Access Points for Everything: Part I…
By Non-Troppo. Sunday, 23. September 2007, 09:55:41
With Opera 7 came a great revolution hidden in an obscure place: dynamic search available through things called "access points" in M2. Once we brethren saw it, we knew it was good. The long-overdue assault on the folder had begun, and as in any war, there was (and still is) much resistance to change. Static folders are comforting, they do what they are told. I put A into B and it stays there. Unfortunately I can't put it into C without copying it, then if I want to edit it I have to do so in two places repetitively and so on. Folders are inefficient and inflexible. They are inferior. Access points can behave like folders, but do much much more. But to benefit from an access point, we need sufficient information to allow the access point the ability to store what we want.
So if we only have a title to a page, that says "Apples are great", we don't know from the title alone if that page belongs to a food category or a computer category. But if we can index the page content then that ambiguity is gone (hint: Kestrel does it now).
So when I saw this patent:
Apple Patent Hints at Future Navigational Interface
I saw there a technology I've been using for years applied to page history; access points. Sorting things in piles dynamically based on categories is what access points do. Indeed, I can do that manually now in Kestrel by using opera:historysearch?q=MY_TOPIC saved as a bookmark, but I want an interface to store my access points more elegantly than that. And I want a "Top 10" for word frequency for my page history. That makes Apple's patent trivial.
So if we only have a title to a page, that says "Apples are great", we don't know from the title alone if that page belongs to a food category or a computer category. But if we can index the page content then that ambiguity is gone (hint: Kestrel does it now).
So when I saw this patent:
Apple Patent Hints at Future Navigational Interface
I saw there a technology I've been using for years applied to page history; access points. Sorting things in piles dynamically based on categories is what access points do. Indeed, I can do that manually now in Kestrel by using opera:historysearch?q=MY_TOPIC saved as a bookmark, but I want an interface to store my access points more elegantly than that. And I want a "Top 10" for word frequency for my page history. That makes Apple's patent trivial.
WIDGETIZE