A couple of hours from now I should be firmly planted in my seat with popcorn and drink for The Two Towers. I didn’t get to finish re-reading the book this week as I had planned, but from what I’m hearing there are enough differences that maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. These films have a way of intruding on our own version of the story. After seeing the film, it’s sometimes hard to remember how you first imagined things.

Not to mention the plot changes. There was one subtle change that annoyed me about Fellowship, and as far as I can tell there was no reason for it. In the last chapter of Fellowship and the opening of Two Towers, Aragorn is busy running around and makes a crucial decision as the Orcs attack to not continue to find Frodo, and so Frodo and Sam leave unnoticed with the ring. By the time Aragorn realizes what has happened, he admits to himself that it’s probably best for Frodo to go the rest of the journey alone, and he can focus on rescuing the other hobbits.

But in the film, Aragorn and Frodo have a little talk, and Aragorn lets Frodo go to Mordor alone. This is definitely wrong for Aragorn’s character, since after Gandalf disappeared he was responsible for seeing the journey to it’s conclusion. He would never have willingly let Frodo go alone, and my guess is that Tolkien spent some time crafting the right situation that would allow Frodo to go by himself.

Meg: “I’m most looking forward to seeing the Ents.”

I’m both looking forward to and dreading the Ents. In the early trailers, there was no sign of Treebeard or his friends, so I assumed they had been given the ol' Tom Bombadil (cut). Of course it will be computer animation, but I wonder if they can pull it off in a believable way.

Steven Johnson for Slate, “Is the Computer Desktop an Antique?"

"Now that Microsoft has largely caught up to the Mac in terms of basic file manipulation tools -- thanks to Windows XP's elegant user interface -- the iApps have become a key differentiator for Apple. They are also an implicit acknowledgement that the desktop metaphor has its limits. Apple is moving toward a Swiss-army-knife approach to user interfaces: You need different tools to keep track of different kinds of files."

While Apple has moved to many small, focused apps to get the job done, they have also attempted to build a new suite of interface components so that each app is easy to use right out of the box.

One such nifty widget they have invented is the rounded search box. Most of the iApps use it, and so does the Finder. It’s got a little “x” that clears the search text, and rounded edges so the search box is easy to find. (“Which of these text fields do I type to search? Oh yeah – the round one.")

Splasm Software’s Checkbook is the first app I’ve seen to copy Apple’s search box. Unfortunately they didn’t get it quite right. (Psst: The “x” is supposed to be inside the box.)

Aaron Swartz talks at the Creative Commons launch party:

"Right now you can only ask a search engine one question: 'What pages have these words in them?' When pages include RDF metadata, you will be able to ask more advanced questions like 'What's the current temperature in California?'"

Aaron, thank you for being optimistic. Someone still needs to be.

Back in 1996, when RDF was more an idea than an acronym, I worked on a side-project with my friend Travis Weller. It was based on RV Guha’s MCF and hosted at the domain metacontent.org. We demoed the first part of the software at Mactivity/Web, and I still have the slides for the presentation (click the logo to advance). It was a web server plug-in that served a site from an object database (the prototype used an embedded version of Userland’s Frontier database, but the idea was to eventually provide object-relational mappings to other more common databases). We called the web server portion Rendezvous, because it gathered pieces of content and metadata and assembled them together to serve a page. Apple likes that name too.

We also designed parts of the admin interface, which was to be the killer app to enable thousands of web designers to make metadata an integral part of their web site. You sell users on the product by providing a great interface for managing an entire site’s content, and then handle organizing the metadata behind the scenes.

Somewhere along the way, we realized the magnitude of our goals and grew disillusioned. Or maybe we just found better day jobs. Either way, the metacontent.org domain expired and was taken by someone else, we never shipped any software (although I still have the code on a backup disk somewhere), and the W3C’s Semantic Web effort eventually emerged with a ton of smart people trying to solve this problem.

