Humanized Enzo

[nontroppo]

Darwin: 

I recommend that you do spend a little time and watch their trailer and screencast demos to see where they are coming from. Thay are actually doing stuff that is different to Quicksilver in the sense that selections are a more central part of their core functionality - Quicksilver does have a clipboard plugin however.

In their main trailer - they hint at what the future holds and it seems pretty impressive, plugin expandability to work to modify any selected graphics etc.

mouser: Yes, FARR 3 'Verbs' should get their own thread! I don't think modifier keywords can do what needs to be done effectively IMO.

[Darwin]

Thanks nontroppo - I'm off to watch the trailers now (I didn't make it past the first one last time  )

[Darwin]

Well... I've watched, read, learned and I liked what I saw. I've downloaded, played and am less enthusiastic. First, holding down THE KEY THAT SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS while typing a command is a royal pain in the rear, though I would probably get used to it (my left pinky is actually SORE). Second, I'm on Win XP Pro Sp-2 (fully patched) and I can't go anywhere near the system tray icon with the mouse without Enso crashing. I've submitted a bug report. Now, this business about typing a natural language-esque command IS compelling BUT after using both ActiveWords and DirectAccess it's a bit of step backward. I mean, all I need to do to launch notepad under either launcher is type my command and hit my trigger and it opens. I don't have to hold down THE KEY THAT SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS while I type out a sentence. I understand that this makes Enso much more simple to use, from the perspective that one does not need to remember hundreds of word commands, but I find it very awkward. Maybe if I could assign an alternative trigger key I would find it less annoying. Finally, resource use is rather excessive. My prediction about Enso having only THE KEY THAT SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS to monitor resulting in reduced memory usage was wrong, very wrong. Out of the box and before I had even used it, it was at just under 50 MB RAM consumption (32 MB VM) which is where both AW and DA are after a lot of usage. After the last crash it's restarted itself and I've not even invoked the trigger and it's sitting at 38 MB VM. AW, in comparison, also spell checks everything that I type on the fly and it's footprint is about the same AFTER I've been using it for a few hours. To be sure, Enso shows great potential, but there are a number of things that would need to be tweaked before I'd consider forking out any cash for it. Still, I'll keep playing and see if I can fall in love over the course of the trial...

On a positive note, I like the open cmd -I wish AW or DA would do this (essentially what FARR does; show me a list of start menu links and favourites/bookmarks that are similar to what I am typing). Perhaps I'll drop a word into the (receptive) ears of the respective developers.

[nontroppo]

Well... I've watched, read, learned and I liked what I saw. I've downloaded, played and am less enthusiastic. First, holding down THE KEY THAT SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS while typing a command is a royal pain in the rear, though I would probably get used to it (my left pinky is actually SORE).

-Darwin (February 01, 2007, 07:35 PM)

think of it as a digit workout!

Now, this business about typing a natural language-esque command IS compelling BUT ... I understand that this makes Enso much more simple to use, from the perspective that one does not need to remember hundreds of word commands, but I find it very awkward.

-Darwin (February 01, 2007, 07:35 PM)

It should be flexible enought to allow both, my issues with it are that it forces us to use natural language and there is no fast completion. You have to keep writing and/or use the arrow keys to get to the command you want. FARR lets us use F-keys to get to the 4th in the list instantly and execute it. Quicksilver uses tab-navigation and further auto-completion. Enso forces us to noodle on the keyboard for longer. BUT I agree that natural language is a good option to have if one could tweak the way of using it...

Finally, resource use is rather excessive. My prediction about Enso having only THE KEY THAT SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS to monitor resulting in reduced memory usage was wrong, very wrong. Out of the box and before I had even used it, it was at just under 50 MB RAM consumption (32 MB VM) which is where both AW and DA are after a lot of usage.

-Darwin (February 01, 2007, 07:35 PM)

Blame the Mozilla framework (and Python) which it uses! There is a price to be paid - but the benefit will be portability to other platforms, and plugins will be easy to write...

[Lashiec]

This Enso thing is a bit heavy, unless in download size... I'll test it this afternoon.

By the way, I'm reading some things about FARR v3 here and there, and the new ideas you have for it. Where do you discuss them? In the forum or in the chat room?

[Darwin]

I should have mentioned FARR, AppRocket, etc. in my discusssion of the trigger. Hitting a trigger key or sequence of keys to invoke a field that you then start typing in works well for me, too. My problem with Enso is having to hold down your trigger key while typing a naturalistic sentence. Also, I must recognise my own obsession with resource consumption. This is why I got rid of all apps that tweaked my RAM. Other than WinDVD 8, which will use up ALL free RAM and bring my machine crashing to a halt, my machine is pretty carefree whether it's got 700MB or 70MB free, so it's a bit irrational of me to be so fixated on it. Enso's memory consumption isn't, in a world of multi-gigabyte RAM configurations, really that alarming.

[Darwin]

Well, I uninstalled Enso late last night. *Kind* of liked it but couldn't get over my issue with the trigger key (see notes above) and couldn't get used to having to type a naturalistic command. I think that if more configureability is added in future builds this will be an interesting app.

[mouser]

By the way, I'm reading some things about FARR v3 here and there, and the new ideas you have for it. Where do you discuss them? In the forum or in the chat room?

FARR v3 discussion is in this forum under the secret description of "FARR v2 discussion":

• https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=3713.0
• https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=2272.0
• https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=2277.0

For those new to FARR, let me just point you to the web page: Here.
And remember thats just version 1, the alpha of version 2 is available on request, just send me a message through the forum and i'll send you the download link.

[Dr-Leech]

I like the search of open Firefox tabs of Enso. This should be useful for me in FARR.

[jgpaiva]

I like the search of open Firefox tabs of Enso. This should be useful for me in FARR.

-Dr-Leech (February 25, 2007, 09:18 PM)

FARR's plugins!
'nuff said