For the last couple of months, I have been spending most of my spare time working on my blogging application, TypeWriter. Well, the fruit of my labour is now here. Adriaan Tijsseling and I have agreed on collaborating on the development of ecto for Windows. I hope my skills are up to scratch for this new and exciting venture!
GUI: Illustrated History
Thanks to Scott I came across this great site about the evolution of the GUI, GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface gallery.
It’s interesting how we went from the primitive to the complicated, and from the simplistic to the cartoonish within two decades!
[Posted with ecto]
New game to play
On Google (or any other search engine). The game is called Google Whacking. Here is the description from the Feedback section of the New Scientist magazine:
It’s called Google whacking, and the craze has spread across the globe. The idea is that you put a pair of seemingly random words into the Google search box with the aim of producing only a single hit – a Google whack. Now, for bored biomed researchers everywhere, Mathew Smith and Christopher Morris of the Welsh School of Pharmacy at Cardiff University have devised a purely scientific version.
To play the game, which they have called Pubmed Whack, you enter two search words on the main Pubmed search page (www.ncbi.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) with the aim of getting just one cited reference back. For example, “dendrimer endocytosis” is a Pubmed whack, as is “mitochondria daffodil”.
Perhaps the years working at New Scientist have affected Feedback’s brain, but we have tried this and found it strangely addictive, in a frustrating sort of way. To our chagrin, “neanderthal spacecraft” produced no citations at all, whereas “neanderthal computer” produced five. We’ve been at it for hours, and we are still desperately trying to get a whack.
[Posted with TypeWriter]
OmniWeb 5 beta 2
Curiosity gets the better of me and I downloaded beta 2 of OmniWeb 5 last night. (Camino nightly is busted since 2/19 kind of help my curiosity too!)
Beta 2 is definitely a big improvement over beta 1, as it no longer crashes easily though it still crashes on some situation. There are still a large number of known issues and bugs but right now beta 2 is good enough for me to try using it as my default browser over Safari. The tabs implementation is very interesting and the ads-blocking is really good. The two features that I really like are the Site Preferences (you can set individual settings for each sites) and RSS feed detection.
If and when OmniWeb uses the latest WebKit from Apple (it is still on v85, i.e. Safari 1.1) I will definitely tempted to pay for this browser.
Update: Spoke way too soon. OmniWeb has been crashing throughout the day. Must have crashed at least 5 times today already. Back to Safari…
OmniWeb 5 Preview!
OmniGroup releases version 5 of OmniWeb today for preview! Again, I got it minutes before I have to leave for work.
Lost in Colonisation 