Recently in Computer Category

I was going through my old MarsEdit drafts, when I saw this one. I realized it was almost a post, so here it comes!

If you like computer archeology, you'll love this video from the early 90s of Steve Jobs demonstrating NextStep. What I find amazing is how much of OS X is already there, and it is also somehow sad that so little has changed. Where are virtual reality, visual programming by example, voice driven interfaces, jet packs, and flying cars! Is it the year 2000 yet?

Seriously, it seems that the only recent real improvement in the interface of computers is the iPhone. Multi-touch screen and position sensor are a great way forward. But it still feels like a very small step, after all this time.

Following a link from I forgot where, I read this amazing article on MagicInk by Bret Victor. I really recommend that you read it too, maybe just to look at the pretty interface pictures. This article made me realize how important interface design may be, both for the pleasure of using the interface as for the clarity and amount of information it may convey. This also reminded me why I've loved using Macs for the last few years: for most software on this platform, it seems that a lot of thought and polish is given to the interface. It's usually very small things, but the whole point is that it's small things, and that the interface quickly goes away by becoming intuitive. (And I mean becoming intuitive even if it sounds contradictory.) As a related aside, I heartily recommend watching this amazing video by Edward Tufte on the iPhone interface.

As I wanted to see what other things Bret Victor might have written, I decided to visit his web site. And there ... waouh. I was floored. I just love his design. Because it's fresh, because it's fluid. Because it's dynamic and it pulls you in. And because I lost too much time diving into it.

And going back to the initial article, to check a couple things, I noticed this quote in the About the author Section:

I currently work at Apple, creating things I can't talk about.

Nice. Very nice. Can't wait to see what they are.

I discovered Evernote a few days ago, thanks to a post from ViewFromTheDock, and even though I'm not fully convinced yet, they do have a strong point to make. So why not try it out? (And I'm not getting anything out of this... ).

Get your Evernote invitation. Time's running out.: "

(Via Evernote Blog.)

We don't live in a huge flat, far from it. But we have two computers: the main family computer, an iMac G5 in the big corridor, and my laptop, often in the living room.

For a while, we would listen to music on the iMac, and when Hermine is sleeping, the music would play on the laptop through iTunes sharing. But there was one main drawback to this approach: if we're moving a lot, there is no way to listen to the same music synchronized on both computers.

A couple weeks ago, I decided to try to remedy to this. I quickly discovered Airfoil and Airfoil speakers: Airfoil runs on the iMac, sending its music to the local speaker or to the laptop, and sometimes, like right now, only to the laptop. To control iTunes remotely, I'm using iTRC which is ugly but works great (I tried TuneConnect but it kept crashing or not refreshing). What prompted this post was an enthusiastic comment by Christelle, earlier today, when we were listening to synchronized music loudly on both computers. Moving from room to room and having the music follow you is just great! And both Airfoil and Airfoil speakers have a Windows version. Two thumbs up!

One final note: I could not make Airfoil connect to Airfoil speakers initially, and even though I had not yet bought the product, the support at Rogue Amoeba was amazing: they answered very rapidly (on a Sunday) and we finally found out what was wrong (one computer had IPv6 turned off).

Next week, I will start teaching a course on type systems. As I will give it in English to Italian students, I thought it would be better to use some slides instead of just writing on the white board. So I have been working on these slides, basing them on Benjamin Pierce's great book on type systems.

I did not dive immediately in the slides, I first tried to get an idea of how I would start the course. To do so, I searched for some course notes online, did some lists of concepts I wanted to convey, and dropped all this in a Curio idea space. I then crafted a more detailed list of this first course outline, which I then transferred to Keynote.

Why Keynote you may ask (maybe wondering when I'll get to the point of this post)? Well, I have grown fond of it, and it prevents me from writing slides that are too technical (or too much like a copy and paste of a research paper). I really like LaTeX, and I cannot imagine using something else to write papers, but I am less sure about slides.

In any case, having chosen Keynote, there was still some technical content to typeset, as type systems are all about things like "Γ ⊢ λx:T. t : T → T'". One solution would be to use LaTeXiT, a great small free utility to produce PDF images out of LaTeX, which when combined to its LinkBack support makes it play great with Keynote. I however see several drawbacks with this approach:

• one would have to work hard to make sure the text fonts in Keynote and the generated fonts by pdflatex for the mathematical symbols are close enough for the result not to be ugly;
• if some mathematical symbol occur inline some text, then either all of it has to be done in LaTeX, or editing the text becomes a bit painful (as images have fixed positions and cannot be anchored at some point in the text);
• similarly, if coloring needs to be done, it has to be done and edited in LaTeXiT;
• LinkBack works great, but I've found that going back and forth between LaTeXiT and Keynote to tweak things takes some time.

So I searched for an alternative solution. As Keynote is using Unicode fonts by default, there are many many characters available. And by many I mean this

This palette is accessible in many applications, using the Edit → Special Characters... menu. However, I quickly found tiring to go to this menu, double-click on the wanted character (which I usually put in the "Favorite" tab using the gears menu on the bottom left), and going back to editing. Even assigning a shortcut to invoke this palette would not speed things enough. Which is when I thought of using TextExpander.

