The way I blog, I gather bits of news stories or other blog posts and write up an opinion on them for later blogging. Then when I feel like posting something, I go through the queue of things I’ve written and pick one out, or take several related stories and put them together. I used to use BBEdit for this. Then I started using NetNewsWire’s notepad. Lately I’ve been trying out VoodooPad. The interesting thing about this approach is that I end up writing about a lot of things that never get published. After a certain period of time they are no longer relevant or interesting.

For this last post of 2003, I went through the queue of a dozen or more recent things I could blog about. This thoughtful article about Calvin and Hobbes and creator Bill Watterson stood out:

"The pressure on Watterson must have been enormous, but he steadfastly refused to sell out, even a little bit. 'I look at cartoons as an art, as a form of personal expression. That's why I don't hire assistants . . . and why I refuse to dilute or corrupt the strip's message with merchandising,' he said in his Festival of Cartoon Art speech. 'Characters lose their believability as they start endorsing major companies and lend their faces to bedsheets and boxer shorts.'"

So I guess maybe the advice for the new year is to stay true to what you are doing. Focus on the real problem and don’t compromise your vision for the wrong reasons.

Happy new year.

I’m blogging this so it will be indexed by the great search engine in the sky, and perhaps save some Mac programmer out there a little time. The new control drag-and-drop Carbon Events are only partially documented. In addition to returning noErr from your kEventControlDragEnter Carbon Event, you need to set the kEventParamControlLikesDrag parameter to true if you want to receive the drag. Unfortunately this constant is missing from the headers. The correct value is: ‘cldg’.

Your code should look something like this:

Boolean t = true;


SetEventParameter (inEvent, ‘cldg’ /kEventParamControlLikesDrag/, typeBoolean, sizeof(Boolean), &t);

These new events were introduced in Mac OS X 10.2, and they are quite convenient. Happy coding.

After SXSW earlier this year, I posted that Tantek wanted a way to add meaning to blogrolls, something with less complexity than FOAF. Apparently he and others have been churning away at this idea since then, and the resulting specification is called XHTML Friends Network (XFM). It’s refreshingly simple.

P.S. Happy holidays, everyone. Enjoy the weekend.

NetNewsWire 1.0.7 adds support for the feed protocol. Wes has suggested that MIME types and helper apps are the correct way to handle this, but modern browsers seem to have practically given up on good integration between MIME types and other apps.

I took a few minutes to read the feed protocol specification. It needs a little refinement, particularly the part about extensions (sending commands and parameters with the URL). For feed URLs with no commands, I don’t like that feed://http://example.org/rss.xml is the same as feed:example.org/rss.xml, but if you introduce a command, the real protocol (“http” or “ftp”) seems to be required. The “how to process a feed URL” section continues this confusing by saying that the real part of a URL is denoted by either “:” or “.”, but all the examples always include “http://”, which implies that feed://command/example.org/rss.xml would not be valid. Even more confusing would be an example like feed://command/localhost/.

A minor gripe, perhaps. Anyway, we’ll see whether it catches on.

Another smart experiment with making subscription easier (or at least not as disconcerting for new users) is the work done by Jason Shellen to apply CSS to the Atom XML file. The addition of a proposed “info” element helps describe what the user is seeing.

Update: Brent points to Dare Obasanjo’s pre-draft feed URI spec. On first glance it appears to be a more formal but less complete spec (not necessarily a bad thing). Apparently this is a somewhat unorganized effort.

Doug of Stopdesign discusses fixed vs. liquid layouts in CSS:

"Truth be told, table-based layouts are currently more capable of handling this issue than CSS layouts are. I'm certainly not advocating a move back to tables for layout. But unless dimensions are heavily manipulated by CSS, tables do work well at 'containing' any objects placed within their cells. This, without needing to worry about content from one cell overlapping another, or a cell suddenly getting re-positioned below a cell instead of beside it. With the current abilities of CSS, I can see why some designers have chosen fixed-width layouts."

It’s refreshing to hear him admit the advantage that table-based layouts still have. I would have expected CSS to be in a better state by now. Designers shouldn’t have to choose fixed-width layouts just because it’s easier.

Meanwhile, the <a href=“http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-css3-page-20031218/

“>CSS Paged Media specifications (which I’d never heard of before) are nearing completion. Maybe CSS will fulfill its promise after all.

Apple still hasn’t fixed text drag-and-drop in Cocoa. In addition to going against how drag-and-drop has worked in previous versions of Mac OS for a decade, I believe it is based on a flawed concept. Has it seen any usability testing within Apple?

I guess the argument for this behavior goes something like this: Because selecting text is more common than drag-and-drop, dragging over a previously selected run of text should take precedence. If you really want to drag the text itself, merely hold the mouse down for a half-second after the click and then drag. Simple, right?

Not at all, for three reasons:

1. It is counter to how drag and drop works in the rest of the system.
2. It is slower.
3. It is difficult for a new user to "learn" this Cocoa behavior.

The first is easy enough. If you can drag most “things” (a file in the Finder, or a window, or an object in a graphic design application) by clicking and dragging right away, why should dragging selected text be any different?

And it’s slower not just because you have to click and hold, but because you have to think too much. How long do I hold? Half second? Full second? Us humans never know exactly, and it’s easy to make a mistake and get a selection when you wanted a drag.

To illustrate what I mean by the last reason, let’s go over how someone would learn to make selections and use text drag-and-drop.

The Cocoa way: User makes a selection. They want to drag that selection, but instead the app keeps making a new selection where they clicked. User tries a few more times, then gives up, thinking that the app doesn’t support dragging of text. They use copy-and-paste instead.

The Carbon and old Mac way: User makes a selection. They drag that selection and it works as expected. If they are a new user, they might try to make a selection inside an existing selection, but without meaning to drag it. In this case they get the wrong behavior – the text starts to drag and they are momentarily confused. The next time this happens, they realize that they should single-click to remove the selection before making a new one in the same run of text.

