I’m not sure if I understand what word processors are supposed to do, but I have found that there isn’t one which meets my needs. For me a word processors should be: fast, simple, flexible, and mobile. Most of the time when you want a word processors you want it because you need to type something, not do something advanced, so why does OpenOffice take several seconds to load when Notepad takes a blink of an eye? Typing doesn’t require much technological advances and so anything which takes more than a second or two is clearly lagging behind what state of the art should be. The biggest culprit to this fallacy is the fact that most word processors are hardly simple. When MS Word starts you are presented with half a dozen menus and toolbars each with their unique and rarely used feature. I use the following features: Font size, double/single spacing, lists, header/footers and endnotes/footnotes. These features probably don’t make even one percent of what word processors offer. Perhaps this abundance of useless features is due to vendor’s hopes that their product be flexible. They are indeed flexible so much so that I have found myself stuck trying to fix a list which the word processors insists being indented five times more than I want it to be (or the blank lines that just don’t seem to want to go away). Flexible should be giving me options when I request them, not executing options without my request. Yet with all the flexibility mobility is the one feature that no word processer has yet succeeded in implementing. Mobility is not only giving me a small file which can be read in any computer, but giving me a file which accessible from any computer and that looks exactly like the original one which the user made. Some word processors offer good file sizes, others offer formats which look the same on any computer (ex. PDF) and some offer access to files from anywhere (Google Documents) but no vendor offers one program that does it all. In order to find a solution the problem will be dissected into three parts: language, interface, and platform.
There are several languages for formatting text most notably used today being XML based. It is indeed very good, it offers many features and extensions but it fails at being simple. For every formatting component there is usually two tags associated with it making it highly inefficiently when compared to other languages such as Latex. In Latex every thing is tightly written with small tags and braces. A file can be written in a much smaller space and yet it is readable to the user (if he or she chooses to read the code for his or her document). True, neither XML based languages nor Latex were created for every day use: they all require some sort of GUI.
Any form of formatting other than spaces will most likely require some sort of GUI but not your average GUI. When a designer hears the word GUI he or she most likely thinks of buttons, toolbars, menus and dialog boxes. I believe that the GUI should never interfere with the editing of a document. If I require something from the word processor I should be able to invoke without leaving the editing environment. This implies that a mouse should not be required nor fancy sequence of keyboard shortcuts. Yes, Control-B and things of that nature are alright, but whenever a command is more complicated a user should be able to invoke it by simply typing the feature in the document and pressing a specific key. Example: user needs to add a picture so he or she could type “add picture [press tab]” and a file selector would appear. This way the user never leaves the “editing” mind set to become a button pusher and menu navigator.
If both Language and GUI are simple, mobility should exist very easily. Any platform that supports a Terminal should be able to support a version of this word processor. The file being compromised by a simple language should allow for a very simple implementation of the client to be able to be accessed from the Internet, mobile devices and computers.
Right now the closest thing that exists to such a word processor are text editors which support macros. However, no word processor exists which has implemented the above. HTML editors do a good job except that they are neither made for print nor support a simple GUI. Both the internet and OS X offer a very good platform for a creation of a new kind of word processor.
Frequently I see students memorizing and cramming as much information as possible before an exam and then trying later to mechanically regurgitate the information during the exam – and very likely the machine will break down. I like to think of exams and school work as a performance, some are in front of a live audience like exams and others are recorded like take home exams and homework. Its not how much you know about a subject or how well you can recall the material, its about the final product which will be created uniquely over the span of the exam. That is why no amount of preparation can ever be enough for an exam because in the end its all down to talent.
When you enter the class room for an exam, it should be like walking onto a stage. There’s nothing you can do except to trust that you can perform what you have practiced or that if you don’t remember something that you can improvise to a degree to which no one will notice. One should also never attempt to perform without an inspiration. Imagine playing the Four Seasons by Vivaldi without anything feeling – every movement would be as dull as the previous – spring and winter would for once be the same.
An exam is a performance: don’t take it, perform it.
When I was younger and iPods were still relatively new, it was fashionable to exchange iPods with someone else on the street to see the music they had. There was a small group of owners and because of that there was a certain amount of trust in exchanging iPods. If you were seen with one, it was a sign of your coolness and eclectic tastes in alternative music.
Today, as I am quickly discovering, a similar thing is happening with macbooks. In the past two days I’ve been approached to keep an eye on someone’s macbook while they went somewhere. People who have these small, beautiful pieces of technology know their values and their power. You don’t want to ask just anyone to look out for it because for all you know they might run away with it. Only owers can be trusted with these marvels. Apple truely has created a clan of loyal users.
Text and the way it’s printed for the most part has not changed ever since Gutembergh printed the first Bible. This means that both fonts and formatting have basically stayed the same for hundreds of years. This wasn’t a problem for the most part because paper until a few years back was the primary medium for communication, news papers most importantly. From the oldest paper I have seen, the format and the way articles are positioned have never changed. There is something about the way that the formatting was perfected over the years that makes reading a newspaper a very enjoyable experience (even with its original page numbering system)
However today I find myself reading more and more online versions of newspapers and magazines such as The Economist. Not only is this medium totally new, but neither conventional formatting nor typography works well in it. Take a look at The New York Times for instance. Beisdes columns somewhat existing not a lot else is the same. Blue headlines? Having the time since it was posted instead of the time it was printed? Always the same formatting? Although the newly designed site is much better than the previous one, there is still to wish for I believe.
