Peter Harbeson: Radio

One UI enhancement that might be helpful in Radio is to include two checkboxes with each subscription-based news item. One would be "delete" as it is today, and another would be "post", enabling you to:

place two items in juxtaposition in a single post
create a set of posts all at once and then go into "editing mode", serially editing all your posts. (maybe on a page with more than one editable text field)
concatenate the process of deletion and posting into one click.

Well, I just popped a bunch more subscriptions into the list; we'll see if using more "quick scan" items in a subscription list is sufficient compared to actually visiting sites and reading what they have to say. Yes, I know I can click the links and still read the articles, but there's a certain context that's abandoned in the process. It feels different to me; I'm going to try it fairly intensively and see what I can find out.

And yet...

Here's one more thing about Radio, UI oddities or no -- it does draw my attention. There's no single feature or characteristic I can put my finger on, but there's something about this scruffy little app. Have you ever seen the movie Tin Men? The scene at the end where DeVito and Dreyfus are looking for their New Thing in the early sixties. A VW Beetle putts by. They both say "I got it." That moment, that's Radio Userland.

I'm trying to clearly identify why I seem to avoid using Radio whenever possible. There's something about it that just doesn't feel good to me, even though it can do things my other two blogging systems can only dream of. For one thing, it feels slow and cumbersome. This is not to say that it really is, objectively slow. In terms of sheer elapsed time, it may be equal to or even better than my other tools. But my immediate sensation of using it says "cumbersome". Another thing, I think, is that with both Blogger and my home grown system I have the (perhaps incorrect) belief that I understand what's going on; I know how it works. I know that this is not a consideration for everyone, but it is for me. Now, usually I can figure these things out to my own satisfaction within a week or two. I don't, after all, ever use anything really complicated, like a chemical plant or a space shuttle. Maybe the wall I've hit with Radio is temporary. I hope. Back to the "documentation".

When does the template in my public page get updated? It doesn't seem to happen until I actually publish a news item like this one. I'm not sure that's the way it works, but it seems to be. Why don't the various Prefs settings in Radio also have "Publish" buttons?

Who's got the menu?
My latest Radio conundrum has to do with the menu bar. This is one of the rare (for me) cases in which the Macintosh UI doesn't work as well as the Windows paradigm. When you use Radio, you're really using two applications simultaneously; Radio and a browser (I say "a browser", but I've found that Radio really doesn't work correctly with anything but the latest Internet Explorer). Both applications stay open and I switch back and forth continuously. Radio functions a bit like an enhanced set of bookmarks or favorites, so I open my home page (the local one) from Radio, then edit in the browser window. If I want to do something back in Radio, I have to first make Radio the frontmost application. This works better in Windows than in MacOS (any version) because Windows doesn't have a menu bar; it has a menu bar in each window. MacOS has a single menu bar at the top of the screen, not graphically connected to any window. Of course, this would all be solved if you could write and edit in a Radio outliner window and directly pasted into your blog, but as far as I can see, you can't. I'm learning to work as much in the browser window as possible, so I suppose I'll just have to take all those links I grab from Radio and bookmark them. Seems like a lot of extra work. In fact, I'm pretty sure Radio might be able to automatically insert those bookmarks. And as usual, as far as I can see, it can't. That may be the most frustrating thing; that I never have any confidence that I have the real answer to any of these questions.

Referers indeed
Here's an odd thing. My Referers page displays the (hopelessly short) list of other sites that refer back to mine. The subtitle of the page is "Statistics and information about your community of Radio users." But I just noticed on the list another site I run -- a site that has nothing to do with Radio. That site does refer here, but how did it get into the referer log without being in "my community of Radio users"?

More on Local Pages
Another issue with the second Radio menu in Radio -- specifically the Local Pages -- is that one of the local pages is called "weblogs.com". The ".com" clearly implies a page at a particular domain, not anything local. However, it some sort of local page containing weblogs that have changed recently, and out of those, the ones I've chosen as my "favorites". The page lives at a fairly obscure local address: http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/weblogsCom One of the things Radio is doing is blurring the distinction between "local" and "web"; some of my local pages have content that automatically comes from the web. some of my web pages update automatically based on things I've done locally. I think this is a good thing, but the UI is not helpful at all in making any of this clear. Instead of using existing terms in ways that don't fit, we need a bit of new vocabulary to apply to new kinds of features and new contexts.

Local pages
The Radio menu bar has a few quirks, not least of which is that in OS X there are two menus called "Radio". The Radio menu -- that is, the second Radio menu, contains only hierarchical menus. The largest one is called "Local Pages". This makes sense for some of the items, including obvious things like your Prefs page. But the menu is clearly depending on the "Local pages" to indicate that the Home Page you select is the local one, not the public one. The "Cloud links" menu also contains a Home Page item, which in that case is the public one, not the local one. Then there's the home page itself -- the local one -- which contains a Home Page heading that's not a link. That heading refers to the local one, not the public one. And on the right, under a tiny "Cloud Links:" heading, is -- what the heck? The same choices you see in the Radio > Cloud Links menu. It seems as if the Radio UI design was created by somebody who thinks in "paths" rather than locations; the user must trace back the path containing an item to understand what the item is. This could be made easier two ways: change the name of the local home page to make it clear what it is, or simply call it "local home page" in menus and links.

From The Shifted Librarian:
Movabletype v 2.0 is out...
This is another blogging tool I'd like to try. My current reviews:

Blogger: simple, easy, fast. Doesn't get in your way.
Radio: very powerful, user interface designed on some other planet.
text editor and ftp client: still my favorite; I write more and better in that environment.

Wait. Let me get this straight. In order to add a weblog to my "favorites" list, it has to have been updated in the last hour? What the.... What about a way to just add a weblog to my favorites? There must be a way. Undocumented, naturally. Sigh.

Radio UI and me
One of the problems I have with the Radio UI is that I haven't yet figured out the organizing principle behind it -- which means I tend to look for things in the wrong places. Or maybe I look for things in the right places, but that's not where they are! Anyway, I just found the "favorite weblogs" list (which does I know not what, but I'll get there). I think it's something I've been sort of looking for, but I'm not yet sure.

Radio and RDF
Tomorrow morning I present my proposal for a knowledge management and collaboration system based on Radio, Radio Community Server (RCS), and RDF (a Semantic Web technology). I think this has great potential. There are only a couple of key problems to solve, since Radio and RCS take care of everything else. The toughest problem is in the organizational behavior arena; how do you convince people to use blogging tools in a work environment? Years ago I was a consultant to large insurance companies, and some of what we did fell into the organizational behavior realm; it's not easy to get people to use new things, especially when you don't have the desire or ability to order them around.

Notepad? NOTEPAD?!
I've been looking for the outliner I knew was somewhere inside Radio. I finally found it under a menu item called, of all things, Notepad. Now, I know "notepad" is a pretty generic term, but does it suggest a certain minimal Windows text editor to anyone else? Would Outliner have been so bad as a menu item? Sheesh. Now, how on earth do I go from "notepad" to a story posted on my home page? Hmmm... there doesn't even seem to be a way to do it without several intervening steps. It's easy enough to copy and paste, but I thought there'd be a cleaner way.

Where are the categories
I found the categories page on my local version of this site, but I can't find it in the live weblog. Not sure why yet, but I'd like to create links to my categories as views of all the information on the site. Simply inserting "/categories" into the URL gives me a directory listing, which isn't what I want. However, each item in the directory listing is what I want, as it appears as a home page with the information filtered by category. Maybe the thing to do is to edit the item template to show the category. I'll try that.