Thursday, September 28, 2006

Note Taking

I'm still trying to find the ideal note taking tool that can hold all my thoughts together. I tried TiddlyWiki for a while, until it lost two separate sets of conference notes (despite a rigorous saving routine), and am now having a fiddle with Google Notebook - which looks like it is great for online research, but very specific to that. But I was surprised that I had never heard of Microsoft OneNote, which looks like it could be very useful in the MS environment which exists at my workplace. Think I'm going to download the trial version in a couple of weeks and see where it takes me...all good for personal knowledge management.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Form Follows Function...Follows the Web

I'm probably slow getting to this, and doubtless this has been blogged already, but I noticed in today's Financial pages of The Guardian (I've noticed a few things in its hallowed pages today) that the article "bulking up in the drugs industry" contained blue, underlined keywords which were then further defined in a call-out box. I think it's really interesting that a print publication is using the default hyperlink formatting to indicate "more information" - the influence of the WWW continues to grow.

A Catalogue of Errors

From today's Guardian Education Supplement somes Improbable research: a catalogue of errors, an article highlighting the need for knowledgeable, experienced library staff. The problem: foreign language books being mis-filed and therefore "languishing unfindable in libraries". The example: Gaelic books being catalogued under "na" ("the" in Irish Gaelic), for instance "Na fir" ("The Men") not being catalogued under "Fir".

"Imagine if The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury and The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark were all filed under 'T'"
Marc Abrahams


Indeed...

Monday, September 25, 2006

Spry from Adobe

While it's not quite standards compliant, I have been enjoying scratching the surface of Adobe's Spry - which seems like one of the easier Ajax frameworks to use.

Perhaps I am attuned to it because we have been working with FLEX 1.5 (not 2.0 yet - shame!!!) and the two approaches seem like close cousins. Likewise the controls and effects available seem to ape the core FLEX items.

Anyway, I used the accordian for a wee training package (within the firewall) this week, and it works like a dream. I'm going to fiddle about some more when I get a chance and look at binding to data sources and tabbed interfaces...

Ajax edit in place - NIFTY

Via Tim’s Weblog – here’s Joseph Scott’s edit in place: you too can have Flickr type user entry fields!