Lots of pasta ahead

Apologies for the lack of activity on this blog recently. I do have a list of things I want to post about, but I've been so busy at work that when I get home, I just want to switch off and play Myth II, because my brain's too tired for anything more constructive.

The main reason I've been so busy is that I'll be leaving my current job at the end of September. Instead, I'll be studying for a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction with Ergonomics at University College London's Interaction Centre.

Although it's a full-time course, I think that being a student will give me some more time to work on my software, post on this blog, and watch my bank balance dwindle.

buzztracker

http://www.buzztracker.org/

If you aren't using it yet, you have to try it.

This is a great piece of information design. I've been checking it regularly for the last two weeks or so, and I find that I pick up news that would have previously completely passed me by. This is because buzztracker draws your attention to the most significant (from the press's point of view) news, whereas on traditional, headline-based news sites you are most likely to notice news associated with regions or topics familiar to you.

I only wish the article titles weren't truncated.

Also check out the About page, which is quite interesting.

Scroll-ahead

Although scrolling on the iPod is famously easy compared to other music players because of its wheel, it still has one problem: when scrolling quickly through a long list, for example all your artists, you are very likely to shoot past the artist you want to select. So the typical procedure is:

1. Scroll down quickly until you see the desired artists whizzing past.
2. Scroll back up more slowly until they re-emerge at the top of the screen
3. If you missed them again, scroll down one or two rows until you've finally got them.

The basic problem is that most of the time while scrolling, the selection is right at the top or right at the bottom of the screen, meaning you need superhuman reflexes to stop in time when the correct artist's name appears.

A solution would be to keep the selection near the middle of the screen (unless you're right at the beginning or the end of the list, of course). That way, you can see a few rows ahead while scrolling, because your artist's name will become visible just before it becomes selected.

I sent this as a suggestion to Apple a while ago, but I'm not too optimistic about who actually gets to read what's sent through their feedback page.

Smart Library drops

Ever since Mac OS X came out, I have been missing how the classic Finder used to try to recognise what kind of file you dropped on the system folder and would offer you to move it to the right place automatically, for example Extensions or Conrol Panels.

With new kinds of extensions being introduced in every version of Mac OS X (Preference Panes, Contextual Menu Items, Screen Savers, Widgets, Dictionaries, Image Units), it would be very convenient if we could just drop these on one of the Library folders and let the world’s most advanced operating system handle the details.

You but me

It would be nice if English-like programming languages such as BASIC or AppleScript allowed using but in place of and.

Logically, and and but are the same; only but carries some additional semantics implying contradiction or contrast. (Note how I cleverly avoided using two successive buts there).

Why bother? Well, consider the following example:

If License.IsValid And License.IsBlackListed Then
    LectureUserAboutPiracy
End If

Now read this:

If License.IsValid But License.IsBlackListed Then
    LectureUserAboutPiracy
End If

Although interpreted the same by the computer, the second version makes the programmer's intention more obvious to a reader of the code.

This is similar in spirit to how you can use the in AppleScript and HyperTalk to make code more readable without affecting its behaviour. But this would be even more useful, because complex logical propositions can be quite a pain to decipher when you don't know the original intention. In fact, even constructing them can be difficult when you're having to translate from real-world terms into and and or-terms.

Becoming one with the machine?

For the past few weeks, when using my computer at work, I have been getting unpleasant onrushes of a feeling that’s probably best likened to motion sickness. What seems to happen is that right after performing an action such as scrolling or dropping down menus, my eyes move automatically, anticipating where my attention should be focused next. However, that reflex is sometimes quicker than the software, and this mismatch between what I expect and what I see seems to have a slightly nauseating effect. I think it’s especially bad with animated (smooth) scrolling under Windows, because it behaves quite unpredictably, with some increments moving faster than others for no obvious reason. That’s actually where I started noticing this feeling, but it has since started happening in other, non-animated situations as well. On a few occasions it’s been so bad that I had to look away and my eyes started watering, although that could have just been general tiredness of the eyes. I also think my awareness of the effect makes it worse.

Have I used the computer so much that my brain has started treating what’s on the screen like a real environment, or have I just not noticed before? I’ve been using computers for more than half of my life now (and I’m only twenty-five!) and very regularly for the past nine years.

I’d quite like to test myself with an eye tracker and see if my eyes really move ahead of the graphics, and if so, by how much, and how it compares to less extreme users.

Maybe how we use animation and how responsive our systems are is more important than we think, especially with what’s happening with Aqua on the Mac.

Update: I think the worst situation for this motion sickness is when the expected motion doesn't occur at all. That happens quite often when using the mouse's scroll wheel in Windows IE, because this sometimes stops working until you click in the window's content area, as if it lost its focus.

I'm also pretty sure now that my eyes watering is a separate problem, but the two combined make for a particularly unpleasant scrolling experience.

CSS3 multi-column layout

http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-css3-multicol-20010118/

As you can maybe imagine, I'm quite excited about this. I wonder when WebCore- and Gecko-based browsers will start supporting this. Although I guess adoption by web designers will be scarce until Microsoft gets its act together.