I’ve only played with Google’s new Fast Flip newsreading feature for a few minutes, but I’ve already got one major problem with it: it’s hard to scan headlines. When you think about it, that’s something that reading a paper newspaper still lets you do — you open up a double-sided broadsheet and you’re scanning over probably 5 or 6 stories on the inside, depending on the number of advertisements. If you scan down the front page or the main page of a section, you can see the headlines for 8-10 stories. With Fast Flip, the “scanning” view is a bunch of screen caps of the articles you’re about to look at, with the headline in small print underneath. Scanning this list of screen caps isn’t that informative because the shrunken headlines are hard to read.

Contrast this with the front page of Google News or something like Techmeme or memeorandum and you’ll see what I mean.

Now I get that Fast Flip is designed for you to click into one of the streams of articles and then use the left/right arrows to page through it, but this causes me to “zoom in” conceptually and doesn’t really let me stand back and see all the headlines from a distance. So I can have the experience of “flipping” from page to page and not knowing in advance anything about what I’m going to see next (other than some basics of subject matter), or I can scan small headlines all at once. Doesn’t feel like the greatest compromise in the world.

For me, I’m still deciding if I like this or not. I’m a big fan of graphic design and I like that Fast Flip offers an opportunity for that to shine through earlier in the reading process than it can on something like Google News or Techmeme, but I’m not sure if that outweighs the benefit of being able to move fast through a large number of headlines.

As we all wait with bated breath for the latest announcement of awesome from Cupertino, I thought I’d mention something that I’d love to see Apple make: a “soft button” keypad for configurable hotkeys.

I spend most of my work day at the computer, either writing code or working in hotkey-heavy applications like Adobe Fireworks or OmniGraffle. I also tend to use hotkeys for closing windows, switching applications, creating new tabs in browsers and terminals, switching between windows, and (all the damn time) copy/paste. The result of all this hotkey action is that I get pain in my fingers, particularly my left index finger — the go-to digit for most of my hotkeying. Between that and the constant need to type almost as fast as I can, the pain can sometimes become nearly debilitating, causing me to have to stop using my computer for up to half a workday sometimes, which in turn costs me money.

As has been pointed out quite a bit, QWERTY sucks and is really just around because of design inertia. Keyboards don’t really seem designed to be used by human hands. As much as I love Apple’s recent innovation of the peripheral keyboard that feels like a laptop one, I still find myself with major hand fatigue at the end of the week.

If I could just set my hotkeys to be what and where I want them to be, I think I could solve a lot of this. I’m envisioning something that looks sort of like a square iPhone, sitting to the left of my keyboard and plugged in via USB. Spread across the screen of the device would be my hotkeys, customized in function and position, and changing automatically when the active application changes. Since the keys would be on a “soft” screen, I could position and size them how it made sense for my hands and my workflow. Since they could each have a custom function, I could reduce the claw-making, four-button combos I frequently have to pull off in my editor to just one tap of one button. This would make my hands happier. Happy hands, happy dev.

I know there are soft keyboards out there, but I’m not really looking for that. What I want would me more versatile — a “key palette” if you will. I could see this being only one of many possible uses for such a device.

Anyway… Apple, should you decide to make one, there’s no need to give me credit. Just send me a free one. My over-stretched left index finger will breathe a sigh of relief from inside its ice pack.

Some historical perspective

I’m not usually a huge fan of Joe Klein’s feelings about how this or that politician ought to act in this or that situation, but he’s definitely a savvy political observer. This article gives some great insight into the state that nihilism has left the Republican party in:

To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama’s plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush’s presidency has been obliterated. The party’s putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama’s political prospects. In 1993, when the Clintons tried health-care reform, the Republican John Chafee offered a creative (in fact, superior) alternative — which Kristol quashed with his famous "Don’t Help Clinton" fax to the troops. There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009. The same people who rail against a government takeover of health care tried to enforce a government takeover of Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life decisions. And when Palin floated the "death panel" canard, the number of prominent Republicans who rose up to call her out could be counted on one hand.

