I continue to find myself sliding towards atheism and misanthropy. The misanthropy is no surprise (it's usually accompanied by bouts of unabashed humanism, selectively). But Atheism - who knew?
Maybe I've been watching too much Deconstructing Harry.
But seriously - it's time for something new here. The western faiths have failed me.
I'm back to evaluating the note management application NoteTaker for Mac OS X, now up to version 1.6. NoteTaker has long had a cool feature - when you classify an entry as a Web Page, NoteTaker draws an icon of an @ sign next to the item. Double clicking on that icon would replace the entry with the web page linked to in the entry's contents. In version 1.6, NoteTaker uses WebKit, the engine/API behind Apple's Safari web browser. The results not only look better, but you effectively get an embedded (and simplified) Safari browser in the page, with back/forward buttons, a location bar, and the ability to drag and drop a PDF of the current web page anywhere you want.
This reminds me of CyberDog! Safari is not Apple's first browser, nor is their simple HTMLKit and (post-AppleGuide) Help Viewer applications. CyberDog was made to show off the compound document system OpenDoc by providing OpenDoc parts for a web browser, a notepad (bookmarks on steroids), mail and news, FTP, etc. Using it, you could embed a web browser anywhere that supported OpenDoc parts. At the time, I thought it was kindof silly. But seeing it in action with NoteTaker makes me miss it. Again.
Some screen shots: NoteTaker, Web Page Entry Collapsed and NoteTaker, Web Page Entry Expanded. Some old screen shots of CyberDog can be found in this article (its the one shown in my NoteTaker screen shots).
It's been said time and time again that CD's are too expensive. I stopped in at Border's the other day and was walking through their CD section and came across the new Spiritualized venture, Amazing Grace. $18.99! A Radiohead single, with only two new tracks, $12.99! (I could understand that price for the Airbag/How Am I Driving mini-album, but that had seven tracks, not three). The new Stereolab EP - $9.99 (iTunes Music Store price - $4.99).
Fortunately, there's a better music store close to borders that should have all of these items for reasonable prices.
But considering I can get a damn good DVD at an average price $14.99-$19.99, it's no wonder CD sales are down.
Jon Udell has been writing about interfaces lately. This little bit makes me miss an old Mac OS feature:
In one crucial way, the rich GUI is tragically disadvantaged with respect to its poor browser cousin. Trying to sort out a permissions problem with IIS 6, I clicked a Help button and landed on a Web page. The page could only describe the tree-navigation procedure required to find the tabbed dialog box where I could address the problem. It could not link to that dialog box. This is nuts when you stop and think about it. Documentation of GUI software needs pages of screenshots and text to describe procedures that, on the Web, are encapsulated in links that can be published, bookmarked, and e-mailed. A GUI that doesn't embrace linking can never be truly rich.In System 7.5, which was initially billed as the "half step to Copland," Apple introduced Apple Guide as its preferred help system. Apple Guide had many elements of modern HTML based help systems, but it could also control the user interface, and hilight elements to click on. A guide might say "click on the Apple Menu" and circle the Apple Menu in red. It could perform some steps for a user, with a "Do it for me" action, but still showing the steps involved. This could teach the user things like changing their screen resolution, how to change views in the Finder, etc, all by guiding a user through the actions. It was a very rich and intelligent environment. Unfortunately, it was apparently difficult to develop for. Very few applications ever used the guide features.
["How Rich is the Rich GUI?", Jon Udell, 17 Oct 2003, viewed 20 Oct 2003]
Now, there's nothing like that. Apple Help has been basic HTML since sometime in the Mac OS 8/9 family. A lot of applications have it. But none can guide you through events, like organizing bookmarks in Safari. Now you just have a collection of paragraphs like:
To add a bookmark to the Bookmarks menu, open the webpage and click the Add Bookmark button in the address bar. Type a name for the bookmark and choose Bookmarks Menu from the pop-up menu.Some help files contain links, usually to other help files or to the web, and on rare occasion to certain control panel elements. But it's still pretty weak.
Hopefully, now that AppleScript supports full GUI scripting, Apple might think of combining AppleScript and Apple Help to allow for more interactive help files.