One of my students, Steven Robinson, pointed me to the human-computer interaction (HCI) research of Johnny Lee of Carnegie-Mellon, who has hacked a wiimote to do some really cool HCI stuff. It makes we want to buy a wiimote and try his demos.
One of my favorite applications for Mac is Quicksilver?a great new way to interact with your computer more efficiently. In the below video, Nicholas Jitkoff, developer of Quicksilver and now Google employee, discusses the philosophy behind the application.
I had heard that Apple’s new operating system, OS X Leopard, will support resolution independence, but I haven’t seen anything recently online about whether this feature is still supported.
However, I found confirmation of resolution independence in Leopard in a description of one of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference sessions:
If your application uses custom controls or artwork, make this session a top priority. Modern displays vary in size and pixels per inch. Find out how to design a rich, scalable user interface for your application. The session will discuss guidelines for revising icons and artwork, new functions to adopt, testing strategies, performance concerns, as well as common problems and solutions.
There is also a video introducing the topic on iTunes here (Apple Developer Connection account needed).
Quicksilver is a great application that is quickly approaching “killer-app” status for me. In an earlier post I described Quicksilver as an application launcher for Mac OS X. Actually, Quicksilver is much more: it is a new way to interact with your computer. By combining indexed keystrokes with a graphical command language, nearly any file or operation on my computer is a few keystrokes away.
Now that I use Quicksilver extensively, I find myself wishing that Quicksilver could somehow be extended to the various Linux servers I administrate. For example, instead of using an SFTP client or SSH to administrate the server, it would be great if I could use Quicksilver’s keystrokes to quickly navigate to remote directories, edit files, and copy files to and from the server.
Today I found a way to do this using Google’s MacFUSE and SSHFS. Basically, SSHFS simulates the remote server as a locally mounted file system. Now, if I type name of the network mount the files of the remote server come right up. This works surprisingly well considering that both Quicksilver and MacFUSE/SSHFS are in beta.
In the Quicksilver action below I navigate to my web server’s root directory and select one of my web pages to edit. Accessing remote files in this way takes less than three seconds.
In this next Quicksilver action, I select a PDF document to upload to my server. This similarly takes just a few seconds.
I find using Quicksilver in this way is much faster than using an FTP client like CyberDuck or even using SSH/SCP from the command line. Now I can administrate my local machine and several remote Linux servers through Quicksilver’s interface as one seamless system.