techno.blog("Dion")

A friend pointed out the new ‘Satellite’ link on Google Maps.

Go to an address and hit it to see it kick in!

That is very very cool.

Now I just want Google to be more personalized friendly… and let me save common places so I don’t have to type my damn home address in all the time when I do directions ;)

Oh, and it will be really nice to get more map data in there (satellite runs out in many places, and europe will be a nice addition too ;)

And, wouldn’t it be nice to have state lines, lines around cities, etc etc. It can be hard to know what you are looking at sometimes when all you see is Satellite data.

It doesn’t even remember what you have typed before.

It is cool how the satellite work can piggy back off of the standard maps. Instead of mt.google.com there is now kh.google.com which returns the squares as satellite images rather than 2D maps. It is also interesting to see the subtle Google copyright as a watermark.

A friend pointed me to a (seemingly old) project called XMLTerm. XMLTerm is a mozilla based “A graphical command line interface”.

At first you may laugh, and ignore some of the security implications for now, but this could actually be quite cool.

Ajax could also come in to really help this out.

Some thoughts:

• % du: When you do a ‘du’, wouldn’t it be cool to show a pie chart usage as well as the numbers?
• % ssh [TAB]: tcsh came up with the ‘complete’ command, which lets you get smart with your tabbing. We can take that to a new level with a bit of UI integration. If you hit TAB after typing a command that needs a host (e.g. ssh, scp) then a select list can appear with your list of hosts
• % history: Since we can place cool widgets in places, we could have a history bar which would allow you to click on an item to rerun it. Command Line Suggest could also get pulled up if you TAB at the beginning of a command, showing a drop down on history.

The XMLTerm site itself has ideas on graphical ls which shows thumbnails, and a special cat which groks HTML, images, etc.

In theory, this could be an interesting marriage of the command line interface (power), and richer functionality (not just text).

Ben and I have had great feedback from the presentations that we have given on Ajax, so we created Ajaxian.com, as a place to talk about all things Ajax.

For instance, today we wrote about Handling usability concerns, such as the back/forward buttons, and bookmarking in the browser.

The entry talks about the opensource Dojo Toolkit, and its new bind() mechanism.

This is very cool. Although, it probably shows you what you thought was common sense, it is great to see true analysis.

A joint eye tracking study conducted by search marketing firms Enquiro and Did-it.com and eye tracking firm Eyetools has shown that the vast majority of eye tracking activity during a search happens in a triangle at the top of the search results page indicating that the areas of maximum interest create a

Engadget does something both smart, and cool.

Note the following next to advertising on the site:

Comment on this Advertiser (11 comments)

This offers new incentive to make sure that quality ads are placed on the site. Ads that make sense in that community, are not too flashy/marketing-y, etc.

TiVo should let me thumbs UP and thumbs DOWN on the rare times that I have to watch commercials on TV :)

All the love is for Cocoa. Why does Carbon get such a bad rap? I never looked into it much, but just last week a friend talked about how he thought Carbon was a poor mans solution, until he actually spent some time on it too. And, he found that it was actually not a bad solution, especially with the Java bindings.

James Duncun Davidson has also just written that Sometimes Carbon isn’t so Bad.

Jef Raskin, Mac pioneer, dies at 61.

Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface expert largely credited with beginning the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61.

Raskin, the author of The Humane Interface, died of cancer, according to a man who answered the telephone Sunday at Raskin’s Pacifica, Calif., home.

Raskin, who named the Macintosh after his favorite fruit, joined Apple in January 1978 as employee No. 31. The Macintosh was launched in 1984, but Raskin left Apple in 1982 amid a well-documented dispute with Steve Jobs.

Reskin was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s when he first visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). (Apple is often accused of copying Xerox’s graphical user interface–GUI–into the Macintosh operating system).

Check out this demo of zoomable interfaces. We see some of this with F9 and company.

We still have so much to do wrt human-computer interfaces. Don’t you feel like a primate who can only poke and prod at things?

RIP.

You gotta love adding to “JS?” acronyms. Now we have JavaScript Templates, which, as Aslak talks about, can work well in the new world of Ajax.

Here

          

Jon Udell is spot on. We are going to annotate the planet. One of the ways in which we will do this is Google Maps. It isn’t just a way to look something up… it is a platform for us to use!

Take a look at how he took his GPS info. Still photos. Digital movies. And greated
a walking tour of Keene, MA using Google Maps.

It was inspired by Matt King.

See more Google Maps Hacks

I noticed that Google Maps has a slight change on the front page of its UI.

I mentioned the right hand side ‘Examples’ when I first saw the app. Having the text boxes and multiple search buttons was confusing.

Now Google has taken them out and has replaced them with sample text and ‘Try it’ links which run the sample queries.

It took me a bit to change my pattern of:

yp.yahoo.com

find the place that I want

map it

to:

maps.google.com

nameOfPlace in theTown

My next request is due to having my father-in-law with a Hybrid. Have you noticed how you can get obsessed with seeing your hybrid not use the engine, and watching it get energy back via braking etc?

There should be a ‘Show me directions that are most energy efficient for my hybrid” to complement “shortest distance” and “shortest time” ;)