Part of reading the newspaper in the morning is the artistic surprise I believe. Newspapers are always different and like a painting you are always overwhelemed with all the headlines in different sizes and styles (besides the Wall Street Journal and USA Today which have pretty bad layouts in my opinion). The randomaness and yet solid format of daily newspapers forces one to see everything, unlike lists of news headlines which GoogleNews offers that lets the reader quickly skip the longer headlines (god forbid the reader actually reads everything). In the current style for onlines news you have one of three styles: the google list style (which is extremely ugly and inefective in getting news across to the reader), the CNN style which seems like a Microsft web portal from the 90s, and The New York Times which although better seems to manage to incorporate a bit of everything.
Granted, the medium as it stands has many limitations, and is never manually formatted (unlike newspapers who have professional people dedicated to making all of the articles fit nicely together) yet I think its a branch of computing that still requires a lot of exploring. Imagine the day that all of your RSS feeds are formatted randomly into a newspaper like format. I wouldn’t mind having slightly less current news in trade for a good experience. Reading the newspaper over a nice cup of coffee used to be an amazing experience which I would hate to see disappear.
What if life is like a book which has already been written? Suppose we are the anaphoras and similes and metaphors that this book has? What if we are the symbols? When you read a biography at the end you always notice a pattern a person had – a battle which repeated several times and if they were lucky they managed to conclude it before their death. Yet can someone which is living in this book discover these literary elements while living? I think you can, or like to hope I can.
When I was a eager sophomore in high school at the beginnings of my learning of computer science I was called down to the principle’s office. This would be the first of many times that I would be approached over the matter of how I use computers. The story is not very interesting, and rather silly yet a very important theme began at that point. At the end of the discussion about what I did the principle told me – “What you did is like having a gun in school and not using it.” That bothered me, I hate analogies when they attack me, but I moved on after a while. I never got in trouble and that was the last time I spoke with him.
Four years later though, the same thing has occurred. I have been approached by Facebook.com pertaining to a script which violates the terms and conditions which the site institutes. I admit, it’s not legal to use the script, but does it mean I can’t make it available? I have taken the script down for the moment to avoid too much fuss but I don’t think this is the end. This is just the beginning. Is it illegal to make a gun and not use it? Is it illegal to be strong and not punch someone? Is it illegal to know and not use the knowledge. I choose to defy their opinion not because I disagree with why they dislike my script (because I’ll admit I would do the same thing if I worked for them) but because it feels like a possible learning opportunity. A chance to perhaps, just maybe, place a conclusion to a battle that could perhaps repeat several more times more in my lifetime.
So let’s see, we have half a dozen picture sites (ex. Flickr), a half a dozen blog sites (ex. Blogger), half a dozen social network sites (ex. Facebook) and just about everyone has a different collection of sites that they use. Some use Xanga and Facebook, some use Flickr and Blogger, some just like LiveJournal and mySpace. Its such a mess. I think there is a high demand for a portal of sorts which can tie all of these services together into one. Even go as far as tying all of the APIs that are out there into one application.
Imagine: you log in and you see your friends from all the sites that you have accounts in like Flickr, Blogger, Facebook, and mySpace. Then you request more information about a person and you get a meshup version of their profile based on all the services which they use (and you have access to as well). You can then continue to request more information such as calling up googleMaps and so on.
Considering the abundance of information which is out there, if a service could consolidate all of this information in a slick way, it would make heads spin. This would be the holy grail of web 2.0. Its even worth leaving school and working just on this for a semester, perhaps this is the new pot of gold waiting to be discovered.
I have been pondering the possibility of creating a distributed and collaborative system to detect plagiarism in assignments submitted by students in universities. No one can really trust the effectiveness of automated systems such as turnitin.com for as reliable as it is: its far from a perfect system. The lack of trust in automated systems results in graders having to manually ‘double-check’ the results to be sure that the results are reliable. What I propose is a collaborative plagiarism detection system where assignments are checked twice: once by a computer thereby eliminating clear insistences of lack of plagiarism and a second check made collaboratively by those who use such system.
The system will work by allowing graders to check as many sets of assignments as they wish(thought by the automated part of the system to be potentially plagiarized) and decided if it is plagiarized in their opinion or not. The key here however is that the sets shown to the grader should be no longer than a few lines long, this will eliminate bias based on content surrounding the scene of the potential crime. The effectiveness of this will be based on participation. The more graders that exist and the more sets that are evaluated the more effective it will be. Due to the short nature of each set it should take a very short moment for one to evaluate it and therefor creating a fast speedy system for identifying cheaters.
There are 3 types of people who I horribly dislike and annoy me to the end of the earth in my computer science class.
- The Whiny They complaint about the silliest things. You know, if you just do it right maybe you would get more points. This is a science, meaning: EXACT. No, your answer which is slight inexact does not cut it it buddy!
- The Cheater These make me furious. If you are a senior and still cheat and have no clue what is going on in the class its probably a hint that you do not deserve the diploma. I really wonder what they will do in life. They probably think computer science means automatic income. Sorry buddy, that ended in 2000.
- The Kiss Up Sorry, no one cares if you know or ask stupid questions. Who computer science was discussion oriented? Buddy, leave kissing up with your pre-school teacher.