Category: General

Ori Folger (someone reads my blog! hi!) prefers XNView (“another excellent, free graphics tool“) to Irfanview. It looks good. He also notes that Opera has had the feature I noticed in Mozilla yesterday “for a while now”. I can’t see it in Opera 5, maybe it’s in Opera 6. Opera 5 does have a “search with google” panel at the top of each window frame, which is nearly as convenient and more flexible (in Mozilla, you’ve got that in the location bar).

The most beautiful feature I saw in Opera was the presentation mode. “Beautiful” here means elegant, simple and cool: it let’s you define a presentation (like Powerpoint) by setting style rules that Opera applies while in full-screen mode. This lets you write a whole set of “slides” in HTML in a single document, and keep the lecture notes and the slides together. Folger says “Open Source is imitative, rather than innovative”; this is one feature that I’d like to see Mozilla imitate.

I just discovered a cool feature in Mozilla:

Notice that there’s an entry in the context menu to search Google for the highlighted word; that’s my favorite bookmarklet slotted directly into the browser.

Mozilla rocks.

I spent a chunk of the weekend reading GNS AND OTHER MATTERS OF ROLE-PLAYING THEORY by Ron Edwards, a big article that tries to analyze both game design and player satisfaction in terms of GNS (Gamist/Narrativist/Simulationist) goals and attitudes. Lots of fascinating roleplaying terminology.

An easier introduction to GNS as Edwards sees it can be found here.