See the difference? With the original Mac drag-and-drop behavior, the user might make a mistake once but that process teaches them how selection and drag-and-drop works. With the Cocoa behavior, the user might never learn how text drag-and-drop works!

Luckily, Mac developers using Cocoa can override this behavior in their application (which speaks to the power of those frameworks), but I have yet to see an application that does.

Congratulations to James Duncan Davidson, whose Running Mac OS X Panther has gone to press just in time for him to enjoy the holidays. I had the opportunity to review the book, and it’s a solid achievement. He covers many topics that will be useful to new and long-time Mac OS X users alike. Even in the most basic chapters there was nuggets of goodness, little tricks that will make working with your system easier. I particularly like how he covers the command-line tool equivalents for many features, which makes the book a good resource to turn to later.

Mike Clark has a fun review which will surely make the back cover. The official web site is also now up.

I’ve been digging back into comics lately, hence some of the comic-related posts. One of the things that fascinates me is the abundance of great web comics out there. Tons of artists who haven’t quite found the right business model, but are producing incredible stuff anyway.

Chad Townsend pointed me to Kazu’s work at BoltCity.com. His latest there is a quality monthly one-page comic called Copper.

I went shopping in the real world the other day, and came back with the Adventures of Mia, by Pixar story Enrico Casorosa; The Red Star, colored by Animation Nation member Snakebite; and a few issues of Bone, the award-winner from Jeff Smith.

What will the future hold for independent comic artists? Who knows. Here’s a semi-related excerpt from a Dave Sim speech from 1993:

"The critical difference with Spawn is that Todd McFarlane recognized that he is hot NOW, while he was working on Spider-man. He recognized that he was making an enormous amount of money for Marvel Comics and that the percentage of that money that he was being paid was minuscule. He recognized that there was a window of opportunity NOW to make his future financially secure and to take control of his career. He recognized that at Marvel, his career was out of his control. A change of editor, of editorial policy, of company ownership, any number of things could throw him out in the street at a moment's notice. If Marvel could throw Chris Claremont away after fifteen years, refusing even to let him write a farewell note on the letters page of the book he had made into the industry standard, what security is there? Todd McFarlane recognized that there is no security. There never has been and there never will be."

Over a decade ago I bought most of Todd McFarlane’s Spidey comics, as well as the first few issues of Spawn. Fast-forward to today: Spawn is drawn by someone else and McFarlane is a millionaire. And Dave Sim is a few months shy of wrapping up the entire 300 issue run of his independent comic, Cerebus. (He started 26 years ago.)

I’ve come to enjoy the yearly tradition of putting up Christmas lights: balancing on a wobbly ladder, hanging over the side of the roof, and searching for that elusive burned-out mini-bulb. This year we put our lights up in record time, before the sun set on the eve of December 1st. Ah, the holidays.

(Not a great photo above. I was trying to capture the lights on the bird feeder.)

The New York Times covers Roy Disney’s resignation:

"Roy E. Disney, a nephew of the founder of the Walt Disney Company, said on Sunday that he was leaving the board of directors and called for the resignation of the chairman and chief executive, Michael D. Eisner."

Animated-News.com has a reprint of the full letter to Eisner and the board:

"I have and will always have an enormous allegiance and respect for this Company, founded by my uncle, Walt, and father, Roy, and to our faithful employees and loyal stockholders. I don't know if you and other directors can comprehend how painful it is for me and the extended Disney family to arrive at this decision."

Big news. It’s a shame that Roy is the one to leave. It’s clear that Disney (the company) has lost its way, and Eisner has no vision for what the company could be.

While looking for something else the other day, I ran across this Apple technote. I think it illustrates quite nicely the kind of sacrifices that were made to put Mac OS on top of unix. In the end the rewards are worth it, but the way volumes are handled is a step backwards. Seems like they could have created a small root partition, just for links to standard unix directories (usr, lib, etc), and mounted volumes in their own directories /My hard drive, /My apps, etc. This “/Volumes” business is silly. It’s another example of the fragility of the new system.

We used to brag that you could rename your System Folder and the Mac would still boot. Those days are long gone.

Related: John Siracusa reviews Panther.

The Austin Chronicle profiles HorseBack Salad Entertainment:

"In February 2001 -- working out of their homes -- the four formed HorseBack Salad, a 'ground up' animation and multimedia firm whose chief claim to fame was and is its ability to generate unique results fast, whether the project is a music video, an animated pilot for the Cartoon Network, or a piece of educational software -- you know, for kids. With an animation style that occasionally echoes Jamie Hewlett's work for Brit hip-hop popsters Gorillaz and encompasses everything from their own projected animated shorts and series (this is where the kung-fu robots and Kabuki snowmen come in) to more serious (but not too serious) outings like their bouncy animated segment in local singer-songwriter Andrea Perry's 'Simple' video, HorseBack Salad has initiated or had a hand in 44 separate projects: a whopping record considering they're the new kids on the block."

I first saw their name when the Question Authority interactive game showed before the Matrix at the Alamo Drafthouse. It was immediately obvious that these guys had talent, with some traditional animation know-how that is absent from a lot of online content.

It’s been a few years since Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics was published. In that time, a couple digital cash companies have probably closed their doors, and thousands of web comics have been created by artists with little expectation of even covering their costs.

Peppercoin is the latest company trying to solve this problem (not just for web comics, but for any small purchase, such as music downloads). An article on Technology Review covers the details, and I have to admit it’s a pretty clever idea:

"One transaction out of a hundred, selected at random, is sent to Peppercoin. After Peppercoin pays the seller 100 times the value of that transaction, it bills the customer for all of her outstanding purchases from all sites that use Peppercoin. Since about one out of a hundred purchases is processed, her last bill will have come, on average, a hundred purchases ago. That's the trick: by paying the seller and charging the customer in lump sums every 100 purchases or so, Peppercoin avoids paying the fees charged by credit card -- roughly 25 cents per transaction -- on the other 99 purchases."

