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.
So I’ve had my iPad for a couple of days now. I have some thoughts about it…
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The iBooks reader: is absolutely phenomenal, and the dictionary is just awesome. Would be great if it was multi or poly lingual, though. Speaking of the context-sensitive dictionary, it’d be even better if this feature was on the mac as a service. The iBooks delivery mechanism makes amazon’s buying experience look like a total piece of crap. By the way, why can’t we read eBooks directly in iTunes? I also want to be able to “run” apps directly in iTunes too. Hurry up apple… don’t let you developers run circles around you in terms of updating. -
“Services” menu and syncing: man, I totally hate the huge, disparate random set of ways that we currently have for synchronisation across these devices. The whole thing feels like a total mess. I wish they’d all comply to the Mobile Me api and that Apple would make the whole Mobile Me thing free for the first two years of having a device and build the price into the price of hte device, because the device really is SO MUCH BETTER with mobile me. Most people would update their devices after two years anyway and possibly buy both an iPhone AND an iPad (and the same with the mac). By this reasoning I’d have never had to have paid directly for mobileme… and make it so that developers just use the mobile me sync method. -
Netnewswire:
Netnewswire is just excellent when combined with instapaper for reading distraction-less news feeds, and webpages that they link to. Awesome. If it had a dictionary like the iBooks app, that’d be even better, but instapaper has one so I don’t really mind that much as most of the things I need to look up are in longer articles anyway. My workflow basically goes that I use netnewswire (on iPhone / mac / iPad) to mark interesting articles and scan non-interesting ones… then I use Instapaper (clutter-free reading) to actually read the articles, and highlight interesting things and the like.
One thing I find very frustrating is if I “jump” to the next article and then want to go back to where I just came from because I didn’t want to go to the next one, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do this. Also if I’m in the middle of my RSS reading and a new one comes in to a feed list at the top, then this “next” won’t “roll around off the bottom and start again at the top”. It’s a bit counter-intuitive. Also adding new RSS feed… what the? I must be missing something but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do that… in fact there doens’t seem to be any way at all! I have to add them on the mac first and then re-sync my iPad. Meh! -
General use: Man reading stuff on the iPad is awesome. What a great experience. It’s about the perfect size for reading stuff wherever you are, and it’s the perfect weight as well - far less than most books, and just feels right in your hand. Lovely. I had the interesting experience before purchasing of trying to describe what it’s going to be like and why I’d want one before I’d use it. As someone who spends their whole lives pretty much abstracting things and re-applying truths I find in one are to another are or recontextualising information, I found this experience quite strange. Mostly because I’d never actually used one, and yet I was trying to explain the very same experience of trying to explain to someone what using an iPhone is like to someone who’s never used one. It’s the experience that matters, not so much the feature set. It’s like there’s this unique item and you can’t exactly explain exactly what it is that makes the thing wonderful to use. It’s something to do with the fact that it’s been designed so well to do most of the simple easy things we do day to day. This means we feel more pleasant, because the experience is so sweet. Take the phone: using an iPhone is so great because all my contact information is connected up in that basic way between email client, contact list, web sites, and so on… the little things that are so simply to think of if you actually use a device, but so difficult to put a monetary “feature set” developmental price on. It’s the difference between it feeling like it’s actually good and fun to use and it feeling like it’s an absolute pain to use.
For a long of people, such as my David, my father, the iPad could effectively become his day to day computer. That’s just amazing. $680 aussie dollars and it can be your main computer! wow. Get two! (Actually I was thinking it’d be quite good to have two or more the other day… and at the price point, it almost makes it possible. I may just pick up another one later on… it’s kinda like having a second screen but oodles more useful).
