777 times lovelier than I'd ever seen
January 2004
January 15, 2004
LaunchBar
LaunchBar is a devestatingly simple program to describe: press command-space, and a dropdown menu appears. Type the first few letters -- generally two -- of the name of the application, hit return, and it launches the program. It's sort of like tab completion for the Mac, only it works better than tab completion in any shell I've regularly used. Like Simson Garfinkel's wonderful SBook5, Launchbar seems to have been designed to just do what the user thinks it should do, in almost all cases. OS X's directory structural is rather rigorously defined (as are most Unix boxes), so the first time you use it, LaunchBar has a guess about where your documents are and indexes them. It knows your bookmarks. It pulls your most recent selections to the top, out of alphabetical order. You can drag and drop files onto the menu, so I could type easily switch to using a piece of source code in BBEdit instead of XCode, or vice versa. You can keep hitting space to scroll through all open applications. Etcetera, etcetera. Except for adding my Projects directory to LaunchBar's index list, I haven't touched the preference. It just works. And it's a godsend -- Apple's keyboard navigation support is notoriously bad, and I've hunted and hunted for decent replacements for the Dock. This is it. If you're running OS X, try it; I think it'll entirely change the way you interact with everyday tasks on your computer.
January 6, 2004
The Book of Leviathan
The Book of Leviathan seems to be a collection of Sunday newspaper strips from England's The Independent. The author, Peter Blegvad, has a website, is a New Yorker, and has performed with the Golden Palominos. I know these things from the back cover of The Book of Leviathan, and that's pretty much all I know about the strip or its creator, but now I need to find out more. This is really, really good -- the best way I can describe it is Zippy the Pinhead if Zippy the Pinhead were actually funny instead of just odd. Blegvad the same willingness to stretch for a groan-out-loud pun (he makes a "bear arms/arm bears" joke, for instance), but where I think that the Doggie Diner is the best part of Zippy, I find this stuff both sweet and funny. The stories are about little Levi, a faceless baby made of aboout a dozen lines. His cat talks to him, the voice of tolerant adult cynicism. There's a family, Mama and Papa and sister Becky, who show up in some of the strips. (The book opens brilliantly, with the cat serving as Levi's guide to the hunting lodge of the dead to bring Mama and Papa back to him, Orpheus-style; I wasn't at all sure where it was going, what sort of thing to expect. It was a brilliant choice on the editor's part; the strips are generally funnier and less narratively cohesive in the rest of the book, but I was hooked.) Blegvad is an artistic mimic; I caught references to Little Nemo, Pogo, and what seemed to be Gorey and Addams riffs. The strips wobble between Duchampian surrealism and a Krazy Kat air of English gone wonky. In one strip the Godlike hand of the author, straight from a Daffy Duck cartoon, compares Levi to Henry announces that Leviathan is "the FRUIT of an UNHOLY UNION between [Dick Tracy's] "NOTHING YONSON" and J.W. Anglund's larval minx." A number of the strips are available on Blegvad's site; check them out. If this is the sort of thing you like, I guarantee you'll like this.