But it still requires the user to install new software. The content will have to be extremely compelling for people to install new software they’ve never heard of just to access it. Even BitPass, a competing service just getting started, is completely browser based. As is PayPal, for that matter.

Meanwhile, we recently resubscribed to the local paper. (You know, the physical one that shows up on our driveway every morning.) Imagine my surprise that the comics section is now a full one-and-a-half pages, not just the one page when I was growing up. Now that’s progress.

Something interesting is going on with VoodooPad, winner of O’Reilly’s Mac OS X Innovators Content. It’s the best front-end to a Wiki I’ve seen, but more than that, the implementation for talking to servers is XML-RPC based and open (overview and more documentation).

The API is simple, and you could probably use it as a front-end for other custom content-management systems, not just Wiki. But it is yet another API. I wonder if they considered building off of one of the existing weblog APIs, or the Atom project.

I’m going to give VoodooPad a try for general purpose note taking. I’ve always liked the idea of a Wiki but have never been able to successfully use one for anything meaningful.

My new G5 arrived last week. This machine replaces (supplements) my old TiBook, which was really showing signs of age even with Panther. It is an understatement to say the G5 is a fast machine, and it makes programming a joy again.

Of all the machines in my office now, the new G5 most resembles another machine I got just a few months ago: an old Power Mac 9600. That machine was a monster in its day too. As a Linux server, it does the job quite nicely. I finally finished migrated this site and email to it last night. (If you’re wondering why I would move this site to such an old machine, I should point out that this site used to run on a Power Mac 7600, even more ancient and running an extremely old Linux Kernel. Both run Yellow Dog Linux.)

In the process I learned something valuable: Webmin is your friend. I had heard of this web-based unix administration suite years ago, but finally tried it yesterday. I configured a bunch of stuff that I didn’t know how to touch before now. I like the power of the command line, but using Webmin probably shaved two hours off of what I was doing. The only real problem I ran into was with Postfix, and I had to do a little troubleshooting with netstat and friends. Overall the migration went very well.

After visiting family in Louisiana last week (wait, 2 weeks ago), we took a trip to New York City for a few days vacation. It was great New York City weather: cold, and a little rain one night. We did the usual tourist sites, Broadway show, and walks in Central Park. We covered the city on foot, by taxi, and in the subway. All great experiences, and even though I’m back at home I catch myself jaywalking. Oops.

The night we arrived, Al Franken was signing books. I finished his “Liars” book a few nights ago. It’s mostly good stuff, and I found myself laughing out loud at 1am, trying not to wake the sleeping three-year-old next to me. But there’s a darker side too. There’s only so much “funny” you can put in September 11, and he puts very little.

Of course ripping apart conservative talking heads is fine, but the problem is not just with the right. Cable news in general has spiraled down into so much sensationalist garbage that there’s little or no time for real journalism. Even so, most of Franken’s arguments are pretty dead-on and well researched. (Disclaimer: I don’t actually have cable anymore, so what do I know.)

One of the unfunny chapters is a moving description of the memorial service for his friend, Senator Paul Wellstone. Now Al Franken is contemplating a run for senator in Minnesota:

"Driving him as well has been his distaste for the Bush presidency, he said. 'I felt like after 9/11 this president had a chance. We were united in a way that I had never seen, and he had a chance to take this country forward in a spirit of mutual purpose and mutual sacrifice. Instead, he just hijacked it and used it to his own political ends.'"

Some people look to 2004 and ask, “How can a Democrat hope to win against Bush?” But this president’s credibility has been weakened, and the uphill battle right now is his. Wait to see the turnout on election day. Democrats hate this guy, maybe even more than many Republicans hated Clinton.

Semi-related: George Soros gives $5 million to MoveOn.org, attacks Bush.

(Don’t worry, politically-themed posts to this blog will be very rare.)

Earlier this week, the brand new English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso was screened at the Paramount Theater as part of the Austin Film Festival. I bought a full pass to the festival to make sure I wouldn’t get cheated out of seeing this film, and I thought I could catch a few other films and the pass would pay for itself. No luck, I haven’t made the time to see any other films. But who cares. This is Miyazaki for crying out loud, and the only chance to see it on the big screen before it hits DVD next year.

As John Lasseter said on some of the Miyazaki’s DVDs: “You are lucky. You get to see (insert great film here).”

The film was fantastic, and the audience loved it. Funnier than his other films, but also with that sincere Miyazaki touch – beautiful sky scenes, not afraid to pause and appreciate a moment.

Cindy and Donald Hewitt answered questions afterwards. They did the English dialogue for Porco Rosso and also for last year’s Academy Award winning Spirited Away. Sounds like they enjoy working on these films, even though they have a short time to get the screenplay done (2-3 weeks). They are also playing a bigger role in directing the voice actors.

To see how potential voice actors will fit the part, they use Final Cut Pro to take audio clips from other movies and play it over the animation. When working on the English version, they just practice the dialogue while watching the movie, trying to get the lip sync right (lots of rewinding). They use the direct translation and also other existing dubs as a guide.

Miyazaki’s next film, currently in production, is Howl’s Moving Castle.

Today: Apple and Pepsi to Give Away 100 Million Free Songs

Two decades ago, Steve Jobs to John Scully of Pepsi:

"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"

My copy of the Rustboy book arrived the other day. It is an incredible achievement, one of the best “making of” books I’ve seen. Like the upcoming film, it was put together by one guy, a Mac with off-the-shelf software, and some good design sense.

Much of the book contents can also be found on the main Rustboy web site, but there is new stuff in the book too, plus some great insight. And hey, it even comes with 3d glasses.