I noticed a lot of the time where there are comparable tasks possible on my laptop or on the iPad, I will choose the iPad just because generally the whole experience is so much nicer using the iPad for things like searching, browsing the web, etc. Interesting, huh? :) -
Safari: What happened to searching within a document? I can’t seem to do that. Once I’ve loaded a web page, how am I supposed to search for a particular bit of text in it? This wasn’t a problem on the iPhone implementation of the iPhone OS, but on the iPad it’s something I need because you can actually do work on this thing. -
VNC: In order to control other machines remotely from within our network, I tried out a couple of the free VNC utilities. This is something that I’d tried on the iPhone before but never really felt useable at all. I want to try out the Jaadu VNC (Now named iTeleport which is a much better name) but at the moment I can’t justify spending $30 AUD on a VNC for something I might not use too much… I probably will soon… apparently it’s the best and from the demos and such it looks pretty nice… if it makes actually using a mac or PC from the iPad viable, it could be awesome!
I’m often out or away from my computer on either the iPad, iPod or iPhone and I think “oh damn I didn’t put THIS on here”. It’d be really nice to modify my device’s synchronization settings right then and there so that the next time I synchronized the device it added those songs or files to the device. I have no idea how one would implement this nicely, though, really without some form of cloud settings synchronization. Mobile me I guess!
One thing that I’ve noticed while using the iBooks app is that the built in dictionary is impressively useful just by the sheer force of the fact that it’s in the right place when you need it. Turns out context is everything. How useful when you don’t know a word and there’s a dictionary right there if you just hold your finger on that word.
This is the kind of book I wish I’d had when I was a kid still in school. How much greater a vocabulary it’d have been possible to acquire had I had this tool then ;)
However… Changing the language to French or some other language illustrates that the iBooks dictionary is not multilingual or polylingual. The project gutenburg books that come for free wit the iBook store are in different languages than English as well as English and I’ve studied a couple of these so imagine what a language learning tool it could be if the iBooks app allowed multiple language dictionaries right there in the app.
There are a couple of use-case scenarios that flash can’t be replaced with HTML for at the moment: one is copyright material or material where more control is desired over that content or the delivery of that content. This material isn’t generally in the spirit of the web. Interesting but yeah… You can do what apple does and only put content or segements of that content that you don’t mind being copied on the web and put applications around everything else… But also the other thing is that there isn’t presently any way to do cross-platform video or audio easily. Is is obviously the same issue if considering iPhone os too.
inessential reports on iPad apps automatically discovering each other so that they can essentially work like Mac or windows apps - together. I agree that what we need is some form of unified interface for these things. Something that could tie app functionality together. Part of the problem that I can see is that each app is a distinct entity. Possibly iphoneos needs a services API in much the same way that OS/X implements one.
Interesting…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_management
http://www.redmine.org/
http://retrospectiva.org/overview
http://retrospectiva.org/wiki/AgilePM
irb
RUBY_PLATFORM[/mswin/] ? system(“taskkill //F //PID #{$$}”) : system(“kill -9 #{$$}”) # Kill thyself!
Pocketnow have a comparison of the HTC Nexus One, HTD HD2 and iPhone 3GS. In particular, it’s comparing the newly announced (but not released) Android 2.2 “Froyo“‘s webkit based web browser (do we call this mobile Chrome?) with the Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3GS. Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the three running different hardware, so how is it a software comparison? If it’s a comparison of software, perhaps a jailbroken iPhone running Android 2.2 would be a better comparison. Perhaps we’ll see what the A4-based next gen iPhone brings to the table in roughly eleven days time at WWDC. If it’s a platform comparison, well then well done reviewers, you’re comparing the Nexus One released Jan 5 2010 running pre-release Android software with the iPhone 3Gs released June 19 2009 running production software (ie not iPhone OS 4. Stay tuned for when I release my comparison of a cat with a leopard… Headslap!
Computer users have always been plagued by encodings. That’s why I was pretty excited to find this in Yehuda Katz’ blog today when I looked again: Encodings Unabridged. I’ve been a big fan of Yehuda for a while now. He’s got some pretty interesting viewpoints and is definitely up there in terms of my internal list of people who have excellent BIG ideas and great understanding. He groks things quickly and well! This is a neat write-up of encodings.