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.

From the BBC: “The international community has a ‘moral responsibility’ to avoid war with Iraq, the Catholic Church has warned.”

Meanwhile, Bob Kerrey (former Democratic senator) makes the moral case for war in Iraq:

"We know what a terrible thing we did after the Gulf War to encourage Iraqis to rise up and then not follow through in helping them. But you can't take the worst America has done and then cite it as reason not to try and do anything good."

Jeffrey Shell is building an OpenDoc-inspired framework on top of Zope.

Joel on Software, “The Law of Leaky Abstractions”:

"If a large UFO on its way to Area 51 crashes on the highway in Nevada, rendering it impassable, all the actors that went that way are rerouted via Arizona and Hollywood Express doesn't even tell the movie directors in California what happened."

I haven’t seen Futurama since it first aired – the time slot doesn’t work for me, but I wonder why I haven’t been taping it. The fourth (and final) season started last night, so I finally made time to watch it again. What a great show. It was especially funny that the Al Gore character was voiced by the former Vice President himself. I guess it helped that one of his daughters was on the Futurama writing staff.

Associated Press:

"Gore's head is introduced at a global-warming convention as 'the inventor of the environment and first emperor of the moon.' He's also known as the author of 'Earth in the Balance,' and the 'much more popular Harry Potter and the Balance of Earth.'"

And on the big screen… Disney has submitted Spirited Away (in addition to Lilo & Stitch, and the upcoming Treasure Planet) for Oscar consideration, but only in the Best Animated Feature category, not for Best Picture. This increases my concern that it will be difficult for animated features to ever compete with live-action films for best picture, now that they’ve been relegated to a separate category. Other likely contenders will be Dreamworks' Spirit and Fox’s Ice Age. It’s not clear yet whether there will be enough films to trigger five nominees or just three, but either way I’d be surprized if Lilo didn’t take the win.

And finally… Animation Blast unveils their tribute to Ward Kimball:

"Ward Kimball has always struck me as being the quintessential animator. When I read about artists who played gags on each other and the crazy studio atmosphere of the Golden Age, I can't help but conjure up the image of the impish bushy-eyebrowed Kimball running amok and causing all sorts of mayhem."

Today is the big day, and you should vote. Even though you can’t stand all the negative ads. Even though it’s hard to tell who’s the Democrat and who’s the Republican because they all move to the center for their campaign. Even though they just give us the buzzwords we want to hear (“education”, “health care”, “drugs for seniors”, “social security”) without telling us what they plan to do about it. Even though it doesn’t appear that half of them truly believe in anything anymore.

Even so, you should vote.

I voted last week on the eSlate, the replacement for the paper ballot in this county. It’s not a perfect interface, but good enough, and there was one convenient feature that I wasn’t expecting: when you vote straight party, it automatically marks all the candidates of that party and you can just page through the ballot reviewing and making changes as needed.

The only real concern I have is that people who have little or no experience with computers will be scared away from the polls, even though the system is easy to use. Luckily they had a demo station dedicated to showing people how it worked while we waited in line. I saw at least one person take them up on the offer.

Apparently the turnout this year has been higher than usual. The line was conveniently positioned along the donuts in the bakery (it was at a grocery store), and everyone joked about how tempting it was to grab a dozen glazed and make a party out of it.

Houston Chronicle: “Stakes high for eSlate voting”.

Associated Press: “Scrutiny of High-Tech Voting System”.

Austin American-Statesman: “Travis GOP reports problems at polls”.

Matthew Thomas' “When good interfaces go crufty” is a fun read. It’s nothing we don’t already know, but sometimes it’s helpful to be reminded that some of the interfaces that we are so used to are still confusing for new users. His talk on the evils of using file paths to reference files and applications is resurfacing in the Mac world, as a new crop of Cocoa-based applications generally ignore using aliases (not alias files in the Finder but the AliasHandle toolbox type to keep track of files that might be moved or renamed out from under the application). Try this test in BBEdit, then in Apple’s TextEdit:

1. Make a new document and save it on the desktop.
2. While the document is still open, rename it in the Finder.
3. Go back to the open document, type some more text, and click save again.

When I tried this with OmniOutliner, I expected it to perform as poorly as TextEdit. Instead, OmniOutliner does recognize the change and updates the document’s title bar with the new name. But then it ruins this intelligence by asking the user whether they are sure they want to save with the new name. It’s as if OmniOutliner is bragging – “Hey look at me, I’m so smart I noticed that you renamed my file”. Applications shouldn’t need to show off, and the ones that just work as expected will usually be more enjoyable to use.

Out all last week, vacationing around the Gulf coast. It was good to unplug for a week and forget about the email, the blogs, and the constant hum of a noisy FireWire drive. I think we went three whole days without hearing the word “sniper”.

Brent Simmons responds point by point to the misinformation in the Applelust.com article, “Going Native: The Attraction of the Cocoa Interface."

Although the article is a mess, there are a couple of valid observations in it:

"Still, at this point in the evolution of Mac OS X, it is quite possible, as an end user, to perceive a very real difference between Cocoa and Carbon applications with respect to their interfaces and the way they interact with their users."