I only hope that he can finish the film itself relatively soon. Yesterday I caught myself saying that he would never finish it at this rate, or that it would take 5 years, but the truth is that I can see it being completed in another year or two. My only concern is that the story might not be strong enough to engage an audience for 25 minutes, but his work is beautiful so it hardly matters. And he has been such a perfectionist up to this point, it’s better to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters essay surprised me. I put off reading it for months, because I assumed I knew what it was about – that programmers are artists, that their work today is just as important an art form as that of painters during the Renaissance. And sure, there’s some of that in there, but that’s not really the point at all. By looking for patterns between two seemingly unrelated subjects, Paul attempts to better understand the strengths or weaknesses of different approaches to programming. In the process I think he also defines what a hacker is – a tinkerer, a designer, but also someone who jumps in and starts coding. Not all programming projects should be tackled this way, and that’s fine too.

"If universities and research labs keep hackers from doing the kind of work they want to do, perhaps the place for them is in companies. Unfortunately, most companies won't let hackers do what they want either. Universities and research labs force hackers to be scientists, and companies force them to be engineers.

"I only discovered this myself quite recently. When Yahoo bought Viaweb, they asked me what I wanted to do. I had never liked the business side very much, and said that I just wanted to hack. When I got to Yahoo, I found that what hacking meant to them was implementing software, not designing it. Programmers were seen as technicians who translated the visions (if that is the word) of product managers into code."

Andy Murdock, of Lots of Robots:

"If you sit around waiting for permission to follow your dreams then you are just sitting around waiting to die."

The human figure is complicated and beautiful and impossibly hard to draw well. If you can master it, the quality of the rest of your work will improve. When I have time, I go to an open life drawing session on Saturday mornings to practice. I don’t have anything recent scanned in yet, but here is some stuff from a few years ago (nudity).

For some people, drawings appear to just flow off their pencil. They’ve also usually been carrying a sketchbook their whole life. For others, it is a constant struggle to improve their drawing skills. When I was young, I fell into the former category. But right now, it’s work, and I think it will take drawing regularly for a few more years for it to become easier. On the other hand, fighting over a drawing or piece of animation (and winning) is good too.

Richard Williams, animation director for Roger Rabbit and author of the excellent Animator’s Survival Kit, writes:

"I've never understood why some people in animation are so desperate to save work. If you want to save work, what on earth are you doing in animation? It's nothing but work!"

Kelly is an animation student beginning her second year at CalArts, and writes one of a handful of LiveJournal weblogs that I’ve run across. I think she would agree with Williams, but she says it as only a passionate student artist can.

"I wanna be struck by my unknown story with anvil force, thrown against the wall by more than I can handle, smashed and lightheaded on concepts I don't understand but must master, and grinding my pencil through my desk as I carve the lines of the living character into the paper. I want it to be messy and painful. Because there lies the beauty."

Most people who know me know that I’m a big fan of animation. There’s a great potential in animation to create stories and characters that move the audience in ways that are impossible in live-action. Many considered it the art form of the 20th century, but in the aftermath of Saturday morning cartoons and outsourcing to cheap labour in Asia, it is rare that audiences get a glimpse of what animation can do.

In addition to being a fan, I’m also something of an animator by night, working on a short traditionally animated film. I’ve been working on it for about a year, a few hours a week, in the evenings when time permits. (Often, it hasn’t.)

Lately I’ve found myself talking about this more frequently, so it seems the right time to expand the coverage of this weblog to include some of the things I’m working on. Mainly as a chronicle that I can come back and read later.

Here’s a little sketch I made last night while doing thumbnails (a quick way to explore the key poses for a scene before animating). As I get further along with the film I will post some storyboards, production stills, and pencil tests.

TidBITS, iMovie 3 Tips and Gotchas:

"Although the program introduced a number of welcome new features, performance was sluggish, the program crashed for no reason, and exporting data was problematic. iMovie 3 had become the new Word 6 (for those who remember that giant step backwards)."

I still wonder about performance sometimes. Why is iCal so slow anyway? And why is the rewritten-in-Cocoa iMovie 3 slower than iMovie 1 and 2? No doubt that it is design decisions more than the language or framework that makes an app slow. OmniOutliner and Keynote are two examples of fast Cocoa apps.

I spent several weeks last month working on Cocoa experiments – small test applications and new features in a Carbon application. It’s clear that the Cocoa framework is very powerful. If I started a new application from scratch I would probably use Cocoa, but for an existing Carbon application the choice is more difficult.

Look at apps like iTunes. It’s still all Carbon, even the new music store. Or Final Cut Pro. These are some of Apple’s best apps. Not to mention Photoshop and Illustrator. Why should I abandon Carbon if it produces apps like these?

And there’s something else: I trust the Carbon team at Apple. They know the Mac better than most – not just the APIs but what it takes to build solid apps, and what the essence of Mac UI is all about.

I need to think about this more. Contrary to my previous post, mixing Cocoa and Carbon windows in the same application is problematic. Window focus doesn’t always work correctly, and dealing with menu commands in two different ways complicates the app. A better approach would be to stick with one framework for the UI (Cocoa or HIToolbox), and mix-and-match Cocoa and Carbon as needed under the hood.

You always think that these are the kind of things that happen to other people, until it happens close to you. I went to the funeral service for Kali Sansone today, someone I saw practically everyday from kindergarten to 8th grade, but had not seen at all since.

Some people are lucky to live to an old age and have their accomplishments written about in history books, but for the rest of us, it’s about what we leave to the world through our children, and in those who remember us. Many people will remember and be inspired by Kali.

I don’t usually post this kind of personal stuff here, but I met up with some old friends and wanted to note that. If you’re Googling and find this site, send me an email. I’d be interesting in hearing about what you’ve been up to these last 12 years. :-)

Jeffrey Veen argues for the practical advantages of new web standards:

"Huge interfaces squeezed through plodding modem connections have been a plague since the Web's inception. The increasing dominance of broadband has only helped a bit. A hotel phone line plugged into a business traveler's laptop may be the only tenuous link you've got to a new customer. Adopting clean, standardized code gives users a shortcut to accomplishing their goals at your site."

