Have started using del.icio.us. Is good.
Things I did not make (category archive)Page 2 of 4
Stock.XCHNG. Over 200,000 free stock photos made by submitters. A very useful site.
BBC Religion & Ethics is an interesting website with in-depth discussions of many religious and ethical issues.
Alt+left-clicking on a link is equivalent to ’save link as’.
From Joystiq. Patrick Curry is a video game designer, and for every week of this year he’s posting an idea for a game—and they’re excellent, inventive, and well-thought-out (considering they’re weekly). Rather than summarising them here, I’ll just suggest you take a look at them yourself.
One of my favourites is the Blackout concept:
Blackout is a survival game with a realistic premise: you’re trapped in a large urban city that’s completely devoid of electricity. There aren’t monsters, zombies, or aliens taking over the city… just other people. How will you escape? How will you survive?
I recently downloaded a beta version of Microsoft Office 2007. It’s a fairly major upgrade, and so I am going to do a little review about the new version of Word.
First impressions
The first thing I noticed about Word 2007 is that it’s blue, and rather fancy looking. In fact, it looks completely different to all previous versions of Word.
This overwhelming blueness is the Windows XP theme. You can also change it to the Windows Vista theme, which is the same thing, except black. Once I went past the purely cosmetic colour changes, I noticed that Word 2007 is missing both normal toolbars and a menu bar. These have been replaced by two new components: the Quick Access Toolbar and the Ribbon.
Quick Access Toolbar
The Quick Access Toolbar is just like a conventional toolbar in older versions of Word. By default, it sits astride the Ribbon, and has buttons for save, undo, repeat, and print. It can be customised to have different buttons, and you can also choose to place it below the Ribbon.
Ribbon
The Ribbon is a far bigger change than the Quick Access Toolbar. Basically, it combines the menu and toolbars from previous versions of Word into a single tabbed palette. The options in the main area of the Ribbon change depending on what tab is. To use the old terms, the toolbars change depending on the menu selected.
Access keys
The access keys (keyboard shortcuts) for the Ribbon are very good, thanks to the excellent KeyTips feature. KeyTips are little tooltips that appear underneath available functions in the program, and they tell you what key to press to active that function. Pressing (and releasing; no more of this holding-down nonsense) the Alt key will display all the KeyTips available in the current view. Press the key that corresponds the function you want, and it will be activated. In some cases—selecting a Ribbon tab, for example—you will be shown some more KeyTips.
For example, I may want to change the size of the margins:
- Press ALT.
- Press P, for the Page Layout tab.
- Press M, for the Margins option.
- Use the keyboard to select the margins option I want.
KeyTips are very intuitive, balancing the need for beginners to access anything without remembering keyboard shortcuts with the ability for more advanced users to quickly select the function they want. My only complaint is that KeyTips are not more common; they’re widely available, but there are still some areas of the program that lack them.
Conclusion
The new interface is going to take quite a bit of getting used to, and I’m still undecided as to whether it’s much better. Never the less, it’s nice to see that Microsoft isn’t resting on its laurels, and is instead making the effort to come up with an interesting new concept.
The Spike is a useful little Microsoft Word feature. The Microsoft Word Help says:
To use the Spike, you remove two or more items from nonadjacent locations, append each item to the Spike’s contents [using CTRL+F3], and then insert the items as a group in a new location or document. The items remain in the Spike, so you can insert them repeatedly. If you want to add a different set of items to the Spike, you must first empty the Spike’s contents [with CTRL+SHIFT+F3].
Basically, you can go around selecting text and images and pressing CTRL+F3 to grab them from the page and stick them in the Spike. When you’re done, you press CTRL+SHIFT+F3 and it spits out everything you’ve put into it. It is also cleared when you do this.
There’s a (fairly) new version of foobar2000 (the minimalist, powerful, extensible, brilliant audio player) now available: 0.9.1. Some new features (playing WMAs, for one) and a fair bit more polish than 0.8.3.
Also, make sure you get the Columns UI component for maximum graphical niceness.
Slashdot has announced a CSS redesign contest; the winner also gets a laptop. Judging by the look of some of the current contenders (see CmdrTaco’s Journal), the end result is going to be very good. I’m looking forward to it.
The mighty Torrent Jabberwalker returns, with new features. Hopefully the searching for the rest of the sites gets hooked up soon.