Monthly Archives: April 2009

First draft of my thesis, done! Kinda.

So as many of you know, I’ve been trying to get my Master’s thesis done soon so I can graduate this May.  Today I reached a bit of a milestone:  the first draft.   It’s not all I want it to be: it’s still missing a few figures, mostly screenshots to explain what’s going on.  That’s

Broken Alt-Tab and Web Applications

One thing that has recently become a problem for me is the loss of usefulness of Alt-Tab. For those of you who don’t know, Alt-Tab in the Windows world and beyond is the shortcut to quickly switch your active application. But what happens when I can’t switch to my active applications, because they’re buried in my web browser? This effect will become more pronounced as more and more applications that we use daily sneak into the web browser – unless we launch everything from Silverlight or Gears shortcuts on the desktop. That is not the case, since I’m much more likely to get to Google Calendar by clicking an Add this GCal link, than I am to launch it from my desktop.