there are lasers. and fairy dust.
Things you need to know for the following to make sense:
- Constellation is a highly beta experimental plugin for Quicksilver trying to do some UI stuff via radial wheels. If highly-beta-and-experimental interests you, Garoo has the best tutorial for getting it up and running that I've come across.
- I always get asked a lot about MacWorld and WWDC and all those things, and whenever I get badgered enough I usually try to spin it towards the absurd and rub it shiny-weird. Since I wasn't going to be going, there was talk of a scavenger hunt involving The Cow and various developer booths with prizes for the top finishers.
The dev of QS wouldn't be having a booth, was amusingly down with being the "mobile Cow" and walking around MW with a Cow on his back just to introduce some randomness. I realized it'd take a lot more effort than I wanted to give to take it past the lame stage into the absurd, and promptly forgot about the whole thing.
Anywho...
That's right, lasers and fairy dust. And people wonder why I sometimes have to change my pants several times a day.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 06, 2006, at 05:12 PM
Comments (16)
Posted by: Aaron Brethorst at January 6, 2006 05:53 PM
C'mon DB, you're at least C-list ;-)
Posted by: Chucky at January 6, 2006 07:06 PM
Does it make me a Normal if I still think LaunchBar runs circles around Quicksilver?
Posted by: stinksoup at January 6, 2006 07:17 PM
My memory's hazy. And I can't be bothered to Google. Which came first, Quicksilver or LaunchBar?
Posted by: Electric Monk at January 6, 2006 08:31 PM
LaunchBar.
Posted by: cameron aka desk003 at January 6, 2006 10:46 PM
Anyone know what this app is that quicksilver dev describes as taskplaque? Sounds like something I need.
Also, DB, what do you use for your to-do list?
Posted by: cabbey at January 6, 2006 11:20 PM
Not sure if someone's made an application and used the name, but "task plaque" is a common name for the stuff that just never seems to leave todo lists. Or that returns just as soon as it left, like say "do laundry". At least in circles of folks that make heavy use of todo lists.
Posted by: Chucky at January 7, 2006 12:35 AM
"Not sure if someone's made an application and used the name, but "task plaque" is a common name for the stuff that just never seems to leave todo lists. Or that returns just as soon as it left, like say "do laundry"."
Hence the rationale for using apps like Life Balance to maintain your todo list.
Posted by: Arden at January 7, 2006 06:57 PM
And people wonder why I sometimes have to change my pants several times a day.
With a name like drunkenbatman, I think I know why...
Posted by: at January 7, 2006 11:16 PM
Constellation menus are the shit. Absolutely wonderful app switcher. They also work really well if you put a bunch of scripts that have some theme, like controlling itunes, in a folder, and then have a trigger to open the items from that folder. In that case, I get like "play/pause", "next track", "previous track", "next album", "previous album" scripts in a folder. It's totally awesome.
Posted by: Peter da Silva at January 9, 2006 01:25 PM
The problem I have with pie menus is everyone has to roll their own, and because they're rolling their own they spend a lot of time making them look cool... and they end up sucking dirty swamp water because there's too much real estate spent on making them look cool and not enough on making the slices easily recognisable and navigable.
What I'd like to see would be a Haxie that turned contextual menus into simple and straightforward pie menus. Start laying down the menu items at 45, 90, 135, 180, 225, 270, and 305. If there are exactly 8 items, 0 gets #8, otherwise 0 gets a link to the next 7 (or last 8)...
Visually, just plop the text down. In a wheel or rounded boxes or a domino board, that's not a big deal, though I personally prefer a wireframe wheel.
Posted by: Andy C at January 9, 2006 11:02 PM
I think something that many radial menus miss is that they require you to click on options. Shouldn't a radial menu allow you to click and drag through the hierarchy of radial menus. Doing such allows the users to learn gestures based on the radial menus, in a fashion similar to Maya (or at least what I have heard described of Maya). isn't that the benefit of radial menus? (Considering that good, standard contextual menus should have items ordered by importance).
Posted by: Peter da Silva at January 11, 2006 11:04 AM
I recently started using Maya (PLE) and it's a REAL PAIN having to click-and-hold and drag-select all the time. In a drafting program like the Maya object editor, you get into a rhythm of clicking to select and dragging to change, so when you right click and nothing happens it's really annoying.
Almost all normal menus allow both click and click-and-hold. Apple uses click-and-hover, Microsoft uses click-click-click, and my perfect user interface would give me all three mechanisms... but a right-click on an object should never do "nothing".
Posted by: Peter da Silva at January 11, 2006 11:06 AM
By the way, the earliest version of pie menus I heard of used a "hover" interface, with the addition that the menu transitions used a radial wipe effect... they got dubbed "pac-man" menus for obvious reasons.
Posted by: mikey at January 12, 2006 05:45 PM
The lasers and fairy dust line is one of the rotating taglines on the Quicksilver home page... is this new?
can you get a picture? i need some magic in my life.