Введение

Раньше у меня довольно часто возникала проблема захламления рабочего стола огромным количеством ярлыков, и я начинал теряться в них, соответственно терять время при поиске необходимых мне приложений. В дальнейшем я научился пользоваться сочетанием клавиш win+r, создавая ярлыки с короткими именами в system32. С приходом Windows Vista (7) теперь только кнопки win, однако гибкость и настройка данных методов весьма ограниченна. Имеется так же огромное количество hotkey-менеджеров, однако не с одним из них я так и не сдружился.

Лаунчеры

Недавно (по-моему после прочтения книги “Продуктивный программист. Как сделать сложное простым, а невозможное – возможным” Нила Форда) мой интерес пал на launcher’ы. Для windows-платформы я нашёл несколько:

• SlickRun http://www.bayden.com/SlickRun/
• slimCODE http://www.slimcode.com/
• Colibri http://colibri.leetspeak.org/ – некоторый аналог небезызвестного Quicksilver для Mac OS X
• Launchy http://www.launchy.net/

Ну и герой этого поста:

• Enso http://humanized.com/enso/

Немного истории

Изложу настолько, насколько я сумел разобраться в ней. Первоначально Enso был строго коммерческим проектом, разрабатываемым компанией Humanized (основанной Джеффри Раскиным, в котрой в последующем работал его сын). В дальнейшем компания начала работу над Mozilla Ubiquity (аналог Enso, являющийся плагином для FireFox), что позволило ей сделать Enso бесплатным.

Enso

Лучше 1 раз увидеть, чем 7 раз прочитать, базовые возможности представлены в следующих роликах:

На настоящий момент на сайте компании есть две версии продукта:

• Версия 1 http://humanized.com/enso/

удобна в эксплуатации, но умеет делать лишь базовые вещи.

настройка (как и во второй версии) происходит через embeded веб-сервер

• Версия 2 http://humanized.com/enso/beta/all/ (остальное на данной странице является плагинами для Enso)

в данной версии появилось огромное количество очень полезных плагинов (к примеру поиск в google, генерация объектов-карт по выделенному адресу) однако юзабили немного упало (с моей точки зрения) в плане того, что после ввода команды начала открываться отдельная строка для ввода параметров, на что уходило время, и приходилось нажимать лишний раз enter

Все отлично, за исключением того, что проект на данном сайте вроде как заброшен, что не совсем воодушевляло к использованию, однако слазив внутрь и посмотрев реализацию, обнаружилось, что всё написано на Python (межплатформенность?), а так же исходники доступны в свободном доступе, что немного приободрило.

В дальнейших поисках упоминаний о Enso я наткнулся на коммунити http://www.ensowiki.com, а так же (самое главное) хостинг нынешей версии Enso https://launchpad.net/enso, итак, что же изменилось с тех времен:

• настройка больше не через веб-сервер
• межплатформенность (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, etc)
• интерфейс первой версии
• практически все плагины из второй версии

Используем Enso

Для установки существует инсталлер, поэтому трудности вряд ли могут встретиться. Далее у меня возникла необходимость в настройке (теперь для совершения настроек существует файл enso\config.py) “основной” клавиши (Caps Lock) в режим залипания (Sticky в терминологии создателей программы), для этого я проделал следующее:

Расширяем Enso

Классно, мой питомец (Enso) теперь стал послушным и ласковым, однако хочется научить его понимать новые команды, ну что ж, пускай это будет Enso hello world.

Я отправился в папку commands в корне, куда добавил файл butaji.py со следующим содержимым:

И у меня получилось следующее:

Великолепно! я думаю, что мы с Enso очень сдружимся.

Executive summary: Any sufficiently advanced GUI is indistinguishable from a CLI.

People older than a certain age will recall the time when the only way to tell a computer what you wanted it to do was to type in stuff through a command line interface (CLI). So if you wanted a word count on a file, you typed wc filename and got the answers with no fluff. Then these kids came along with their graphical user interfaces (GUI) and persisted in believing that (among other things) opening the same file in a large and slow word processor and clicking on Tools | Word count was somehow more user-friendly than remembering commands like wc.

And where are we headed now? Watch this video about Enso (which is Japanese for circle) from Humanized, and you might almost believe that the future of a GUI is a CLI, perhaps a semantically aware CLI, but definitely some creature where you type commands (or start typing them anyway) instead of one where you point and click.

What’s Japanese for “full circle”?