And, in tribute to HotWired and the old school of web design, I present a list of things I miss from when the web was young:

• webmaster@hostname email addresses
• "best viewed in Netscape 2" buttons
• colored bullet images
• rainbow divider lines
• that under construction digging guy
• no .htm
• h1, h2, h3 (making a comeback thanks to CSS)
• background patterns (also back in style)

The series finale of Futurama aired last month. It was a great show that ended too soon (thanks Fox execs). I had only seen a handful of episodes until last month, when I rented the first season disc 1 on NetFlix. I had forgotten how great the show was, so I bought the first season box set and ordered season 2, which I’ve been enjoying since.

The commentaries on the DVDs are some of the best I’ve ever seen. Completely unscripted, funnier than the episodes themselves in many ways.

Now that Fox has pulled the plug on the series, Futurama is enjoying a popular run on Cartoon Network. The fanbase is there, and there could be a movie version some day. But chances of Cartoon Network funding new episodes seems pretty slim, given the cost of each episode. Producer David Cohen has done a few interviews lately, here’s one.

I guess anything’s possible, since apparently a Family Guy movie is in the works as well [via BoingBoing]. I never watched the television show, but it had a shorter run than Futurama yet strong DVD sales.

I just received my copy of Fragments in the mail. It’s a great collection of sketches and paintings by Pixar story artists Ronnie Del Carmen and Enrico Casarosa. (Pixar, for those not paying attention, is the new Disney – where artists control the process, and good storytelling still means something.)

There’s a shift occurring in the animation and comic world, a change that favors independent artists. Fragments is self-published. So are Michel Gagne’s popular books. The RustBoy book should be out by the end of the month, and all indications point to great sales that will help fund the film. Countless comic artists are publishing sketchbooks, or moving their comics online. The other piece of the puzzle is the technology: producing an independent short film at home has never been more possible, if you’re willing to put in the work to see it through to completion.

Why does this matter? It enables artists to create what they want, if the audience is there. And it provides a personal touch that big companies can’t match, such as this little cat sketch from the Fragments mailing package.

We saw Whale Rider last night, and I was pulled into it from the very beginning. There were few big surprises, but the story was moving, especially for all of us with daughters. It was told in a uniquely honest way that made the whole feel special. The scenes had a thoughtful timing and flow to them that really worked, and you could tell each shot was carefully composed. As Traci said as we left the theater, it was one of those rare films that you want to see again soon.

A new sketch group officially started up yesterday, led by local artist John Rubio. The first meeting was at Opal Divines. We passed around sketchbooks and discussed art, comics, animation, and how the digital world has effected independent artists. Some people brought laptops, some brought prints. Most everyone sketched.

Rick gave out copies of his comic book, Budget Strips; Justin had his Flash short films on his PowerBook; Ismael showed some framed prints inspired by doodles; and John and Jasun both had great sketchbooks. About a dozen people showed up, an incredible mix of talented artists. I’ve been trying to get in the habit of keeping a sketchbook and drawing more regularly, so it was a big inspiration.

John Gruber counters anti-Carbon arguments from Andrew Stone, again:

Apple’s original plan more or less boiled down to replacing the Mac OS with NextStep; Mac developers had the crazy idea that it should be replaced with a new version of the Mac OS. Apple listened, the plan was revised, and six years later, here we are.

Apparently, no one sent Stone the memo.

The good news is that most of this Carbon vs. Cocoa stuff has died down by now. Developers realize that there are strengths in both APIs.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with adding Cocoa functionality to an entirely Carbon app. It turns out this is fairly straight forward. In fact the hardest part was making the move to mach-o and an application package. At that point you can drop NIB files in to the project, and mix and match Objective-C with C++. All using CodeWarrior.

The integration is mostly seamless. For example I have drag-and-drop working between a Data Browser control in a Carbon window and an NSTableView in a Cocoa windows. The Cocoa code knows nothing about the Carbon window and the Carbon code knows nothing about Pasteboards. Another surprise was menu integration: NSTextView properly enables and responds to menu items in my Carbon Edit menu!

I often subscribe to a weblog because I trust that person’s opinion on a certain subject. I know that they worked at a company I have respect for, or wrote software that I like, or created some art or film that is interesting.

But many go further than that. They open up another part of their life that in many ways is much more interesting. A great example of that is Jeffrey Veen. Forget web design, his posts on cycling have been great. He also blogs in a pattern that I have come to appreciate: infrequent posts but each one actually says something. Too many bloggers now post 10 times a day, and it’s all useless stuff. You have to read a week’s worth of garbage to get something insightful.

Here’s Veen on Pain and Cycling:

"I crawled back to the city, wobbling across the Golden Gate into 30mph winds. My vision blurred and a cramp in my hamstring knotted and released with each pedal stroke. When I finally got home, I was unable to lift my bike up the stairs. I rolled it around to the garage and stumbled into the house. Leslie looked at me and said, 'Oh no.' I took a 30 second shower and fell into bed with a bowl of pasta."

Friday night’s premiere of The Animation Show here in Austin was a lot of fun. An excellent collection of shorts. Many of them I had never heard of, and most I had never seen.

Afterwards Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge took some questions. Here are two quotes from Don:

"Really the point of this is to give back to the artists."
"We've done this before -- we hope we can help them get through the door."

Basically, he made two points on the purpose of the show:

• To get good animation to audiences. Not just a few cities but into the midwest and all over the country. Apparently they are booking more shows than is usual for Spike and Mike.
• To help artists get their work out there, help them make money. Don feels that short films should be a viable pursuit in themselves, not just as a way to land a feature job at a big studio.

Other points:

• It's not a competition. Spike and Mike and The Animation Show can co-exist. Mike Judge pointed out that in the 80s there were several shows (International Tournee, etc). Don remarked that it doesn't have to be like the big features, where there can only be one player for a given movie weekend.
• Every year there will be a new show, with both brand new shorts and also older classics. New submissions will be considered for the 2004 show.

The big surprise in the program was the inclusion of Ward Kimball’s 1957 film, “Mars and Beyond.” Kimball, one of Disney’s Nine Old Men, passed away earlier this year.

