The great feature that isn’t. A few days ago I came accross a blog entry by Tony Ruscoe about a hidden dictionary feature in google docs. There’s a little snippet of javascript you have to use to turn it on. Three new items are added to the menu when you right-click a word: “Dictionary”, “Encyclopedia”, “Thesaurus”. Using the code from you can grab here: Ruscoe’s article, I created a bookmarklet to turn it on. Just save the following link as a bookmark.

gDictionary

I was surprised to realize that I’ve been using this feature a lot lately. A real honest to goodness dictionary/thesaurus is something I’ve been needing in a word processor for a long time; Mainly because I’m a no talent hack who likes to look up big words as much as possible. This will be a very solid feature for Google Docs when it goes live. Lately I’ve been using Google about 50/50 with OpenOffice. Along with sharable docs and anywhere accessibility I have a compelling reason to use Google almost exclusively. As Google releases more features taking advantage of the web as a platform, it’s going to become very hard to justify those old desktop apps.

PDF Online is a great, free (as in beer), service for converting your docs to PDF. It may be faster just to use a free PDF printer utility like CutePDF, but there are a couple of advantages to this method. First, it’s great if you are on someone else’s computer. Second, PDF Online lets you email the resulting pdf to anyone, saving you the trouble.

PDF Online provides some code you can insert into any web page to give it a “Save As PDF” button. So I thought, why not make a bookmarklet out of it and save any page as PDF? Just save the following link as a bookmark, or drag it to your bookmark bar for an instant “Save As PDF” button:

Save As PDF

Now just click it for an instant PDF of any web page.

It’s no secret that I’ve never been a fan of OSX. I should qualify that statement, but I won’t get into the specifics of my dislike for newer whiter Apple. I will however mention that I am a huge fan of classic Mac OS. The first computer I ever bought ran System 7.1p2, and my all time favorite work environment is still Mac OS 8.6. After spending 5 years trying to find some reason to stick with Windows; I finally settled onUbuntu (now running Edgy Eft and loving it). But I digress. Even after escaping the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, I still love to watch his keynotes. I generally get all fired up, caught in the moment, until I realize that nothing he’s announcing is really new… just new to the Mac. While watching theWWDC 2007 keynote, there was one thing that really stuck out to me. More of a philosophy, that I hope and pray Apple will embrace whole heartedly.

Before I get to that one (more) thing. I just want to briefly comment on “stacks”. Stacks are the hot new thing coming to the dock, where folders of items can be stored in a single icon and revealed on demand. As I stated earlier, most things inOSX aren’t really new. As you old time mac users should have noticed, the stacks feature isn’t new… not even to Mac OS . I can’t verify the exact version, but I believe OS 8.5 was the first to have “Window Drawers” (may not be the flashy apple name). With window drawers you could drag any open finder window to any side of the screen and it would collapse into a tab. Click on the tab, and your window slides out. It really bothered me when that feature went away and I’m glad to see it back.

Now that I’ve got my friendly jibe out of the way; I’m really excited about the new finder coming to Leopard. I see what I hope is the first baby step towards my dream operating system. That is, a tag-based file system. A tag-based file system means there are no folders, every file simply exists on your hard disk. You organize your files by assigning tags to them. The biggest advantage to this is simple, your files can appear in multiple places at once. Say you’re working on a presentation for next Tuesday, you’re also collecting documents for Steve in accounting (there’s always a Steve in accounting). Which folder does your Power Point (Keynote) presentation go in? If you still don’t get it, use gmail exclusively for an entire month and tell me you still prefer sticking your email in folders.

What apple did with the new finder was integrate the iTunes model of information management. As pragmatically inefficient as iTunes is, it’s an excellent information manager. You can instantly search out what you need. But even better, you can create dynamic searches called “smart lists”. Say you only want to hear the music you haven’t heard in a couple months, create a smart list. I swap out music on myiPod by assigning 5 stars to the tracks I want in a list called “Current Favs“. When I’m bored with a song, I can bump down its rating on the pod and it’s off on the next sync. Using that method, I never have to organize my music files,iTunes does it for me. The same should be for my OS. I shouldn’t have to organize my documents, my OS should do it for me.

The new finder is a good first step in this direction. It may even change my opinion of OSX and the newer whiter Apple. Some day soon I hope take that Mac Mini off of my TV set, and put it back on my desk.

I had a realization the other day, and I thought I’d throw it out to the web and see what people think. I am now convinced that there is an undocumented feature/bug in iTunes that is known only to the core development team. I have termed this feature the “Suck Bit”.

I tend to keep all of my music in one iTunes playlist and leave it on shuffle. Though Apple claims the shuffle feature to be truly random, every few sessions I find myself repeatedly hitting the “next” button; as it continues to load up the worst songs in the list. Though this happens at random intervals, it happens often enough to be plainly obvious.

This has convinced me that within the iTunes shuffle routine there is a boolean value called PLAY_WORST_ON_LIST. And every few plays, it is set to TRUE. I decided to share this thought with some friends , and all seemed to agree with me in retrospect. Further more, they now seem to notice it on a fairly regular basis too. So, I’m turning to the web for more input. Let me know if you have encountered the Suck Bit on your iTunes.