Friday, January 24, 2003

TVs That Turn Themselves On This seems really innovative. Later this year, new TVs will be on the market with an added feature: if there's some sort of important storm warnng, the TV will turn itself on to let you know. On first reading this, my fear was that this sort of service would eventually be abused in an Orwellian sort of fashion. "We are now forcing you to watch this Presidential broadcast, please stand at a attention". However, the current implementation is customer controlled, and has different levels of alerts, from just a light indicator, to tuning in to a weather warning, or even having a siren. For people in tornado country, such a system sounds very useful. [Techdirt] I could see the TV being used with home video phone system, such that an incoming video call my Jackson's grandparents would turn on the TV, and then we could manually turn on our broadcaster to complete the two-way connection... 11:26:36 AM

J.D. Lasica: News that comes to you I've seen his name numerous times before, but I'm still not sure I understand who he is. Regardless, this article is drawing considerable blog coverage. As I'm perusing it, I see a very nice quote regarding RSS replacing email newsletters! Bowman, a freelance journalist and designer, makes two predictions: "I think that RSS feeds will start replacing e-mail newsletters because they do a better job of providing structure and a more efficient means of parsing through data." And he sees revenue possibilities here. "RSS could be a great way of distributing and reading classified ad information, customized to the user's preferences. If news media don't do this soon, eBay and Monster will." Yes yes yes! There's money to be made here... 10:46:05 AM

How to Structure Web Pages Visually This one is for ColinJ. Boxes and Arrows: Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization Whenever we attempt to make sense of information visually, we first observe similarities and differences in what we are seeing. These relationships allow us to not only distinguish objects but to give them meaning. For example, a difference in color implies two distinct objects (or different parts of the same object), a difference in scale suggests one object is further from us than the other, a difference in texture (one is more blurry) enforces this idea, and so on. Once we have an understanding of the relationships between elements, we can piece together the whole story and understand what we are seeing. In their dialog with designers, marketers have everything to win in getting familiar with basic design concepts. Sites that organize visual flow properly sell more. A visitor who doesn't know where to look doesn't read, doesn't click and doesn't buy. Posted by Olivier Travers at 12:05 PM Comments: (post your comment) Nollind Whachell @ January 24, 2003 11:31 AM: While I agree with this approach 150%, getting your client to accept this as a web developer is almost next to impossible (unless you luck out on a client who trusts your web experience and knowledge "over" theirs). No matter how much you may educate them why it is a better approach, they will still want their site developed "their" way (i.e. 100% Flash-based). I've learned that "logic" doesn't always reign supreme in the business world (as I'm sure many of us are aware). I even received an email back from a gaming publisher exec a few weeks ago, after I commented about their usage of 100% Flash-based sites. He responded that they create these types of sites for different reasons but he didn't want to go into the "politics" about it. Also he indicated they made sure the site was "accessible to 56K modem users" and they don't create them just for "wow" factor. Really? He can say this with their home page initial file load being 1.37MB in size! The only way I can see them starting to listen to developers is if every design publication, including Macromedia, indicates that this is bad. It worked for Flash splash pages, as there was a huge exodus from them after Macromedia indicated their misuse. The developers need something they can show the client to say, look you're "alone" in wanting this, "everyone else" is saying not to do it this way and "your customers" don't like it either. [marketingfix] 10:40:32 AM

99 Trial Balloons - Bush's Fast-Vanishing Proposals Plastic::Politics::Disaster: Seems like a lot of Bush's Great Ideas are vanishing into thin air. Is the administration really trying, or just sorta spitballin' here? [Plastic] Amen! 10:36:37 AM

