Archive for August, 2008

The 2008 US box office visualised

A nice week-by-week visualisation of the US box office takings throughout 2008. It gives you a good sense of how quickly many films drop off the radar, and also of the size of the gap between successful movies and (comparative) flops.

http://www.xach.com/moviecharts/2008.html

As you scroll along to the right, for example, you’ll find yourself thinking that Iron Man looks pretty impressive. Then you’ll get to The Dark Knight…

links for 2008-08-29

  • I agree with Stan Schroeder (writing for Mashable) here, the idea of a Facebook movie made me check that it wasn't April 1st when I saw it on the BBC site earlier today. It's particularly stupid that the person apparently tasked with writing it openly admits to knowing nothing about it.

links for 2008-08-28

RocketDock – Close but no cigar

RocketDock is a nice idea. Billed as a “peace offering” from the Mac community to Windows users, it’s a recreation of the OS X dock – the customisable ribbon of icons allowing quick access to files, folders, applications and URLs.

Rocketdock screenshot

I’ve just installed it on my Windows XP machine and for the first five minutes or so I found myself warming to it. You might think it’s a needless duplication of the Quick Launch section of the Windows taskbar, but it’s not. There’s a lot of scope for customisation of icons and actions, and the ability to position it anywhere you’d like on the screen is a useful one.

However, once I’d removed most of the default icons and added several of my own, I encountered some strange behaviours. Dragging shortcuts to the dock, which had earlier on resulted in their appearing as icons, no longer worked. However, after a failed drag, a blank space appeared on the ribbon which did nothing and made the interface harder to use.

Mucking about with RocketDock’s settings, removing some more icons and even restarting the application didn’t help matters. It seems to have decided that the set of icons in there is definitive, and is no longer willing to countenance even the idea of change. Bit of a prima donna if you ask me. Fail!

links for 2008-08-27

links for 2008-08-26

links for 2008-08-25

links for 2008-08-23

links for 2008-08-20

links for 2008-08-19