Inquisitor is genius

Inquisitor 3 is a great search plugin for Safari (apple's web browser). It implements Spotlight-like functionality for Safari. (just type something in the search box and get immediate highlighted results, autocompletion suggestions, etc).

This application is an immediate Bonzai. The developer just completely nailed it. It works amazingly fast, it's dead easy (since the user is only required to use the search box the same way he is already used to) and it works just great.

I just wish I could have that on Firefox on my mac, and actually, on Firefox everywhere.

The interface is the system

Dan wrote an interesting post on the adaptivepath blog: "The interface is the system". Users perceive the entire system through it's interface and are unable to differentiate one from the other. They are unaware of the system's internals and details - they only see what they interact with...

Back to basics: bloatware vs. keeping things simple

I remember the first time I tried to download Easy CD. I was in a distant computer with broadband far from my house and wanted to burn some mp3s I downloaded quickly. I had a cd burner but no burning software.

I quickly found out that Easy CD was a 100mb or so download, and I could not be more surprised. A CD burning application that comes in the size of an iso image? Are they insane? Why should the burning application take 100 off my hard drive? (and this was 4 years ago.)

In a recent visit to Nero & Roxio websites I found out the situation today is much worse. Nero requires 288MB of 'permanent' disk space and Roxio's Toast requires 300MB of disk space.

Roxio and Nero forgot how to keep things simple. A burning application should just be able to burn cds and dvds. It shouldn't be the 1-stop-home-media-editor. It doesn't need a wave editor, and a photo organizer.

Disco is a new (very hyped) burning application. It is what one might call a trendy-eyecandy-ish burning application. But other than being really pretty, it has one important feature - it's an insanely small, 700 KB download! It's a small, minimal, simple application that helps me get things done and doesn't take too much space.

Why is that so special nowadays?

Flatlab

Flatlab is a home for some weird graphic artwork: icons, pixel graphics and my main intrest: expressive GUI mockups.

Flatlab was formely known as CubeLab in the BeOS community, where several cubelab inspired themes exist.

Old machine gone, new Macbook arrives

It's hard to describe how frustrated I felt when my PC completely crashed last Wednesday. I think the PC just went nuts and became jealous because it learned about me getting a new mac laptop.

Computer crushes such as these are a nice opportunity to fire up the old BeOS partitions I have installed, or boot into the QNX live cd. They're always a joy because they boot in virtually no time and let me do stuff I need quickly.

Another crash time surprise was an old AMD K6-2 I had lying around in my room for the last 3 years or so. Since I wasn't sure what's going on with my PC, I had to remove every bit of hardware and use my old k6-2 in the meantime. It's always surprising to see a machine that I ditched for being too slow suddenly run winxp and Illustrator fairly well.

Legacy / rarely used systems can be very useful at times. It's a shame that I only boot into BeOS to save my files from various disasters, but I'm having a blast each time I do it.