Posted on

Dear Google …

Generally speaking, I actually quite like the new layouts you’ve been rolling out.  I do have one problem with it though, and yes, it’s the whitespace.  It’s not the quantity of whitespace that I have issues with, mind you.  It’s the placement.  Putting whitespace around something draws my attention to it.  Putting whitespace within that something makes me go cross-eyed.

Let me put it this way:  In gmail, please give us a “super compact” option!

Posted on

Wanted: CTRL-TAB in my browser to work as ALT-TAB does in windows

Hey, Google, Microsoft and multitudinous Firefox geeks!

At the moment, both Chrome and Firefox have the same functionality on this:

  • CTRL-TAB cycles through your tabs in the order that you’ve got them physically arranged
  • CTRL-PGUP/PGDN also does this, although obviously CTRL-PGUP goes in the opposite direction

In Internet Explorer, CTRL-TAB works the same as in Chrome and Firefox, but they don’t have the CTRL-PGUP/PGDN functionality.

I don’t know how Safari or Opera work.

I want CTRL-TAB to work in my browser like ALT-TAB does in Windows and APPLESYMBOL-TAB does on a Mac:  The order in which it cycles through them should be the order in which I last viewed them, not the order in which I opened them.  If possible, like the operating system versions, it should also show small images of each tab as I cycle through them.

That is all.

Posted on

Wanted: A measure of semantic correlation

“The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” and “There is a dog and a fox.  The fox, which is brown, jumps over the dog, which is lazy.  The fox is quick.” should give a value of 1.

“The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” and “There is a dog and a fox.  The fox, which is brown, jumps over the dog, which is lazy.  The fox is fast.” should give a value of 0.999.

Yes, I know that it’s complicated; but it’s not impossible.  Google clearly does something similar when grouping stories together for news.google.com.

Then I want to have all news stories automatically compared to corporate press releases.  I want my webpage to show me the press release on one side and the news article on the other.  I want the news article to be shaded with two different colours; one colour for sections that are possibly reworded, but ultimately just taken from the press release and one colour for sections that represent actual work done by the reporter.