Sony's schizophrenia Last year and the year before, I spent a lot of time interviewing with a gentleman named Simon over at Sony SJ, for a project to build DRM on top of QuickTime. The way he explained it to me, Sony was interested in modelling typical human behaviors: loaning, exchanging, etc. For many reasons (coder-level only & long commute), I ultimately decided not to pursue the opportunity. But my biggest concern was that the DRM project(s) seemed like a political hotbed, and I didn't feel good about creating a technology that potentially limited people's fair use. Most coders I know love their freedoms (see Open Source), so I wonder how the current engineers on these projects feel? Anyway, here's a BoingBoing post about Sony's difficult choices. Frank Rose's long feature on the schizophrenia inside Sony (which is simultaneously an entertainment giant and a consumer electronics giant) is excellent. DRM is destroying Sony's product lines, from "NetMD" minidisc recorders than can't share over the net to digital televisions equipped with restrictive outputs and recording tools that hobble your ability to tape and manipulate programming. The company that gave us the Walkman has all-but-abandoned the personal stereo market, focuing on dead-end tech like CDs and MiniDiscs, instead of hard-disc players that offer more flexibility and utility. The personal stereo market has been taken over by niche players like Apple and Creative Labs (Creative was just a tiny little startup in Singapore when its products rocketed it to success, the kind of outfit Sony was accustomed to grinding into paste without even thinking -- today, it's sucking away tons of business from Sony's personal stereo market). Sony's not pouring its R&D efforts into better products that offer more value. Instead, it's chasing a DRM scheme that makes every product it touches less useful. Sony's betrayal of its customers is a big part of the crisis in the public's rights in copyright today. From 1976 to 1984, Sony fought tooth and nail for the right of Americans to record video off their televisions; today, Sony is part of the RIAA's efforts to stifle innovation and contract fair use to a sorry, mingy speck. Where the iPod simply lets you sync its contents with the music collection on your personal computer, Walkman users are hamstrung by laborious "check-in/check-out" procedures designed to block illicit file-sharing. And a Walkman with a hard drive? Not likely, since Sony's copy-protection mechanisms don't allow music to be transferred from one hard drive to another - not an issue with the iPod. "We do not have any plans for such a product," says Kimura, the smile fading. "But we are studying it." Really? No plans? When the world leader in consumer electronics takes a pass on the hottest portable music player out there, you have to wonder what gives. Sony became a global giant on the basis of innovative devices manufactured by the millions on nothing more than a hunch that people would buy them. Now Apple is delivering the innovation while Sony studies the matter. LinkDiscuss [Boing Boing] 10:33:20 AM

Unwiring Everest is HARD More on the Everest WiFi project: It turns out that setting up WiFi access on the climbing-approaches to Mt. Everest is really hard: But in contrast to many climber services, this one does not stand to benefit foreign-run outfitters primarily. Although it is an obvious perk for the climbers, the residents of a nearby town may get Internet access because of it, and the mountain may get a bit cleaner. The technical challenge is significant. Wireless radios will be positioned on moving glaciers, and gear must be insulated against temperatures far colder than they were designed to withstand. And at the helm of the project is Mr. Gyaltsen, who is not wealthy and has no formal technical training. LinkDiscuss (via WiFi News) [Boing Boing] 10:26:31 AM

