oofoe

See also http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html - "A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Cost Away", written in 1993...

This guy has integrated it with org-mode for Emacs: http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#sec-13.1

It's almost exactly like writing out HTML. The advantages are that you're writing something that your editor and your program can understand. The editor can highlight things appropriately, the program can insert or delete html easily since you've encoded it as a standard data structure.

Also, you may not have noticed that even though it can handle the data in tuples, if you write it in list form (as in your comment), it's trivial for a program to add extra items enclosed in a particular tag. So if I have:

   x = ["ul"]

I can just append elements to x to fill out the list:

   for i in range(10): x.append(["li", "Item %s" % i])

However, I don't think that it's _quite_ as painful as writing HTML... You don't have to worry about closing tags, for instance. That said, I really wish Python could deal with barewords in data structures, because that would really clean it up otherwise.

I completely agree, may I suggest http://hotwax.infogami.com/HeRF as well? It's maybe not too fancy, but it's very short and simple to deal with. It also ensures correct tag closing without any special effort on your part.

Actually, yes... As one example, Jef Raskin pointed out that Click-Drag was an innovation of the Macintosh group (compare to Click-Drag-Click as used by the Star). Also the single button mouse, which while it might have been too far in the one direction, was certainly easier to use for a novice (which everybody was at the time!) than the 3-button Parc brick.

There is more to a GUI than the screenshot, there's also the actions associated with executing operations in the GUI. Consider the PC-GEOS vs. Windows of the time (2.x or 3.x, I think). GEOS was lightning quick, and a good deal of thought had gone into the interfaces for the major tools. The same machine that would run GEOS so sprightly would crawl under the iron heel of Windows. The interfaces looked very similar, but the quality of your interaction with them was entirely different.

So yes, there's been progress -- unfortunately, a lot of it has been backwards!

When I try it, there's a big Gimp install dialogue taking up most of the site snapshot. The title is "Opening Gimp-2.6.1-Leopard-Intel.dmg".

Good idea though!

for i in xrange(1000000000): print i

xrange() addresses the problem you describe and has been in Python since, like, forever. However, range() is nicer for learning the language, since it's easy to see how it composes into a list.

Couldn't enter a standing offer for a game. Tried before I created an account and after. Both times, it would only do anything when I clicked "no" on the offer box.

Other than that... It was fairly easy to figure out and use (until the problem above. ;-).

Check out Paul Heckbert's ray tracing business card at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/ (you'll need to load the page, then search for "business card"). The files themselves are chunks of PostScript code -- they can be viewed with GhostScript or Illustrator.

I really hope not.

I don't really like Adobe as a company, but whenever Apple buys a professional tool house, they kill it but awful. Witness the demise of Shake and Silicon Grail, both top notch compositing packages for Irix, Windows and Linux. Jobs bought them both, jammed them into a forced marriage and told them that their stuff could only run on Apples. People in the effects industry stayed away in droves (because of the Mac as dongle thing), which finally led to Apple fire-saling the Shake source code and killing the product. _That_ sure worked out well.

Now the only professional compositing option for Windows and Linux is Eyeon Fusion. Not a bad program, but the only one left standing thanks to Apple's actions. I suppose that if Apple buys Adobe, makes everything but Flash players Mac only, then Corel can finally make a comeback...? ;-)