Alcides Fonseca

The geek web trembled with the announcement of Ubiquity, the QuickSilver for the web. Well, it happens that I am not a fan of that application. I rarely use Spotlight to open my apps (which is fine for me). Why? Because I’m a Mouser, I am more productive using it, and shortcuting through all applications.

I’m happy that I wasn’t the one thinking the same:

Now don’t get me wrong, I am a fairly fast typist. But my problem is I can’t remember commands. Putting a keyboard command in my head is like putting sand in a sieve. The reason I love graphical interfaces is because I can’t remember shit. I wish I could, because I am sure I would be much more efficient. Keyboards are much faster than mice and GUIs. The problem is when you are staring at a keyboard you have to remember what to do. A GUI is for me a giant cheat sheet.

Same applies to me. I have two modes. The one when I’m writing code from scratch and my both hands are on the keyboard, and using the cmd+s shortcut a lot! Or I have one hand on the mouse, poping up menus, and clicking in buttons, and the other in cmd+c,v.

Even a long, long time ago, when I used to live without a mouse in Windows 3.1, I use the Alt shortcuts that allowed me to navigate through the menus, instead of the Cntr shortcuts that had to be memorized.

So most of the geeks are productive with their keyboard, and even in terminals and terminal-based editor like emacs or vim, but I’m really happy in my GUI software just like the majority of users, to whom the only keys they use in the keyboard are the letters, numbers, space and enter :)

And IE8 beta2 is out

I’m a critic of IE7 and now IE8’s UI layout, because it steals the worst parts of the new Vista organization, and the Vista organization is just not that good. (Short aside on the Vista organization if you missed it: menus are gone, except when they’re not. If you’re going to uproot things, go all the way because that’s the only way you’ll make it work. Also, many programs are now somehow web pages with flow layouts and links. That’s the closest analogy I can find, but it’s not perfect because it implies that IE should fit hand in glove, and it just doesn’t.)

Read the whole post from Jesper about IE8 beta2.

Beta 2 has yet to provide any new breakthroughs, which is a bit unnerving since a fair bit of the previous process turned out to be the same old game of providing the solution using new standards — even standards that had been shot down in the HTML5 working group before!

Outch!

WebcamInput

This project aims to be a easy-to-include unobtrusive code to transform a input type=file into a webcam input. People can then click to get a picture, and upload it.

It consist of a Flash swf file to get the webcam, and some javascript glue. In the server side, you just have to guess if you are receiving a file (if the user is not using javascript) or if it is a string and base64 decodeit.

A simple php file that has that condition for you is included.

I am developing this in order to scan some book covers easily, but I believe this could also become very popular in the Social Network world, where you take an instant picture for your avatar.

Show me the files!

Here they are

Todo List:

• Transform the PHP file, in a real upload code.
• Improve the user-interface, some apple-like icons
• Move the click and show logic form the JS to the AS, so it works in IE and other browsers without the data: protocol.
• Make it optional to use the webcam.
• Make a Django Widget out of this