Word of the day. Just added a new word to my vocabulary. Affordances. As in, “seeing software exlusively in functional terms also overlooks affordances“.
iJustWorks. Speaking of affordances, two of my favorite new applications are KeyNote and Pages.
I don’t do presentations often (not complaining, if anything gloating), so I don’t have much patience for ParallelsPowerPoint or its younger, somewhat challenged, cousin Impress. KeyNote, on the other hand, has this uncanny ability to read my mind and just do what I need it to. Except for one annoyance. I can’t figure out how to assign keyboard shortcuts to different slide master. Suspect it’s not even possible.
Pages is nowhere as powerful as Word, which explains why I’m getting so much done with Pages and dream I could edit Ruby in Practice with it. Alas, it doesn’t support Word macros/fields, required by the last mile of editing. Wish I was smart enough to use it during pre-production.
If you have to PDF … Two things missing from Firefox 3 for the Mac. Some would argue Safari looks and speed, but I’m so far not seeing the difference (and I use both). Anyway, two things. One is full screen support, the other is a good PDF viewer. Firefox-mac-pdf solves one problem.
Rails Doc. If you’re looking for better Rails documentation … let me know, I’m also on that hunt. But at least we’ve got a better Rails online doc viewer.
Accessibility moment. The BBC takes issue with the abbr@title microformats pattern, removing them until further notice. Which reminds me, once in a while I should be checking the UI for all the inaccessible elements that crop up during development. Now would be a good time.