Archive for December 11, 2004

Saturday, December 11, 2004

FrameMaker for Mac OS X Petition

Adam Engst:

I just heard from Paul Findon that the petition to encourage Adobe to develop a version of FrameMaker for the Mac OS X has now exceeded 2,700 signatures.…FrameMaker remains the pre-eminent tool for writing long, structured documents. I use and like InDesign, but it’s far more of a graphical layout program than a structure publishing application.

Adhesive Labels on CD-Rs

Nicholas Riley lost data because he labelled his archive CDs.

Google Suggest Number

Jerry Kindall:

How many letters of your name do you have to type into Google Suggest before your name appears on the suggestion list, and at what position does it first appear? (If your name is the only thing on the list, you get position zero as a bonus.) Write the results as “8.4” (you have to type 8 letters, and your name appears first at position #4).

My number is 9.3, which I guess is pretty good considering that my first name is rather long and common:

Google Suggest

And I bet Moore, Jackson, and Jordan, etc. don’t have Erdös Numbers

Auto-Complete Patent

Dan Crevier got a patent from his work on Mac Outlook Express:

The system and method of the present invention automatically provides dynamically generated completion information for facilitating user input of e-mail addresses or contact information. This completion information is developed from a “data store” comprised of multiple data sources such as previously sent or received e-mail, and other types of electronic files such as word processor or spreadsheet files. The present invention monitors and uses the information in the data store to automatically store, track, maintain, and organize data entries in a dynamic “resolution list.” As a user begins to input an e-mail address or contact, the present invention can either automatically complete the entry using a most probable result from the resolution list, or can display a list of likely matches from which the user may select the desired e-mail address or contact.

Hopefully, I’m just bad at reading patents, because it sounds like a lot of current programs—from Mail to LaunchBar—might be covered by this.