I’m going to Lift France 09 tomorrow! Since a big part of my motivation for going was its focus on networking, since they encourage you to fill a profile on their site and over half of the >550 participants actually do it, and since the theme this year is “A hands on future”, I decided to do a quick re-interface their list of participants, which was too unwieldy for me.
Check it out at http://elzr.com/lift
Backbars on social link-sites is a GreaseMonkey script to
turn the headlines and comments of social link-sites into ambient bar charts (of votes/diggs/views/users…) It works on
Reddit,
Delicious,
Digg,
Hacker News, and
Stack Overflow (and
MetaFilter now!).
The idea is to give you subtle non-verbal clues to improve your browsing experience almost subconsciously. The backbars don’t replace the count they represent, what they do is convey you its magnitude unobtrusively, and, crucially, compare that magnitude to those around it. So you can now see, almost without thinking, that, say, some comment is popular, but that there’s a comment around that’s twice as popular.
Once you have it, just start browsing at your favorite social link-site:
Reddit,
Delicious,
Digg,
Hacker News, and
Stack Overflow.
It’s the first release but it’s very usable already, I hope.
I hope you enjoy and find it useful, please let me know what you think of it in the comments.
Wikipedia Backbars is a
GreaseMonkey script to add
histogram backgrounds to Wikipedia tables. It’s a great way to make tables more graphic, to visualize the patterns in the excellent, but usually very dry tables in Wikipedia.
It’s early days yet but it’s already usable enough to give it a spin.
To install it just download it from
its UserScripts page. You need to have
GreaseMonkey (version 0.8 or more), a Firefox extension, installed first.
Where, but the web, would you find someone like Oliver Steele? This ain’t no metaphor. That name was a link. I’m not talking about Oliver Steele the person, I haven’t met him (though I apparently am 1-degree of separation from him; weird, that). I’m not talking about the sweating, walking, pinchable, space-and-time-and-flesh-bound avatar, I’m talking about his online persona. And either I’ve gotten crazy enough or technology has advanced enough that I’m ready to treat Oliver Steele —the link, his blog, words, diagrams, code, and further media— as a person by its own merits.
And, boy, is he an interesting guy:
Boy, boy, boy. Syntax across languages, a massive compilation of programming language features, is so damn cool, so damn useful, so damn usable in its text-only simplicity, in its many angles to approach the collection (sorted by language or by categories, or all in one big page). If you’re a programmer you must bookmark this. Now. (If only a similar thing existed for general languages…)
People who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea.
Edwin Land, inventor of Polaroid
Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.
Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.
Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.
The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.
One painful thing about translating between two languages is that you usually have to specify a direction. That’s bollocks. Life’s already too complicated to worry about whether you’re translating from English to Spanish or the other way around.
In that spirit I created the str (“Super/Simple/Synchronous TRanslation”) YubNub command. You specify, in any order, 2-letter codes for the two languages you want to translate between and the text you want to translate. str avoids the direction decision by doing both at once, each one presented in an individual vertical frame. This is not only much faster in practice, it’s more unconscious and habit-friendly.
You can try it right here! (en stands for ENglish, es for ESpañol=Spanish)
You can see more instructions and the 2-letter codes at str’s man page.
YubNub, for the uninitiated, is “the (social) command line for the web”—a social webapp to use (and create!) handy commands that search your favorite websites and do a whole nother bunch of wonderful things. The simplest way to use it is from their homepage but there are a ton of ways to install it. Installing it in the location bar, as I once explained here, is in my opinion one of the coolest.
Had to resize a photo just now on my macbook and I still don’t know how. Decided it would be easier to find and finally use one of the many online photo editors now available. It was. Which speaks volumes about why the web is the next platform.
A JS library JS’s first great app? Indeed. jQuery is the shit. It makes JavaScript, and particularly the intersection between JS and HTML, more fun than you thought it could be. It is one big lump of syntactic sugar, sweet as only truly elegant thinking can be. It is crossbrowser, lightweight (~20kb, compressed), and it leverages your CSS knowledge. jQuery + FireBug is raw sex. You’ll find yourself traversing the DOM just to feel the wind on your face.
