amarbledesk.com
a menu of placations
| archive for December, 2009 |
41 31 21 11 1
23 Dec 2009 19:21 EDT
41 years ago today I was spending a cold winter in Michigan, a dark-haired little boy.
31 years ago today I was 11 years old.
21 years ago today I was spending a very cold winter in Alaska.
11 years ago today my 2nd son was born; today my dark-haired little boy is 11 years old.
1 year ago today during a cold winter in Ohio I received the gift of life from an old friend, my 2nd kidney transplant.
Merry Christmas to all
Apps I love: yWriter 5
23 Dec 2009 00:19 EDT
I started writing fiction in earnest early this spring. All authors have their own medium of choice for the creative act of writing — some longhand with fountain pen, some on legal pads, some dictating into a machine, some use a good old typewriter, and of course, many on computer. The choice seems usually to be personal and quirky, not unlike a musician’s choice of axe. I use the computer myself since that’s what I’m most comfortable with and find it the quickest method to flow words from my brain to “paper”.
For umpteen years, or actually more like twenty-ump years, I’ve been writing with Microsoft Word as a tool for technical documents, reports, whitepapers, standards docs, etc. I started writing fiction using Word as well; it’s fine for research, character creation, backstory, etc., but I found that it’s not really the best tool for the actual act of writing novels. It’s rather too generic and doesn’t have any awareness of the building blocks of novels: chapters, characters, scenes, and so forth.
Then in the run-up to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, where I’m Derek Balsam), I learned about yWriter. In particular, I discovered yWriter 5 (older versions are still available, but I wanted the latest) from SpaceJock Software. It’s FREE (as in beer) software written by a single developer who is also a published novelist. He wrote the tool that he wanted for writing novels.
It has a great philosophy behind it: it’s free (though I did make a donation to its author), it’s quick, it’s light. Its interface is minimalist and uncluttered, and you can customize fonts and colors to suit your preferences. What it does is provide tools to organize scenes, chapters, characters, points of view, locations, and key items; for outlining, drafting, scheduling/tracking/repoting. and storyboarding.. It also has global and local search/replace and (very important!) word counting and usage statistics. A great set of features for writing stories.
What’s almost more impressive are the features it doesn’t have. It doesn’t have an interface full of icons; it doesn’t provide complex formatting, page layout, or publishing features. It doesn’t check you grammar or try to reformat things as you type. In short, it doesn’t try to be a word processor. If you want, you can import and export stories or chunks to and from your favorite such program, but yWriter itself concentrates on the craft of writing, not of printing and display.
Two other awesome features are its text-to-speech capability (it will read you story to you) and context-sensitive highlighting of characters, locations, and items — this latter feature includes the ability to click any of these building blocks, which will bring up your own notes on each of them. Last, I’ll just mention that the program has real auto-save — it automatically saves your work so you can’t accidentally quit without saving.
Thanks to yWriter, I was able to write the first 35,000 words of my first novel in just 30 days. It’s a useful tool that does only what it needs to do and no more.
Apps I love: Notepad++
20 Dec 2009 17:12 EDT
Notepad++ is a freeware text editing program available from Sourceforge. The name implies that it’s a Windows Notepad replacement or enhancement, but that’s true only in the sense that bacon is a replacement or enhancement for pork. Notepad and pork are fine, but Notepad++ and bacon are awesome. Even better, Notepad++ is free, and you still have to pay for bacon.
I use the program mostly for web stuff — HTML, CSS, XML — but also for regular English .TXT files. The features I enjoy the most are syntax highlighting in the formats of my choice: option of light-colored text on a dark background for good visibility; support for a wide variety of file types; multiple-document multiple-view interface; great editing and search/replace capabilities; syntax folding to collapse and expand logical units; drag-and-drop; awareness of file modifications made outside of Notepad++; indentation guides and automated bracket finding.
It’s very quick and very lightweight — it uses a wonderfully small amount of memory. After years of the industry creating bloatware and believing that delivering more features is equivalent to using more resources, I’m always pleased to find programs that aim for simplicity in the right places. Notepad++ is very rich on features, but its interface is uncluttered and it remains fast and easy to use.