TextExpander is a preference pane that lets you assign things (that can be text, but also images or even the result of some AppleScript) to abbreviations. When the abbreviation is typed, it is immediately replaced by the corresponding text. I use it for fairly mundane things, like salutations at the end of an email: when I type cdt, I get

Cordialement,

Alan

I have many of these abbreviations defined, for website addresses I often go to, for my phone numbers, for salutations, for the current date in ISO format... and now for special characters

Creating these abbreviations was very easy: just create a new snippet, and in the text field simply use the Special Characters palette to enter the character wanted. And this is how I now easily enter these strange Γ and λ without leaving the comfort of the current application, be it TextMate (as of right now), Mail, or Keynote.

I've just heard this just after the 22:50 mark in the latest MacBreak Weekly podcast.

So maybe you should check Unison out too .

I wanted to add to the previous post that TextExpander's support was most helpful: they sent me a new version that works with the Dvorak - Qwerty Command layout (and also with the improved version). So all is well now ;-)

I was reading a very interesting post on Daring Fireball this morning, about Tog's controversial opinion on the relative speed of using the keyboard and the mouse. I knew about this study, but John Gruber quoted something that I found really interesting:

By using Command X, C, and V, the user can select with one hand and act with the other. Two-handed input. Two-handed input can result in solid productivity gains (Buxton 1986).

Reading this, I realized that these keyboard shortcuts are very smartly placed on a qwerty (or azerty) keyboard, very close to the Command key, and all on the left-hand side of the keyboard. Unfortunately (for me), I'm used to Dvorak keyboard layouts, where the X is at the place of the B, where the C is at the place of the I, and where the V is at the place of the :. If you look at your keyboard, you'll see that they (B, I, :) are mostly on the center or right-hand side of the keyboard, right where the mouse-hand would not be ready.

But there is still hope for us, right-handed Dvorak lovers (more on why I'm using the Dvorak layout below): OS X ships with a Dvorak - Qwerty Command layout that is the usual Dvorak layout, but when one hits Command, the keyboard becomes a Qwerty layout, with keys now nicely placed. So I decided to try this, and retrain my muscle memory for Command-W, X, C, V, and Q. (Among many others...)

This story would be of no interest for the following point. I use TextExpander quite a bit. This small bit of software let you assign abbreviations to some text, like "aan" for "Alan Schmitt", "aaw" for "http://alan.petitepomme.net/", and "ddate" for the current date. This may sound very trivial, but I use it constantly (in fact I rely on this quite a bit when I'm browsing). Unfortunately, it seems that using the Dvorak - Qwerty Command layout break TextExpander: abbreviations expand to nothing. Searching for this, I found a post on the subject, which seemed to suggest that the situation is not so hopeful. I've contacted SmileOnMyMac tech support, highlighting that this problem is supposed to have been solved in version 1.3. I'm still waiting for an answer. But not all was lost, I discovered there than an improved Dvorak - Qwerty Command layout is available!

I guess the bottom line of all this is that there may be too much diversity to support in keyboard layouts, and everyone should just switch to Dvorak. ;-)

Speaking of which, here is a quick note as to why I use it. I started 4 or 5 years ago. It was a very interesting process: I got to know the layout in about one day, but it took at least a month before I could start to type, that is, before I would need to use my brain to know where the next key is. If you're a (not too good) piano player, you definitely know the feeling: you see the chords, but somehow the brain has to be involved and it takes one second to be able to play it. After practicing some, the brain can be short cut and playing is fluid, with no thinking involved. In other words, there is much more to doing than knowing.

Anyway, this does not explain why I switched to Dvorak. A stupid answer could be that my password would be more difficult to type. A smart answer would be provided by this comics. But the honest answer would be that I've liked change. I used to switch my watch from one wrist to the other every few months, just for the challenge of the physical learning. When I seriously started using computers, I used Windows, OS/2, then Linux. Staying on Linux I tried several WM, including Enlightenment (in which I contributed a tiny bit) and even ion. At one point I switched from Emacs to Vim. And in the maelstrom I did try the Dvorak layout, because I was a little worried about RSI, and also because it was a challenge. This is however how I learned to touch type, which is very useful!

Now it's several years later, all my computers are Macs, running OS X. But there are remains of this period: I wear my watch on the right wrist, I use TextMate as a text editor, and my keyboard layout is still Dvorak (on a physical Azerty keyboard, and I really don't want to use Azerty on a Mac). But I'm still up for a small challenge, like using shortcut keys the way they were meant to be, even if I have to relearn some things ;-)

Augustin likes to use the Lego Digital Designer tool to build some things he does not have enough bricks to do for real. It's really nice to see him manipulate these 3D models, rotate them, add one brick here or there, and ask that we save the final result before we quit the program.

He also likes clicking everywhere, so he often ends up on the Lego web site, looking at existing models, sometimes finding some Lego movies and ... Lego flash games (at the moment this one).

I see in him the same fascination I had when I was 7 or 8 and going to some friend to play the Atari VCS. The mechanics of the games are also fairly simple, the graphics of the flash game are just amazingly better. And he's having simple fun.

I guess I'll have to start hiding my Nintendo DS.

This is a must see. Lawrence Lessig gives a shorter, and much more brilliant, version of his talk on the necessity for Creative Commons.

Both the contents and the form are amazing. Go see it. now