thingoid

I’m sure I’ve got a short attention span. And I guess I can be easily distracted by pretty, shiny things. So although I haven’t really begun to get to grips with Zotero (still trying it out), I’m already moving on…

My latest distraction is a handy complement to the Snipshot online image editor that I thumbsed-up in June. Gliffy is a tool for making vector diagrams. You know, all that flow-charting / floor-planning / UML-ing / network-diagramming / general-jiggery-pokery that you can do with Visio, OmniGraffle and the like.

There’s a reasonable set of shape templates, all the usual features for editing properties of shapes, and being an online tool, it’s got the collaboration and online publishing features that you’d expect. You can also export diagrams as JPEG, PNG, and very cool SVG.

They don’t have a pricing model as yet, but it appears that there will be a subscription version with all the attachments (including the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves) for the corporate presentation-making power user, and a free, ad supported Gliffy with limited feature set for the miserable skinflints like me.

Now this looks very, very good:

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you to annotate, organize, and share the results of your research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when you are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will—on many major research sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for you in the correct fields.

Will it have the folks at EndNote shaking in their shoes? Probably not. But for many a struggling scholar, the price is certainly right!

Seriously have a look at this thing—it may not be the EndNote-killer but if it’s half as good as they say, it could well be the killer extension for Firefox 2.

Unfortunately I don’t have Firefox 2 setup on the office beast just yet, so I’m leaving right now to install this beauty at home…

[via Linux.com]

You probably know that on many web pages you can make a link directly to a specific spot within the page. For instance, let’s say you wanted to point someone to the information about the Web Site Design SIG at Melbourne PC User Group - it’s at this web address:

http://groups.melbpc.org.au/

But there’s a lot of other information on that page and you can be even more helpful by directing your friend right to the relevant part of the page, by doing this:

http://groups.melbpc.org.au/#webdes

Where there’s a marker in a web page, called a “named anchor”, you can link directly to that spot by adding the name of the anchor (in this case “webdes”) onto the end of the web address with a # symbol.

Seen it?

Well, you’ve probably seen that trick before - but did you know the same idea also works for PDF files? There’s something about PDF files on the web, isn’t there? They’re often huge and they’re always harder to navigate than a normal web page - so much the better then if you can offer a link that takes people right to the relevant page.

Now let’s say you also want to recommend some books on web development to your friend. Well, the Melbourne PC User Group library listing is available at:

http://www.melbpc.org.au/library/Library.pdf

But it’s 26 pages long! How could you help your friend locate the relevant books? They are listed at the bottom of page 6 and the top of page 7, so perhaps you could provide a link that goes straight to the top of page 7:

http://www.melbpc.org.au/library/Library.pdf#page=7

Do you see how it works? Nominate the appropriate page number and add it to the web address with a # symbol. And unlike web pages, this works for all PDF files without needing to have special anchors included in them.

Open parameters

There are several of these “open parameters” that you can play with, for example:

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/acrobat/
PDFOpenParams.pdf#page=5&pagemode=bookmarks&view=fitbh,400

Since I was shown this trick by a friend at work, I’ve used it frequently and I reckon you’ll find it handy as well.

More information

For more information on “named anchors” in web pages, see:

• the HTML specification, or
• W3Schools

For more information on PDF “Open Parameters”, see:

• Adobe’s Open Parameters

Well Photoshop it aint’, but Snipshot doesn’t intend to be. It’s just a site that provides “Basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resize”.

Keep this one in the toolbox.

[via templatedata]

Well it looks like I was right: old adventure games never die - they just get a facelift and come back as freeware.

A mob calling themselves Infamous Adventures has just released a remake of the classic Kings Quest III graphical adventure game with the following new features:

• All 16 color backgrounds remade into stunning VGA graphics
• Enhanced Close up cut-scenes and dialogue pictures help immerse you into what is known as the first plot driven chapter of the King’s Quest series.
• Original music by professional music composer(s)
• Re-experience the adventure with a stunning new interface (no more typing) And if you never played well, you’ll probably enjoy it anyway.

Personally I don’t see that “no more typing” is necessarily an improvement, but I’m sure they’ve come up with a good interface that will still allow for a rich player experience. The screen images are certainly pretty lavish:

Infamous Adventures claims to be

a game development group focused on bringing adventure games back into the mainstream by updating classic adventure games as well as creating new masterworks of our own.

Their site also points to a group called Anonymous Game Developers Interactive, a “team of dedicated members … devoted to bringing adventure games back into style”, who have a couple of older projects I hadn’t heard about previously: remakes of Kings Quest I and Kings Quest II.

Cool.

If you’ve never played the Kings Quest games before, here’s you chance to have a bash at some genuine gaming history, as the AGD Interactive folks explain:

King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown, a revolutionary game designed by Roberta Williams and released in 1984, epitomizes the adventure gaming experience. This game was the first of its kind that allowed the player to interact in an entirely original 2.5D world, and can be credited as the game that started graphic adventure gaming on the PC altogether. King’s Quest was not only groundbreaking, but also history in the making, and was followed by seven more games bearing the King’s Quest title.

So download ‘em and have a go – they’re tons of fun.

Hmm, I think I can see another wasted weekend (or three) coming up…

Inform 7 was released on 30 April 2006, ten years to the day since the last major upgrade of the Interactive Fiction authoring system. And it’s an exciting leap forward (more…)

There’s very little required to start playing with Interactive Fiction: install an interpreter and download some game files then you’re ready to roll (more…)

Oh wow!

I haven’t had a look at anything Interactive Fiction for ages but things have kept moving along. Inform, one of the big two authoring systems, has just gone to version 7 with a stack of features. And is that a spiffy new IDE I see there?

I notice this version has been a real team effort with recognisable names like Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin being added to Graham Nelson’s in the credits.

OK, downloaded and ready to play - it looks like I’ve got a few more wasted weekends ahead!

SketchUp is one of those cool tools that even design-impaired plonkers like me can get excited about. It’s a 3D modelling tool that’s not quite CAD, but much more than a toy. But no matter how interesting it sounded I was never quite excited enough to fork-over the US$500 to get hold of it.

Liked it so much …

Well it appears that Google also liked it. In fact they liked it so much that they bought the company (@Last Software). And yesterday they released a free-for-personal-use version of SketchUp (more…)

So the Classification Review Board has banned another video game in Australia. This time it’s Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. And in what way has this game offended the censor? It promotes graffiti.

Yep, that’s right. Graffiti. (more…)

An arbitrary top twenty

Here is a collection of twenty programs that you might want to try. Are they “the best”? Well, that all depends on what your priorities are but they are all pretty good. (more…)

Free PDF!

Most Windows applications that can print can also produce PDF files. Here is a way to produce PDF files for free. The secret is that a PostScript printer driver produces a PostScript file as output. Freely available utilities can then be used to convert the PostScript output to PDF.

It’s even easier on Linux and Macintosh. And OpenOffice.org does it too. (more…)

An arbitrary top twenty

It’s great to hear about some handy tool or program that you haven’t tried before. And it’s all the better if you can get it gratis. This top twenty was collected from the opinions of friends and workmates who were asked to suggest their favourite useful programs. The top twenty were chosen from those that:

• cost nothing,
• don’t require “registration” of any sort,
• are fully functional and may be used indefinitely, and
• are not known spyware (or any other nasty).

The list is completely arbitrary - it is neither review nor recommendation - but hopefully there’s something here that you will want to test-drive.

(more…)