Hello mr Login is not a verb dot com person… You may have heard of a little thing called “common usage”. It’s how language evolves. This is functional linguistics 101 stuff. If a word is used as a verb, it’s a friggin verb, okay? Traditional grammar is practically useless these days.
I (subject) login (verb block)
She (subject) logged in (verb block). It’s not that “she logged” and “in” specifies where the action took place.
How about the usage where we say “I penned it” or “she chaired him”, or any other usage where a noun takes the place of a verb? huh? what do you say about this usage?
The adage is know the rules, but pay more attention to the reality. Grammar is a map and in exactly the same way that you wouldn’t argue that a map was more right than the physical reality it portrays, you really shouldn’t argue that a native English speaker is less right than a grammar that dictates it. English, the slut of all languages (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way at all) is most happy when adapting itself and changing (quite quickly) over time.
This whole “my holier soapbox is better than you” thing is absolute crap.
Linked from Daring Fireball.
To “log in” is a phrasal verb. Englishpage.com’s phrasal verb entry.
This piece (I’ll tell you what’s fair) by John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame makes an awesome point about curated web-blogs. John’s site is as curated as Apple is, and that’s a really good thing IMHO.
Awesome points, John.
Spec sheets
I find it amazing that apparently we (for example Wired, today) haven’t learnt from years of having microsoft as our overlord.
Tech spec sheets a product appraisal do not make… yet Wired seem to not have noticed in this tech spec sheet comparison between iPhoneOS and Froyo. If anything, years of using Microsoft products should have taught us that the words on the box don’t necessarily translate into a nice user experience or being able to do anything actually good with the product. If that was the case, the Nokia N93 I had years ago would have trumped the iPhone 3G I bought years after it…
Besides, they forgot Android’s crazy Facebook integration… but is that really a feature? I think it’s just google’s way of getting around Facebook’s denial of the search-giant’s request to index all their photos years ago.
Overlords?
I don’t use or own google or android products (aside from where it’s inevitable, like services or products I use relying on them: maps, gmail, reader), yet somehow google have all my photos from facebook on thier platform, and my address and phone data. How? My friend has an android phone and has turned on facebook integration.
Google most likely does have your personal information without you even knowing about it.
Take one mac, and one camera (iphone works well).
You need a copy of QuickTime player 7… which doesn’t come on new macs if I remember correctly… bit of a fail there as you can do things on this old version that you can’t do on the latest one. Long story but basically apple is reinventing quicktime in a new “x” version variety which means there’s some functionality missing, but what *is* there (basically playing back media) works a lot better in Snow Leopard.
So yeah, grab this, take some pics, iPhoto connect your camera, grab the images out and then drag them into a new QuickTime 7 player movie window… this will insert the pictures in the order you’ve got them on the disk and basically create you a stop motion video.
Save and voila! :)
How cool is this?
TextFree Unlimited lets iPhone OS (iPad / iPhone / iPod touch) devices send free SMS’s.
Huzzah. They’re adding FREE VoIP later on… as averse to Skype which won’t be free (I wonder why).
I’m quite interested in context. What iPhone OS does is quite genius in disguise.
It makes a decision for you: you are only going to look at one app at any one time.
Turns out this is very useful because too many things on the screen confuses people and makes it harder for most people to use, because we have to process all the visual items on screen.
One of the “features” of windows which mac os x doesn’t have, which is possibly the most useful is “expand to full screen”. We have a “zoom” feature which switches a window between two sizes, but we don’t have the former.
Context is very important, but if I want to get something particular done, I need to hide all that context while I work. I’m fairly sure I’m not alone here :)
What I find quite a need for… is not programs (or apps if you will), but “slices” across sets of programs. I will have several tasks that I’m doing (which I currently use spaces on the mac for). For a particular job I’m doing, I will use up to five programs… xcode, a browser for testing sites and things I’m working on, email, a couple of web apps inside the browser, a couple of interface apps, itunes (gotta have that music), apps for looking at database data, a console or two (sometimes three).
NetNewsWire on the iPad actually does do this… it has a browser built in. This is two-app slicing.
So… what I’d really like is “named sets”. Spaces works for this - sort of - but wasn’t really built for it. I’d like to be able to save and open “projects” (slices of context across multiple apps)… and have an “app-universe” overseer co-ordinate the many apps (unix command line prompt-like?)
So when I open one of these “things” whatever they are, I want browser windows to open to specific points, terminals to “cd” into directories for me, textmate to open folders of code, etc. etc. You know… reinstate the named context :)
Food for thought?
I’ve got two gripes with the iPad…
Actually my gripes aren’t really with the iPad but rather with the content organisation.
I’d really like to be able to annotate an eBook, and then have those annotations collated into some form of document… but also for them to be “just there” inline next to the relevant part of the book. I love Apple’s iBooks app.
I actually love the dictionary feature in it that I think it should be a total os-wide feature (service). I also think this annotations (context sensitive notes that are extractable) should also be an os-wide feature, and this brings me to the next point…
iPhone OS really needs some form of services feature… “ways in which users can extend their own operating system with plugins that developers (apple or not) write”. Dictionary and annotations would be perfect examples of this. They should definitely have a size restriction, though.
Back in the days of text-based IBM pc computer programs, we had a thing called Sidekick (really I was a Commodore 64 / Amiga boy, but we had a PC as well) which was a “resident” program… very small (coz back then we had hardly any RAM) which on a keyboard shortcut, would “spring to life” and when you’d finished using it, disappear.
We really need something like this. And I think these two features… dictionary and annotations… would be great in the Mac OS, too…
Best name for a product ever?
Windows Small Business Server 2008 Standard, Component Technologies for Server Repair
OMFG COMPLEXITY FAIL!
This is seriously impressive… :)
Jessica Love writes about pronouns in her article They Get To Me. She’s a psycholinguist, confessing her deep love for pronouns:
“By definition, pronouns only contain vague information, like first-person or plural. In order for something this vague to effectively retrieve a word’s meaning, there has to be a whole lot of context. Imagine all the words contained in your mind as a vast pool of fish. Look carefully and you’ll see that each fish is different from all the others. If you had a hook selective enough, you’d be able to control which fish you catch. But pronouns are not selective hooks. Pronouns are sweeping nets. You have to cast your net shallowly in the hopes that you catch the one noun the pronoun refers to. That’s what context does: it pushes what’s relevant to the surface of the mind.”
I find it quite interesting that perhaps she has it around the wrong way. Who says that your mind has to “fill in” the context? Actually I think the context is what is normally filling in your mind. We have to rather make a slight effort to de-contextualise ourselves… in fact, the further away from the context we get, the more our mind has to work. That’s, at least, my experience of the phenomenon.
She goes on to try to describe what context is. The trouble with that is that it’s a feedback loop between the filtration system of one’s self, and the entirety of everything. Each person has a truly different experience of the all (the entire context of everything) because of who we are - constantly filtering out various parts of reality, picking and choosing. Context is different for every person, and yet somehow not at the same time and also constantly in flux.
I guess I find this so interesting because my brother generally always uses context to ridiculously good effect. If you just relax, you know exactly what he means. What else could he mean? :)
People want to find what they’re looking for… at all cost to actually seeing what’s actually there.