Syndirella first impressions Here are some really good first impression notes regarding Syndirella. I'm going to try Syndirella first. What's funny is that the first thing I noticed when looking at the screenshots was that there was no count of new items. Lo and behold, I go to his weblog and he just implemented it. Oh, and Syndirella exports the feed list to OPML, which I can do whatever I want with. Shit, it doesn't support categories though. However, given how eager the author seems to support new features and how hard he tries ("It now passes all the tests from the test suite of Mark Pilgrim's ultra-liberal RSS parser") to do the right things ("It tries harder"), I suspect he'll get that in there eventually, so I'd be willing to put up without it for now. Sigh, now I have to download the .NET framework... Holy crap dude! I just rebooted after installing the .NET framework and ran Syndirella for the first time, and it used up ALL my system resources. And I mean all of them. And that was after taking like a minute to start with my disk thrashing and everything. Not sure whether this is .NET's fault, the program's fault, or just an error in this particular build. Ok, I just ran it one more time, and, while it still started up a little sluggishly (which is probably .NET's fault), it's chugging along now using not-too-many resources. That was really strange. Maybe .NET, or Syndirella, was doing something strange for initialization the first time it ran. Hey, there we go with the categories: After that, I'm going to finally implement a decent way of sorting and organizing feeds. This is probably the most important shortcoming of the current Syndirella UI. It would be easy to replace the listview with a treeview - but I don't really like the idea of using the treeview here. I think there is really no need to have multiple levels in the hierarchy - one level of grouping should be enough. Thus, I'm thinking of implementing collapsible groups looking somewhat like the Opera 7 mail client. Also, I'll add some way to sort and/or reorder feeds within a group. Nothing fancy is needed here - just a popup menu option to sort the feeds in a group alphabetically, and drag & drop for manual reordering. I agree, nested categories aren't needed, which I think is a great observation. I'm really looking forward to seeing what he produces. Ok, now to export my current feed list... let's see what formats this thing can import... oops, one bug - "back" doesn't work correctly. Ok, it can import OPML, so now to export my feed list in OPML... now where the heck is the documentation for this particular OPML format? There we go. [snip] Now let's see if Syndirella imports it! Cool, worked, except I got the XML format wrong at first and had to spend a few minutes looking at it to realize I had "xmlURL" and "htmlURL" instead of "xmlUrl" and "htmlUrl" (I updated the script above to match). Ok, I'm now a Syndirella user. It rocks. Now for feature requests: Categories, or some way of organizing feeds. Seems to be in the works (see above), so I'm happy. Statistics on feeds. How often they update, etc. If it turns out a feed doesn't update often, you can increase the amount of times between checks (or maybe Syndirella could do this automatically if you set a preference allowing it to). I thought I had more, but I can't remember them now. Guess Syndirella is pretty good then. Ok, I just did some testing and Syndirella doesn't support ETags or whatever it's supposed to do to save bandwidth, so that's a feature request. Hey, how freaking cool would it be if when a post was updated, Syndirella did a diff on it so you could easily see what was new?! That would be awesome, but this is more a "wish list" item than a "feature request". To be honest, that would really help with blogs like Erik's and Doc's. I want an easier way to copy the feed's site's URL to the clipboard (this is a very minor nit - you can already copy the RSS feed location easily by going to the feed properties, but not the site's location) One of the nice things is that because each feed is separated from all others one feed's bad HTML can't break the rest of the others. And I had thought that not having all feeds on one big page together would have been an inconvenience to me, but I don't think it is at all. I wonder how Syndirella handles things if entries are reordered within a feed... [Keith's Weblog] I can see that NetNewsWire has a good jump on the other desktop aggregators. But I see no one asking for searching! Don't you all need to find stuff?!?! 10:14:51 AM

Culture Remains Persistent Stuart Halloway of DeveloperMentor adds his 2 cents to the 101 list. (BTW, Stuart, wrote a great book "Component Development in Java") ... Point #2 The reason Java GUIs don't look as clean as .NET GUIs can best be explained by going through the metamorphosis demo found at http://www.jgoodies.com. Swing is possibly the most flexible GUI framework ever designed, however its default settings are just plain horrible. IntelliJ is ample proof that Swing isn't as bad as many claim. [Manageability] jgoodies looks very interesting. I wish I had the time to explore thier freeware source code more, but I really need to wait until i get thru school. 2004 seems so far away... 9:56:00 AM

Anne Schofield, 191?-2003 My dad just called to share the sad news. GG Anne passed away this morning. Apparently, I'd missed a call last night from my mom, explaining that GG Anne had fallen into a coma, and that they must postpone their trip up to the bay area. I just got the message this morning, and had been trying to reach my folks to no avail. My folks are driving up now to sign the release. My dad sounded different on the phone, grief for sure, and perhaps something else as well. My thoughts go out to him most of all. 9:40:35 AM