Supersonic Feet

Reading about Thomas Baekdal's cool new home office setup, one of the comments pointed to a cool app that lets you share your mouse and keyboard with other computers (Windows, Mac and Linux) called Synergy. You basically run a server on the computer that has the mouse and keyboard you want to share, then a client on the other computer(s) and it's then as simple as moving your mouse off the edge of one screen and onto another.

I'd seen apps doing this just for Macs, but I have a Windows PC and an iMac, so this is great!

No more do I have to use the crappy Mighty Mouse or Mac keyboard (I know it has its fans, but it's FAR too small for my liking). I was getting ready to order an extra Logitech MX Revolution and MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 for use on the Mac so as long as Synergy doesn't fail me I've just saved myself a bunch of money.

Only thing I've noticed so far is that it tends to hang briefly every minute or two on the Mac (client), then catches up. Hopefully there's a bit of config somewhere to help iron this out as that could get annoying.

EDIT: Forgot to mention: it also lets you copy & paste between machines too. Very nifty!

The entire bragster team is off to Austin, TX in early March for the South by Southwest Interactive festival. Should be fun!

The official Rails blog has the announcement that Rails 2.0 is done and great news that is too. Now I just need to find the time to eventually catch up on all the changes and start playing with it!

Brian Oberkirch has been on a bit of a blitz of great posts about social networking today (and I'm not just saying that because he picked up on bragster supporting hCard import yesterday).

The one that I really liked is from "simple to obvious", in which Brian has a go at the propensity people have for assuming a 'regular user' exists and can/should be catered to. You should read the whole post for the detail, but the bit that got me at the end was this:

I think we?ve made a fetish of 'simple' software... Simplicity is not a value in & of itself. It's a condition of usability within a given context. Maybe we should start trying to make 'obvious' software instead. What's obvious to someone may not be obvious to another.

This is a really good point. There's a clear danger of just designing 'simple' interfaces and interactions where what we really want is something that's obvious to the user. It may be that a successfull task is not a 'simple' thing to complete, but if it's always obvious what you need to do next, success becomes more likely. As Steve Krug would say, "Don't make me think!"

While you're at Brian's site, be sure to read "What PR people should know about social media".

Having mentioned I wanted to implement proper hCard support on bragster.com, the opportunity arose much sooner than expected.

Having played with the mofo Ruby gem over a weekend, it became obvious we could implement not just hCards on our profiles (which is a very quick thing to do), but that we could follow Satisfaction's lead in letting people import their hCard-supporting profiles when they sign up at bragster. So we did.

We just deployed the code to our live site this morning, so new users on bragster can now click the logo of the site they have a profile on already (places like flickr, twitter, last.fm), or the microformats logo to enter the full URL to any page that has their hCard on it, and it'll pre-fill the sign-up form with as much data as we can use. Depending on the profile you're importing and how much of it you filled out, it can pre-fill your username, first and last names, and which country you're from.

This will hopefully be a first step and we can later add more features like subscribing to your hCard to get auto-updates to your profile; finding which of your friends are already on the site via XFN and more. Along with stuff like OAuth, hopefully we'll be able to move away from asking for users' passwords for other services (e.g. Gmail) just to help them move their data with them.