Sadly, I agree. I think one of the reasons is this: most Carbon developers still support Mac OS 9, which makes adopting X-only features (drawers, toolbars, and sheets) more difficult because of the need to maintain two separate pieces of code. But as more users move away from OS 9, Carbon developers will give their apps a good facelift and release X-only versions, possibly even Jaguar-only versions in some cases.

Last night I saw Spirited Away. I first heard about the film shortly before its release in Japan, and finally it is getting a limited release here. It opened in Austin at 3 theaters, which is more than I expected. Our showing had a good attendance, and one earlier in the day had even sold out.

That Spirited Away is original and brilliant shouldn’t surprize anyone who has seen Miyazaki’s previous films. I have only seen 3 others (Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke). There is a lot to take in from this one. In fact, after a few failed attempts at writing a critique where you see this sentence, I’m going to wait on giving my personal interpretation and instead just say: go see it.

From an Animation World Network profile of Miyazaki:

"With Spirited Away he had noticed that some of his granddaughter's friends, girls about 10 years old, seemed very apathetic, only interested in passively watching modern popular culture, unaware of Japan's rich cultural past. He felt that he should make a film for 10-year-old girls that would both introduce them to their heritage and encourage them to develop a sense of self-reliance and responsibility."

AWN also has an interview with husband-and-wife writing team Cindy Davis Hewitt and Donald H. Hewitt on adapting Spirited Away to English.

The comments for Slashdot’s “Which Coding Framework for Mac OS X?" are frustrating. I have been experimenting with Cocoa lately, and I really like it. Objective-C is slick and the UI frameworks are good. But I’m so tired of seeing Carbon discounted as just a transitional technology and not as “native” as Cocoa. Now that it is possible to mix-and-match Cocoa and Carbon windows in the same application, hopefully we will see both technologies used where appropriate.

As big a Carbon fan as I am, though, I would probably recommend Cocoa for first-time programmers looking to write a simple X-only app. But it’s not appropriate for all apps. Photoshop and similar cross-platform apps will stay Carbon and C++ for some time to come, and many have their own internal frameworks to make life easier between the two platforms.

Unsanity.org has a good Cocoa vs. Carbon article that discusses the speed issue. Many people have noticed that recent Cocoa apps from Apple such as iPhoto and iCal are sometimes painfully slow, while iTunes and iMovie (both Carbon apps) have always been speedy even on Mac OS 9.

And then there’s iDVD. I used it for the first time last week, and it’s a great piece of software.

It took me a little while to figure this out, but the DVD Enabler that used to be distributed with OWC’s DVD-R drives does not work under Mac OS 10.2. I had to install 10.1.5 on a second drive and boot from that to use iDVD on my TiBook. But it’s well worth the trouble. iDVD is one of those rare apps that takes something that was impossible to do before (mastering DVDs for home movies and pictures on the cheap), and not only makes it possible but makes it easy. That iDVD is a Cocoa app speaks to the power in the Cocoa frameworks when used effectively.

The first thing I saw when I woke up this morning, from the BBC News: Former US President Jimmy Carter wins the Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

The Nobel site has a long history on the Nobel Peace Prize, including this bit on the first award to a US president:

"[Roosevelt] received the prize for his successful mediation to end the Russo-Japanese war and for his interest in arbitration, having provided the Hague arbitration court with its very first case. Internationally, however, he was best known for a rather bellicose posture, which certainly included the use of force. It is known that both the secretary and the relevant adviser of the Nobel Committee at that time were highly critical of an award to Roosevelt."

And the second, to Woodrow Wilson:

"In 1919, the Peace Prize was awarded to the President of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson for his crucial role in establishing the League [of Nations]. Wilson had been nominated by many, including Venstre Prime Minister Gunnar Knudsen. In a certain sense the prize to Wilson was obvious; what still made it controversial, also among committee members, was that the League was part of the Versailles Treaty, which was regarded as diverging from the president's own ideal of 'peace without victory.'"

Aaron Swartz has an excellent write-up of his trip to Washington for the Eldred case. Also covered is Brewster Kahle and the Bookmobile:

"Brewster talks about how he sat down with book industry executives. He points out that they have thousands of out-of-print books, which they aren't selling and are making no money off of. He pulls out his checkbook. 'How much do I have to pay to be able to make these books and give them to children?' he asks. They refuse, they will not let him make their books for any price."

Every week or so the tech weblog world (or at least the portion that I view) aligns on one issue. This week it’s the Lessig arguments in the Eldred case before the Supreme court.

Matthew Haughey, “Copyright and the Commons”:

"As the law currently stands, this very piece I've written here and the image I made to accompany it are protected from someone trying to sell it and pass it off as their own, and that's great for me as an artist/writer. Yet that also means neither will be available for reprinting, repurposing, or any other use without my permission for a very long time. If I die on my 75th birthday, you'll be free to reuse the above image or this text in 2117. Is that what copyright was intended for?"

Another timely piece I enjoyed was a Salon article titled “Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile”. Boing Boing summarized it well:

"Brewster's Bookmobile is a van with a sat dish, a duplexing printer, and access to thousands of public-domain children's books. As a dramatic demonstration of the value of the public domain -- which Larry Lessig is arguing today before the Supreme Court -- Brewster is driving the Bookmobile across the country, stopping in working-class neighborhoods and printing books on demand for school libraries."

