Apple Data Detectors (was: Re: Address Book utilities)

On or about 4/28/07 5:19 PM, thus spake "Jochen Wolters"
<jochenpolytropia.com>:

>> an exceptionally cool Apple-supplied utility called ADD (Apple Data
>> Detector)
>
> For those who haven't seen it yet, here's an older (and rather long)
> article that addresses (sorry, bad pun...) ADD:
>
> <http://www.miramontes.com/writing/livedoc/index.html>
>
>
> Like many cool Apple technologies, ADD was developed by the Advanced
> Technology Group, which, unfortunately, was disbanded in 1997. This
> is one of the things I sorely miss from the earlier Apple days: a
> more publicly visible research group within Apple -- visible both in
> terms of its very existence and in terms of products. Unfortunately,
> Jobs's insanely great secrecy is in the way of that wish, I guess.

What's in the way of that wish is a very reasonable desire that Apple should
not heedlessly hemorrhage money. The Advanced Technology Group was a massive
drain on Apple's resources, and produced only a series of red herrings and
dead ends. I am no Steve Jobs fan, but you've only to compare Apple's
financials in 1996 to those released last week to see why Advanced
Technology had to go away. Insanely great secrecy had nothing to do with it.

m.

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Matt Neuburg wrote:
> On or about 4/28/07 5:19 PM, thus spake "Jochen Wolters"
> <jochenpolytropia.com>:
>
>>> an exceptionally cool Apple-supplied utility called ADD (Apple Data
>>> Detector)
>> For those who haven't seen it yet, here's an older (and rather long)
>> article that addresses (sorry, bad pun...) ADD:
>> <http://www.miramontes.com/writing/livedoc/index.html>
>>
>>
>> Like many cool Apple technologies, ADD was developed by the Advanced
>> Technology Group, which, unfortunately, was disbanded in 1997. This
>> is one of the things I sorely miss from the earlier Apple days: a
>> more publicly visible research group within Apple -- visible both in
>> terms of its very existence and in terms of products. Unfortunately,
>> Jobs's insanely great secrecy is in the way of that wish, I guess.
>
> What's in the way of that wish is a very reasonable desire that Apple should
> not heedlessly hemorrhage money. The Advanced Technology Group was a massive
> drain on Apple's resources, and produced only a series of red herrings and
> dead ends. I am no Steve Jobs fan, but you've only to compare Apple's
> financials in 1996 to those released last week to see why Advanced
> Technology had to go away. Insanely great secrecy had nothing to do with it.
>
On top of that folks and the "Mac Press" would go on and on whining
about things they'd seen from Apple never making it into releases. Any
serious developer knows that it is a long way from a technology to a
product.

David Ross

On Apr 29, 2007, at 08:18 AM, Matt Neuburg wrote:

> What's in the way of that wish is a very reasonable desire that
> Apple should not heedlessly hemorrhage money. The Advanced
> Technology Group was a massive drain on Apple's resources, and
> produced only a series of red herrings and dead ends.

Well, as I recall, QuickTime came from ATG, so that's one point for 'em.

--
Chris Page - Retrospective Electrical Engineer

  Never attach a 12V/1A power supply to a 3V/5mA chip;
  that releases the magic smoke that makes it go.

On 28-Apr-2007, at 18:19, Jochen Wolters wrote:
> Like many cool Apple technologies, ADD was developed by the Advanced
> Technology Group, which, unfortunately, was disbanded in 1997.

I really miss the Apple Data Detector technology as well. I also
miss IceCoFfEe (yes, I know this was ported to OS X, but it was
ported as an aped module, and I will not run APE on any machine, so
it's dead to me).

I'm wondering if there will be anything in Leopard to replace the
various functions that the Input Managers have taken on (like
PithHelmet especially) or it all that customization is simply going
to go away.

