June 2005 Archive

Spotted a novelty sales-scheme advert in one of my old 1980's comic-books. It's strikingly similar in layout to what many shopping-cart and e-commerce websites end up looking like, so it's got posted as a new cover .

The 'trend' of overwhelming the viewer with badly organised masses of information isn't new but doesn't have to be a bad thing. After all, cheapness, avaliability and choice are all key to attracting certain markets. On the other hand, the company advertised doesn't exist any more, and those kinds of adverts don't get made, even in the funny papers!

Anyway, its got an image map annotating the key functional areas of the advert, and these link to ecommerce sites which highlight that particular element.

By the way, the text under Ask For Janet reads: "Please… operators can take names and addresses only… CANNOT answer questions"… which sounds like most modern call centers…

Continuing a theme from an earlier post about new media and supermarkets , looking at the entire (sub)urban landscape as if it were 'hyper-media'. One method of chronicalling the idea, is annotating photographs (mostly taken with a mobile phone) of signage and the suchlike. …[more]

Whilst looking for a text-editor to use on my iBook I came across SubEthaEdit which is free for non-commercial use,

It isn't strictly a text-editor, more of a collaborative working tool. Being able to invite participants to edit a document, in real-time. It seems to handle code-highlighting nicely, and also 'tracks changes' by highlighting. I assume each editor gets their own colour, but I haven't had the opportunity to test out the networking capabilities.

Again, there seems to be no macro ability, but thats understandable within a realtime network environment, running a series of commands on a document which might be changing as it executes could cause havoc. There is a regular expression find/replace, which is not only this seasons must have feature, but also sanity saving when you're tidying up non-standards based code into something more elegant, or when variable names need rationalising through scripts.

What exactly defines a 'symbol' I don't know, but SubEtha lets you float to the next or previous ones. It seems to pick up heading tags as symbols, but not list items, a bit odd really.

However, the real point of SubEtha is the multiuser mode.The idea that documents can be constructed in real time by teams, instead of a feedback and control loop is interesting. But assembly-line methods are deeply ingrained in our workplaces, as are the task and tool orientated roles that go with them. Realtime multiplayer editing seems to cut through those kinds of structures. Questions of efficiency of new methods have to be answred before this kind of tool-work become widespread.

I'm not thinking about the collaborative note-taking and drafting exercises that most multiplayer editors are designed for, but the actual constuction of software, websites, or even narrative texts. In that respect a Flash Platform frontend to a Wiki could provide a similar, but much larger scope with many users. (Just Letters for example)

SubEthaEdit is not the +5 scroll of Text-Edit I'm looking for, but its unique multiplayer abilities means it gets to stay in my backpack.

Looking for a text-editor for the mac:
skEdit $25 lifetime use.

Ok, so I think the whole hard-hat logo is a bit on the cheesy side. Integrated FTP? I don't care. However, skEdit closes your tags for you automatically (nice!) and colours code very handsomly (although it looks like no support for PHP/HTML crossovers). The search and replace can do regular expressions, which is a bit of a must these days.

I couldn't find the case-change (you'd be suprised how MUCH STUFF is done in caps when it should really be lowercase or mixed), and there are no macro-recording things (although being new to the mac, I'm nost sure if AppleScript can do those functions). Anyway, I don't think SkEdit is for me. The limited 30 day trial isn't long enough for me to get comfortable with it either…|

So I'm now looking for an industrial strength text editor. All my text editing (i.e. HTML and CSS) on the PC is done with TextPad . The reasons I luse textpad are:

Macros so repetitive tasks can be automated.
Code/syntax Highlighting turns HTML tags and attributes different colours, with extendable libraries, so it does css/php/actionscript as well.
Join lines which is just so damn usefull.
Case Change title-case, sentance case, lower-case and upper case.
Price about £15 - free upgrades forever

And finally it's British!

Textpad is only for PCs (one suggested reason is that it's actually been written so tightly, that to 'port' it to another operating system would mean a whole rewrite). So I have to find another text editor for the mac, preferably whose features match…