Kudos to the entire Notepad++ development team for their useful and usable project.
Google browser size – but what about liquid?
17 Dec 2009 19:22 EDT
People view the web in many different ways. There is little uniformity in the display sizes, aspect ratios, and resolutions that we use to browse the web. When creating a web site or a web-based application, you need to check how your design looks through different combinations of the above — and then you need to make some guesses about how many people are actually using each of the combinations. Sure, some people might still be out there trying to look at your web site in 320 x 200, I suppose, though too few to warrant a lot of work on your part to optimize for them. So you need to take into account both your majority audience as well as enough of the long tail to satisfy most of your likely customers, while weighing this against the work it takes to test this.
The goal is usually something like making sure that the “important stuff” that you want people to catch at first glance appears above the fold — a borrowed newspaper metaphor.
Google Labs has just released a tool called Google Browser Size that attempts to help understand what percentage of likely web audiences use various screen sizes. They measure screen size in horizontal and vertical dimensions as percentage of users. You can now understand how people are likely to interact with your page from a statistical point of view.
The tool has some neat technical aspects, such as the set of div’s that allow you to interact with the underlying page even when it has been overlaid with the Google statistics. According to their about page they get these statistics from all visitors to Google (it’s not clear if they mean the Google home page or all Google.com pages).
One unfortunate drawback is that the tool only supports the native (non-virtual) viewing size of the display of whoever is using the tool. This specifically presents an issue for web pages that use a liquid design which resizes itself at least partially according to the user’s display. On my 1280×800 widescreen laptop display viewing a liquid page like http://www.markbeadles.com/, for example, the tool incorrectly implies that objects on the right side of my screen aren’t visible to most users, when actually they are due to resizing. [I suppose the solution many of you would recommend is to not use a liquid layout. Eh. De gustibus non est disputandum.]
Rough week for Google (great week for Evil?)
12 Dec 2009 03:12 EDT
Google, the company whose motto is “Don’t Be Evil“, has had a rough week or so. First, they released Vevo, a crippled, redundant, and non-user friendly music video site — the only group that might like Vevo is the oligopoly of commerical copyright holders and the RIAA. Let’s put it this way: there’s not much to be found there, and what there is can all be found on YouTube anyway. And as I write this, at 2147 EST, the service cannot be reached. Great stuff, guys.
Second, a rather minor point but since I’m piling on what the heck, I love Google Chrome but I hate the current extensions. They call the extensions “beta” but in this particular case they actually mean it! Most of them seem to be broken and/or useless. Too bad, a working ad block tool is the one thing missing from their beautiful, minimalist, speedy browser.
Finally, we have their CEO, Eric Schmidt. Eric, Eric, Eric. For those who haven’t heard, this week he made a very revealing and very stupid statement regarding privacy. He said, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,“. Well, Eric. Can I call you Eric? Or is that too, um, personal? I don’t want you to know what time I went to the crapper. Does that mean I shouldn’t be doing it in the first place? I don’t want you taking pictures of my children in the school locker room. Does that mean they shouldn’t go to school in the first place? I don’t want you to know my credit card number, doofus, does that mean I shouldn’t have a credit card? Things that are private, things that are personal, things that are secret – these are three different categories with complex overlaps.
I’m not building a straw man here, I warn you. I expect the argument that ‘he was just referring to what you do online’. That distinction is useful to a company like Google but in fact is completely irrelevant. Privacy is privacy on-line or off. If the head of the only search company that matters, the company that sends vehicles down our streets to take pictures of our homes and workplaces, the company that uses satellite photography to show us our neighborhoods and schools, the company that wants to put its OS onto our billions of mobile devices — if the head of that company doesn’t respect our privacy, then maybe they’ve grown beyond their “Don’t Be Evil” infancy into something less…Not Evil.
Which sucks, I kinda like their software.
about mark beadles
I write the things you read here. Polymath renaissance redneck. I build software, stories, and young men. More...on the desk
around the web
in the vault
-