That said, I downloaded and have used Enso for a few hours now, and it’s certainly got its uses. My first impressions are by and large positive.

On the plus side:

1. the caps lock-based interface is usable and not intrusive — I had feared that using the caps lock key would interfere with normal operation, but it’s not bad.
2. The calculator function is rather helpful, though currently limited to the four basic arithmetic operations with constant operands. It is reminiscent in functionality of the sagetex plugin for TeX and LaTeX, whose best use I have found is to write HOWTO documents for mathematics without typing the formula once and copy-pasting the results again. It’s probably helpful to think of Enso’s math abilities as a stripped down fast-response sagetex.
3. The spellchecker and the case-toggler are nice, but your use for them will be much less if you type a lot in Firefox (blog posts, comments, etc) and already have a spellchecker add-on and the LeetKey add-on installed. Enso will probably be more useful if you do a lot of typing outside a word processor or a browser.

On the minus side (for me at least):

1. I had a rude shock when (out of force of habit) I tried to exit Enso by holding caps lock and typing “quit”. Instead of quitting, Enso closed the application that was in the foreground! BE CAUTIOUS! Save all your work when you’re trying this thing out! This is not expected behavior for a habitual CLI-user, where if you type “quit” or “exit” you will only leave the command shell and be returned to the GUI. Perhaps “close” might be a better word than “quit” for closing other applications?
2. The commands available for the calculator cannot currently read arbitrary scientific expressions, even ones that can be done with the plain old Windows calculator in scientific mode, or those that be done by asking Google Calculator. Hopefully this will change in future.
3. It would be helpful if the user could switch between “replace the selected text with the result” and “append the result to the selected text” modes, particularly when writing math formulas in a document followed by their evaluations: the reader needs to see both the expression and the evaluated result.

Overall, the product looks promising, and I expect to find it more useful with a few more features and a little more extensibility.

Much has been argued about the way computers are evolving and how new approaches are being explored to find new ways to interact with them.

Among the many possibilities are (multi)touch screens, voice recognition, etc. But are these fancy solutions good or useful for the next few years? It would be a great challenge to replace our everyday keyboard with more exotic solutions: the lack of sensitivity in touch screens, for instance, would make it much harder to use it although it might look like a huge breakthrough at a first glance.

The immediate future relies on the way we use our everyday devices in a more efficient way. Watch Aza Raskin’s Google Tech Talk:

Many years ago the Canon Cat tried to do all this unsuccessfully. This project introduced a variety of concepts that we still don’t use nowadays. The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin is the book you should read to deeper you knowledge about this. You can as well try Archy: the prototype project that brings all these concepts to your computer.

Finally, a huge step is being given by these guys, Humanized, and their Enso. These project actually brings some of these interaction concepts to your (windows) system today! Watch the demo and try it out.

Da ist mir vorhin beim Kommentieren von gnubuntu was aufgefallen.

In diesem Blog wird auf die Ansichtssache vom Standard hingewiesen. Diese beschäftigt sich in 11 Bildern mit den neuen Gnome 3.0 MockUps und eventuellen “so-könnte-es-mal-aussehen”. Auf Bild 8 ist mir dann aufgefallen, dass es dort scheinbar auch eine Kommandozeile geben soll, die ähnlich (oder sogar gleich) wie enso von humanized funktionieren soll. Dabei werden Befehle in einer ausblendbaren Commandline eingegeben: “google interaction design” und der Rechner startet den Browser, geht auf “google.com”, gibt “interaction design” im Suchfeld ein und setzt die Suche ab.

Laut den Erfindern ist dies ein erster Schritt zur Sprachsteuerung – das kann ich mir wirklich gut vorstellen, dass dies klappt. Leider ist enso derzeit nur für Windows erhältlich, aber ich hab das mal mit einem Freund ausprobiert. Wenn ich mir nun dazu die neuen Features von Gnome vorstelle und eventuell die Workspaces, die mit compiz fusion super einfach zu wechseln und zu bedienen sind, dann schaut das Ganze schon nach einer neuen “Interaction Experience” aus.

Hm… denken wir mal weiter: das Bedienungskonzept vom iPhone oder das des “Surface” (auch wenns von Microsoft ist) dazukombinieren und tara!: dann sind solche Projektionsflächen und deren Ganzkörper-bedienung wie schon in “Enthüllung” (nur ohne Datenhandschuh) oder “Minority Report” möglich. Und da sprechen wir nicht von Prototypen, von denen auch bereits einige Videos im Netz kursieren, sondern von tatsächlichen Desktop Funktionen, die in ein bis zwei Jahren für Linux oder andere Betriebssysteme zur Verfügung stehen werden.