Some more highlights (incomplete list):

• "Strange Invaders", from the National Film Board of Canada
• "Mt.Head", a great piece from Japan
• "Cathedral", CGI with great backgrounds, really well done
• "Parking", Bill Plympton
• "Vincent", Tim Burton
• "Das Rad", neat idea and well executed
• "Huh?" and "Office Space" by Mike Judge
• "Billy's Balloon" and "Rejected", plus the 3 new shorts for this show by Don Hertzfeldt

The Animation Show web site now has a complete program list, and a schedule for cities the tour will hit over the next year.

I finished the fifth Harry Potter book last weekend. It was easily the best so far, and as usual a lot of fun to read.

Here are two pictures from the bookstore party last month. I picked up my copy at midnight with hundreds of other fans. I half expected a lot of crazies to show up, but it was all normal folks. Just people of all ages exciting about reading. A few dressed up. One woman let me take a picture of her Golden Snitch tattoo.

I guess I should go back to reading adult books now. Yawn.

I meant to blog every day from WWDC, but the network was just too flaky, and all my free time was spent coding. I wrote up a few things and will post them over the next week.

I hoped to feel rested, but I was drained after the conference was over. Slept on the plane back, and a big nap the next day trying to adjust. The church that owns the land behind our house put on an incredible fireworks show Sunday night. It lasted a good 30 minutes, and rivaled any city-sponsored fireworks I’ve seen. It was even bigger than the same event two years ago. We had just moved into our new house the previous day, and we sat on the back deck with a drink, staring at the sky above our house. It was a great welcome to the neighborhood.

John Gruber: “The elephant in the middle of the room, of course, is Apple Mail.”

For a while now I have regretted switching to Apple Mail. But this is not unusual, because I have regretted switching to every single email client I have tried since the Eudora days. Let’s face it – Eudora’s ugly, but it was a rock-solid app.

The first big mistake was moving to CyberDog. There was a lot to like about that app, and I was a big fan of OpenDoc, but even today I have a bunch of mail stuck in its proprietary formats. I need to boot into Mac OS 8 and extract that stuff one of these days.

Then I moved to Mailsmith. Unfortunately I lost mail due to corrupted databases. I have no idea how to get that stuff out. Even so, the 2.0 release sounds nice, and I’d be willing to give Mailsmith a another try. I’m stupid that way.

Back to Apple Mail. If you are ever confused enough to think it’s a great app, try this: delete a single email message in a folder containing 2-3 thousand emails. On my TiBook, the OS locks for a good 5+ seconds.

The saving grace of Apple Mail is that it is easy (presumably) to get out of it – they use standard unix mbox files for everything. Thank you Apple.

Now I’m at WWDC, and Steve Jobs just demoed the new Apple Mail. Pretty nice stuff, but no mention of performance. I’ll wait to dump Apple Mail until trying Panther, which I’ll install on an external drive sometime this week. Or maybe I’ll just get a G5 desktop and not worry about performance anymore.

It’s going to be a fun week.

I believe in traditional (2d) animation. But watching Nemo, for a moment I almost believed the hype – that 2d just can’t compete with 3d anymore. To remind myself that it’s not true I looked at the great drawings in the Art of Finding Nemo book, and remembered the fish sequence from the original Fantasia. Both mediums are appropriate for their own stories, and any great idea with strong characters can be embraced by audiences. You only have to look at last year’s successes Lilo & Stitch and Spirited Away as proof. The thing that makes Pixar great is the story artists and the hands-off management, not the render farm.

There will be great 2d films to come, and to be successful they will need to embrace what makes 2d special: drawings. It’s clear that Disney (the company) has never understood what Walt believed in. Jim Hill thinks that many top artists, rather than submit to 3d re-training, may leave to build a new traditional animation company, taking over the art form that Disney pioneered.

"And -- since WDFA execs now seem genuinely reluctant to greenlight a new traditionally animated feature -- that's why many Disney Animation vets are now reportedly talking about '... pulling a Bluth.'"

Don Bluth, tired of the cheap production process compared to the classic Disney films, left the company and took many senior animators with him. They made The Secret of Nihm, and then the financial successful An American Tail.

Although I don’t know the political climate at the studio, it is clear that there was a division among the animators, and Bluth left many young recruits behind. One of them, Glen Keane, is among the most respected animators in the business. He has supervised the characters Ariel, Beast, Alladin, Pocahontas, Tarzan, and Long John Silver. Now he wants to direct Rapunzel with charcoal animation, or 2d with 3d hair, but the project is being forced into an all-CG production.

Getting back to Jim Hill’s point, would Glen leave rather than make a completely CG film? Maybe not. Ironically, he worked closely with John Lasseter before Lasseter left for Pixar, and then closely with Eric Daniels on the computer/traditional hybrid Long John Silver in Treasure Planet.

Witold Riedel:

"The writers at Pixar are somehow always able to think outside of one age group and so I think that even if Pixar decided to make movies with paper-napkin-puppets exclusively, they would still be able to turn them into wonderful classics. Their storytelling sits at the beginning and in the centre of the process and this really shows."

Happy Father’s Day!

Finding Nemo – about a father, among other things – set a new record for biggest animated film opening with $70 million, and another record for fastest animated film to $100 million. Now, in its third weekend, it is still the number one movie, and will likely pass $200 million total in a few days. Congratulations Pixar!

More on this subject tomorrow.

It’s appropriate that I’m in a coding frenzy for the next few weeks. WWDC e-ticket in hand, and at work we go GM on a major version of our software just a week before the conference.

This will be my fifth WWDC, and I think it will be a good one. It’s great to work for a company committed to this conference. Lots of mysterious TBA sessions, which probably means they will cover new Panther technology. Unfortunately the session map puts some of the good Carbon sessions on the last day. Every WWDC I have to wonder if Apple will fully support Carbon development.

