More stuff done with Ruby: Ta-da List

OK, here is web usability gods 37Signals‘ won fluff on their very usable web app for making todo lists online:

To Do with Ta-da List: Simple sharable to-do lists. To-do list, todo list, task manager, task list, todo task, easy list, simple todo, free todo list manager.

What blew me away is that they made a mini video for us to see all the features in the thing. More and more nifty small things are packed with applications of high usability, and we Windows users have a hard time getting to the nifty stuff as we are so used to the loops, hoops and have-tos of Bad Software. That video showed me two or three things I had not seen while signing up.

And the FORM for signing up is a miracle of communication. I like big letters. And colors used to convey different levels of importance, that was smart, too.

Saved by GNU tools

GnuWin32 Packages is the official list of GNU tools for the win32 platform.

Some of these tools are pure magic. diff rules, and I felt all broken when my Cygwin install broke, because all my settings in diff were perfect there. Now I don’t even have to open the bash commandline, the tools are on my path, in Windows.

Handy.

When I grow up I am going to start using patch, too. Applying patches as I go along!

Edit: OK, the best packages are those that give you the filesystem commands from UNIX, fileutils.

With these things installed, you do not have to get used to the Windows command-line commands again.

Theory of translations

I have begun reading Introducing Translation Studies, by Jeremy Munday, as I am trying my hand at commercial translation. _Dolmetscher_ is the slightly derogatory term for commercial translators. It was coined by 19th century theologian Schleiermacher, who still is a defining influence on translation theories. (Most things that folks in T Studies are doing nowadays are in response to some conecpt or thought of his (!), according to Munday.) The other, artistic and literary kind of translator he calls _Ãœbersetzer_.

“Number One With A Bullet”, explained

I was snooping around for the hidden meaning of the term “number one with a bullet”. Its meaning could not only be the movie with the same name. And, of course there was more to the story.

I’m glad you asked, flow. As a matter of fact, the term “number one with a bullet” originated with Billboard Magazine’s (110 years!) charting system. When a song or album is number one, it has the most sales or spins out of anything else. when an item on a Billboard chart has a bullet by it, it means that those sales or spins are climbing higher than they were the week before. So a “number one with a bullet” is a song/album that not only is number one, but still continues to climb in terms of sales/spins. So it’s a number one with a vengeance.

Source

Here is an example of the chart in 1964:

(Note, no bullet illustration in this one.)

No Software Patents!

No Software Patents! is a portal, a portal you should spend five minutes at today.

The link above is to a page showcases a fictional webshop (created by
The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure) that could be any webshop, and it uses some basic functions that webshops use, such as paying with VISA, and thus it breaks a software patent that the European Patent Office has already granted. Granted, not enforced.

We can still influence this. Let’s.

Search function with auto-complete “suggest”

The search function at the PHP homepage has got a new functionality: suggesting what it is you’re typing.

Like auto-complete. And Google Suggest.

> The source code of this feature is released under the PHP License and is available from the PHP CVS server without any support.

Nice of them. The script is included at the bottom of every page that uses it, and when you view its source, it is a very much optimized version you see; i.e. you can’t read it. Obfuscation.

With some fiddling, this could be used in many places, I guess.

Maybe this is something for Alexandria.dk, Peter?