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Wednesday, January 30, 2002
Jesse James Garrett lays the smackdown on IAs in the first of six articles. He's exactly right, and points out that "One school of thought tries to define the discipline based on the role. The thinking seems to be: 'I'm an information architect; therefore, whatever I do is information architecture.' " It sorta pains me when IAs start talking about how they really need to be in on constructing the business strategy to do their work, or really need to be able to control the visual design to insure the quality of the information architecture.
Monday, January 28, 2002
Frogdesign's GUI design showcase includes a section on the work they did for Windows XP, and some other nice interface design work. Which OS are they talking about here, though, the Mac OSX or Win XP? "For the UI, one of the main directives was that it be softer and more inviting to the touch. To get that look, frog approached the UI design as if it were a product, giving it brushed aluminum textures, soft-yet-rich colors and dimensional lighting."
frog seems to have started calling some unit within itself the "convergent" media team, quotation marks theirs. It makes them sound so "confident" about what they're doing.
Wednesday, January 23, 2002
Brewster Kahle on archiving it all: "So if all books are 20 TBs, and 20 TBs are $80,000, that's the Library of Congress. Then something big has changed. All music? It's tiny. It looks like there're only one million records that have been produced over the last century. That's tiny. All movies? All theatrical releases have been estimated at 100,000, and most of those from India. If you take all the rest of ephemeral films, that's on the order of a couple hundred thousand. It's just not that big. It allows you to start thinking about the whole thing."
IMHO, this is a must-read interview. There's tons of exciting little asides in it, from Perl-based OSes for parallel clusters, to free movies, to inspirational pep talks for librarians.
Tuesday, January 22, 2002
This is stupid, possibly the lamest that Don Norman has ever seemed. "I searched it thoroughly and studied it carefully looking for problems or flaws...I couldn't find anything."
I don't know why I still find myself reading tales of dot.com dashed hopes, except I guess that they often have some poignancy and are usually kind of funny. Some short notes by the guy who founded Atomic Vision, which was later bought by RedHat. These happen to be mixed in with his short posts about being unemployed, hanging out, thinking about stuff, most of which really are funny. And he reminded me of the existance of the Apple eMate, a very short-lived, education market-only, small computer which was kind of a souped-up Newton. I saw this thing one time at the UT computer store; it's cool looking in a Batman sort of way. Ebay'sgot a bunch of them if you want to see.
Monday, January 21, 2002
I think I got it. The "clear" element in CSS was kinda confusing to me, until I read this from the w3c's CSS-1 spec: "This property specifies if an element allows floating elements on its sides. More specifically, the value of this property lists the sides where floating elements are not accepted. With 'clear' set to 'left', an element will be moved below any floating element on the left side. With 'clear' set to 'none', floating elements are allowed on all sides." Allows floating elements. Why haven't I seen it put that way anywhere else?
Sunday, January 20, 2002
So the SIG-IA list archives are not as straightforward as they should be, but here's a reason to check them out: this post, the first I can remember on SIGIA by a software developer, addresses the dev methodology of Extreme Programming and some of the IA/ Interaction Design criticisms of it. This post has been really interesting to follow, mostly due to the long and considerate posts that this developer has been sending in response to various questions. It's nice to see this list take its collective nose out of its navel this week.
Friday, January 18, 2002
Having some fun learning about Director's Imaging Lingo. (About 20k, Shockwave required)
Wednesday, January 16, 2002
I don't know who this guy is, but this is a funny little dig at the perpetually bumbling KPMG. "In the JavaScript code they do things like name frames "top" which makes it really awkward to get to the top object at times. What genius thought abc was a good function name?" The genius who was billing at $200 and hour, I'll bet.
Oh my god, that is funny. The new Creed album cover. (via WhatDoIKnow.
Dollarshort is an attractive and funny (and w3c-HTML-compliant) weblog by one of the makers of MoveableType, making me want that software even more than before.
Apparently, I am a liver.
I just got Stephen Johnson's recent book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. I'm a big fan of Johnson's writing, so I want to like this one. In skimming through I can find something on almost every page of real interest to me: mentions of John Maeda, Danny Hillis, Mitch Resnik and StarLogo, interface design, the Sims; as well as plenty of stuff I have a passing interest in, like open-source software. But it looks like there's an awful lot of recycling of Johnson's work here, like the section on interaction design that mentions Maeda, Will Wright, and Jodi.org which is lifted almost verbatim from Johnson's essay in ID Magazine's 1999 Interactive Design awards issue. Several of his stuff for Salon.com seems to be cut-and-pasted here as well. In other places it doesn't seem like he's gotten much deeper into topics than I have just by reading around on the web. There's not much more about the emergent properties of online communities like Slashdot than I've picked up in the last few years without even really reading that much on the topic. Maybe it's just a case of Johnson's interests and mine overlapping a lot.
Or maybe it's that (as one review at Amazon points out) that emergence really is everywhere once you start looking. It's one of those ideas that's almost too broadly applicable to be useful.
