Monday, February 18, 2002

Jim, I want to subscribe.  Where is you XML coffee mug for easy subscriptions?? [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Ok, I have to rant for a moment. A friend of mine tries Radio on my suggestion. [Paraphrasing] "Cool," he says, "but I type the URL of a site I want on my News page and nothing happens." I tell him he needs the URL of the RSS feed. "Ok," he replies, "how the hell am I supposed to know that?" Or you could just click on the XML coffee mug. "You gotta be kidding me. What does THAT mean and how would anybody know what to do with it?" He's right on every point. 'XML' + coffee mug metaphorically connects Radio to the RSS feed in the same way that 'C11H12N2O2' + a photo of my dining room tells me that I found a place to buy lunch. It works only if you know the whole backstory. Fact is, no USER should have to know that XML is how you flow news (which is wrong, RSS is how) and Userland has missed the opportunity to create a standard around one-click news subscription. Why not tell the whole world to link their RSS to /localhost/system/pages/subscriptions?URL (I'd suggest something shorter) and then we'd build a market for other news readers. It's a good thing because the presence of RSS readers will create RSS publishers, and RSS publishing is something that Userland is much better at than reading. Oh, and pick an icon that means something to people other than Radio users. Remember, users that will send you money in the future aren't yet Radio users, and they'll wonder what those little mugs mean but never know the answer. 9:35:14 PM

Sunday, February 17, 2002

Dave seems to be investing a lot of time in defending himself in this tables/CSS thing. I've got a secret for many of you: Dave's an engineer. You may not realize that - hell, he might not either. But his vocabulary is textbook engineer - everything from bootstrapping to 'we make shitty software, with bugs!' He's the internet engineer: building solutions to problems that compromise in the right places - easy to use, cheap, reliable, and so on. Dave will fully embrace CSS when he needs to. He's provided it for me and you and everyone else to use, but he will personally use it when he has a need for it. In the meantime, tables work fine for his needs, so his energies go elsewhere. As for the CSS is the right thing to do people: keep saying it. You are the internet scientist: developing and promoting concepts that will keep the train on the tracks. One day Dave will wake up and have a problem with Scripting.com or one of his other sites and not quite know what to do about it. CSS will turn out to be the answer and he'll be thankful you educated him. He'll probably ask for your help. 10:38:11 PM

Wednesday, January 23, 2002

"In Radio 8 terms, I'm starting to visualise Filemaker Pro and its 'web companion' as a sort of a 'cloud' element with regular updates, upstreaming etc all happening in the background and drive by the Radio Tool that I'm working on. I'm nearly sure this could be made to work OK. [Greg Smith: Filemaker2Radio]" Bingo That is precisely what my solution is doing. On the FM side, I have a database that keeps track of records that are dirty, update dates, stuff like that. In Frontier, a similar .root file that keeps tabs on what user records have dirty records, etc. Frontier controls the talk back and forth, upstreaming and downloading records, updating flags, timestamps, junk like that. The downstream could be RSS, but FM has it's own way of tossing data, so we make do. Upstream is scheduled, once per hour, to do the reverse. Data can be downloaded in batches as to not overwhelm either server. It's a lot like Radio. I'm curious to see what Frontier learns from Radio that I can steal! 9:39:46 PM

Monday, January 21, 2002

"Anyone interested in using Filemaker Pro on the web should really read this page on the Filemaker site. What I get from that page is kind of an admission that XML can work more efficiently than the 'cgi' style of interaction involved in products such as 'Lasso' , Frontier (non-xml) and the 'web companion' itself. They put it like this: XML makes a very lightweight envelope to hold data so it's fast to read and fast to write and I would heartlly agrees having had 6 years experience with FM on the web using all of the 'cgi' connectors above. [Greg Smith: Filemaker2Radio]" Yep. Actually, I'm building such an animal right now. I've got close to 1GB (yep, with a 'G') of Filemaker data deployed for my staff that I'm exposing to the web. I looked at the AS route (I'm quite adept at AS) but sucking down xml was just so much easier - and faster. Frontier (I'm using the full product) does a nice job of handling the xml, however Frontier doesn't always know how to easily work with serialized table data (the output of the xml.compile verb.) I've had to build in a fair amount of code to get everything working right. Even so, there's no question that the solutions I'm building work better than anything I could have built with Lasso or FM Web Companion directly. 11:31:31 PM