On 4/29/07 13:01, "David Ross" <drdavidrossconsultant.com> wrote:

>>> Like many cool Apple technologies, ADD was developed by the Advanced
>>> Technology Group, which, unfortunately, was disbanded in 1997. This
>>> is one of the things I sorely miss from the earlier Apple days: a
>>> more publicly visible research group within Apple -- visible both in
>>> terms of its very existence and in terms of products. Unfortunately,
>>> Jobs's insanely great secrecy is in the way of that wish, I guess.
>>
>> What's in the way of that wish is a very reasonable desire that Apple should
>> not heedlessly hemorrhage money. The Advanced Technology Group was a massive
>> drain on Apple's resources, and produced only a series of red herrings and
>> dead ends. I am no Steve Jobs fan, but you've only to compare Apple's
>> financials in 1996 to those released last week to see why Advanced
>> Technology had to go away. Insanely great secrecy had nothing to do with it.
>>
> On top of that folks and the "Mac Press" would go on and on whining
> about things they'd seen from Apple never making it into releases. Any
> serious developer knows that it is a long way from a technology to a
> product.

To bring this around to ADD's, Services gives you pretty much most of what
ADD's ever did, just not in a contextual menu.

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

> The Advanced Technology Group was a massive drain on Apple's
> resources, and produced only a series of red herrings and dead ends.

Like AppleEvents, AppleScript, and QuickTime?

<http://acm.org/sigchi/bulletin/1998.2/miller1.html>


> Insanely great secrecy had nothing to do with it.

Note that I didn't say that secrecy was the cause for shutting down
the ATG. With Jobs being a product person, though, that secrecy is in
the way of creating a successor to the ATG if that successor was as
open about its research as the ATG was.


Regards,

Jochen.


--
Jochen Wolters
jochenpolytropia.com | http://polytropia.com | jochenwolters (Skype)

John Welch wrote:

To bring this around to ADD's, Services gives you pretty much most of what ADD's ever did, just not in a contextual menu.

If ever I were going to find a group of people who actually use Services, this is probably it -- who uses any regularly, which ones, etc?

My perception is that no one much uses them, but maybe that's colored by the fact that similar things like Dashboard Widgets are much easier to find and install -- or maybe that's part of the problem.

I know I've never caught on to 'em, and I'm generally an early adopter of shortcut kinds of things.

> To bring this around to ADD's, Services gives you pretty much most
> of what ADD's ever did, just not in a contextual menu.

The beauty of ADD is that they automatically extract the required
information, so the user doesn't have to. As an example:

"Call me at +1-916-555-1624, or send me an email to
someguysomebiz.com."

With ADD, just select the whole text and have ADD automatically
extract the phone number and the email address, and offer appropriate
actions for each in a contextual menu. You get immediate feedback on
what the ADD have found, and what you can do with that information.
Viz (Figure 1):

<http://www.miramontes.com/writing/livedoc/index.html>

Contrast that with services: they work just fine if you, the user, do
the extraction bit -- say "Skype -> Add Contact" on a selected phone
number. However, use a service on a text selection that it doesn't
know how to interpret, and you get -- nothing. The service silently
fails, and you don't even get feedback that it has failed, let alone
why. Definitely quite a "different" user experience compared to ADDs.

Let's put it this way: Services vs. ADD is like "good enough" vs.
"let's make this better, way better." ;)


Regards,

Jochen.


--
Jochen Wolters
jochenpolytropia.com | http://polytropia.com | jochenwolters (Skype)

On 5/1/2007 11:13 AM, "joe011" wrote:
> If ever I were going to find a group of people who actually use Services, this
> is probably it -- who uses any regularly, which ones, etc?
>
> My perception is that no one much uses them, but maybe that's colored by the
> fact that similar things like Dashboard Widgets are much easier to find and
> install -- or maybe that's part of the problem.

I use them fairly regularly. The one I use the most is WordService, which
gives you a *bunch* of options for formatting and converting text:

<http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/services.html>


I also use TinyURL Service:

<http://www.riverdark.net/board/index.php?showtopic=344>


And, of course, anyone who uses Services should get Service Scrubber to
manage the Services submenu:

<http://www.petermaurer.de/servicescrubber>

On 1-May-2007, at 12:13, joe011 wrote:
> If ever I were going to find a group of people who actually use
> Services, this is probably it -- who uses any regularly, which
> ones, etc?

If they where in the contextual menu, I would use them MUCH MUCH more
than I do. as it is, the only ones I use with any regularity are
Mail => Send Selection and Speech => Start Speaking text, and even
so, I use them rarely.

I used to use calc services, but I've put my life around Launchbar so
much that I tend to use it to google formulas.

--
The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.

