The blogosphere as we know it may have just been blown wide open. Dave Winer released his OPML Editor yesterday. Adam Curry says “it’s fantastic… takes you like 3 seconds to kinda reset your brain and try and figure it out”. Well, I’ve been playing with it for a lot more than three seconds, and I haven’t figured it out yet… but it could be big. It reminds me of the first time someone told me about this new app called Mosaic, and how it “browsed” something called the “World Wide Web”. I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept. At the same time, it has a “why didn’t I think of that?” feel to it.

It’s basically a free (beta) authoring tool for any kind of information that can be expressed in outline form. Like blogging. Or podcasting. Or RSS. It’s all online, so you can collaborate with others by subscribing to their outlines. Anyway. Here’s my outline and here’s my blog. Somebody subscribe to it so I can see what happens.

Don’t be put off by the geekety name, homebrew-style interface, or the myriad of cryptic menu items. Dave’s been working on this thing forever and a lot of big names have been playing with it. Try it out, and come up with something completely different.

I don’t know about you, but I hate it when I leave a comment on someone else’s site and then forget to check back later for responses. In case either of you SRC readers feels the same way, I just installed the WordPress SubscribeToComments plugin.

For those of you who have figured out my wacky layout and found the comment links (they’re on top), you can now be notified by email if someone responds to your comment.

Somebody try it out and let me know how it works!

Bren at Slacker Manager is finally switching to Mac. He’s a longtime ActiveWords user, and expressed hope that Quicksilver would be a decent replacement. I commented that Quicksilver eats ActiveWords’ lunch:

I almost never use [ActiveWords]. Nearly every time I open ANYthing, it bugs me to add a word. It makes me stop what I’m doing to figure out what word to use. Then I have to remember later what word I picked, and move my hands away from the home row to find F8 and hit it. The interface looks like it was written in VB 5….

Quicksilver, OTOH, is invisible unless I call it up with the super quick two-thumb hotkey. I start typing and it shows matches while I type. No shortcuts to remember, except for Cmd-space. The more I use it, the faster it gets, because it learns from me. And it does so much more than just open apps or folders. And it’s FREE!

Whereupon someone at ActiveWords emailed me to find out how I really felt. I won’t name or quote him, because I don’t know the netiquette for that sort of thing. His points are below in italics; my thoughts follow.

• The auto suggest feature of ActiveWords can be disabled. I started it on purpose, hoping it would be a little more intelligent. After I’ve launched the same folder or app n times (where n is configurable), it interrupts me with a Clippy-style “ActiveWords has detected that you have been using such-and-such a lot. What would you like to do?” As a developer, I frequently access folders and sites with similar names on several different servers. There’s no real shortcut naming convention I could follow. Quicksilver would pop up a list of matching locations and narrow it down as I type. Instant feedback, with no up-front cost.

• If you have a hard time remembering what shortcut you use for a particular app, give it several shortcuts. This involves less thinking on the back end (when you invoke the shortcut), but more thinking on the front (when you create it). My goal is less thinking, period. Quicksilver interprets anything I type. Again, instant feedback. No learning curve — Quicksilver does the learning for me, to make the match faster next time.

• The interface is designed to be simple, and few people complain about it. There are two options: dock the toolbar at the top of the screen, or dock the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Yes, I know it can be auto-hidden. Auto-hide in this context is an abuse of Fitts’ Law. Auto-hidden items pop up when you least want them, and refuse to go away at random times. For Pete’s sake, ActiveWords is supposed to reduce your dependence on the mouse. There’s no need for a permanent toolbar. If there’s a way to disable the toolbar altogether, I couldn’t find it. I can’t tell what the icons do (why do I need icons?). The one that looks like an alarm clock says “Productivity Center” when I hover over it. I rest my case.

• You don’t have to hit a hotkey to trigger ActiveWords. This one is subtle but essential. As I mentioned in my original comment, Quicksilver’s hotkey is less obtrusive than ActiveWords’ F8. I can hit Cmd-Space without moving my hands from normal typing position. Two thumbs, bang-bang. It’s even sort of cathartic. Once I’ve done that, my brain is in the right mode to talk to Quicksilver. Emacs or vi nuts will understand what I’m talking about here. With ActiveWords, I have to switch modes anyway to think of the shortcut and type it. Then I have to pick up my right hand, find F8 and hit it. Once that’s done, ActiveWords either a) launches my app or b) tells me it couldn’t resolve my shortcut. Option a means everything is ok and my brain goes back to what it was thinking about. Option b stops me cold. I never know which I’m going to get.

These are examples of why Windows software aggravates, while so much Mac software is perceived as friendly and fun. Write this down, Windows developers: it’s not about your app. It’s about the work the user is trying to accomplish. Good interfaces get out of your way; they don’t interrupt your train of thought to make you think about them.

