Speaking of the Mouse Wheel...
A brief addendum to my last post about zoomable interfaces… Did you know that the mouse wheel was originally intended to be used to zoom in and out of large Excel spreadsheets? Pretty cool.
Zoom Zoom
Lukas Mathis linked to this video of a mod tool Chris Taylor’s Gas Powered Games is working on for their (now canceled) Wildman Kickstarter campaign.
Coincidentally, I installed Supreme Commander just last weekend to give it another go, so the zoom-happy interface looked familiar. Indeed, Taylor and GPG are the same folks behind Supreme Commander, so it’s not a big surprise this made it into areas beyond the game.
I’m not a huge fan of it, though, which may mark the first time I’ve disagreed with Mathis in a very long time. Obviously I haven’t used the mod tool, but in Supreme Commander the zooming in and out to navigate the battlefield gets very tiring. In the context of the game, you need to move around the field a lot, so zooming out, then zooming back in on the area you want to focus on is much slower than a minimap that you can click on to navigate around. If such a thing exists in the game, I couldn’t find it. Not that I looked that hard, though… Something was really busted with the audio, and the game is old enough that finding the patches is hard. Oh well.
Anyway, back to the mod tool… There’s certainly a lot of interesting stuff there, but I remain skeptical of zoom being the only means of macro-level navigation. Unlike the game, though, perhaps moving around the field rapidly is something that you do less often in such a tool. If that’s true, then zooming might be quite nice. My objection is certainly not to the concept as a whole, but rather to it as sole means of navigating, and the fact that today, the primary means we have of performing such an action is with the mouse wheel. Even when scrolling web pages or documents the mouse wheel gets tiring, but at least there we have the scroll bar1.
So I’m skeptical, but intrigued. Intrigued is good. Let’s see where it goes.
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I often miss the scroll bar when using an iOS device. While the ‘scroll to top by tapping the top edge of the screen’ is pretty universal these days, there’s no analagous shortcut for jumping to the bottom. Seems like I need that all the time. Maybe I’m weird. ↩︎
Small Dog Ambassadorship
I didn’t always consider myself a “dog person.” In fact, until a few years ago, if you’d asked me, I would have told you that cats were more my style. Self-sufficient, independent, stand-offish – these were qualities that I thought I admired in cats.
Three or so years ago, though, after much discussion, Elizabeth and I got our first dog, a Chihuahua named Cody. And it didn’t take long for me to become a full-blown dog person, and now I’ve taken to calling myself a small dog ambassador.
If you do consider yourself a dog person, then you probably have some preconceived notions about small breeds. “They’re really finicky; they bark a lot.” “They’re always poorly behaved.” “They’re less intelligent than other breeds.”
While all of these things can be true, they can be true of all dog breeds (and, like people, there’s a lot of variation between individual dogs even within a breed!), and chances are you simply haven’t had a chance to really interact with small breeds that much. Elizabeth and I have been blown away by the number of times we’ve had friends or family meet our dogs (both Chihuahuas) and say, “I never really liked small dogs, but your dogs are really awesome!” We are not some crazy-skilled dog whisperers or something. Rather, there are two fundamental things that we keep in mind when we’re relating to our dogs.
Read more →Base64 Encoded SHA256 Hashes
File this away in your “might come in handy some day” drawer… Here’s a quick PowerShell script to calculate the Base64 SHA256 hash of a file:
param(
[Parameter(Mandatory=$True,
ValueFromPipeline=$True)]
$filePath
)
$hasher = [System.Security.Cryptography.SHA256]::Create()
$content = Get-Content -Encoding byte $filePath
$hash = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($hasher.ComputeHash($content))
Write-Output ($filePath.ToString() + ": " + $hash)
You can pipe every file in a directory to this script like this:
ls -File |% {.\Get-FileHash.ps1 $_}
Principles and Taste
Came across this solid advice from Thomas Jefferson recently:
In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.