I made the switch to MacOS several months ago. I am now an experienced Mac user.

Here are my favorite applications:

• TextWrangler. It is a free text editor that has pretty much everything you could dream off except for some nifty things like autocompletion. There is a commercial version called BBedit, but I do not know how well it supports LaTeX (autocompletion?).
• Firefox. Enough said. Try the GrApple theme for a more integrated look and feel.
• The basic Apple applications are good enough: iTunes, Preview, Terminal, and so on. I found some of the replacements, like iTerm, to be more complicated. For example, iTerm maps the arrow keys in such a way that vi will no longer work. They are even quite open about the fact that they hacked the keyboard mapping. I can’t have that! Leave my keyboard alone! I simply regret that Preview will not automatically reload a PDF file that has changed on disk.
• When in a bash shell, the open command is really very useful. Generally, you can do pretty much everything using a remote ssh shell under MacOS: mount drives, install software, and so on. I know because I do it. All the time.
• Fink is good but do not bother trying to get X11 working unless you really need to. You can get XFig and gnuplot to work though.
• NeoOffice is good. It is a good replacement for the Microsoft Office that I will not buy. However, getting MacOS to open doc files with NeoOffice is not so obvious (hint: you have to right-click on a file, then click on Get Info).
• Eclipse works well.

I was chatting with a friend from NRC-CISTI this morning. He said he was not very keen on tag clouds. (If you do not know what a tag cloud is, follow the link!)

I must admit that I rarely use tag clouds. This is usually a bad sign in IT: if you are not using a new gadget, maybe nobody is. A good example are PDAs. I once belonged to a lab. where everyone owned an expensive PDA. Nobody used them. PDAs have since gone out of fashion. I must be the only PDA user left in Montreal. Ontologies are another such example: some labs are producing ontologies, but I do not know anyone actually using ontologies for real work.

But I think that several people are, indeed, using tag clouds and that they will stick around. And yes, I have an argument coming later.

Let us review what tag clouds can do for you:

• provide an intuitive, easy-to-use, bird eye’s view;
• support, intuitively, user interaction through hyperlinks.

Finally, they are easy to draw and easy to implement (using current HTML technology).

Here is a challenge for you: name one thing that can compete with tag clouds other than a list of items?

The reason I think tag clouds will stick around is that Amazon started using them on their site and, while Amazon is often wrong, they have had good luck whenever they picked up a new idea. When I log into my own Amazon page seeking my recommendations, Amazon throws a tag cloud at me. Why? Because instead of providing a nearly useless list of recommended items, they figured out that it is better to give a tag cloud so I can select what type of recommendation I want. Now, that’s smart! Right now, I have Mathematics and High Tech as large bold tags, and then Probability and Statistics or Software Design as smaller weaker tags, and then a bunch of lesser tags. I rarely buy books about Mathematics, so Amazon has gotten by personalized tag cloud wrong, except that I really enjoy having my recommendations presented at me this way. They try to direct me to the type of recommendations they think I want, yet they allow me to have a complete picture.

In effect, on the Web, other than the list, the tag cloud is the only navigation tool that works for me. Some have been trying to sell us 3D for some time, but I think we just finally got 2D right with the tag cloud. (Text is, arguably, 1D.)

Why did it take so long? Mostly, I think, because tag clouds in print are not common. Web design was initially built by analogy of GUI software and the printed media. That is why we have bullet points, tabs, buttons, text boxes, and so on.

Question: why aren’t there tag clouds on the front page of my blog?

Answer: just wait.