Ich freu mich drauf

For a truly Zen experience of your Windows desktop, install Enso from Humanized (http://www.humanized.com).  Enso Launcher and Enso Words are simply must-to-have.  These are very small programs that run in the background and are brought up by pressing the Caps Lock key (this is the default setting, which can be changed, of course).  Press Caps Lock, type in a command, release Caps Lock and stuff happens: applications launch, websites open, words are defined and texts are spellchecked.  My favorite features or commands are “Spell”, “Calc” and “Define”, which allowed me to check and correct the spelling of any selected text regardless of the application, calculate the result of any math equation and lookup dictionary definition of any selected word.

Another great feature of Enso is that you don’t need administrator rights to your computer to install it.  It drops into your Documents and Settings folder with a very small footprint.

I so got used to Enso that I totaly miss it on my Mac.  And while in some features it is similar to QuickSilver, I find that I liked Enso and its features better.

Definitely give Enso a try, you will like it.

Firefox

Firefox ist die Grundvoraussetzung, um überhaupt ins Web zu gehen (nein Internet Explorer zählt nicht!)

twitterbar

Ein Firefox-Addon, dass es einem erlaubt, direkt aus der Adresszeile zu twittern (Twitter-Account vorrausgesetzt)

twitterfeed

Ein Service, der in regelmäßigen Abständen (d)einen Blog auf neue Posts überprüft und auf Twitter posted

ubiquity

Erneut ein Firefox-Addon, über das man auf einfachste Art und Weiße zugang zu Wikipedia, Google Maps, Gmail, Wetter, ebay, tinyURL, Ask.com, Babelfish, screengrab, flickr, google, youtube,… hat. Mit ernormen Verbesserungen von ubiquity (obwohl es jetzt schon genial ist) ist zu rechnen.

a feed reader

Feeds sind kleine News-Updates von einer dynamischen Site (z.B. einem Blog) mit Links zu den Original-Artikeln und sehr praktisch um das Überangebot an Information zu bewältigen.
Feedreader gibt es verschiedene von unterschieldicher Qualität und Komfort. Nicht empfehlen würde ich MS Outlook oder Thunderbird (ein weit verbreiteter Open Source Mail-Client), da sie den Workflow unterbrechen. Deswegen Empfehle ich web-gebundene Feedreader wie :

• Netvibes
  Here you can add widgets containing feeds you define. widgets can also be chatrooms, your webmail-inbox, …
• iGoogle
  very similar to Netvibes but from google. You’ll find it at the right hand side of the normal google searchpage
• Google Reader
  Now this is the first real Feedreader. Here you can add Newsfeeds from any site and sort them via categories or tags
• Feedly
  Feedly acutally uses Google Reader but displays the content in a much mor convenient way. Unfortunately adding new feeds is not really comfortable right now
• Humanized Reader
  This Reader from humanized.com has the best and most comfortable interface i’ve seen so far. Unfortunately the Reader-Site seems down right now…

blogging-client

Blogging Clients sind was Funktionalität und/oder Workflow angeht, den Normalen Web-Interfaces der Blogs meist über. Auch hier gibt es verschiedene Optionen

• Windows Live Writer
  Eines der wenigen wirklich gelungenen Produkte des Microsoft-eigenen Windows-Live-Dienstes. Leicht und übersichtlich zu benutzen, kompatibel mit fast allen Blog-Engines, Preview-Funktion (wie der Post auf dem Blog tatsächlich aussehen wird), usw. WLW hat nur zwei wirkliche Nachteile: Man kann ubiquity (s.o.) während des Bloggens nicht verwenden und er läuft nur auf Windows.
• Flock Blog-Editor
  Flock ist eine Weiterentwicklung von Firefox mit einem integrierten Blog-Editor, der zwar von der Funktionalität her durchaus gut ist, aber ebenfalls keine unterstützung für ubiquity bietet.
• Deepest Sender
  Eine Firefox-Extension. Gute Funktionalität (nicht ganz so gut wie WLW, zu verlgeichen mit Flock’s Editor) und ubiquity Unterstützung. Einziges Problem ist der fehlende Support für WordPress-Blogs
• ScribeFire
  Diesmal wird alles Unterstützt, die Funktionalität ist aber ausbaufähig

diigo/zotero

Diigo und Zotero (ich rate dazu, entweder oder zu verwenden) sind Research Tools für den Firefox Browser. Was sie beide bieten: Annotation (also Text auf websites dauerhaft markieren und/oder kommentieren), Speichern, organisieren,…
Es gibt eigentlich nur zwei Unterschiede: Diigo ist grundsätzlich ein Social-Bookmarking-Service, was bedeutet, dass man über diigo einfach Links austauschen kann, Kommentare von anderen Nutzern sehen kann und auch von “Friends” links erhalten kann. Zotero kann das nicht. Dafür (zweiter Unterschied!:) ist Zotero wesentlich besser darin, die Gespeicherten Links (usw.) zu organisieren.