One or two other thoughts:

• Quicksilver does a lot more than just launch stuff. Its real power is in its plugins. I can browse my iTunes content or my del.icio.us links. I can copy and paste into and out of it. I can run shell commands out of it. Quicksilver has a flow to it; you pipe information to it, do something to it, do something else to it, and get other information back out. It’s a uniform frontend for all your applications. After all, it’s about your work, not the app.

• Did I mention it’s FREE!?

Update 8.5.05: Slacker Manager has posted their own AW vs. QS cage match. This one is coming from the perspective of a longtime ActiveWords user and, as such, is probably more objective than mine.

Evidently it’s Dakota Fanning Month at the stark raving calm house. The last movie in our Blockbuster queue (I canceled it yesterday to save some cash) was Hide and Seek. It isn’t a good sign that I had to think for a minute to remember the movie’s title. Not like there have been any suspense movies with nursery-rhyme names lately. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see Fanning, Amy Irving, and especially Robert De Niro on the cast list. Despite the big names, this one is a forgettable addition to the list of Sixth Sense also-rans, five years late. Here’s the nutshell version: David (De Niro) and daughter Emily (Fanning) lose Mom in tragic fashion. To recover, they move from Manhattan’s friendly confines to a creepy small town, where Emily makes an imaginary friend who turns out (get this) to be not so imaginary. This is one of those movies written by and for New Yorkers who seem to have a congenital fear of open spaces, big houses, and neighborly people.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: There Is A Twist. I’ll spoil it a bit by saying that it’s ripped directly from Secret Window. I didn’t figure it out in advance, probably because I was having too much fun MSTing the suspense-movie cliches to take it seriously:

• Disturbing crayon drawings: check.
• Mutilated dolls: check.
• Dead pet: are you kidding me?
• Murky bathtub: oh come on now.
• Dark cave climax: you can’t be serious.

After the end, I did the obligatory skim back through the movie to see if the plot supported the twist. There was a bit involving a boiling kettle (yes, rote Hitchcock) that should have given it away. However, director John Polson cheats, in very un-Shyamalanian fashion, by placing David in at least one scene that he turns out to have imagined. No fair.

Not much can be said about the acting, either. De Niro phones in the Bruce Willis role of a distant psychiatrist who couldn’t diagnose his daughter, or himself, out of a paper bag. He plays the role a little too straight, so that we get absolutely no hints as to David’s true nature — but maybe he was resting up from Meet the Fockers. Fanning turns up the Wednesday Addams dial to 11. Her shtick is annoying through the first two-thirds of the film, but becomes completely sympathetic in retrospect, after you realize what poor little Emily was going through. Creepy-character specialist Dylan Baker, playing no one at all creepy here, is actually a relief.

The best thing I can say about Hide and Seek is that The Twist gave me some things to think about. Complete spoiler below, if you haven’t figured it out and don’t care to watch:

David has multiple-personality disorder. His Evil Personality is, natch, Emily’s not-so-imaginary friend. Fanning’s character has endured life alone with her two dads for months. This is why she always eyes Dad with shell-shocked distrust, and why our opinion of her does a complete 180. There is absolutely no chemistry between De Niro and Fanning, though, which would have made the truth much more gut-wrenching.

The other thing that struck me was how everything goes south when Mom dies, and stays that way until Emily is reunited with a kind, caring, female guardian. Maybe I’m being a bit of a Rebel Dad here, but this plays up that safe old stereotype — that fathers are unsuitable caretakers of children — in the worst way. If that’s something you really want to see, don’t rent this one; pick up The Shining instead.

For those of you confused by the posts with funny French names, this is Day 5 of my Quebec travel journal. It was originally written on Wednesday, June 8.

When I woke up this morning, I felt like a car wreck. Joshua was awake half the night. We gave him cough medicine with pseudoephedrine in it by accident.

Yesterday, we took him up to the historic (read: tourist) district and had poutine. Ah, if only I could get cheese curds back home. It started to rain the instant we sat down at our nice little sidewalk table on the Grande Allee. Afterwards, we drove down to the riverfront to park and walk around the Vieux Port, the oldest section of the city. This is a collection of cobblestone streets and 1700s-era buildings huddled between the St. Lawrence River and the 200-foot ridge that supports the rest of the city. In the manner of old cities, the history, architecture, and geography are intertwined. The riverfront was settled first, in the 17th century. Later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, things moved uphill. Quebec City’s location is a military strategist’s dream: the St. Lawrence River is the main waterway from the Atlantic to the continental interior, and narrows to about a mile across at the city. Cape Diamond, the aforementioned 200-foot ridge, looms out over the river and sports a fortress (aptly named the Citadelle) at its peak. This was the setting for the major battle of the French and Indian War, prequel to the American Revolution. George Washington cut his military teeth (not the wooden ones) in the battle here.