On May 1, 2007, at 11:13 AM, joe011 wrote:

> If ever I were going to find a group of people who actually use
> Services, this is probably it -- who uses any regularly, which
> ones, etc?
>
> My perception is that no one much uses them,

I think that their use or disuse has to do with the user knowing
about this feature (no one talks much about services), and having
something of value to use this feature for.

For example, WordService , all by itself, makes the services feature
quite useful for me:

WordService (free)
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/services.html

WordService provides 34 functions to convert, format, or speak the
currently selected text, as well as insert data or show statistics of
the selection.
Features:
Reformat, Remove line attachments/endings/links/multiple spaces/
multiple feeds/quotes, Trim line beginnings/line endings/lines, Sort
lines ascending/descending, Shift left/right, Initial caps of words/
sentences, All caps and lowercase, Mac/Windows/Unix line endings,
Rotate 13, Straight/Smart Quotes, Encode/Decode tabs, Insert date/
date and time/time/contents of path, Speak native/German text,
Statistics. And more!

___________________________________________
Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
___________________________________________

At 11:13 on 01-05-2007, joe011 wrote:
> If ever I were going to find a group of people who actually use
> Services, this is probably it -- who uses any regularly, which
> ones, etc?

Though I've tried, I have never really been able to get into
Services. I think it is largely down to two things.

  1. Out of the way and requires quite a bit of mousing to activate.

  2. Not configurable, so: I have to navigate through a large number
of services I have no interest in; the keyboard shortcuts are
essentially random (to me) because I haven't set them so I don't
remember what they are.

In the end, I just tend not to remember what is available with my services.

_________________
=> Jolin

On 5/2/2007 3:54 PM, "Jolin M Warren" wrote:
> 2. Not configurable, so: I have to navigate through a large number
> of services I have no interest in; the keyboard shortcuts are
> essentially random (to me) because I haven't set them so I don't
> remember what they are.

I mentioned this in a previous message, but it bears repeating: Check out
Service Scrubber, which not only lets you configure which services appear,
but also lets you customize each service's keyboard shortcut.

<http://www.manytricks.com/servicescrubber/>

On May 2, 2007, at 11:58 AM, Dan Frakes wrote:
>
> I use them fairly regularly. The one I use the most is WordService,
> which
> gives you a *bunch* of options for formatting and converting text:

My favorite is TextSoap by Unmarked Software. I am always using it in
Mail.app.

On May 1, 2007, at 1:13 PM, joe011 wrote:
> If ever I were going to find a group of people who actually use
> Services, this is probably it -- who uses any regularly, which
> ones, etc?
>
> My perception is that no one much uses them, but maybe that's
> colored by the fact that similar things like Dashboard Widgets are
> much easier to find and install -- or maybe that's part of the
> problem.
>
> I know I've never caught on to 'em, and I'm generally an early
> adopter of shortcut kinds of things.

I use CalcService pretty regularly, particularly when tweaking CSS.
--
Lorin Rivers
2406 Pruett St
Austin, TX 78703
512/478.8114

At 22:33 on 02-05-2007, Dan Frakes wrote:
> On 5/2/2007 3:54 PM, "Jolin M Warren" wrote:
>> 2. Not configurable, so: I have to navigate through a large number
>> of services I have no interest in; the keyboard shortcuts are
>> essentially random (to me) because I haven't set them so I don't
>> remember what they are.
>
> I mentioned this in a previous message, but it bears repeating: Check out
> Service Scrubber

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I have tried Service Scrubber (or
something similar) in the past, and it worked fine. I just find that
the way Services work is a bit unwieldy/time consuming. I have to go
through dozens of Services and configure them. Then I have to run
Service Scrubber every time I try out a new app, or at least every
couple of months or so.

I would prefer a system where I explicitly install new Services. That
way they would remain manageable without continuing attention. Hence,
contextual menus tend to be more useful for me. Additionally,
contextual menus address my first complaint, in that they are much
quicker to activate and less out of the way.

_________________
=> Jolin

I just checked and I have access to the services menu via contextual menus, but I am not sure how I enabled it. ???

On 5/9/2007 11:30 AM, "Michael Logue" wrote:
> I just checked and I have access to the services menu via contextual menus,
> but I am not sure how I enabled it. ???

Most likely via ICeCoffEE:

<http://web.sabi.net/nriley/software/>