Google Notebook launches

Google seems to be getting more and more into the personal organization space.

The latest is Google Notebook. From what I can tell, it is like a personal Wiki. I think the nicest thing about it is its integration with Firefox. Anyhow, Google Notebook is organized by Notebooks and then Notes within them. Notes can have Section Headings, and the whole thing (or parts) can be made public.

Here are some screen shots….

Google Notebook
Here’s Google Notebook on login. Notice the clean Google aesthetic with contextual indicators of UI actions.

The Firefox plugin on startup
This is the Firefox extension in action. It adds a link to the bottom of your screen where you can add notes and such to it. At any point you can maximize to fullpage view. You can also drag any text from the webpage to a new note.

Firefox plugin
A clean and simple screen to add new notes.

The notebook
Here’s the non-Firefox UI. Pretty clean with some AJAX in there for good measure.

Adding a new note
Here’s the interface to add a new note.

All in all, its a nice, elegant and easy to use service, but is it revolutionary? No, not at all. Also, as Google’s mission is to organize the world’s data, and not necessarily my own, I do wonder if I’d entrust the contents of my Yojimbo! library to Google Notebook. I think not.

2006
05/16
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Asides

    Andreas Schlegel currently lives in Singapore. He likes to write programs that generate audio, visual, and physical output. He enjoys doing projects with syntfarm.

    via sojamo.de

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    ["Five measures prove to be useful: A, the area of the isovist, which gives us a measure of size (in 3-D this is a volume); P, the perimeter of the isovist, which gives us a measure of the boundary length (in 3-D this is an area) excluding the horizon and excluding Q, which is a measure of the length (area) of the radial, component of the isovist boundary; M2, which is a statistical measure of the variability of the boundary’s distance from x; and M3, which is a measure of the asymmetry of M2." From Benedikt]

    If we dimensionalize the data from any given social framework online, could we apply isovistic theory to the quantification of perceptual awareness around a user in this textually augmented reality we now find ourselves?

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    Infra-mince, Duchamp declared, cannot be defined, but can only be described by examples, such as the difference in displaced volume between a clean shirt and the same shirt worn once, or the taste of one's mouth lingering in exhaled smoke.

    Infra-mince was a new way to think about physical and temporal dimensions (decades before Mandelbrot discovered fractals). Holes in some of Duchamp's artwork link the 2nd to the 3rd dimension. Sometimes he shot the holes out with bullets, echoing infra-mince again in the delay between the sounds of the shot and the impact.

    via everything2.com

    Add this to the isovism concept and you basically describe a social network.

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    A single isovist is the volume of space visible from a given point in space, together with a specification of the location of that point.

    via en.wikipedia.org

    Isovism is an interesting concept when applied to the creation of a website. Quantifying the perception of space in a given point. How far can you see from your homepage for instance into the larger n-dimensional world a site creates?

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    The new iPad has lots of space. The screen offers 1024x768 pixels.

    via tuaw.com

    What excites me the most about the iPad, I think, is that it takes paradigms and approaches and lets us expand them. Good art, whether visual or interface, comes from working against constraints imposed by the medium. The iPhone imposed very strict constraints and amazing new paradigms of interface design came out of that. These new approaches have bled their way into Mac OSX apps, Windows 7, etc. I expect the same to happen with the iPad.

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

    - #

    The funny thing is, if Adobe does not take the steps to make tools to address a future with HTML5, what we'll be left with is tools others create. And chief amongst those others will most likely be Apple. Flash's stance here reminds of Microsoft's during the creation of Blackbird and later their migration toward Visual Interdev and Frontpage. When you build the walls so high around your garden, the fall will just kill your plants.

    [From Flash, iPad, Standards – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report]

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    Rest in piece little buddy.

    [From xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe]

    - #

    Idiotic. Copy paste wasn't missing because of an ideological reason. It was missing because it wasn't ready. Same with an SDK and an App-Store. Multitasking presents a usability challenge that I wager they are nearly set in addressing. I bet the camera is supply chain related (same with the iPod Touch). WIth Apple products, what is MISSING is the interesting part, as it usually leads to exposure to ideologies, challenges or works in progress.

    [From What We Learned About Apple Yesterday]

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    I wonder if they are also seeing concurrent apps running from the same device, and that's how they know? I imagine the Tablet will be able to run multiple apps in a grid of some sort, given the screen size.

    [From Apple Tablet: The Second Stage Media Booster Rocket ]

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    A pretty big deal I think, especially considering the move from entertainment companies from "impression" based metrics to revenue.

    [From Boxee Blog » Coming soon: Boxee Payments]

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