So, we have 17th and 18th century architecture by the river, 19th century architecture (government buildings, houses, fortress) on the hilltop, and modern sprawl on the other side of the ridge. Our apartment is in the latter section, but if you’re a serious walker and don’t mind climbing a hundred steps, you could make it to downtown (which is up!) from where we’re staying in about twenty minutes. There are sets of stairs all over town to get you up and down. We poked around the Vieux Port for awhile, enduring the drizzle, stroller bouncing on the cobblestones. Most of the old buildings contain fancy tourist restaurants, art shops, or souvenir dives. Gluttons that we are, we decided to walk up the hill. In the rain. In flip-flops. Pushing a stroller. We stuck our heads in a couple more souvenir shops, used the facilities at the Chateau Frontenac (the most famous city landmark, a hotel that resembles a German castle), went back down the hill, and drove home.

We read for awhile (I really like not having cable TV this week!), and the women did more shopping. The family came over and we had a hit-and-miss catered dinner of sandwiches and other finger foods. The tuna sandwiches were awful. We put up the swing, which (if you’ll recall yesterday’s entry) turned out not to be so long-departed after all; it was, in fact, hiding in the basement. I finally broke the ice with cousin Olivier by getting him to feed Joshua his evening bottle. His cold has progressed to the coughing stage, so we went with Olivier to the drugstore to pick up cough medicine. Which (if you’ll recall the first paragraph) turned out to be a bad idea.

So, back to today. Lack of sleep notwithstanding, we went running up on the Plains of Abraham. This is a nice park of grassy rolling hills flanking downtown, up on top of the ridge. The battle I mentioned earlier took place here, and the park features the usual array of cannon, powder magazines, and interpretive placards. While jogging up and down the hills, we debated what to do today and the rest of the week. We agreed that this vacation has been a lot of work, but somehow, we sound like we’re arguing even when we agree.

I lobby for a visit to the museum. There’s a Russian history exhibit going on. Stephanie wants to go (where else) shopping. I think we’ve reached a compromise.

(to be continued)

We may not be seeing as many movies as we used to, but at least we’re hitting all the top-shelf summer blockbusters. Star Wars Episode III was a pleasant surprise. Batman Begins just may steal the title of Best Comic Book Movie Ever from Spider-Man 2. Saturday night was a date night, and I offered Stephanie the option of seeing Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but dodged a bullet when she said she’d rather see War of the Worlds instead. I’ve already read a couple of reviews, and I feel less original if I then turn around and write my own. Like I’ve poisoned the well of my own opinion by reading someone else’s. So I’ll call this a collection of unpolished impressions instead. Minor spoilers follow, but for anyone who’s read the H.G. Wells book, there are no surprises here.

What I liked:

• Four years after September 11, disaster films seem to be back in style, or at least tolerated. The destruction shown here is on a smaller scale, though. Steven Spielberg skips the pulverizing of landmarks for the most part, instead sticking to mob scenes, flung cars, and traumatized children. This works for a couple of reasons: it stays away from 9/11 territory (except for a few shots of bulletin boards covered with photos of the missing), it sets Worlds apart from last year’s The Day After Tomorrow, and it humanizes the apocalypse.

• Spielberg shifts back into Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan gear to capture the trauma of the alien invasion. There are no dismembered limbs or gunshot wounds in this invasion, though; victims are vaporized right out of their clothes. There is a positively eerie scene where said clothes float down out of the sky, amid the ashes of their owners; there is a spooky tableau involving a wrecked airliner that is straight out of Lost.

• Tom Cruise makes his character’s transformation to likability — from deadbeat dad to role model — believable and subtle. Cruise has considerable skill but, as a big-movie actor, is generally underrated. A lesser actor would have picked one of the character’s several turning-point scenes and beaten us over the head with it. I barely remember Born on the Fourth of July, the movie for which Cruise received the most acclaim, but I seem to recall that he pulled off a similar transformation in that movie as well.

What I didn’t:

• The aliens (when we finally catch a glimpse of them) are barely distinguishable from the aliens in the inferior Independence Day. Maybe after we beat them with a computer virus in the first movie, they came back five years later, only to be wiped out by the biological version.

• No summer sci-fi extravaganza is complete without plot holes. Cars, boats and electricity failed when required by the plot, and conveniently worked at other times.

• Dakota Fanning was really the only choice for the role of the daughter. Like Kirsten Dunst before her, she’s been typecast as the spooky-quirky-cute little girl. She’s handicapped by the script, which gives her a lot of screaming and saucer-eyed gasping, and not much else. She’s dangerously close to becoming an underutilized blockbuster actor along with Cruise. Let’s hope she survives the transition to adult roles as Dunst did.