MemeRocket » usability

Github Implements Agency-Aware Identity

Bill Burcham — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:10:25 +0000

Github lets you specify your agency context

Github gave me a whole new reason to love them last week when they introduced agency-aware identity in their new organizations offering. Crazy cool. Now each of my clients can have their own Github organization and I can participate in each! Same goes for each of my Open Source projects. And I can use it for a day job if I had such a thing. And all with one identity—one set of credentials. Brilliant Github!

Watch a Video While You Work

Bill Burcham — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:25:27 +0000

I like to have a TED or SALT talk playing while I work on something mindless. The problem is that on my single 15″ display, there isn’t really enough room to keep my work and the video (window) side-by-side. I’d like to designate the video window as the top window so that it never gets buried.

Unsanity WindowShade X Icon

I found two OS X solutions, each of which appear to be OS X window manager hacks to let you force a window to float atop all the others: ∞labs Afloat and Unsanity WindowShade X. I installed the latter and can attest that (after a reboot) it will indeed keep a browser window afloat. Just select the window of interest and hit the command key twice (⌘-⌘). The keystroke is configurable.

WindowShade X relies on Unsanity’s Application Enhancer. I was concerned about security vulnerabilities introduced by that thing but since my Google searching didn’t turn up any obvious warnings I went ahead with it.

Usable Gmail Thread URL Arrives

Bill Burcham — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:10:11 +0000

I was optimistic that the Quick Links feature just released with the new Gmail Labs would scratch my itch for the ability to link to Gmail threads. Well Quick Links itself is pretty raw but I was able to use it to figure out the URL format for a thread to wit:https://mail.google.com/mail/?zx=mca2fxr2r24c#inbox/11a5bb2474f4842dI hadn’t seen that ‘zx’ query parameter before and it appears to be not strictly necessary (may be a proxy cache defeater—I removed it and found the URL still worked fine).What is new to me is that whereas last time I tried to revisit such an URL I was taken not to the thread, but to my Inbox, now when I replay this URL I am taken to the thread (as expected!)Now if Gmail would only provide a “Link to this page” control à la Google Maps my life would be complete.

OS X Quality Problems

Bill Burcham — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:47:56 +0000

by Enzo D. (Zoen)

I love my Macs. But dang it, I’ve encountered a couple annoying Leopard problems that have significantly impacted their value.

First, my old iMac won’t connect via WPA2 to my Airport Extreme since upgrading to Leopard. What am I gonna do—run an ethernet cable across my living room floor. Or should I say: across my wife’s living room floor?!?

Second, this week, my MacBook Pro stopped waking from sleep mode. The solution is simple but devastating – simply turn off Bluetooth…um, and then you don’t have Bluetooth.

What is going on here? I’ve had years of happiness with my OS X Macs. And now I’ve got two men down (out of three). Only the trusty PowerBook is unaffected by any of this.

‘sup Apple? Did you get ahead of yourselves with the sheer pace of coolness?

update June 6, 2008: The good guys at MacForce helped me out w/ the sleep/wake problem on the MBP. The fix was simple: reset the PMU. A no-brainer (but only if you think of it). WPA still broken on the iMac as of OS X 10.5.3.

NYT Multimedia Presentation Viewer

Bill Burcham — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:37:16 +0000

The New York Times’ multimedia presentation viewer is a thing of beauty. The example below is taken from a story on Benazir Bhutto.

Flash wins again. Notice how hovering over the thumb yields a time-indexed image popup. Very fluid, very useful.

Flickr Attributions in WordPress

Bill Burcham — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 05:55:13 +0000

I’m tired of creating HTML attribution markup and style by hand every time I drop a Flickr photo into a post. I noticed the Yahoo Shortcut Plugin purports to address this issue. So I ended my procrastination and upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2 and installed the plugin. And here we are (see the image to the left)

Convincing the Yahoo Shortcuts Plugin to fetch the actual image of interest wasn’t as easy as I’d like but it’s clearly doable. I found the image using colrpickr, then navigated to the image and then entered the title of the image in the Yahoo Shortcut Plugin’s “Review This Post” view. The plugin found the image and allowed me to then add the image to my post.

Now wouldn’t it be the bomb if krazydad could integrate his colrpickr directly with the Yahoo thingie and save us all the steps?

Still Waiting for Gmail Thread URL

Bill Burcham — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 22:44:35 +0000

Update to Gmail Thread URL. Folks are claiming that the recently released (to some folks) Gmail “2.0″ supports permalinks to threads (and various other resources e.g. inbox).

I have the new version running on Firefox and I see no explicit permalink support for threads. I fiddled around a little with some thread URLs e.g.:
https://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox/1161876aa6a75d27
I copied that from Firefox and pasted it into Safari’s location bar and was taken not to the thread but to my inbox. Still waiting for Gmail to support permalinks.

Gmail Thread URL

Bill Burcham — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:27:37 +0000

Why can’t I copy the URL for a Gmail thread into e.g. Google Calendar? That would be so useful!

Actually I think there is an URL syntax that would work if I only knew the incantation. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was simply in the address bar of the browser?

Apple Packaging Porno

Bill Burcham — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:38:12 +0000

Update 3/28/08:Here’s a young man of like mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjS89zUxtgM

Rails IDE Goes Jurassic

Bill Burcham — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:04:43 +0000

About a year ago in Smalltalk Browser Goes Jurassic I lamented the fact that the Smalltalk browser UI was caught in a techno-aesthetic time warp and cheered the possibility that it might escape to the future and in doing so completely skip a whole generation of UI effort-waste and bad taste (e.g. Eclipse Rich Client Platform) and move directly to Web-technology UI currency. I ended with this:

How long will it be before a complete IDE is delivered as a web application? To varying degrees, Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA are stuck on the same island that Smalltalk was. Theyâ€™re all trying to be graphically rich and run on many platforms. Theyâ€™re all expending lots of resources maintaining UI toolkits (think of Eclipseâ€™s Rich Client Platform). And the resultant UI technology, while often innovative and sometimes pleasing, suffers a â€œcredibility gapâ€ when compared with platform-specific technology on the Mac or Windows. When will the IDEâ€™s throw their weight behind the DHTML+AJAX crowd and embrace the â€œthird platformâ€?

Well there is renewed hope – but it looks like Ruby and Rails may arrive before Squeak does. Gyre is an honest-to-goodness Ruby on Rails IDE delivered through the browser complete with source-level interactive debugging, project navigation, and an interesting syntax-aware text editor.

Seems like the next step is to get the Gyre folks working with the Firebug folks. Can you imagine it?