Sunday, January 13, 2002

"The problem with all the Mac tools announced by Jobs at the show is that the Web publishing functionality is weak.  What's needed?  A CMS for a robust personal Website or Weblog.  That is the flaw in Apple's hub strategy - weak Web publishing tools.  All this great content but nothing that helps you publish anything more complex than a simple home page.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]" Yep, Apple is focusing on publishing content specific to the tools that they have. Doing it more generally is hard. How many years has it taken to develop Radio 8.0? But a fully iTools, iApp aware Radio could sell really well, and would probably offload most of Userlands traffic from weblogs.com to Apple's exceedingly fast mac.com host. A sufficiently well integrated, yet easy (the easy still needs work, guys, but you're getting there) app could get a keynote mention. It means building an unbalanced product - Windows Radio users wouldn't get the same benefits, but your Mac market could expand considerably. 10:46:45 AM

Do you use OS X? Get LaunchBar. I've been running it for about 2 hours now and I can't believe how much better X is with it. I'm gonna buy it on Monday. 12:39:25 AM

Not progress toward my iTools tie-in, aside from getting more important matters out of the way, but I got Radio tied back into my work sites now. I manage my Manila sites using both the standard Radio site management stuff and the Webedit suite. I built a pile of scripts that renders Frontier tables as html tables. It's different than the usual stuff in that I can reorder the columns, specify table attributes, and so on. Nothing special, but one of Manila's great weaknesses (well, most html editors, actually) is handling tables well. Webedit allows me to check out my table data, edit it on my sofa, and stuff it back up to the server. Not bad. Since I've recently written a bunch of code to make a sort of uber-xml storage server in Manila that works directly in user accounts, syncing data with my Filemaker stuff, and tying in with prefs.root (it's lovely, really) I'll probably go in and rewrite my table code to work with xml/opml instead. In time, I'd prefer to toss together a simple Applescript Studio companion tool to Radio that provides 'Edit this Table' functionality, passing xml around as needed. I could kill Webedit at that time and simplify things quite a bit, I think. Needless to say, it's a necessary component to what my wife and dad are looking for. Overall, things are going swimmingly. 12:34:34 AM

Saturday, January 12, 2002

"Kimbro Staken reports trouble with Radio 8. I'm going to get right on it. One of the things on my post-ship list is to write a file-system upstream driver. Anyone who does WebDAV uploads is going to need this." [Scripting News] Well, here's one piece of it. Thanks Dave... 11:57:13 AM

One of my primary needs for Radio is as an easy publishing mechanism to iTools. John Robb is right that Apple should make such a thing, but I think that Radio could be perfect, but there is much to do yet. First is to get iTools enabled. Not just publishing via WebDAV, but making Radio aware of your iTools prefs in Mac OS X so that it 'just works'. Radio needs to be aware of iTools directory structure, and Radio needs to learn how to talk to iPhoto, iTunes, and so on. These shouldn't be a problem. Radio should be able to do all of these with no problem. But the real key to every iTools user wanting to use this, and I'm sorry to say it, is to get a real editing client. Editing in the browser is important, but Mac people are Mac people at least in part because the usability of the system is very high. Browsers, well, suck. We need WYSIWYG editing, drag and drop, service support (thanks, Brent, I don't even know where to start using this...) and all that. My first thought is Applescript Studio. But this is hard, as I'm sure all at Userland can attest... 11:52:30 AM

I'm curious, what brings you here? 12:55:32 AM

Friday, January 11, 2002

My Radio Story 11:04:45 PM

© Copyright 2002 Robert Cassidy.