Dori's Dashboard

Here at ADHOC, people have comments on the number of widgets I have open on my desktop. I thought I'd share what it looks like and what they all are.

If you click on the image, you should be able to see a larger annotated version. If that doesn't work, let me know.

Enjoy!

Stupid Widget Tricks

A stupid widget trick, although not quite stupid enough (I think) to enter in tonight's Showcase:

1. Take this script
2. Turn it into a widget
3. Drag the widget into the Finder desktop; for best results, drag it into the menu bar
4. Enjoy!

I'm going to leave it like this for a while, it actually looks kinda cool. For some variant of cool that makes sense if you're severely sleep-deprived.

How I talk

After I did today's talk, several people asked me how I did my slides. As it's a little complex, I figured that I'd describe it here. To understand this, you have to keep in mind that I'm married to a man who's written multiple books on both PowerPoint (1, 2, 3) and Keynote (1, 2). Given that, here's what I use:

• OmniOutliner Professional
• OmniOutliner to S5 XSLT exporter
• S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System
• Safari
• Saft, a Safari extension (for its kiosk mode)

It's not as complex as it sounds, and it works wonderfully.

Join the Crew!

A followup to last night's post: Tom suggested the name, "Let's Be Bad Guys", and so we are. Join us!

Wanna join a Browncoat Crew?

Because Tom already knows that I'm a complete Serenity fangirl (and I know I'm not the only one here, too), here's what's going on the Official Serenity Fan Site:

In order to spread the word about Serenity more effectively throughout the 'verse, Browncoats will now be able to form their own Crews. These Crews are small groups you create amongst yourselves that will enable you to compete against other Crews and get more Credits faster.

Here's how it works: Any member of The Browncoats with over 4,000 Credits is eligible to become a Captain and to create a Crew under his or her command. Each member can join only one Crew at a time, and the Captain of one Crew cannot join another. The Captain will recruit up to 30 Browncoats to serve in the new Crew. If a Captain decides he or she doesn't want someone flyin' on their boat any longer they can send them packing. A Captain will also be able to make their Crew public or private to other members.

Anyone want to form a Mac OS X crew? A Backup Brain crew? Whoever has the highest number of points (i.e., lowest rank) can be captain (i.e., I wanna be captain but don't want to brag about how many points I have, but I have more than you do). If so, respond in the comments and we'll figure out what team to start up.

There's a connection to be made between this and Kathy Sierra's T-shirt-first development, but I haven't slept enough in the last two days to write up the lengthy post that that requires. Suffice it to say that if you're at ADHOC, I'm the one wearing this shirt.

ADHOC begins

One of the many ways in which The Advanced Developers Hands On Conference (aka ADHOC) is different from any other conference is that the keynote starts at midnight. Which is… just about now. And we're off!

If you're a reader of this blog and you're around here, come say hi.

Recording audio while note taking

Over at Flutterby, Dan asks:

Forest is here, and we're working with him on study skills. Part of that is note taking, and as we were talking about it I mentioned some of my difficulties, and he suggested that I record Skype and iChat conference calls so that I can go back to 'em later.

So, all you "podcasters" and whatever: Audacity doesn't seem to have a "record what I'm hearing in my headphones", and what I'd really like is a "record both my mic and my headphones" application. For the Mac. Anyone got experience?

The official canonical approved way to record audio on the Mac is Audio Hijack Pro or its little brother, Audio Hijack. Having said that, though, that's not what I use. At least not when I want to both record audio and take text notes simultaneously. Promise you won't laugh?

What I use is Word 2004 for Mac. In particular, its notebook layout view with audio notes.

Hey, you said you wouldn't laugh.

The ability to combine text notes with voice in a single document, combined with timestamps to make it easy to find just the one piece of audio you want to hear again makes it work just the way I do. I think it's pretty clear that I'm not a MS shill — I just think that this is a way cool feature that too few people know about. Go check it out; it may work for you, too.

Google Maps vs. MSN Virtual Earth: first impression

We're all familiar with Google Maps, which totally kicked the butt of past map services such as Mapquest (which still has not caught up to Google Maps; how lame is that?). Today's new competitor is Microsoft's Virtual Earth. So I tried it out with the first thing that most people do: show me where I'm sitting right now. Virtual Earth has many of the nice features we first saw with Google Maps; you can drag the map view around with the mouse, and it has the map view, an aerial view, and a hybrid view. Points off for requiring an ActiveX control for full functionality, but at first glance it looks like it's in the same league as Google Maps. Little things aren't as good or are buggy, probably because of insufficient testing with browsers other than IE6 for Windows. On Safari, pop-up windows wouldn't close, one time the map got stuck when I was dragging, and I had to double-click to get it to unstick and let go of the map, things like that.

But one big difference became immediately apparent. Here's the Google Maps view of my neighborhood. Now here's the same view with Virtual Earth. Hey, what happened to all the houses?

We've been living here since these houses were built six years ago. It's clear that the Virtual Earth dataset, at least for our area, is more than six years old. I can't date it exactly, but it looks as though it's older than the Fall of 1998. It's also interesting to see how much the color of the Google images help you grasp the terrain, compared to the grayscale Virtual Earth images. So my first evaluation is: nice try, Microsoft, but you've got a ways to go before you can match Google Maps.

What about you? Have you noticed if Virtual Earth's dataset is old for your area?

Yahoo buys Konfabulator

Holy crap: Yahoo Buys Maker of 'Widget' Applications:

Hoping to pave a new path to its popular Web site, Yahoo Inc. has acquired Konfabulator, a tiny software maker that provides a computer platform for monitoring the weather, stock prices and a wealth of other customized information without opening a Web browser.

My money had been on Microsoft buying K and making it part of Vista. Yahoo buying K (and giving the runtime away free!) makes things very interesting.