Finally, a use for numeric keypads… March 8, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : web , 3 commentsI now have one less reason to use a mouse with the discovery of Rudolf Noe’s Mouseless Browsing extension for Firefox.
Here’s a screenshot of how it decorates the page with tiny link ids, that can be navigated by entering the displayed number, followed by enter.
Furthermore, Mouseless Browsing can be granted priority access to the keypad so that regular numbers continue to be entered into form fields and the like, whilst numeric keypad presses are used for link navigation. The links can be hidden by default, with a quick double-tap of NumLock bringing them into a view… another double tap dismisses them. It appears to give priority to submit buttons as well, although some pages seem to provoke a rather hapzard numbering of links.
Now, if only it was either;
- available for Safari, or
- Firefox didn’t suck on OS X,
life would be complete!
Meanwhile I have been playing around with Colibri (Quicksilver for Windows) at work to see if it makes me more productive on WinXP. It does a good job of figuring out the application or Control Panel applet that I want to launch. I find the keyboard navigability of most Windows apps to be better than many OS X applications anyway (gasp!) so I don’t need to replicate Quicksilver’s (via a plugin) menu navigation functionality, and I don’t need it’s tight integration with OS X at work, alas. The chief sticking point I have with Colibri is that its trigger hotkey, ctrl + space, also happens to be one of the major keybindings of IntelliJ, the tool I am spending most of my time in anyway. It would be great if Colibri (and Quicksilver for that matter, I am presuming I would have the same problem on OS X) could be configured to ignore the hotkey when a certain set of applications has the focus. And whilst I’m asking for things, a .NET API as well for plugins would be cool!
Demosceners and Will Wright’s Spore March 6, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : software , add a commentThe News Before The News is late to the party on this one however this video of Will Wright’s upcoming game Spore is long but well worth watching. What I find especially interesting, according to Gamespy, is where Will found the inspiration for some of the techniques behind the game:
Wright looked to the “demo scene,” a group of (mostly European) coders who specialized in doing a whole lot with a little bit of code. Their procedural programming methods were able to, for example, fit an entire 3D game in 64K, using mathematics to generate textures and music, etc.
I spent a great deal of my mispent youth in awe at the faraway European coders creating amazing graphics and sound on my Amiga 500, exhibiting their awesome grasp of assembler to wrest every inch of power from Agnus, Denis and Paula. I thought it was quite cool that their techniques have influenced what might be the ultimate sandbox.