In recent news...

[drcuriosity]

I have a stomach bug, thus feel somewhat blurky right now. It's apparently going around.

I seem to be somewhat difficult to see and hear, if you're an actor named Jeff. Two separate actors named Jeff completely failed to register my existence when greeting them the other night.

We had an interesting seminar today by Ben Bederson, director of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab, wherein he talked about "staying in the flow", and how it doesn't happen much when using computers. Some definite food for thought, there.

During the seminar, he talked about nifty things like the International Children's Digital Library, and a couple of useful tools called PhotoMesa (for browsing large collections of photos efficiently) and NoteLens (which looks like quite a useful little note-taking tool).

Cinnamon and orange soap is nice. Also, spending comforting time with friends. I need to do more of that.

Comments

[sethop.livejournal.com]

Notelens is good. Not as good as the heirarchical outline organiser widget with mozmail style rapid fire text search that I was thinking about, oh, 18 months ago, but it's a lot easier to create something on paper (or, in my case, in notes in another heirarchical outline organiser) than it is to actually code the sucker. It's tempting to show notelens to someone, show them all my notes on how to build a better one of these widgets, tell them to start coding and say "look, we can do better than these guys.", but I think I'd feel guilty.

Essentially, the usability isn't high, and the feature count is low. But the basic idea is there. Adding features isn't hard. They also thought of synching with outlook, which is clever, and I didn't think of.

Still, it's nice to see one's ideas come to life, even if they were someone elses ideas by the time it actually happened. What interests me is to see whether the competition (ie, the heirarchical outline people) notices, and implements the critical searchbar feature sooner rather than later.