Managing the Snippets
After over a year of on-again, off-again looking, demoing, playing, and stalling, I think I have finally settled on a note/snippet manager: Yojimbo, from Bare Bones Software.
When I first started thinking about a snippet manager, what came to my head was something that looked basically like Mail, except that instead of messages it would contain notes. They could all be tag-able, and you could create smart folders out of those tags. When I started looking around, the product that satisfied this “dream app” exactly was Notae, from Code Poetry. So why Yojimbo?
Yojimbo has several features that I really like, even though the program as a whole is not as elegant as Notae. I really like the quick-entry box that can be called up with a system-wide shortcut key, I really like that it has a separate note type for passwords, and I really like that it supports syncing (not that I have any devices that need syncing to—yet).
Notae’s inability to sync across devices bothered me, but what worried me more was that the Code Poetry blog identified a major performance problem in Leopard back at the beginning of January that has yet to be addressed nearly three months later. I can’t say I blame the developers for having day jobs, and I absolutely love the independent developer community out there for the Mac, but there is a little bit of comfort knowing that the Bare Bones folks are working on their products full time.
Another distinction that would explain why Yojimbo has note types for things like passwords, serial numbers, and bookmarks is that it is designed as a snippet manager, whereas I guess Notae is designed as a note manager. Since I’m looking more to manage my snippets than my notes, Yojimbo may be the better choice.
I’ll see how the 30-day demo of Yojimbo goes, but so far I like it.
No Google Calendar in Google Groups?
This seems so obvious. Why should a group not have the option to have an associated calendar? And documents, too. Everything else is great: discussion, files, pages. All very cool. But a group calendar and group documents would be really excellent.
I hope this is a stop-gap solution.
SI Visiting Days!
It’s been over a week since my last post. Whoops. But if I couldn’t make it to yoga for a week, do you really expect me to blog? But, I did have a really good weekend.
This past weekend was Visiting Days for perspective admitted students to U of M’s School of Information, and it was really cool. I’ll admit, they are marketing masters, but even without all that, I am pretty pumped for the program. Here are a few highlights:
- I changed my intended concentration. I had been thinking Incentive-Centered Design, but after hearing current students talk about what they’re studying, I think I’ll go for Human-Computer Interaction. Of course, almost all of the concentrations seem interesting to one degree or another, and the opportunity to take classes outside SI excites me, too, so I’ll probably go in HCI, but ultimately change to some sort of tailored program. In addition to Social Computing and other concentrations within SI, I’d also like to take some classes in the Business School, and get a taste of other related fields like Cognitive Psychology and Sociology. Basically, I think two years will be too little time to really experience everything I’d like to.
- I met other prospective students, which was great not only because these are the people with whom I’ll be spending the next two years, but also because I found that they are a group of people with whom I can relate. They come from very diverse backgrounds, some of which were very similar to mine, and some of which were very different. The same goes for the future goals of my soon-to-be classmates: some are very different from mine, but there are some with whom I could see myself working beyond SI. (Yep, definitely jumping to conclusions here.) The discovery that SI is a common route for people like me who are trained as engineers but do not want to work as engineers was also very encouraging. And a lot of SI people are also musicians. Cool.
- I met current SI students. Dinner at Pizza House was really nice. I sat with a couple of current students, one of whom will be opening up a usability consulting company (a route I may go), and the other is going on to get her Ph.D. in Medical Informatics (also cool, but not my thing). The fact that SI prepares its students to do both of these things is really excellent. At expoSItion, where students show off their projects, I was encouraged by the fact that the students who did some of the coolest projects were first-years. It seems like they dive right in, which I like.
- I met faculty. Not only is their work interesting, but they’re very approachable. I lucked out and was seated at a table with one professor who moonlights as a consultant to start-up companies (and getting equity ownership for it!), and the professor who teaches the entrepreneurship class. Very cool.
- I had some really good conversations with recruiters at the Job Information Fair (which is different from a job fair because they’re not actually recruiting). I made some good contacts, and was encouraged by everything that’s going on.
All in all, Visiting Days was a great experience, and now I’m pumped for school to start.
The Donor Next Door
So, they tell me “Mash-ups” are all the craze, which means, of course, that every imaginable kind of information must be piled on top of a Google Map.
A very cool example of this is The Huffington Post’s Fundrace, which is a Google map of the United States with public political donation information on it. The points are color-coded by party or candidate, and the size of the dot corresponds to the amount given by that individual. That’s right: individual. You can zoom all the way down to individual people or households. It’s kinda creepy, I’m not gonna lie, but it is a good thing that campaign donations are all public information.
On Links That Change Size On Hover
Sometimes site designers style links so that when a user hovers over them they either change size or weight. That has the unfortunate consequence of appearing to jump, or worse, shifting other elements on the page around. Change color, add text-decoration, just don’t change size or weight.
page of text . com
I just came across an interesting take on collaborative editing: page of text . com. Barebones simple, it’s for groups who don’t need a full-fledged Google Doc or Wiki. No registration required: just go and start a “page of text”. I kinda like the idea (not that I have a use for it at the moment).
I also think it’s a bit odd that they like to put spaces in their URI when not using in a technical sense, but whatever.
