Saturday, January 11, 2003

RSS rules. The Fink Project offers RSS feeds for news and updated packages. NetNewsWire makes it easy to get news updates. Keeping my OS X setup up-to-date is easier than ever. Scientists should have RSS feeds too! 1:03:07 PM

I haven't used it for more than an hour, but Tim tells me that Ragtime for OS X is a great Office replacement. It is currently in a public beta and will sell for 99 Euros in the near future. [The Crandall Surf Report 2.0] Just downloaded and explored the built-in tutorial. The interaction between toolbar selection and selected items is a bit counter-intuitive. In a first impression, the document model seems designer- rather than writer-oriented. There's something of that in Keynote too. I don't know of a writing tool that offers a clean separation between content structure and visual structure. For example, I would like to be able to write a structured document -- in brief, an outline -- and then show the presentation program how to map the structural elements of my document to visual elements. No, style sheets is not what I'm talking about. I don't want to waste time figuring out the peculiar style composition rules of Office or any other stylesheet-based document package. If I have to do that, I will rather use (La)TeX, which is infinitely more powerful. Or Scheme Scribe, which is based on a modern programming language, rather than TeX's sui generis macro language. I want to show, not program. 12:46:17 PM

I broke down and bought Keynote at the local Apple Store yesterday. I haven't been playing with it that long, but I note that Power Point seems byzantine, klunky and ugly in comparison. In a week I'll give a longer report, but this appears to be a very impressive piece of software. The casual viewer will instantly know that this is a league beyond the visual experience of most ppt shows - ppt graphics appear to be done by amateurs by comparison. [The Crandall Surf Report 2.0] I did too, even paying premium for delivery and not waiting for the academic price. It does look good. For my purposes -- academic presentations -- its main limitation is the lack of an equation editor. OS X Powerpoint has a limited version of the MathType equation editor, but the full strength MathType is not yet available for OS X. MathEQ (born Expressionist), which I used a lot back in the 80s, is in transition from OS 9 to OS X. In any case, getting either would double the cost. This situation, and the continuing mess with browser plug-ins, show how much we have lost in software creativity and productivity over the last ten years from the lack of an open component architecture. OpenDoc might not been it, but the current state of affairs is ridiculous. 11:55:00 AM