Rave

For all of you who are waiting for Microsoft to get its act together and add incremental find to Internet Explorer, I have news about something even better — and it isn’t an IE plugin. It’s Edwin Evans’ HandyFind, which gives you incremental search in most Windows applications, including Internet Explorer, Notepad, Wordpad, Word, Excel, and all applications that use Microsoft’s main text editing controls. Even better: It gives you one interface that works with all of these programs! Humanized is proud to endorse Edwin’s work and HandyFind.

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Life Hack Rave

Jef Raskin proposed the First Law of Interface Design, paralleling Asimov’s First Law of Robotics:

A computer should not harm a user’s work, or (through inaction) allow a user’s work to come to harm.

Web browsers break this law regularly. When was the last time you lost all the data you entered on a form because your browser/computer crashed or something went wrong? And how many times have you spent 10 minutes relocating a crucial (or hilarious) web page because you closed the wrong window? Entering data into a form is work. Navigating through the petabytes of information on the internet is work. One wrong move, one brownout, and poof! There goes your data, your history, and that web page.

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Life Hack Rave

Last summer, before Humanized got started, Andrew, Atul, and I did some consulting work. Andrew and I were in balmy California, while Atul was back in humid Chicago. We were all working on the same project, and we had a big problem: we needed to talk. A lot. About everything: documents that needed commenting and editing, new ideas one of us had brainstormed, what we were going to do the next day, and the weather. Unfortunately, our tools (phones, AIM, email, and a wiki) were inadequate.

Enter MoonEdit.

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Rave Software Development

Nearly everyone who has built software on Unix systems has had to deal with a tool called GNU Make.

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Rave

Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy starts, “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

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Rave

I’ve always grumbled when a friend sent me a link to a video. Inevitably, the site containing the video offers it to me in a variety of formats–usually RealPlayer, Windows Media, and Quicktime.

First of all, I have media players for all three of those formats on my computer. But none of them work with said video, because said video uses some codec I don’t have–which my player is utterly unhelpful about pointing me to–or because my copy of the media player is way out of date (meaning, of course, that it’s more than a week old).

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