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Using Desktop Manager to juggle more screen space I just started using Desktop Manager (OS X app) to get a little more virtual screen space on my Mac laptop. The clinching demo of it was watching one of the Google Earth people at Mashup Camp zip around his screens. The biggest plus has been an increased ability to keep focus on what's happening in one context without perpetually shifting windows to see everything that's going on. Generally, everything I need for a single task fits on one page, but I might be going from task to task - by confining each combination to its own place it's easier to be where you are and not somewhere else. I wish it let me change the desktop background image too, but I don't see any way to add that amount of added context shift. (or maybe I'm missing something) The idea if you have never used one of these things is that you get multiple desktops, which you can use hot keys or mouse clicks to move through. Each desktop has its own windows on it, and there are ways to move windows from screen to screen to get them just right. My windows now in order are
I have the windows arranged linearly so that I can hot key from one to the next in order and then it wraps around. Conceivably this could be a way to keep way more things running on different virtual spaces than my laptop has memory. So far it's been very handy. There's one funny bug - popups from the Adium contacts window show up no matter what window I'm on if I have that window exposed. That particular oddness is easy to fix (hide the Adium contacts window before leaving the screen) and with that it's working fine. On the private weblog as a communications tool I'm happy so far with a private weblog as a way for a small group of people to get news on a project. It's more structured in many ways than free-form "edit any page" systems, and there's a clear sense of authorship that helps. Typepad only supports a single password to barricade off sites, which is not ideal and really strikes me as kind of weird since it would be within their power to integrate Typekey into an access model. Getting the right balance between ease of use, tidiness of presentation, and systematic security is hard at scale. Some new tools I have a weakness for new software. Cyberduck is an FTP and SFTP (SSH copy) client for Mac OS X. It has a nice one-pane interface and lots of ways to bookmark where you need to upload and download files. I have a bunch of crap that's accumulated in some remote directories, and this might well be a way to deal with some of it. I probably should just mirror it all down to my Mac and back it up and be done with it. Lunch on South University This part of town is very quiet, and most businesses have short hours or are closed for break. Red Hot Lovers, chicago dog, mmm. Working on Assistive Media with Brian Kerr at Cafe Ambrosia Assistive Media records short format fiction and non-fiction from magazines like The Atlantic, Harpers, and the New Yorker, and makes the audio available to the visually impaired. We have about 400 titles online in MP3 and Real Audio formats, and a podcast going as well. The project underway is to redo the user interface to make it more accessable and more maintainable. A continuing challenge is to build it so that people with low vision or people using screen readers can make the best of it. Brian and I worked through the issues of converting the existing site into reusable metadata, and then reconstituting a new site with that metadata turned back into points of access. A good long discussion of where the information was coming from and how it needs to be reused in multiple formats made things that much more clear. Keeping the process clean and making it easy to fix messy data as it comes in will be key. Cafe Ambrosia has wifi! Breakfast at Frank's Town is empty - school break. My favorite libraries Create an OPML outline of your favorites, and then send the link to the OPML here to me at emv@superpatron.com . I'll attach it to http://hosting.opml.org/vacuum/supergopher/favorite-libraries.opml . Once there's some data I'll figure out a way to make it all pretty somewhere. This is inspired by Amyloo's "all our cars" project. I have had boring cars which don't say very much about me. Some little piece of me thinks there should be "collaborative outlining" a la wiki, but then a bigger piece of me remembers that I've already scratched the wiki itch and don't want to revisit that right now. |
Last modified: Friday, October 31, 2008 at 9:26 PM.
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