And then there’s this ridiculous headline from the United Press International web site: “Case could strip Disney of Mickey”. File that one under oversimplification or misinformation, your choice.

Slashdot reports on Brazil’s electronic ballots.

Early voting here in Austin this month will use the eSlate system, which has already been tested in some surrounding counties. It will be used by everyone in Travis County for the general election next year. It looks like an okay interface: a wheel for scrolling through candidates and a big red button to submit your ballot. The final screen shows a summary of your choices so you can correct any mistakes.

Peter Merholz writes about his first contribution to the Mirror Project:

"I went to the mirror, and saw I could frame myself in between the two brothers talking, and snapped the photo you see on the site. My dad is older than Bertin, and in infinitely better shape. I wondered just what dad was *thinking* as he was looking at his little brother, who probably tagged along with him on the streets of Cleveland, who probably looked up to him in that way that younger brothers do, and now, as they enter twilight years, the younger brother is clearly going to pass long before the older."

I submitted a photo to the Mirror Project earlier this year, too, but it doesn’t have an interesting story behind it. I had browsed through the Mirror Project site earlier that day or week, and afterwards whenever I saw my reflection in something I thought about the site. It’s a cool idea. If you like what you see, you can even subscribe to an RSS feed of the latest submissions.

It’s fun watching the posts come in to the Mac OS X Conference “Trackback” feed. Hopefully more people will hook into it before the conference is over. It’s a good way to learn about other blogs that share a common interest.

MacCentral has a short write-up on James Duncan Davidson’s Cocoa talk at the OS X conference. One quote that stood out for me: “Project Builder was the first IDE I actually liked”. That’s funny – the more I use Project Builder, the less I like it.

There’s also some coverage at the O’Reilly site.

James Duncan Davidson echoes a complaint I have also raised:

"The most annoying thing from a user perspective is the different ways that RSS feeds work. Some provide just a few sentences of the post. Others a paragraph, and yet others provide the whole thing. As far as I'm concerned, if you're not providing the whole post, then you are doing a disservice to those people who have clients like NNW."

Meanwhile, the praise for NetNewsWire continues on many sites. The most amusing of all is Mac Net Journal, which feels compelled to notify us every time Brent posts a new beta (as if users of NetNewsWire don’t already subscribe to Ranchero’s feed).

However, seeing links to NetNewsWire doesn’t make me fall asleep as fast as reading more arguments about RSS 2.0 and namespaces. Yet.

Kottke.org, “A Day”:

"A small chat on the phone with my mom, birthday wishes, etc. Then off to the store for dinner supplies. Meg has offered to cook whatever I want for dinner. I decide on some fettucini with roasted mushrooms. And what the hell, a small bottle of good champagne because when am I going to turn 29 again?"

A different format, but nice. He should do that every week or so.

Apple releases the iSync beta. I’ve never seen an Apple software release with so many warnings. Must still be buggy.

Speaking of buggy, Yahoo’s RSS finance feeds were pulled just a week after Jeremy Zawodny announced their availability. Maybe Yahoo thinks they’ll loose clicks into the ad-supported web site? Hopefully the big guys can continue to find ways to make RSS profitable for their business. News stories are easy – just provide a snippet and link to the full article – but it becomes trickier as RSS is used as a more general notification system.

I finally made the jump from Radio Userland’s news aggregator to NetNewsWire last night. It’s good software, and it’s been fun watching how quickly it has matured. I have about 40 RSS subscriptions, but I migrated to NetNewsWire in just a few minutes by dragging the XML links from Radio into NetNewsWire’s subscriptions pane. The app has really embraced interoperability. Brent has also proposed a common RSS clipboard and drag-and-drop format.

Web browsers on the Mac since Mosaic have stored bookmarks in an HTML file. Chimera apparently breaks this long tradition and uses it’s own simple XML format. Is this progress? No. Sure, they do fun things like type=“toolbar”, but the same extensibility could have been achieved with XHTML and some new elements or attributes under their own namespace. Now, we have a politically correct file format that cannot be viewed in a web browser or parsed by existing bookmarks-parsing code. Oh well.

Last week, Joel wrote about Mac software developers:

"There are very few conditions under which it is actually the right business decision to develop software for the Macintosh. Developing for the Mac is not a whole lot different than creating a web site that only works on Netscape."

Of course he gets some things wrong and misses the point on others. Luckily the comments in his discussion forum provided a good balance to his argument. Even Dave Winer jumped into the game this morning, bringing his perspective as a long-time Apple developer who embraced Windows development while Apple was suffering from vision and profitability problems in the 90s.

And then there’s Brent Simmons: “Why I develop for Mac OS X." There’s also some good stuff in the comments below the essay. The essence of his argument is simple: Windows programming is boring.

Dave Winer, on his health and the RSS 2.0 flame wars:

"I want to keep working, but if the choice is between my health and work, health is going to win. If your body is healthy here's a chance for you to learn. Some day it won't be. You may ask other people to cut you some slack because of that, as I am now. I believe that offering a kindness comes back in the form of kindness; and that being cruel comes back as cruelty."