Ich persönlich verwende diigo, auf grund der reinen web2.0-Natur. Konkret: ich kann gespeicherte Links als Webseiten in meinem Blog embedden. Auch RSS-Feeds oder ganze Listen von Links kann ich (als “webslide” – vorzustellen als interaktive live Powerpoint-Präsentation) einfügen.

Jules’ – a disembodied androgynous robotic head – can automatically copy the movements, which are picked up by a video camera and mapped on to the tiny electronic motors in his skin.

It can grin and grimace, furrow its brow and ’speak’ as his software translates real expressions observed through video camera ‘eyes’.

The project, called ‘Human-Robot Interaction’, was devised at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL), run by the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol.

freaky stuff i like my gadgets to look like gadgets. The whole project is ridiculously impressive though.

There is a lot more on this subject at the dailyMail site

It is also seriously worth while checking out the robot gallery on the BRL website as well.

Then it is time to get Humanized. Enso is a very nice interface for windows users – actually they offer two different programs which both are extremely useful: Enso launcher and Enso words.

Enso launcher enables you to write commands to open different things on your computer, by holding down a key (default is caps lock) and writing the command. This may not sound very innovative, but the strength is that you can open all kinds of different stuff without thinking about what program you should find. If the program does not know a certain command you have the option of teaching it to recognize a command in the future. How does it work? Well basically you just hold down the caps lock key and type ‘open’ and what you want to open, be it a certain Internet page, the my documents folder or the windows updater. This is a very nice command shell and once you get used to your commands it is a much faster method than pointing and clicking with the mouse.

Enso word is a spellchecker (English). What is brilliant about this program is that it runs independently of other programs in the background therefore you can use it in all of your programs. Just hold down caps lock and write in the command ’spellcheck’ and you can correct any errors in your text, whether it is in your email program, on a web page, in messenger or any other place. Furthermore, you get several other options like ‘define’ that will look up anything you marked in a text on answers.com.

Both programs can be downloaded from Humanized.com for free.

Qualche giorno fa, un mio amico ha pubblicato il post “La calcolatrice di Word“, in cui spiega qualche veloce trucco per avere a disposizione un veloce calcolatrice dal programma della Microsoft, senza dover aprire calcolatrici o foglio di calcolo. Ma c’è anche un altro modo, o almeno, io uso un altro programma. Si chiama Enso, della Humanized, ed è una… una shell, in pratica, sempre pronta a velocizzare e rendere più facile il lavoro di tutti i giorni con il proprio pc. Tornando al tema del post, Enso, disponibile soltanto per Windows, purtroppo, permette di selezionare una formula matematica presente in qualsiasi programma (ad es. Word, Notepad, il browser ecc ecc) e, digitando da tastiera <tasto speciale> + calc (dove per <tasto speciale> si intende Ctrl oppure Alt oppure un altro dei tasti speciali della tastiera, personalizzabile dalle opzioni di Enso), visualizzare in un attimo il risultato dell’operazione.

Più difficile a dirsi che a farsi. Qui potrete vedere una demo del suo funzionamento.

Calcolare non è l’unica cosa che sa fare questo programma, come potete vedere nella demo, permette di convertire testo minuscolo in maiuscolo e viceversa, aprire finestre di esplora risorse là dove volete, senza dover creare collegamenti sul desktop o scorrere tutti i percorsi. Permette di aprire programmi in maniera rapida. Permette anche il taglia, copia e incolla, ma per questo credo rimangano più veloci i Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C e Ctrl+V.

Lo stesso concetto di Enso, è poi alla base di Ubiquity, un addon per Firefox, di cui magari parleremo presto.

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Awesome messaging using jQuery, lightweight and out of the way:
http://code.google.com/p/humanmsg/

 Snap that mouse clicker HERE to go to the bizarre Pixeloo web blog and see more un-tooned Photoshop magic. Thanx anonymous x pleas keep these up. 