GOP as cult

Someone sent me this piece as well, by Independent (UK) columnist Johann Hari:

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanize the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed — with a straight face — that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

…

These claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors’ Daily claimed that if Steven Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn’t be here without the NHS." Frank Laffer, the right-wing economist lauded by David Cameron, claimed on CNN that it would be a disaster if the government got its hands on Medicare, the program providing healthcare for the elderly, paid for entirely by… the government.

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy-world isn’t new; it’s only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed, as one Republican congressman put it, that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and all the world’s climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

It’s fun to think of them as a cult, but the truth is a lot scarier: there’s no center to this — not even when Bush and Rove were pulling strings. These people freaking out are doing so as a result of ingesting tons and tons of multi-flavored nonsense for decades; political, religious, pseudo-relgio-ethical (I’m looking at you, Ayn Rand, and spitting on the floor), economic. It’s been a steady diet of denial and hate made credible by people who trade in statistics and nice-looking logos and websites and 24-7 cable opinionews. A poison pablum, as engineered for tastiness to the brain as a Big Mac is to the gullet, has turned the GOP faithful into a legion of zombies.

That can’t be good for American democracy.

If you’ve written Ruby, chances are you’ve had to use ruby-debug. You might’ve thought the experience sucked — especially the fact that the debugger defaults to a mode in which you have to use a keyword to get it to evaluate a statement. Lost? Here’s what I mean:

Say you start the debugger here:

Then you want to take a look at the “xml_obj” variable. If this were (for instance) Python’s pdb, we’d just type “xml_obj” and hit return and be done with it. Not so in ruby-debug:

This is because with default settings, the debugger needs a keyword (’p') to get it to actually evaluate your statement as Ruby and not a command to the debugger itself:

That gets really tedious, really fast. The debugger’s help function (’help p’) will helpfully tell you that this is because the “autoeval” option is not enabled. If you’re thick like me, you won’t see this and you’ll just continue doing “p <whatever>” until you get so frustrated you drop what you’re doing one day and go hunt down a fix.

Here is that fix from inside your code:

You can also do this inside the debugger:

Rails already does it via Rack middleware

You might be wondering why the debugging experience is different in Rails than in Ruby you’ve written elsewhere. I did too — remembering that this ‘p’ business isn’t necessary when I run the debugger as an option when I start up Mongrel in a Rails app. So I went digging for the code that Rails uses to set this stuff up. Those settings come from a piece of Rack middleware that lives in lib/rails/rack/debugger.rb. Here’s the class definition:

For more info on how Rails uses Rack, this is a pretty handy page from the Rails guides.

I realize that if you think the internet is like Hollywood, then Scoble is someone you’re supposed to hate. But don’t. IN FACT, back way the hell off and realize for a second that Scoble isn’t just someone to be parodied and mocked at the places @ SxSW where the techies do drugs. Scoble is a force to be celebrated. Scoble is a national treasure for writing like this :

When I heard the news I was walking through San Antonio’s Hard Rock Cafe looking at Kurt Cobain’s high school photograph. Wow. FriendFeed was purchased by Facebook.

I quickly wrote a DM to Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, co-founders and said “call me.” They did, and I got one of the first interviews.

This is poetry. It’s charmingly quotidian at the top (he talks about the Hard Rock Cafe like he’s at Buckingham, and he mentions Cobain’s picture because it’s some kind terrible whitebread muse-talisman to him), but then just after this “oh, me?” scene setting, Scoble is brief and devastating in his establishment of douchey dominance — explicit and unquestionable.

He is the man who will speak about this here internet thing AND tell you the dudes’ names AND tell you that he used to hang with them before this cool thing happened, BACK WHEN THAT OTHER cool thing happened or was happening.

He’ll show you wtf is going on in this world. We should wipe the snot from his camera for the chance to be here. Luckily he lets us listen in for free:

Basically they did not tell me much other than FriendFeed would keep on going on for the indefinite future.

Scoble, no worries. I wasn’t expecting real information and was just glad that you had the opportunity to write this gem. I stand here, in awe, clapping quietly in my dusty corner of the internet. Bra-fucking-vo.