Daily Archives: November 13, 2003

Radio Shortcuts

Radio

I am also trying to do some housecleaning on “shortcuts”, the handy auto-linking feature of “Radio”. Just like the word Radio in the last sentence, you can create shortcuts in Radio that when you type the word with quotation marks, it replaces the text with a shortcut. This is a well know feature to everyone who's used “Radio” but “me”, hence it's not on my “Radio wishlist” of features. Final shortcut: “Radio home server”

I'd bet it's in Rogers' book… [Amazon link]

Radio

I took a moment to subscribe to a couple of outlines via “Radio”. I think I'm beginning to get it. Subscribing to an outline is like subscribing to a static RSS feed: I get content, but it's ordered and easily updated. This would be great for end-user documentation, much better than HTML-based, web-connected help systems.

Steve's new business.

Radio

I'm starting a company, so I started a weblog to go with it. I'm using “Radio” running under Windows to do some of the dirty work and I've been impressed with how fast it is. The Windows version of the app is easily 50% faster than the Mac version running on equivalent hardware.

  • The Mac: G3/400/512MB RAM, MacOS 10.2 Server
  • The PC: P3/500/384MB RAM, Windows 2000 SP2

I'm hoping that the Mac version gets better soon. I'd love to run it on an iBook, but don't want to *have to* buy a 1GHz machine to do it.

As a side note,

Brent on Bug Reports

Weblog

Brent Simmons posts a couple of his favorite bug report “feedback”

Bug Guilt Trips.For me, there are three main tactics that I see:

1. I’d buy it, if…— If NetNewsWire had just this one feature I’d buy it.

2. It would be more Mac-like if…— It’s the trump card of user interface discussion. (Its brother is “it would be more intuitive if…”) The problem is, when an app gets as much feedback as NetNewsWire, you get mutually exclusive feedback. Persons A, B, and C don’t agree on what the Mac-like solution is for a given user interface problem.

3. It should be easy for you to just…— Oh no you didn’t just say that! This comes from programmers as well as people who don’t program. They know it’s good psychology, because it goes right to my pride as a programmer. The thing is, you don’t know what’s easy to implement and what isn’t. Simple-sounding things are sometimes wickedly difficult. Hard-sounding things are sometimes a piece of cake.

And one bonus tactic…

4. You don’t want to try to be Dave Hyatt— Okay, I got this one only once, but I liked it so much I have to repeat it. It came up in a discussion of how NetNewsWire uses Web Kit. (Of course, the thing was that I wanted to use Web Kit—use the great stuff Dave Hyatt and the rest of the Web Kit team has provided. Not be Dave Hyatt. Quite the opposite.)

—snip—

[inessential.com]