I love it when I can guess how to do something new in a program. Skim just did this for me – I needed to figure out how big the rectangle of text in a paper I’m working on is, in inches. I looked for rulers, and then decided I’d just see if I get any size feedback when I make a rectangular selection. Turns out there’s a nice feedback status line in the bottom right – clicking toggles between measurement in pts and in inches.

I like how this solves my problem without adding a lot of new UI for measurement – no rulers, no extra tool to measure length.

Anyone could nominate an app, and the developer community would vote on who wins, in just a few categories.

I’m thinking the categories could be a little more user-centric than Apple’s. For instance, I don’t really care about best adoption of OS X technologies, but something like “best refinement of a common task” or “best default behavior” or “best scriptability” would be interesting, and something that’d be easier to use as a marketing badge…

This is just off the top of my head, so there are probably others. “Least data lock-in”? “Easiest to learn?”, “Best plugin community”?

The article inspired a number of posts about the death of email, misunderstanding the article, but providing some interesting info. Here’s a few of them. Both The End of Email Predicted, Wrong as Usual, from emailserviceguide.com, and Why Twitter and Facebook Will Never Kill E-mail from the technomix blog at FastCompany.com make some good points about some uses for which emerging ‘cloud’ services are just not as good as email. They mostly focus on business, which makes sense. You probably don’t want another company between you and your customers or partners. Imagine if you could only hold meetings at Starbucks – hit or miss, right?

Rackspace.com’s email hosting blog gives us some data in a post entitled “Is Email dead?” short answer – no. It’s getting bigger.

And surprisingly, there were a good number of lucid and interesting comments in the slashdot thread about the article. Provided you filter out comments with a score of 3 and lower…

inspired - merlinmann

From Merlin Mann’s flickr stream, I noticed the book “Time Management for System Administrators” hiding under there, and went over to the O’Reilly site to take a look – there’s a full google preview of the book, and it has a chapter with some good advice about handling email.

I’ll highlight the one piece of advice that I see there and elsewhere – learn to let go of messages that you didn’t get to in time. You don’t need to waste time thinking about your email back-log.

I’m not sure if everyone’s to that point yet, but I think a lot of busy people effectively are, and so I’m comfortable proposing a corollary: It’s not rude to re-send an important email request to a busy person.

Peeking from that pile

You can’t assume they’ll eventually get back to you even if they read it, and they might be assuming that you’ll re-send if it’s really important.

We need a convention for a polite way to phrase the resent ping. I’ve been using “This might have fallen off the end of your inbox, so I’m resending it.” The problem is how to remind them without implying that they’re disorganized. Maybe a convention of putting something like [reping] in the subject line would make sense. It might give email clients (or filters) a chance to adjust the priority of a message in a way that’s more meaningful than the useless priority header that only seems to get set on marketing messages and free food notices.

(Update: It looks like this customization only exists in Emacs 23.)

The key is that vc-mode uses a standard function, pop-to-buffer, to create the new window for vc-diff and vc-log. This is the function that keeps creating horizontal splits that make no sense on my widescreen display. However, it ends up calling a function called split-window-sensibly, which can be customized (of course!). So, if I set the “Split Height Threshold” to nil, split-window-sensibly will never split horizontally, and then the default behavior just magically does what I want. If I start with just a single vc-dir window and invoke vc-diff and vc-log, I get my three columns!

To get to the right customization screen, just do M-x customize-apropos <ret> ^Split.*Threshold. That’ll get you the two relevant customization items. Enjoy!

I made a view that displays a zoomed out view of a string from a text view, with indentation, along with a rectangle showing where the text view is in the file.

You can click around in the view to move the It also highlights the selection, and draws lines in blue if they contain the string in the NSFindPBoard, so you can see all the lines in the file that match when you use the Find panel.

This is available under a Creative Commons license, and I’d ask that if you make any improvements, you send them back to me or join the ‘leverage’ sourceforge project, where the code is hosted. I wanted to eventually make this into a Cocoa text plugin like my I-Search plugin.

Here is the SVN repository for the textshape code.

There was also a Source code Tarball with a demo app, shown in the screenshot below:

Stakeout was a program that runs something when files change, by watching for file changes at the system level using kqueue. It was intended to support running automated tests. The 2nd version even worked with growl to pop up info about the test success or failure.

I still have the Stakeout-2 tarball available, but I haven’t tested it in years.

Why? I’ve been working on things that take too long to test, so I don’t want to run a suite every time a file changes anymore. I still think it’s a useful idea.

The most recent source that I know of is on leverage.sf.net which is a repository for text-system hacks I used to work on. If anyone wants to pick it up and modernize it, I’d be grateful.

In particular, you want the ‘isim’ directory. The other directories are unrelated, but if you find them interesting, I’d love to hear from you.

If you just want to download the last working universal binary build (from 2007), it is here: IncrementalSearchInputManager-universal.zip. Let me know how it works?

It’s about computer usage as a creative act, something that becomes harder and harder to experience the more proficient one gets with a computer.

I feel this way every once in a while too – It used to be fun just getting a computer to do something. Once you know enough about how it works and most of what you do is handled pretty smoothly, some of the fun goes out of it. The problem with high-quality free apps like Mail and Address Book is that they remove the motivation for people to tinker with new ways of using computers for the same old things.

This urge to tinker is pretty strong, at least for me, and I think it might be one reason why I’m not so excited about web and mobile (at least iPhone) programming. Both platforms have a lot going for them, but the barrier to tinkering with my data is high – sometimes I can’t get my data out of a service, and if I want to write scripts to combine two web apps, where do they run?

For example, I’ve seen a lot of great things come from the community built around BibDesk’s scripting interface, and if it were a web app, none of that would have happened.