Thankfully most of the RSS discussion that I’ve seen has been constructive, such as Rael’s post that provided a good perspective of the RSS 1.0 effort.

Bill Plympton has started work on his next animated feature film, “Hair High”. You can watch him draw live from a webcam pointed over his desk. Great idea, especially for an independent filmmaker with a limited/non-existent budget for promotion. It uses a Java applet that updates every second or so, which unfortunately doesn’t do the artist’s skill justice – he draws like a madman, seemingly taking any point on the character and meandering around it until it’s complete, as if he can see the drawing on the paper and is just tracing over it.

Here are some sketches from one year ago by New York animator Pat Smith.

Everyone finds there own form of comfort. For some, it’s a doodle.

John Siracusa has an excellent Jaguar article over at Ars Technica. A long read, but worth it. One highlight:

"And forget about any truly forward-looking features akin to Copland's saved searches or BeOS's metadata-powered custom views. Put simply, the Finder, once the crown jewel of the Mac user interface, no longer seems to be a priority at Apple."

And don’t miss this gem:

"I'll be damned if I'm going to use antialiased text or anything larger than a 9pt font on a Unix command line. [...] Is there a special MAKE_SPACING_NOT_LOOK_LIKE_ASS flag that they're using?"

Jeffrey Veen: Standards Still Matter. “Will there ever be a day when we can just assume that browsers will render our code correctly? Can we imagine a future in which we don’t budget an extra 40 percent to ensure our Web projects work on multiple browsers?”

Matthew Thomas: “Microsoft are, still, five years ahead on the road to the perfectly designed browser. But they’re parked by the side of the road, and having a picnic.”

PHPeverywhere: “When things turn sour, Open Source is not about open minds, but naked egos and pride. That’s why the key to really successful Open Source projects is leadership, not merely technical skills. And this holds true in life too.”

Krzysztof Kowalczyk: “So remember, kids: source code is useless if you don’t have skilled people to work on it.”

James Duncan Davidson, author of the upcoming Learning Cocoa (2nd edition), has a new blog. He’s already started rolling with thoughts on preserving his blog posts:

“As long as I can make sure that my data migrates to long lasting media at some point, I can protect them and read them far into the future. However, when that migration happens, I may have all my data, but I’ll have no idea when I wrote it. You see, all those filebase time information will be blasted away when I move the data onto a new filesystem.”

I’m using Radio for this site, and it can automatically archive blog posts to XML files. That is definitely a step in the right direction, and more than most other products will do. It is particularly tricky to get data out of Blogger.

And I still have too much email stuck in old proprietary formats that I may never be able to retrieve completely. Sigh.

Last night I finally saw Michael Dudok de Wit’s short film masterpiece “Father and Daughter”, as part of Spike and Mike’s classical animation festival. It’s a beautiful film, well deserving of its 2001 Oscar win. Not needing dialogue, each shot in the pencil and charcoal film is brilliantly composed and reads perfectly. Even if the big studios turn their back on traditional animation, there will always be a place for it in the hands of independent artists with compelling stories.

My WWDC 2002 DVDs arrived yesterday, just in time to be useful.

After ignoring Mozilla for 6 months, I took the latest version out for a spin a few nights ago to try Pie Menus. Although Mouse Gestures worked okay for me, I couldn’t get Pie Menus to work (maybe it doesn’t work on the Mac?). I can’t decide whether I like Mouse Gestures yet. Back and forward can be useful, but the gesture displayed on the left (go to home page) is just silly.

News.com: “More than 100,000 copies of Apple Computer’s OS X 10.2 operating system were sold worldwide during its first weekend, the company said.”

Back in 2001: Microsoft Windows XP sold 300,000 copies over its weekend launch.

No Sense of Place points to a great collection of early 20th century animated films at the Library of Congress. Includes Krazy Kat and The Katzenjammer Kids, among others. But no Mickey.

The movies section at Internet Archive also has some great stuff, but it takes a little bit of searching to find the good ones (look for John Hubley).

And finally, when you’re tired of squinting at small QuickTime movies, stop by Oscars in Animation: 7 Decades of Animation Art if you live in the LA area. Can’t beat looking at the real thing.

Kottke has the same NetNewsWire gripe that I do, and a mockup to go along with it. I submitted this as a feature request in Ranchero’s bug database earlier this week. The software is maturing quickly, but the 3-pane approach and the inability to easily get rid of news items you have read have made me stick with Radio Userland for now.

Brent Simmons: “If you’re not syndicating your site as RSS it might as well not exist.” So true. The non-RSS sites I read now can be counted on one hand.

While skipping around through my MP3 collection, it’s easy to forget why I don’t run out and buy CDs frequently. But I bought one a few days ago, which brought back the memory. It’s not that they are too expensive (which they are), it’s that those stupid plastic wraps are impossible to open!

Kottke.org increases the text in RSS files to around 80 characters per post. Excellent. It’s as if he read my mind.

This site was down for a server move over the weekend… Thanks to David and the Interactive Ensemble gang for their generous help and bandwidth.

