard set. File would have uploading and saving stuff, relogging and quitting but lose snapshots, movies etc. Edit would have undo, copy, paste etc. but lose all the stuff about attachments, clothes etc. Help would more or less stay as it is.
Then I'd have some new Menus.
I'd have a social menu that would have gestures, chat, IM, friends, groups etc. and the take snapshots etc. (because you probably take them to share after all).
I'd have an avatar menu, with all the attach, detach, clothes, profile etc. This would also have rebake textures.
World more or less as is, but with find in it and without the stuff that's mentioned elsewhere. I'd hack out the extra layer for "environment settings" and move them all straight into their own boxed section of the world menu.
Tools would lose Stop All Animations and Release Keys to Avatar and Bug Reporting to Help, but stay as is.
Region/Estate would become a separate menu that only appears if you're an estate manager for the region you're in.
The advanced menu would more or less disappear, but a lot of the tools in there that power users use would get added to the bottom of other menus as necessary if you choose the "advanced" option in preferences (now in File btw). Many of the other things in Advanced (disable camera constraints, go afk etc.) would become preferences on their own tab too.
There's more to be done there, but you can sort of see the broad outline of where I'm going.
The thing I would do that is not there at the moment, is add two elements about menus and buttons:
- A key-binding tool. Each menu item would be able to be bound to your own keystrokes, or left unbound. I'd keep, more or less, the current set (Cntl-I for inventory, Cntl-Shift-I for IM rather than cntl-T would be a change). This would be a massive nuisance for mentors, but there would be a default set that you then change if you must. It would be accessed via advanced options, probably in tools.
- A button binder tool: Every menu item would have a "create button" option (this would probably check to show you've got a button already out there). Clicking create button creates a button on the screen, right slap bang in the middle. There would be a button editor element here which would start "on" when you create a new button so you can move the button where you like. You want to use the sides of your screen for buttons, no problem. You want to use the top and bottom, no problem. You want hot corners with various clusters that suit you, no problem. You never use the build button, remembering Cntl-4 (or Cntl-B if you bind it that way) no problem, don't have a build button. The button editor would let you do some more things:
- You could make a "background" so like we currently have buttons on a grey background (or silver) you can create that around your cluster of buttons.
- You could edit the button - this would include uploading your own images, colouring the button and text as you choose, and editing the text. Want a red "INV" button for your inventory? No problem.
Does this give us more functionality? No, not yet. Second Life has a shed load of functionality already, for a lot of users the problem is accessing it, not that Second Life won't let them do it.
I'd be tempted to add some more bits:
- Photoshop lets you dock palettes, create your own tabbed palettes etc. Second Life should too. You should also be able to remove bits. This would give people like me that love it, a separate friends menu still for example. When building and scripting, I often flick between several tabs on the edit floater. I'd like to be able to tear them off and dot them around the screen. You don't want this? No worries, it's an option, not a necessity.
- Display options for IMs. Most IM clients I've seen use tabs across for different IMs, so keep that (although make it easy to tear them off, which we already have and I'm sure some people use). But the presentation is... dull. Let us skin that. Provide us with some common skins. I like black backgrounds and two-tone green writing, or green backgrounds and black writing. They both hurt some people. But you like the iChat look, well make that available (I'm gradually falling for it on the iPhone for SMS conversations I must admit). You want screaming red and teal on an orange background? OK, you can do that.
- Add in an option to set your font. The "SL font" isn't unpleasant, but working with dyslexic learners I quickly learnt there's no such thing as an ideal font. Some like clean, sans-serif fonts, others prefer serif fonts. Some like wide fonts, some like narrow fonts and so on. Like a lot of mac users I have a lot of fonts (about 1,000 at the last count) and whilst some of them are no good for Second Life, it should be my choice.
The whole point of this is to put options in the hands of each resident. My "perfect" interface probably looks nothing like yours. The colours, labels, fonts, positions and everything else are changeable to suit you.
I'm not abandoning the ideas from those who did enter the contest either. I'd lift Damien's idea of separate button sets or themes. I'll extend it and nick the rest from Apple and their spaces idea. I don't use spaces on my Mac, I'll admit, but the ability to define basically any number of skins that I want, brilliant. I'll have building, scripting, texturing, shopping, socialising etc. themes, all available at the click of a button or two.
Inventory needs a rebuild, and I'm just going to steal Jacek's idea as it currently sits there. It might not be the ultimate solution, but it's certainly a big step in the right direction. The yowling masses might moan that favourites will change - well kiddies, I think we're mostly grown ups here. If you change your favourites, change them. Make it easy to do. Apple's sidebar on finder windows is a miracle of ease of use, but that might be too much to aspire to just yet. But a simple right click item on folders to mark/unmark is easy enough. Don't like the idea because you're too lazy to keep it up to date? No problem, don't use it.
Wednesday, July 23. 2008
 I was asked if I made a scorer tool and the answer was, sadly, a no. So, I made one. I quite often make things in this way - simple requests for items that are generally useful so I stop and make them and sell them at Linden Dollar prices.
This score system features:
- You, or a nominated scorer, can easily keep track of scores in games and contests up to 999.
- The colours can be set to any of white, red, blue, green, yellow, cyan and purple. This affects the front and top of the panel as well as the colour of the numbers.
- There are three different scoring buttons so you can set different scores easily. This will handle penalties scores too.
- There is a system to let you nominate the scorer so the owner can play games without affecting the scores directly.
- The scorecard is copy and modify so you can resize to your hearts content, apply logos to the sides and fronts if required etc. You can rez as many as you like - one per team maybe, or different scorers at different places for different games.
This tool is available in world in all the normal places, and on SLEx and OnRez
The Get Satisfaction page for feedback is up too.
Tuesday, July 22. 2008
There are so many ways I could tackle this review.
I suppose the first thing I should say is, that like about 2/3 of the population of the UK my age, ABBA never really did it for me at the time. I was more likely to be listening to The Doors, The Kinks, Free, Janis Joplin and the like. That said, some of their later bluesier stuff did work for me. Now I'm older there's still a lot of ABBA's music I can pass on quite happily, but there's more I do like.
Another thing that should be said up front: it's possibly the ultimate chick-flick. 90% of the audience was big groups of straight women with no men around. There were a few couples, but they were few and far between.
There are also quite a few technical reasons why this film shouldn't work. Meryl Streep and her daughter can sing, as can most of the chorus, but the rest of the leads can't really sing. (It's not painfully bad, but they're not quality singers, nor are they meant to be - they're actors.)
There are a couple of songs where the segue stretches the sense of disbelief as well.
The story was moved along mostly by the songs, but occasionally by dialogue. The problem is that although in other contexts a lot of the dialogue would have worked OK (it IS a musical, so parts were corny, but not terrible), the music is just so big and vibrant that the dialogue almost always falls flat. The exception is the various moments as the men realise they're (or they think they are) Sophie's father.
BUT, it was a blast. The weaknesses in singing voices were used to give the songs character that worked well and engaged the audience. The songs work well to advance the story and the character all work. I've got a soft spot for Julie Waters, and she was a star. The fact that Sophie reminded me quite painfully of one of my first girl-friends might also contribute to the impact of the show.
The suspense about which one is the real father is nicely maintained, and she shows enough elements of all them to leave you unsure.
If that weren't enough, there are a couple of extra numbers sung at the end. Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and the other guy in multi-coloured flared cat-suits is a memory that will stick with me for a long, long time.
I know I don't regularly buy DVDs, but I'll certainly think about this one.
|
