Aaaaaand I'm back!

How are we all doing? Doing well? Welcome welcome welcome to another exciting post on the Laichasse blog, full of interesting and informative information of my usage of Apture.

So, with no further ado, lets get this started!

Tristan asks:

"What would make Apture more useful to you? What things do you expect it to do that it does not do? And what things do you expect it to do that it does differently?"

Well, my answer is pretty much nothing. I've spent a long time raving to Tristan about this software, and he knows I think it's pretty much perfect in conception. In execution, well, I've mentioned a lot of things that were broken and or UI issues. Perhaps somewhere in the middle, I might have something new to add?

I guess If reeeeally pressed, I'd say I'd like it to have bigger windows, and/or smaller text. I feel like the apture windows provide you with nibbles of information on the hotlinked items, I wouldn't mind having something meatier to browse through (hay, come to think of it, is there a text-size option? Or a way to drag Apture windows into something larger? Would love to love to see the both if they don't exist, although I imagine this is something for version 2.0). Continuing with the theme, I wouldn't mind it at all if the apture links were the main show and the blog/webpage behind it were in the background. Like you're reading, say, a techincal document, and you have all these open windows of technical terms and stuff. And could you apture link something inside of an apture link? Somethings to think about....

And:

"Is it still too slow on IE6?"

Oh yes. Yes it is.

I did indeed do a screen recording of it, and below are the results:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/wchwaz (download it quickly, it'll only last a week...)

The full screen capture is six minutes, and I know that's a lot. I'm not sure if I could get you to sit through all of a six minute song that I might try to force you to listen to just because it's my song of the week, much less something as dry as a screen capture. So what I've done is broken it down into a bunch of key moments in the above attachment, namely a screen refresh that took over the entire page, the apture windows being drawn with a weird black shadow/border around them, and demonstration of how long it takes to link something in ie. Assorted other problems include the fact that double clicking a word results in the selection of a sentence instead of just a word (could be my fault). Can one select more than just one word for linking? If not, could be a good idea, if not because it would lead to irrelevant searches, perhaps allowing two words side-by-side might be worth permitting.

Most important quibble, of course, is the speed. Apture works best in an environment where you have zippy internet access, a fast machine, and probably we're thinking a mac. My machine's pretty old, though it's fast enough, my internet connection is pretty keen, and Apture works fine on Firefox for the most part, it's just that ie thing.

Assuming ie isn't even the problem, Apture's going to be used worldwide, where internet speeds and computing power aren't normalized. Perhaps having a low-fi version of Apture sans the animations and whatnots might be something to think about for version 3.0. Do you think that would speed things up, or it wouldn't change much of anything?

Anyways, must run to sign up for a piano course. Toodles!

hrs: 12:40 - 2:05