I hate what smileys have become. Just look at all these from the latest Yahoo Messenger! What’s the point? Give me the :-) and ;-) and I’m fine.

Doug Baron points to an article on Schlotzsky’s plan for free wireless around their restaurants. They’re also looking into providing access for other areas such as libraries and schools.

There’s a Schlotzsky’s about a mile from here, so I’ll have to check it out once they get an antenna up. For a year or more, most of the chain in Austin has provided iMacs for surfing, and now I guess I can check email while waiting in the drive-thru. But more than that, it’s nice to see a company that understands the benefits of doing something for their customers – and the community – without thinking about every cent they are going to make charging people for access.

Good sandwiches, too.

I registered on BlogTree. Hey, everyone else was doing it. :-)

In other blog news… There are very few sites that I read now that don’t have RSS feeds. Two on that short list were PeterMe and Kottke.org, which in the last week have both put up RSS versions. Unfortunately they trim the post so you only get the first sentence or two in your RSS reader. Ugh. I think this may be a Movable Type default.

I also think that Blogger made a mistake when they chose to only support RSS in Blogger Pro (not in the regular free version of Blogger). There are a lot of Blogger sites out there. With the huge momentum behind RSS, and as more good RSS readers emerge, the way people are browsing news and blog sites is changing. Sites without an RSS feed risk being ignored. (I have paid for both Blogger Pro and Radio Userland.)

Hey Apple, can we use those fancy colored checkboxes from iCal in our apps, too?

I have used Yahoo for almost a decade. It wasn’t long ago that I pointed to Yahoo and Google as great successes – sites based on the idea that a simple, functional interface is what users want rather than some fancy Flash application or graphics-heavy site.

But as of today I will avoid yahoo.com like the plague.

Late yesterday I logged into Yahoo Mail and almost dropped to the floor in shock. Instead of seeing my email, a message stared back at me stating that I had not logged in for at least 4 months. My account was disabled and all my mail was deleted! Unbelievable. I regularly log into other sections of Yahoo (the calendar, for example), and it never occurred to me that they would pull something like this on their customers.

Reading over the Terms of Service, all I could find was a vague statement that Yahoo “reserves the right to log off accounts that are inactive for an extended period of time.” First of all, my account was not inactive, since I regularly log in with my Yahoo ID and do other non-email things, and secondly, I hardly consider 4 months an “extended” period of time. I usually use Yahoo Mail when out of town, so it might be months between trips without my PowerBook.

So why do I care? While traveling in Europe a few years ago, I used Yahoo Mail frequently, at Internet cafes, hotels, and hostels. Much of my communication with people back home went through Yahoo’s servers. It’s all gone now.

(Yes, I should have gotten the important stuff off of Yahoo Mail before now, but they don’t make that easy.)

In the unlikely event that someone working at Yahoo is reading this, hook me up with someone in the data center that can pull backups for me. I need that email back!

I love Amazon Light already. Great for when you want to lookup something quickly. I wonder how long it will be before native apps start providing features that use Amazon’s API (or Google’s, for that matter). I’d love a simple OS X app to catalog all my books, for starters. Leveraging the Amazon database would provide instant categorization, etc.

Ward Kimball, one of Disney’s legendary animators, passed away today. Tom Sito sent an email out that reads:

“Please pause to recall one of the giants of Animation who passed away this morning. WARD KIMBALL- artist, animator, designer, filmmaker, trombone and model train aficionado. He was 88 and had been in poor health from pneumonia since early this year. His achievements as one of the Nine Old Men are the stuff of legend- Jiminy Cricket, The Three Caballeros, Pecos Bill, Toot- Whistle- Plunk and Boom and many, many more. His free spirit and nonconformist attitude in very conformist times demonstrates to generations to come how to work in a administered corporate climate yet remain an artist. I heard that when he was in hospital the other day he was still making jokes about the golf course nearby. He will be missed but he will live on in our collective memory.”

From a thoughtful Kottke.org post:

“Elastic sites work well because they embrace the ‘Webness’ of the Web…they allow people to interact and communicate with each other as they prefer to do in the real world. Human relationships are elastic in nature. Like a clingy friend, nothing is worse than a needy Web site sucking all of your time away and not letting you spend any time on other sites.”

37signals has a beautiful mockup for what the future of a web-based car interface might look like. But unlike 37signals usual stuff, it’s not grounded in reality. Car companies need to focus on real innovations like cars that get 100 miles to the gallon before implementing any of this fancy stuff.

Having said that, though, we test drove a wagon with a built-in DVD player yesterday. Not a requirement, but it sure beats trying to find a place to prop up the PowerBook to watch a movie on those long trips.

I got sucked into mc.clintock.com for 30 minutes today. Oops.

As most bloggers on the planet know by now, Dave Winer has been in the hospital this week. Rogers Cadenhead organized a quick passing of the PayPal hat to buy Dave an engraved iPod. I have to admit I got a chill when I read the quote. The ability for online communities to hook up like this and make a big difference is very powerful. Also today, the K5 fundraising drive has almost reached $35,000.