Yesterday I noticed that the metacontent.org domain was available again, so we took it back. Maybe I still have some optimism left in me after all.

The weather turned cold here yesterday, and that just contributes to my blogging apathy after the Thanksgiving weekend. I’m just too lazy to blog, and the backlog of unread items in NetNewsWire was over 150 this morning. Time to trim the subscriptions again. There’s too much to read, and hardly any of it really matters.

Reading text on the screen continues to be a challenge for most people. A recent newsletter article from Human Factors discusses optimal line length:

"What can we conclude when users are reading prose text from monitors? Users tend to read faster if the line lengths are longer (up to 10 inches). If the line lengths are too short (2.5 inches or less) it may impede rapid reading. Finally, users tend to prefer lines that are moderately long (4 to 5 inches)."

Aaron Swartz reviews “The Elements of Typographic Style”:

"What I've realized since reading it is that publishing documents on the Web, no less than preparing them for publication as a book, is typography and deserves the same care as that noble craft. There are some differences, to be sure, but the core it's about making the meaning of the text shine through the words, a craft that has been practiced for ages."

He’s also put some excerpts from the book online.

John Lim of PHP Everywhere:

"I'm actually a generalist. I can code a bit in Javascript, I know some C++, PHP and a thousand other useless languages. A generalist is pretty good thing to be in technology, because computers and software changes so fast and if you spend too much time specializing you're already a dinosaur before you turn 40."

Adrian Holovaty describes the BBC’s ‘intelligent’ design personalization. By keeping track of what links you follow, sections of the home page are given darker backgrounds to draw your attention to those you visit most often. Sounds like a great idea, but I wonder if it is too subtle to work well in practice. Is it better than increasing the number of news items I see on the home page if I always click on the “News” section? How long before every major web site is as personalized as Amazon?

Either way, it’s good news. Web sites that automatically adapt to the user’s browsing habits will succeed over those that need manual customization. Remember the my.yahoo.com and my.netscape.com portals? The personalization burden was placed on the user, and the UI was awkward and limited at best. Those sites need to be smarter. When I go to tv.yahoo.com, the only thing I ever do is click on “show me what’s playing now”. Why not save me a click and put the current TV schedule on the home page, plus a list of shows that I frequently see the detailed descriptions for.

A related article from 1998: Jakob Nielsen’s “Personalization is Over-Rated”.

Odd that I had never heard of Good Experience, a newsletter by Mark Hurst. Just discovered it today via Tomalak’s Realm. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Maryam Mohit of Amazon:

"For example, quite awhile ago we developed the 'similarities' feature - the one that says 'people who bought this also bought that.' In focus groups, no customer ever specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to customers talk about how they buy things, they'd say, my friend bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap, based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something like that based on the data we had."

Peter Merholz, “Thoughts on AIfIA and Information Architecture”:

"As information architects know, explaining what they do, even to smart people in related fields, is difficult. Once given a clue as to what user experience is, folks can understand that improving the user experience of a product will be valuable. That will never be true of information architecture, which, by nature, is more abstract and subtle."

Best of chi-web and sigia-l: “Using the archives for each mailing list, I’ve compiled a list of the summary postings from useful threads, and a few personally selected favorite postings.” [via WebWord]

Also on UIWEB, Reasons ease of use doesn’t happen on engineering projects: “The focus on features for features sake typically results in mediocre features, and a product that is difficult for people to use.”

While re-reading parts of Joel Spolsky’s User Interface Design for Programmers, it occurred to me that I had never actually used any Windows software written by Joel’s team. So I downloaded a copy of CityDesk and started clicking. Although it was mostly straightforward to use, there were a few glaring problems. First, some of the windows support control-W for File -> Close, some do not. There’s no obvious reason for this inconsistency. Second, when I went to publish my new site, I expected to be prompted to enter FTP info so that CityDesk could contact my server. Instead, previewing on the local machine was the only option available. It took a trip to the documentation to realize I had to turn on “Designer Mode” to show the FTP settings. Whoops.