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Thursday September 02, 2004

Roomba Discovery

This weeks email from Ziff Davis has a link to a review of the Roomba Discovery, iRobot robot vacuum.
I noticed that this is yet another case of where we have the letter "i" followed by another word. Apple is big on this. When will it ever stop?

Still, the vacuum looks like it doesn't suck. Um, let me reword that.

iWant one.

[Technorati Tag: Tech]

[Technorati Tag: Robotics]

( Sep 02 2004, 02:23:29 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [3]

Thoughts on Bookmarks

Not the book bookmarks kind, which I've been collecting for about twenty years now, every time I go to a new bookstore. No, I mean the browser kind.
This post was going to be short and simple. I was going to mention that I have to typically use four operating systems from day to day.

Most of my time at work is spent with Solaris. I also use Mac OS X on my powerbook, and we have Windows XP (Pro) at home. Occasionally I have to do some work on a Linux machine too. Because it's so occasional, I don't always remember all the commands I need to use to get my job done.

A little while ago I found this one page (two sided) manual for Linux. It's dated 1999, so it might not be totally up to date, and as we know, each flavour of Linux is not identical to all the others, but it's still very helpful.

Then I got to thinking wouldn't it be great if there was something similar for all the other O/S'es I use. Then I starting thinking about the bigger picture.

Now, if you are like me, you've collected a load of bookmarks over a period of time. You might even have them nicely organised (I fail this part). Recently, to try to improve this, I set up a "links.html" page for myself, which contains just the links I use over and over again. I've tried to condense the bookmark information into a minimal space. It looks something like this.

    * Accessibility [JAH Bugs] [Status]
    * Blogs [java.net] [blogs.sun.com] [TheStreet]
    * Books [Abebooks] [Amazon] [Los Altos Library] [Safari Books]
    * Finance [Stock Quotes]
    * gcalctool [Bugs]
    * Java Accessibility Helper [Bugs] [Design Docs] [Download]
    * Metropolis [Audio] [Bugs] [Build] [I-team Home Page] [Run]
    * Open Source Projects [GNOME] [JSDT] [SourceForge]
    * Search [Google]
    * Technical [Automake manual] [CVS Manual] [J2SE Docs] [GTK+ Ref]

Each of those would be a link. I've delibrately not shown it above as a set of links as some of them would be internal to Sun, and therefore inappropriate, but you get the idea.

I've added this single web page as a bookmark on the toolbar in my browser, so it's one click away. Typically though, I also keep that page open in a tabbed browser window, then it's even easier to get to the page I want.

But now you come to the different browser, different machine synchronisity problem. You can solve that by using an online web based bookmark manager such as MyBookmarks.com or iKeepBookmarks.com.

But in my mind, there are still two problems left that that need to be easily handled:

the time it takes each person to setup this set of bookmarks that can help them with their day to day work.
knowing what that magic set of best bookmarks are.

They are probably already researching this in the Google Labs, but here's the outline of, what I believe would be a useful project:

I'd like to see a variation on the online web based bookmark manager that also helps you to initially select your bookmarks. You would first be presented with a web page similar to my links page above, but for the more generalised subject areas. A bit like the Google catalogs page.

Clicking on one of those links, would take you to another page where the links are confined to that subject, but divided into the various sub-fields. For example, a portion of the "Computers" one could be for

Operating systems
Languages (compiled)
Languages (scripted)
IDEs

Clicking on one of those links, takes you to the page where you can actually select the bookmarks you want. For example, taking the operating systems link, this could take you to something like (I've simplified this - there would be more entries):

Operating Systems
Linux              [ ]Home Page   [ ]Online Doc  [ ]One Page Manual
Mac OS X           [ ]Home Page   [ ]Online Doc  [ ]One Page Manual
Solaris            [ ]Home Page   [ ]Online Doc  [ ]One Page Manual
Windows XP (Pro)   [ ]Home Page   [ ]Online Doc  [ ]One Page Manual

      Select entries you'd like to bookmark, then click on save.


                           [ Save ]

Now the crux of this is that you need to find the best bookmarks that fit each particular category. This is where Google comes in. If you did a search for 'Linux "Home Page"', the top hit is this one. Seems a reasonable book mark for that category to me. Google would automate this process.

With this approach, you would have the ability to quickly setup a collection of bookmarks that hopefully would be the main web site for each category. They would be online and accessible from whatever machine you were running on (assuming you have an internet connection). You could revisit the bookmark setup pages as many times as you wanted to adjust exactly which set of bookmarks you wanted.

There probably would also need to be the ability to add custom bookmarks to your selection too, in a similar fashion to the way that the online bookmark sites let you do now.

So, am I completely out in left field with this idea? Is there already something like this? Sure would be nice to find it, if there is.

[Technorati Tag: Bookmarks]