Last night, Traci stayed up late researching a question on Google Answers about Disney’s use of television and what influence it had on the other major studios. It was an interesting question, and she was able to look through books we have here as well as link to articles she found online. Today, as I’m reading through my daily RSS flow of blogs, I hit upon a post from Cory on BoingBoing that is talking about the same topic. Then I get to the end of the post, and it turns out he was the one who asked the question on Google Answers! I guess it’s a small web after all. :-)

Mark Pilgrim has a great idea for RSS auto-discovery: use the <link> tag to point to the XML version of the page. I’ve made the change on the template for this site. Hopefully it won’t be long before we see smart news aggregators that can pay attention to this extra bit of metadata, or search engines that can automatically find sites with an RSS feed.

A few days ago I took Paper Dreams off my bookshelf and read a few chapters that I hadn’t looked at before. One was on Bill Peet, storyman from Disney on some of their classics, including most of Song of the South, 101 Dalmatians, and Sword in the Stone. Yesterday I picked up another book that I have owned for years, Storytelling in Animation, and noticed a panel discussion from 1988 conducted by John Canemaker that included Bill Peet. What an interesting coincidence. I made a mental note to look for his biography and maybe get a few of his children’s books for my kids when they are older.

Today I see that Bill Peet had passed away just two weeks ago.

It seems that all the great ones are passing on. When I finally discovered Shamus Culhane’s books a couple of years ago, I found that he had died already too.

When news of Chuck Jones' death came, I flipped through Chuck Amuck, remembering when I first received it as a gift. In the inside cover an inscription dated Christmas 1989 reads: “For Manton, budding cartoonist.” That brought a smile. Still not quite there yet, though. :-)

I saw Enigma a week ago. We’ve seen many movies about technology come and go, but so far only Enigma deserves a place next to Sneakers as one of the best ever. Some may be bothered that the characters are fictional, but the rest of the movie was so true to the spirit and technology of the time that I easily fell into the story without a thought to Alan Turing’s absence until I left the theater. From the dials and plugs on the Enigma machine, to the explanation of cryptanalysis and the handwritten notes as the code breakers worked out a problem – it all felt real, a refreshing break from the fake computer interfaces usually designed by Hollywood.

That Turing’s story could be great on the big screen, I have no doubt. But Enigma’s story – romance, cryptography, war – also has its place. The look of the film is perfect, and with dialogue to match. You might recognize Tom Stoppard in the screenplay credit; his other credits include Shakespear in Love, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Empire of the Sun.

When I got home, I searched my bookshelves for other crypto books to supplement the film. Here’s a paragraph from The Code Book, detailing the “weather report” code which was referenced in the film but not entirely explained:

“…experience showed that the Germans sent a regular enciphered weather report shortly after 6 a.m. each day. So, an encrypted message intercepted at 6.05 a.m. would be almost certain to contain wetter, the German word for ‘weather’. The regorous protocol used by any military organisation meant that such messages were highliy regimented in style, so Turing could even be confident about the location of wetter within the encrypted message.”

You gotta love this stuff.

WWDC 2002 was a great week. Apple has a lot of great stuff coming. It’s real, it works. Now that the migration to X is behind them, they are really firing on all fronts. Very focused.

Yesterday I finished reading Steven Johnson’s Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. It was one of those rare books that leaves you with a dozen different things to think about.

It’s a fascinating book, and the topics are woven together beautifully. I get the feeling that Johnson did thorough research, planned out the entire structure of the book, but then wrote many sections straight through without stopping to edit – it flows with a rhythm and pace that makes for an easy read.

A related ant story in the news two weeks ago: “A supercolony of ants has been discovered stretching thousands of miles from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest Spain.”

Mac OS X users have yet another browser choice in the works: Chimera, based on Mozilla but with a beautiful interface that removes the clutter and extraneous features of the full Netscape browser. David Hyatt, one of the main people behind Chimera, provides some background on Chimera development.

Matthew Thomas, also of Mozilla, has some things to say about “Why Free Software usability tends to suck” (also see part 2).

From Joel last Saturday: “It usually takes a lot more code to make a simpler interface.”

Jeff Veen from Dec 1999: “My prediction remains as it always has: The fastest Web sites, regardless of end-user bandwidth, will be the most successful… I’m looking for a page loading experience of under one second. Period.” [From EVHEAD]

Google Features: “Google examines more than 2 billion web pages to find the most relevant pages for any query and typically returns those results in less than half a second.”

Everyone’s talking about web services this week.

Megnut: “All this talk about APIs and web services warms my heart. We’ve passed the nadir of the dot-com hype and we’re coming back to the Web in interesting and important ways.”

Kottke: “Google is betting that a free teaser of their API (only 1000 searches/day currently allowed) will demonstrate to developers the power of Google in their applications and hope that they upgrade to a more industrial strength version (at least, that’s what they should be thinking).”

Brent Simmons: “I like web services. And I’m glad when they’re implemented and adopted, even when they’re SOAP interfaces. Something is better than nothing. The trend is good. But while XML-RPC is a thing of beauty, SOAP should have been named COAP–Convoluted Object Access Protocol.”

Yet, some people still don’t get it. From a copy of Java Developer’s Journal that has recently started showing up in my mailbox unasked for: “I’m not too excited about the whole Web services revolution. Personally, I think it’s just a marketing gimmick to repackage old products and technology.”

