Roadrunner Twice

OK, so, bookmarks.

Web browsers have had bookmarks for more than 25 years, and we're basically accustomed to how they work. Nowadays they sync across your devices, and there are some oddball extended implementations out there (like Pinboard, or Zotero), but they still mostly just act like good ol' bookmarks.

Except, hold on — do they act like bookmarks? Where are the holes in that metaphor? What is a bookmark?

Out in wood-space,* there are multiple kinds of bookmarks. Here are the ones I can think of:

• Cursor bookmarks, which move to track your (mostly linear) progress through a text so that you can pick up where you left off.
• Absolute bookmarks, for remembering a specific location for later reference. These are a research tool, usually implemented as color-coded post-it strips, and you usually use many of them at once.
• Hypertext bookmarks, which make it easier to jump between a main text and its endnotes. These are basically just additional cursor bookmarks that track a parallel text stream.

Web bookmarks are absolute bookmarks, and IMO they're even better at that task than their namesake. (Well, except for the fact that the web is shifting and impermanent and links eventually rot. But never mind that for now.) And hypertext bookmarks are just a crap workaround for a lack of hyperlinks (ugh, endnotes), so the web was always one-up on that.

But if someone refers to a bookmark in a wood-space context, 90% of the time they're talking about a cursor, and browsers are crap at cursors. The only real native equivalent is when you leave a tab open for months. You can sort of re-implement cursors with absolute bookmarks, but what you're really doing is taking out a new post-it strip to mark your current spot and then, as a separate operation, yanking the last one and throwing it away, which just feels like way too much effort when you know in your heart that you just want to move your cursor. It's all enough of a pain in the ass that it's deterred me from catching up on a bunch of webcomics that I legitimately want to read.

I only know of a few efforts to address this over the years. A few serials have rolled their own cookie-based "mark my spot" features, but those have generally been local-only, which maybe made sense when you had exactly one computer and is now mostly useless. And then there was ComicRocket/Serialist: that was a respectable attempt at a general solution, but it relied on a cached database of post order for each supported site, and now that whole edifice has mostly rotted out and it's not really usable anymore. IMO their goal of an integrated back/forward nav was over-ambitious, and sabotaged the really crucial cursor part of the project.

After thinking about this for a few days, I'm convinced that it's possible to solve about 70% of the problem (as I see it) with an honestly very stupid webservice and a bookmarklet. So in my downtime, I'm dinking around on glitch.com to see if I can get a prototype up and running.

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* It's not meat-space because we mostly stopped making books out of meat. (Vellum may have its good points, but it's so expensive and heavy.)

I got irritated by the fact that there was no way to switch subtitle tracks in Apple's DVD Player.app using the keyboard.* If there had been any sort of menu access to that control, then I could have gone into the Keyboard and Mouse preferences pane and manually fucked with the keybindings, but no dice: the one and only way to handle the subtitles is with the little remote control widget.

Well, screw that: DVD Player is scriptable, so I paused the disc for a few minutes and wrote a pair of scripts to let you activate, deactivate, and cycle through the available subtitle tracks.

subtitles.zip -- These scripts are in the public domain. Do whatever you want with 'em.

Download the zipfile and double-click it; it'll decompress into two Applescript files. Put them both in ~/Library/Application Support/DVD Player/Scripts.** Open up System Preferences, and go to the Keyboard and Mouse pane; go to the tab labeled Keyboard Shortcuts. Press the plus sign (+) button below the big list control. Choose DVD Player from the list of applications, and for the "Menu Title," enter either "Next Subtitle" or "Previous Subtitle" (without the quote marks... and you have to type them exactly right, or it won't work properly). The keyboard shortcut is up to you; I use ctrl-N and ctrl-P, but feel free to follow your own taste. If DVD Player is open, quit it and re-open it.

Once you have that set up, you can use those shortcuts (or the items they reference in the scripts menu) to move to the next or previous subtitle track. If you go forward past the last one or backward past the first one, it'll turn the subtitles off; moving in the same direction again will wrap around to the other end. Basically, it works exactly like you would expect it to.

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* I'm watching Brick? And sometimes they talk really quiet. Fucking awesome movie, though.
** "~" is oldschool Unix shorthand for your home folder. So in other words, browse to your home folder, go to Library, etc.