Heartbreak
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Okay, that was a short-lived affair. I'm exaggerating - it wasn't quite heartbreak - but the software I used to blog the last post is definitely still a beta and a few of my follow-up impressions follow.
I'm posting this again using the TextEdit/Quicksilver/Atom API cocktail, but I'll probably be back to the web browser for further updates until this thing evolves some more. Problems include:
choked on html, only works with plain text (no links or lists), so I had to go back to Blogger in the browser and add the ones in the previous post by hand, apparently that's how Joi did it too Update 07/30/04: the software creator just made an update that fixes this - I've tested it on links and it works, it's how I posted the "Aspiring Hackerness" post- no timestamp, so if I modify the same file, save it and post again, it shows up as a whole new post, which means I have to go dive back into the browser and delete the extra posts
- converts every line break to a paragraph tag, so the breaks between paragraphs were unnecessarily huge
- and you have to rely on Quicksilver cataloguing your hard drive in order to see the file you just saved and want to post
That last one's a pretty big one, even bigger than non-linking (which the original creator
said he's working on anyway just fixed). I have mine set to checking every ten minutes, so that means I finally get to post 10 minutes after I finished a thought? Ugh. That's a Quicksilver thing, not the API itself, but still. I actually totally forgot about this post and came back to flesh it out when I remembered hours later. Kind of takes the instant out of instant publishing.
Well, that was bittersweet. Maybe I can use this for short posts with no links, like this one. I can see the potential though and I'll be following the developments to see if matures more. I'm totally rooting for both the Atom API and the underlying Quicksilver software to succeed since they are such lovely, simple, user-focused tools. I'm afraid that may not happen since it looks like the upcoming Mac OS, Tiger, will have something similar to and faster than Quicksilver baked right in, called
Spotlight. That may end up killing the community for this excellent little app - we'll see. I love Quicksilver and the way it reads my mind so much that I may end up using it instead if Spotlight doesn't end up doing the same.