For me, the question of whether to adopt web services is a no-brainer. We’ve all been developing web-based applications for so long that we breath HTTP and SQL. Connecting systems over HTTP is an obvious solution, because it works on top of the same backend that our web application uses, whether its PHP and MySQL or Java and Oracle. Simple, open, cross-platform, and we can use any of the tools we are comfortable with.

Hack the Planet has a long thread on publish and subscribe, OpenDoc, Microsoft, and the new Apple. From Paul Snively: “It’s a commonplace among folks I know that Microsoft doesn’t get anything right until it’s at 3.0, but implicit in that observation is that Microsoft is willing to field a product, have that product fail in the marketplace, find out from the marketplace why it failed, and then try again, until, mirable dictu, they own that market category.”

Joel Spolsky, on Picking a Ship Date: “Generally, people who buy “off-the-shelf” software don’t want to be part of a Grand Development Experiment; they want something that anticipates their needs. As a customer, the only thing better than getting feature requests done quickly is getting them instantaneously because they’re already in the product.”

Userland’s Instant Outliner Beta Notes: “First, let me apologize for inflicting such an unfinished and inadequate piece of software on such unsuspecting and good-natured people.”

Steve Jobs, sometime before 1984: “Real artists ship.”

Alan Cooper’s “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” had been gathering dust on my bookshelf for a couple years before I finally picked it up again. I finished it last week, and I only wish I had read it sooner. There is good stuff in it for everyone involved in software development, from managers to designers, and yes, even programmers. Although Cooper describes a world where software development companies will have a dedicated team of interaction designers, and programmers won’t be actively creating user interfaces, the reality for small companies is that programmers need to be involved in many aspects of product design, including interface and feature definition. The book contains some great tools for changing the way we approach interface design, though, and even just implementing some pieces of his approaches would improve the design process at most companies.

Until now, most sites creating their own UI widgets in DHTML have been slow, not to mention distracting – the non-standard scrollbars and buttons clash with the rest of your system. Oddpost.com changes that, creating an incredibly dynamic application that raises the bar for acceptable DHTML work. Frankly, it makes many of our page-based web applications look juvenile. But it comes at a cost: Windows MSIE 5 only.

Which brings the question: Is this a good thing? With Oddpost, MSIE 5 becomes the platform for your application, and many of the advantages of what we traditionally consider a web application are gone (any machine, any operating system, any browser). Which is fine. But at that point would Flash, with its richer interfaces and broader platform support, be a better choice?

From a technology standpoint, traditional web applications haven’t changed much since the CGI days. With sites like Oddpost, and all the Flash MX interfaces that are sure to come our way in the near future, maybe we will see a gradual shift. The work that KnowNow has been doing is relevant, also.

Peter Merholz: “I believe the degree of security folks are forced to place on their own system is far too draconian.”

Jacob Nielsen, from November 2000: “In reality, users simply write down difficult passwords, leaving the system vulnerable.”

From the Six Degrees weblog: “Disorganized or Just Disorderly?", on the mess that we’re in with email filters and the hierarchical file system. I’ve been eagerly awaiting a look at their product since I heard Joel mention it, but it’s not clear when they will ship. A few screenshots are available.

It amazes me that email programs still don’t learn at least a little from our behavior. As an example, if I subscribe to a mailing list, the email program should help me out by noticing several messages with the same to/cc address and “Precedence: bulk” headers, and create a folder to file those messages in automatically. Why is this so hard?

Anyone care to guess what the difference between the OK and Cancel buttons is?

Meg talks about her experience using personas at Pyra in a new article on Boxes and Arrows.

Evan Williams, from Jan 31 2001: “And Then There Was One”, on the breakup of the Pyra team.

I saw Revolution OS at the Alamo Drafthouse here in Austin on Saturday. A really great film, and very approachable – it doesn’t matter if you’ve never heard of Richard Stallman or don’t know what a kernel is. Certainly the filmmakers didn’t entirely know the culture before starting the documentary, and I think that’s what makes the film work: It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s not invested in the open source movement’s success or failure. They’re just showing a slice of time in which the landscape of server operating systems was completely changed, and having some fun in the process.

Dave Winer mentions some of the thought his team put into making Radio Userland respond quickly to the user. Thank you. The thing that makes this possible (that most other apps don’t have, whether they are web-based or not) is the events page, a human-readable log of events and actions taken on your behalf by Radio. Instead of interrupting the user with error messages or “your blog has been published” notifications, those messages are hidden until asked for.

It would be nice if the user could tell at a glance if there were any fatal errors, though. On the desktop web site home page, add a more useful summary to the events area: “Events: 23 since midnight (1 fatal error)”, with a hyperlink to the specific problem events. (Maybe the software already does this?)

Every so often a web site will add something small that makes all the difference. Today the example of this for me was the Sample Code section of the Apple Developer site. A new popup menu allows quick viewing of source files before downloading the full archive. This change took minimal effort for Apple to implement, but it will save developers from having to download lots of small archives (cluttering up their desktop) just to find the piece of sample code they were looking for.