Update: apparently once created, a page cannot be manually deleted, which I find rather unpleasant. My guess is that if a certain amount of time passes without being viewed or edited, it will get cleaned out, but I really don’t like that a user has no way of removing a page.
West Coast vs. Midwest
There seems to be a distinct difference between West Coast companies and those from elsewhere in the country, with those from the midwest being the absolute worst. Maybe there’s something in sea breeze that makes people do things right.
I decided to try Mint.com (Mountain View, CA) today, and I was absolutely blown away. It is so well done and feels so much like a real app that when I needed to go to my bank’s website to check something, rather than go for the ’switch tab’ keyboard shortcut I reached for the ’switch app’ shortcut. It’s as if I subconsciously forgot I was using a web app! Starting with the sign-up process, everything seems to work exactly the way it should. For example, when typing in my ZIP code, it made an AJAX request and automatically retrieved the name of my city. Why doesn’t everybody do that? I added my accounts (which was an almost flawless process), and away it went. It’s really an incredible application.
Since I had that up and running, I decided to glance through my account information and noticed that my car payment is due tomorrow, and it will be the first payment since switching my payment method to “Direct Automatic Pay” with my auto financing provider (Detroit, MI). I figured I’d double-check that everything was set up for that, and I found the following on the Account Center section of their website:
- I had no pending payments
- I had not registered a checking account for direct payment
- The direct payment option was grayed out
- It would not let me change payment methods
- When I tried to re-register my bank account, the results were ambiguous at best
Finding this somewhat worrisome, I immediately set up an online payment with my bank (Chicago, IL/Troy, MI) — which spawned way more browser windows than I wanted — then called the auto financing people to work it out.
Amazingly, I got through to a customer service rep. in about 1.5 rings with no hold time (after navigating through a bunch of touch-tone stuff, of course), and it turns out that everything was set up fine, and that four business days before a payment is due, they gray out the payment method because they’re already prepping the transfer. Now, I don’t understand why it takes 3-5 business days to electronically transfer money from one institution to another, but that’s a whole different story. At the very least, the website should have told me that I have a payment pending, to be withdrawn tomorrow, that I have a bank account set up and properly linked to my account, and that I can’t change the payment because of this limitation. But no.
Oh, not to mention that I thought maybe there was a browser compatibility issue, so I switched to Firefox from Safari, and in Firefox there was a nasty formatting bug that pushed some text onto a new line that absolutely should not have been there.
Dear Midwest,
It’s no longer acceptable to put a few ugly GIF images on an even uglier front-end to your database and call that Online Services like you could in 1996. Take a page from Mint, Google, and the rest of the Mountain View crowd and I bet you’ll be able to run your online services with fewer people, using better technology, and have higher customer satisfaction. Until then, I guess I’ll have to hope that I can get through to phone reps as quickly as I did today.
Your customer (because I have no other options),
Noah
On Links That Open in New Windows
Often when a website links to an off-site page, the link is set to open in a new browser window. I don’t like this! I can choose to open any link in a new tab or window if I want to, but I cannot choose to open a link that is set to open in a new window in the same window. Please, leave the choice in the hands of the user.
I have been as guilty of this as anybody, but henceforth I will no longer engage in this practice.
Stuff White People Do on Facebook
So, there’s a blog called Stuff White People Like. It’s very funny, and dead on in so many ways. I like it. (Does that make me white?)
I think someone should make a Facebook application that compares a user’s profile to the list of stuff from the blog, then determines how white that person is.
I haven’t given a ton of thought to how that comparison would work (n things in profile that white people like / m items in profile x 100 = % white?), but I think it’d be amusing.
A Subversion Gripe & .htaccess mod_rewrite Issue
EDIT: It turns out the fix below for the mod_rewrite issue does not work. I’d love to know why. If anybody knows, please either comment on this post or reply to this thread. Thank you.
In starting this blog, I had to move my old website into a new branch of my homepage repository. I wanted to be able to do a server-side move from the root of the repository to a new subdirectory, like this:
svn mv http://noahlieban.com/svn/homepage/* \ http://noahliebman.com/svn/homepage/old-site/
Sadly, this didn’t work. What did I have to do? Make the new directory (in the working directory or on the server; doesn’t matter), then svn mv each file in one by one. Stupid. The reason is that it can’t copy onto itself, which I guess is fair enough. The moral of the story is that a repository should always have a /trunk (or other root-level directory) just in case it needs to be branched. Otherwise, it’s a pain.
My second issue is not really a Subversion issue, but with the .htaccess file that Wordpress makes for its permalinks:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
Now, I’m no expert in server configuration stuff, but this seems straightforward enough: If the requested file is neither a real file or real directory, do the rewrite rule. I don’t actually care what the rewrite rule does, because my problem is that Dreamhost sets up Subversion by making it accessible via http request at http://domain.com/svn/repo/, although /svn/ is not a real directory in the root web directory on the server, so it gets caught by the second rewrite condition. This breaks Subversion over http.
I wanted to be able to add another condition that told it to only do the rule if the request URI does not start with /svn/, so I added
RewriteCod %{REQUEST_URI}!^/svn/.*$
to the other two conditions. For some reason, this didn’t work, though. I instead needed to add a new rule in the affirmative above the Wordpress one:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/svn/.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L]
i.e. if it starts with /svn/, don’t change anything. Why doesn’t it work with an exception? I have no idea.