The code I’m working on now will be the last for Mac OS 9. Since I use a custom C++ framework, we’ve been expanding it over the last few months. Wrappers for Carbon Timers, network transfer, and QuickTime. OS X-specific stuff, like sheets. More advanced UI controls, custom buttons, and a search box. A minimal toolbar class, which looks like the OS X toolbar at first glance, but works on OS 9 and doesn’t support customization.

When we finally say goodbye to OS 9, some of this code can be replaced. WWDC is a good turning point. Without worrying about shipping a product, I can dive into the new Carbon HIToolbox APIs. And Cocoa. Based on what Apple says at the conference I will decide whether moving to a hybrid Carbon/Cocoa app is the way to go.

It should be fun.

The Matrix double-feature last night was fun (thanks Damon). Five hours of movies and food, yikes. I enjoyed the movie, and my only complaint was when they started replacing Keanu with a CG character in some of the fight scenes. It started to look more like a video game then a film, but given the nature of the Matrix world, maybe that was the point.

Kottke was also annoyed by the effects: “The completely computer-generated effects (e.g. in the Neo vs. 100 Agent Smiths fight) looked, well, completely computer-generated.”

Before and between the features they screened 3 of the new Animatrix shorts. I had seen part of one online, but was waiting until the DVD came out so I could watch them all. Now I’m not so sure. I’ll probably still get the DVD, but I hope the subject matter in the other shorts is better than The Second Renaissance. Not that it was bad – it was brilliantly done, with a great blend of CG and hand-drawn – but it sure was a depressing little film. Sort of like Grave of the Fireflies: a beautiful and moving film, but not something I want to watch over and over.

IGN: Interviewing the Animatrix

At SXSW I told Mena Trott that RSS 1.0 was dead or dying, because it was too complicated. Turns out I was partially wrong – it’s very much alive, but perhaps only because it’s the default in Movable Type. Six Apart has signed up for the semantic web vision, and they are tool builders so they look for ways to make their products spit out semantic goodness.

I used to feel the same way. I wanted to build tools to help web designers use meta data effectively, provide meaningful structure to their site, put their template-driven pages in a database, and a whole host of other tricks that in 1995 seemed like noble work. I’m too tired for that now. I just want to use the web, and build good software, and do a few other things.

You reach a point where you no longer want to tinker with things that work. Could RSS 2.0 be better? Sure, but so could any number of standards. You need stability to build new tools on top of.

The RSS profile discussion on Sam Ruby’s blog makes me want to set fire to my computer. As do all the competing approaches for putting HTML into RSS.

Ben Trott chimes in with “RSS for Weblogs”. I still think there’s a division in the RSS community between people that want a simple format and people that want to evolve it, embracing RDF and a handful of upcoming weblog-related specs. As such, the battle for RSS standards is going to suck. Of course maybe I’m wrong, maybe this work does need to happen, to “finish” RSS. To all involved, good luck!

<a href=“http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/24/zeldman_has_an_rss_feed.html

“>Mark Pilgrim:

"Zeldman maintains this feed by hand, like he maintains the rest of his site. Let's keep this in mind the next time someone claims that it's OK for a data format to be complex because it'll only ever be produced and consumed by machines."

In the TypePad announcements comes word that they will be pushing FOAF (friend of a friend). According to the Guardian article, “instantly taking an experimental standard and taking it to the mainstream.” Is that a good thing?

Let’s not forget the little guy who has to code this stuff by hand. And don’t push formats that no one wants. Where possible, give choices. When a product takes off like Movable Type has, the formats that it spits out have a big influence.

I’ll end with a few RDF articles. Hopefully this will be my last blog post about blogs for a while.

IT World: “RDF and other monkey wrenches”

Jon Udell, <a href="The Semantic Blog:

"But we'd hate to be saddled with the rigorous data preparation that the Safari production teams slog through. That's the Semantic Web dilemma in a nutshell. Where's the sweet spot? How can we marry spontaneity and structure? Recent trends in blogspace, plus emerging XML-savvy databases suggest a way forward."

A few weeks ago John Siracusa wrote a great summary of the Finder, with specifics on why the OS X Finder is a step back from the OS 9 Finder. In the second half he provides suggestions for improvement that return what was good about the old Finder, plus a general architecture and guidelines for adding features.

And Tog writes that Apple has been squandering the advantage it used to have. Some of the interface innovations he wants include piles, file cabinets, and scrapbooks, all to help better organize documents. Just the names alone carry a lot of meaning.

eWeek hints at possible Jaguar “user at the center” features, including piles that Tog mentions in the link above:

"According to the patent, piles comprise collections of documents represented graphically in stacks. Users can browse the "piled" documents dynamically by pointing at them with the cursor; the filing system can then divide a pile into subpiles based on each document's content. At the user's request, the filing system can automatically file away documents into existing piles with similar content."

There’s an opportunity for Ranchero if they act soon. We are still in the early stages of RSS readers and aggregators, both web-based and desktop apps. Over the next year, we are going to see even more tools for managing weblog subscriptions and discovering new blogs.

<a href=“http://www.dashes.com/anil/index.php?archives/005631.php

“>Anil Dash wants to follow many, many weblogs:

"The second idea that I really believe in, despite the fact that nearly everyone who heard it thought I was either being crazy or facetious, was that in 2 or 3 years, many of us will be reading 10,000 weblogs. It's a hard statement to justify literally unless you factor in how software and platforms are going to evolve."

At SXSW, he made the comparison to the New York Times. Instead of hundreds of writers and editors at a newspaper, you have thousands of bloggers focused on topics they know something about, and smart software that brings it all together.

Impossible today. At least two things are needed: Better ways to discover new blogs, using blogrolls and FOAF-like formats to connect bloggers that share common interests; and filtering systems that allow unimportant entries to be hidden, or special topics flagged and brought to your attention.

Back to NetNewsWire. It has a good UI, it’s built on a nice database (SQLite), it knows network stuff and RSS, and it will soon integrate a good rendering engine (WebKit). Why not use that infrastructure to build other tools on. Plug-ins could hook into the application at different levels, such as filtering incoming RSS feeds, providing search services, or making changes to the subscription list. NetNewsWire has great AppleScript support, but this would go a step beyond that.