What Emergence does prove to me (again) is how uncannily the Doors of Perception conferences in 1998 and 2000 picked up on the most interesting and, well, emergent trends and people a couple of years before they became really popular. I'm sure that Johnson was at Doors 5 in 1997; most of the interesting speakers (even the sort of obscure ones) at that conference are either interviewed or get extensive mention in the book. It's truly lame that I can't link directly to the page of speakers and the texts of their talks at Doors 5, but it really was totally rockstar: Toshio Iwai, Resnick, Alan Kay, Brenda Laurel, Bruce Mau, Eric Zimmerman, Will Wright. (If you go here and click the big 5 at the bottom of the screen, you can get to the Doors 5 stuff under "Content".)
Tuesday, January 15, 2002
So now I think I understand what Radio does, although I still think that the name is misleading (as is all the talk about "web server on your desktop" on their site: it's not a web server in the way that either novices or professionals typically understand that term. Who cares if it uses web server technology under the hood? It's a desktop application that you can program).
As I see it, it comes down to being a writing tool for people who write about technology. Sure, it's a sophisticated, programmable writing tool that does some interesting CMS stuff, although really not database-driven web pages in the way that most other CMSes out there do (except for CityDesk, which clearly says exactly what it does). But the view of the web that it's aggregation functionality seems to encourage is totally technology-centric; Radio and weblog enthusiasts broadcasting and receiving information about....well, Radio and weblog technology. Take a look at this for proof.
It's not sufficiently clear that it's that useful for any other kind of user, not to mention users with other interests or needs. Ex-MTV DJ Adam Curry describes it wtih "There is something very powerful about writing a story in TextEdit, saving it to a folder with your right hand while doing a ctrl-R refrsh of your browser with your left. Content management for the masses." Crap. That's not the way the masses think about web publishing. That's not even really content management. Did you categorize that story in any way? Can users of the website read other things related to that story? Could you involve two or three other people in that writing-publishing process at all?
Monday, January 14, 2002
I want to understand and like Radio Userland. I've read the site, lots of reviews of it, and there seems to be quite a warm feeling for this product. I write a weblog, plus am reasonably savvy about web publishing, servers, internet-enabled desktop apps, etc. So why don't I understand what this thing exactly does? Answer: failure of the conceptual model. The "radios" that I know about sit around and listen to other sources of information, they don't help me broadcast my own.
They say "[Radio is] an easy-to-use Weblog tool that runs on your desktop, so it's fast, and ready to go when you are." To me, that implies "an application that serves pages from my desktop" which is useless to me: my computer is rarely on the network.
Here's what I know: Radio is an application that runs on my computer. Radio is basically a user-configurable web server that lets me do as much or as little in the way of content management that I want. If I want a plain text weblog, it does that right out of the box. It seems to do all kinds of other stuff--RSS feeds, XML, aggregated content--that might be appealing to me, though they're explained usually too technically for me to see the real benefit right away. (Although the "bringing in" of ouside content is the most radio-like function of the program.
Here's my basic question: how does this application relate to the website that lives at www.heyotwell.com and which resides not on my desktop, but on a server in another phsical location? That's dead simple, I'd think, but I cannot find the answer on the Radio website. I think that Radio is a really sophisticated way to publish static web pages, but I can't be sure.
I don't quite see the genius here. Or rather, I don't see how they can explain this thing so that anyone who doesn't already understand actually wants to use it. Publish a large website? Well, you probably want a search box. Radio doesn't do that. Want any kind of dynamic web content? Well, it doesn't do that? What it does do is make creating certain kinds of content easier, if you already think a certain way.
And that's really it: Radio is for programmers, so I don't know if I want to bother with it. To use it, you largely seem to need to think in terms of directories, files-that-are-content, files-that-control-how-the-thing works, and files-that-are-themselves-little-programs. It's crucial to understand, for example, how the arrangement of files in directories affects how Radio works; great for Unix, dumb for most users. Get even a little bit under the hood, and you're already dealing with object.function(parameter). (If you understand that, and can work with it, you're a programmer. Period.)
Well, I'll be. Someone already answered my questions at the Radio discussion area.
So: Radio helps you publish static sites. To any FTP server you like, or to their hosting service. Radio is a really souped-up, scriptable writing tool, which also can "tune in" to other sources of information in some interesting ways. Probably still most useful if you're running it on a computer with an always-on connection.
Hmm. Am I that interested in more complex ways of writing?
Finally got around to cleaning up the little bits of gunk on this site that had prevented the pages from validating properly as XHTML 1.0 docs. Now it works. Cool.
Wednesday, January 09, 2002
Shed a small tear for this annoying lunk who whines about the new iMac and about how Apple lied to him! Thank god Microsoft doesn't lie.
Tufte says that good palettes are derived from colors seen in nature. Textism has some nice nature photos today, good sources for palettes yet to come.
If you have an all-CSS, standards-complyin', table-tag-hatin' site (like this one...), then this solution to the "Flash of Unstyled Content" problem will be a relief. The problem is when a page of content loads before its linked stylesheet does, which produces a brief Netscape 1.0 version of the page: just text sans all that nice typography and color. It's very annoying. (This is a Win IE5 bug, natch.) The solution is pretty simple: include either a LINK tag or a SCRIPT tag in the head of the page.
Monday, January 07, 2002
That new Apple stuff is drool-worthy indeed. But I agree with John Robb's comment that there's nothing there yet that lets people do more than dump stuff into a plain web page. Since you're sitting on apache/php, why not an i-application that does some sophisticated web publishing?
