Day: 26 January 2012

This is an interesting idea.

I’ve been a big fan of Quicksilver for a long time, and recently I have found myself more and more going to the Search feature of the MacOS Help menu as a shortcut to other menu options. It perfectly makes sense to me. [via Brent Simmons]

[HUD] It’s a way for you to express your intent and have the application respond appropriately. We think of it as “beyond interface”, it’s the “intenterface”. This concept of “intent-driven interface” has been a primary theme of our work in the Unity shell, with dash search as a first class experience pioneered in Unity. Now we are bringing the same vision to the application, in a way which is completely compatible with existing applications and menus.

For the last couple of months I have kept Safari, which is my main browser, logged off Facebook. When I want to check what’s going on there (there’s many people I care for on Facebook, mostly family), I switch to Chrome. This is actually not very different from switching to the Facebook app when I’m on my iPhone or iPad. The reason I do this is to prevent Facebook from tracking my web surfing (would be nice if they would expose who they think I am as Google does).

In this set up what I find annoying are web applications that rely exclusively on Facebook for some features. For example, I would like to look into Wavii but they only support Facebook log-in (it’s a beta). Or in the case of Pinterest, the only way to find friends is, again, connecting my Facebook account.

To use these other apps I just switch to Chrome and do whatever I need with them, it’s not very different from switching from a browser window to another, I have plenty of RAM and I always run several browser anyway. But the curious result is that Chrome is becoming the ghetto of FB-only apps.

Wonder where this will end…