Saturday, March 23, 2002

Hey, this could be great Monday morning I'm back at my Manila system, and this is the first thing I'm going to check out: Manila Envelope 1.0.3 Released. Tim Jarrett’s Manila Envelope is an external editor for Manila weblogs. This release adds a couple new features and fixes some bugs. [mac.scripting.com] 10:16:15 PM

Semantic web from on high Eric Hanson posted this brief overview of the Semantic Web. Excellent piece; it makes the Semantic Web simple, which it really is, at the bottom. One of the things that makes the Semantic Web seem complex is that RDF, its "language", is defined in not one but two specification documents, the Model and Syntax spec and the RDF Schema spec. Each spec is harder to follow than it should be because essential information is contained in the other. Instead of reading one, then the other, you really have to read them at the same time, sort of. But imagine this: think about a set of blogs that use the Semantic Web approach. 10:13:23 PM

Who's got the menu? My latest Radio conundrum has to do with the menu bar. This is one of the rare (for me) cases in which the Macintosh UI doesn't work as well as the Windows paradigm. When you use Radio, you're really using two applications simultaneously; Radio and a browser (I say "a browser", but I've found that Radio really doesn't work correctly with anything but the latest Internet Explorer). Both applications stay open and I switch back and forth continuously. Radio functions a bit like an enhanced set of bookmarks or favorites, so I open my home page (the local one) from Radio, then edit in the browser window. If I want to do something back in Radio, I have to first make Radio the frontmost application. This works better in Windows than in MacOS (any version) because Windows doesn't have a menu bar; it has a menu bar in each window. MacOS has a single menu bar at the top of the screen, not graphically connected to any window. Of course, this would all be solved if you could write and edit in a Radio outliner window and directly pasted into your blog, but as far as I can see, you can't. I'm learning to work as much in the browser window as possible, so I suppose I'll just have to take all those links I grab from Radio and bookmark them. Seems like a lot of extra work. In fact, I'm pretty sure Radio might be able to automatically insert those bookmarks. And as usual, as far as I can see, it can't. That may be the most frustrating thing; that I never have any confidence that I have the real answer to any of these questions. 10:02:21 PM

© Copyright 2002 Peter Harbeson.