Martijn van Welie has some concise descriptions of web design patterns and types of navigation that have become common over the years. They are things we intuitively know from building and using web sites, presented together in a clean way.

But then, after I wrote the above, I see an article on Boxes and Arrows in which Jacob Nielson says: “Intuition is completely the wrong word to use – it’s not a matter of intuition. It’s a matter of being very good at pattern matching, being able to spot small things, and hold together the big picture of what that really means.”

Slides from the Veen and Lynch SXSW keynote are up. Also includes links to sites mentioned in the keynote and to Jeff’s notes. Very useful – more panelists should do this sort of thing, especially since its unclear whether video or audio from any of the panels will be made available.

First in a series of new Megnut columns for the O’Reilly Network: Attendee-Centered Conference Design.

Went out to Home Depot this evening to get paint supplies. On the counter was a hand-written sign that read: “Can’t do paint color matching because of computer death.”

Notes from the Simplicity in Web Design panel at SXSW are now online. “Someone suggested that tooltips were always useful, but someone else shot that down because of the time required.” I was that someone else. After the session I couldn’t remember whether I had made any sense or was just babbling. Apparently some if it got through. Although I may not have articulated it very well, my point was really this: Good icons are hard to design. Even the big guys like Apple and Microsoft frequently get it wrong. Icons can serve as a visual aid that guides the user in a certain direction, but don’t rely solely on your icons for meaning. Use labels, or get rid of the icons completely if they are distracting.

In the latest CRYPTO-GRAM, Bruce Schneier weighs in on the factoring breakthrough covered recently on SlashDot. While reading all the SlashDot posts – that could best be summed up as “everyone update their PGP key sizes, quick!” – I knew I would have to wait until Schneier responded to make sense of the issue. While giving credit to Dan Bernstein’s work as good research, he says: “The improvements described in Bernstein’s paper are unlikely to produce the claimed speed improvements for practically useful numbers”. And: “it will be years before anyone knows exactly whether, and how, this work will affect the actual factoring of practical numbers.” Whew.

It turned into a really beautiful day in Austin. I’m sitting outside on the deck with my TiBook. No cars, no phone – just the wind chimes and a few birds. To everyone who was in town for SXSW: You should have stayed through the weekend. :)

A few years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. For some reason I never finished it. I saw it recommended yesterday and dug up my copy. A great book on the need for interaction design.

Which leads into… Next week is the User Interface 6 West Conference in San Francisco. (I won’t be going.) Peter Merholz was interviewed before the conference about his work with PeopleSoft.

At the SXSW keynote the other day, Jeff Veen pointed at his slides and said that they’d all be online by the next day. I smiled, thinking to myself there is no way those will be online within a week, if ever. So far that prediction has been correct. But as he was giving his talk, I recognized some of the slides from other Adaptive Path presentations.

A Pattern Language, a book mentioned in Veen’s slides, is also on the just updated Joel Spolsky book recommendations. It seems everywhere I look I see this book now. Maybe I should finally read it.

Cam writes: “The cool thing is that Kevin was very receptive to my concerns and actually echoed some of them, which tells me that Macromedia is very aware of how their products, especially the Flash Player, are perceived among both the end user and the developer crowds.”

I too got the impression that Kevin understands the issues. But he was still pitching Flash for some types of web applications. The question becomes if Macromedia can educate Flash users on when it’s appropriate to use Flash and when it’s counter to the way the web works. I don’t have high hopes that this will happen.

In the weblogs panel Doc asks: “How many people are blogging this live?” At least three or four hands went up.

I brought my PowerBook to the conference today. A big thank you to Wes Felter and Cory Doctorow for the AirPort connectivity. Cory mentioned that an extra hub and power strip will make things easier, so I might bring my little 4-port switch tomorrow morning.

Speaking of Cory, he will speak with Bruce Sterling in the keynote tomorrow. I’ve read and enjoyed most of Sterling’s novels, but I have to admit to being out of the loop on Cory’s work, other than the occasional trip to BoingBoing.

SXSW was a mixed bag today. Although it’s always good to hear Mike Erwin talk about security, the first panel really wasn’t so useful as a technical discussion (despite my lame attempt to steer it that way with a question about FTP). The second panel followed with the same result. Yawn. I can only take so much mention of Interactive TV in one weekend.

It was good to hear Jeff Veen speak at the keynote, though he seemed a little too accepting of Kevin Lynch’s “replace your entire site with a Flash interface” demo. That’s not the Veen I’ve read.

The best session of the day was Lane Becker’s “Everything New is Old Again.” It was great to connect with Lane again, who I hadn’t talked to since our brief encounter at a web development company back in 1996. I left my PowerBook at home, but to my right Wes and Doc were blogging away on their’s.

Ernest Kim and Jason Fried of 37signals ran a great panel yesterday: “Simplicity in Interface Design: A Game Show.” A lot of fun, with some good discussion at the end on icon design and designing for speed. Ernest and Jason really get it – I hope they inspire some designers to think about web sites in a new way, and finally start focusing on usability and page load time and cut the fancy graphics, roll-overs, and animations.

SXSW Interactive started today. Seems an appropriate time to start a weblog, as if there weren’t enough in the world already. Welcome, and enjoy.