After a long break to take care of my newborn daughter, I’m back in a new office place in the Mile End shared with the talented people of Rita Design and Furni Creations.

The new address is

5445 Av de Gaspé, Suite 215
Montréal, QC, H2T 3B2, CANADA
514.995.6135

Prototype, geographic visualization from Rodolphe G. on Vimeo.

This is the work of my friend Rodolphe Gonzalès and his team at Université de Montréal.

This prototype connect heterogenous data about forests in Canada, and make them easy to browse geographically, through time, and hierarchically.

After watching this video, I felt sad. Windows bashing leaves a bitter taste in my mouth now, I’d like to help.

Come on Microsoft, what are you doing? What we see on the video is just a lame copy of an Apple demo, the passage with the piano is so embarrassing. Your engineers are brilliant — and numerous — people who can do much better than that.

I have a simple suggestion for you (yes, I know, I am actually talking to Microsoft…): develop something entirely new without backward compatibility whatsoever. Impose us your vision, if you have one. Leave the Apple way of thinking UXP. It’s a brilliant way, but it is not the only one, by far. Never forget that Mac OS X is a good looking and very smart version of paradigms invented in the early 70s.

First hint: we all remember the freaky talking paperclip in early versions of MS Office. That was a miserable failure, because the little guy faked intelligence with constant blabber, which is absolutely insulting. But I think it is time now to work again on day-to-day usable artificial intelligence. I think our computer are powerful enough now to support humbly intelligent OS’s, that really start to understand what human users are doing with their machines, so they can help (but without ever raising their voice in front of adults).

Second hint: it is time to impose the distributed model of the web into our plastic boxes. A new OS should allow (force) applications to fuse with the OS, core services and other apps.
To take a simple metaphor, installing an application is now like adding a stone in a bowl, it should be like pouring water into the same bowl — next step : get rid of the bowl, but we’ll see that later.

Anyway, I’d like to have a new kind of OS on my computer. My Mac OS is beautiful, but it is still blind, deaf and plain stupid.

Findloo.com is a niffty meta search engine. It gathers and organizes search results by obvious categories (web, images, videos, items for sale, dictionaries, etc.) and by popular providers (Google, YouTube, Ebay, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc.).

I’ve added it to my default search tool in Firefox, and I’m happy because it works all right.