Den meisten sollten die unterschiedlichsten Programmstarter (Launcher) bekannt sein. Die GUI-Spezialisten von Humanized haben sich an ihre Interpretation gewagt, und was dabei rausgekommen ist, ist mehr als sehenswert. Das schöne Kind hört auf den Namen Enso Launcher und ist unter http://www.humanized.com/enso/ kostenfrei erhältlich. Neben dem Starten von Programmen und Dateien lässt Enso auch noch das Bearbeiten von Texten zu, kann Google-Suchen starten oder Berechnungen durchführen. Das Ganze funktioniert zudem rein textbasiert – einfach Capslock drücken und halten, Befehl eingeben, Caps wieder loslassen und schon gehts los – Freunde der Kommandozeile kommen hier voll auf ihre Kosten!

No puedo creerlo, casi literalmente grité cuando leí el anuncio en grandes letras blancas sobre un negro traslúcido que aprendí a amar, Enso es gratis.

Para la gente que no sabe que es Enso tienen que bajarlo, es el programa más genial del universo, es simplemente perfecto, hermoso, humano, es mi prototipo de programa, es todo lo que un programa podría ser.

Enso es un application launcher, básicamente lo que hace es abrir programas, pero la genialidad no está en lo que hace sino como lo hace, simplemente hay que presionar Caps Lock y apretar las primeras letras del nombre del programa, yo sé que se escucha tonto pero creanme que es perfecto.

Es como Launchy pero mejor, es como el menú de inicio pero mejor, es como el escritorio pero mejor, ok, es un buen programa y creo que vale la pena probarlo… espcialmente ahora que es gratis. Podrá ser tarde y todo pero no puedo esperar para probar todos los betas y nuevos servicios que tiene Humanized, no, no es un anuncio y no me pagan es que simplemente es genial.

http://www.humanized.com/

This week has been big for the Chicago tech scene and entrepreneurs in the midwest.  A couple big stories coming out of the Windy City.

The first big one is TicketsNow (announced 2 days ago) which was bought by InterActiveCorp (Ticketmaster) for $265 million.  TicketsNow is the second biggest secondary market ticket seller website.  A great exit for the Rolling Meadows based company that received over 1.5 million unique visitors in December.  They will now have to battle it out with the largest secondary seller, StubHub.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a new website called Songza, which was created by the guys at Humanized.  The team was snatched up by Mozilla in a sort of talent acquisition.  Congrats guys on your success!

I have written about Enso before and have even played around with their API a little to create my own little application and had a go at integrating it with SAP GUI but suffice it to say Thomas isn’t going  to get a ‘perf mary’ command just yet.

There are changes afoot over in Chicago. First of all a Mac port is on the way to becoming a reality. Check out the teasing screenshot.

Secondly it is now free – as in no charge and they are thinking about opening the source code.

Thirdly, the main brains behind the outfit have been hired by Mozilla.

These are all great developments and congratulations to the guys involved.

Play around with Songza, a music search engine and Internet jukebox, and the first question that pops up into your head will be: How can this be legal? Whether the latest offering from Humanized, a Chicago-based company, is skirting the legal limits or not, or if it will even be around for long, one thing is for sure — it is damn good. (It is the same peer group as Hype Machine, a start up that we have previously covered .)

Scratch that! Not just good, but awesome — and dead simple. I threw some rather obscure artists at the search engine — Rishi Rich, Veronica, Dub Factory, Nitin Sawhney, and Shri. These artists are not exactly chartbusters, and only real tablatronics are aware of them, yet the quality of the results, and speed with which they were served back, was very impressive. The tracks included some songs I wasn’t even aware existed.

A simple right click is all it takes to play back the songs, share them with others, or build a playlist. The tracks in the playlist are easy to manipulate, and you can move them up and down. If you close the browser and come back after a day or so, the cookie remembers your playlist and plays back the tracks. The quality of music isn’t the greatest, but still not bad for spur of the moment listening. (Update: One of our readers has figured out that much of the tunes are coming from YouTube minus the videos.)

Songza can become a good accompaniment when you don’t have your entire music library handy, but have a distinct craving for Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side Of The Moon.” (Forty-something readers of mine will know exactly when that craving strikes!) Now I just hope they can stick around for a while, because I couldn’t really figure out how they intend to make money.

Related Post from WebWorkerDaily: Humanized’ Enso, Quick Silver for Windows