Now would be a great time for Ranchero to start thinking about this, before everyone starts writing their own aggregator. The last thing I want is 10 applications with incomplete features. I’d rather have a couple good ones that are compatible and can be extended.

I was out of the house Sunday night so I set the old VCR timer to record the Oscars. Unfortunately I programmed it with the wrong channel. I guess that’s an argument for Tivo. But it was probably just as well, since I was able to catch up on the winners and speeches in 10 minutes instead of 3 hours.

The big news for me – more than Michael Moore’s rant, or Adrien Brody’s win for The Pianist – was that Spirited Away beat out Lilo & Stitch for Best Animated Feature. Now comes word that Disney will keep its promise to re-release Spirited Away to 800 theaters this week. Hopefully it can find an American audience.

Update: Box Office Mojo shows a 700-theater opening tomorrow. At least two theaters here in Austin.

After SXSW I made a point to seek out new blogs. One is Micah Alpern, who writes about Marissa Mayer’s talk, “The How and Why of Google UI”:

"Marissa is involved in UI, Usability, and Project Management at Google so she's had a big effect on how Google.com has evolved. It was an insightful talk with great examples of how a user centered design processes can lead to successful products."

Also on the Google UI front today, 37signals enhances Google’s default design by exposing similar search terms and their hit counts:

"Our idea for 37BetterGoogle was to go beyond Google's standard search and offer alternatives based on the words you originally entered. By searching for different forms of the same words and comparing those results to your initial query, Google does the legwork for you, helping you see results you may never have discovered the first time around.

Interestingly, 37signals has placed the entire design into the public domain using a Creative Commons license, essentially giving the idea to Google free of charge. Good for them.

Dave Winer from 1999:

"Compare RSS with scriptingNews format, which is richer, it includes enough information to do an elegant syndication-based search engine (coming later today). Netscape's and Slashdot's formats are basically equivalent, neither is as rich as our format."

At some point Dave stopped evangelizing the scriptingNews format, but Userland tools still support it. Manila’s RSS output is actually often incomplete compared to the scriptingNews version. This annoyed me enough with Hack the Planet that I wrote a little Python script to convert scriptingNews to RSS. (NetNewsWire doesn’t support scriptingNews subscriptions.)

I had never coded in Python before, but I’ve read a little from Learning Python and Dive into Python. Even so, the script is mostly an unenlightened mess. The usual disclaimers apply: do whatever you want with it, don’t blame me, feel free to send improvements back to me, etc.

I’m running it from cron on my Mac OS X laptop with curl -s wmf.editthispage.com/xml/scrip… | python sn2rss.py > wmf_rss.xml, and then I point NetNewsWire at the local generated file.

You can download it here: sn2rss.py.txt.

For those wondering why I didn’t just use XSLT, I did try that first. But doing string replaces didn’t seem to be available in the old version of XT I was testing with.

A final warning: Python’s XML parser on Mac OS X 10.2 is broken. I had to install PyXML, which also had a broken install script that required tweaking. Too bad I threw away my changes.

Macromedia is fortunate to have two things going for it: Kevin Lynch, who seems like a smart guy, and Dreamweaver, which won’t let the company forget about HTML.

My expectations were very low for the Macromedia.com beta report, but truthfully there is some good stuff in there. Macromedia will not be successful pushing their Rich Internet Application strategy without educating customers when to use Flash, when to stick with HTML and core web technologies, and when to combine both. The report feels honest. Here’s the take-home point:

"Content and applications should coexist. The most successful sites will walk the delicate balance of using Macromedia Flash and HTML together to create engaging, effective experiences."

Anil Dash said at SXSW, about why audio blogs suck: “They break the web to me in all the ways Flash does.” How does Flash break the web? Used poorly, it’s a glorified JPEG – no links, no URIs, no back/forward button in the browser, no user control. Ironically, Macromedia was held up as a good example in Jesse James Garrett’s user-centered URL design essay, and that URL consistency remains on the new site. Obviously there are people at Macromedia who get it. When the report says “Internally, there was a lot of debate about the home page”, you can read between the lines and imagine the different camps fighting it out in meetings.

I had a great lunch conversation with Trei Brundrett of Handwire last week about Flash vs. traditional web applications. He had experimented with a completely Flash front-end for a previously web-based content management system, with disappointing results (slow load times and decreased usability). Other web developers that go down this path might also find themselves questioning their decision, depending on the project. There are small studios producing entire animated television series using Flash! You have to wonder if the same tool is also appropriate for building software user interfaces.

It’s great to see Macromedia eating their own dog food. I wonder if it will change their rhetoric on Rich Internet Applications a year from now.

After the panel Tuesday I commented to Mena that TrackBack is still sort of Movable Type-only and maybe needs simplifying if it is to gain acceptance in other tools. Turns out I was wrong, in part. TrackBack is a pretty good specification. As far as how pinging works, it’s about simple as it could be.

I started implementing TrackBacks for my blog tonight. I’m using Radio Userland, which has it’s own centralized comment system that I don’t use. For a couple of reasons I prefer the idea of TrackBack. It adds a little bit of accountability (you need your own weblog), and also allows the poster more control over his or her own comments.

However, not everyone knows how to issue TrackBack pings, which is really the part about the system that needs some usability help. So I also want to eventually add support for detecting in-bound links using referrers, which would be gathered into the same database and co-exist alongside TrackBacks. All the coding will be in PHP, included as necessary from the static HTML files that Radio generates.

Another one of my goals is to have simple TrackBack Ping URLs. My first idea here was to use the permalink itself, but right now I think I’ll use a variation like /trackback/2003/03/15. When I have it working, I’ll add the URL below each post.

Matt Haughey is also doing interesting things with TrackBack: “So Winamp is now sending trackbacks to my blog, and every time a new song comes on, a new ping goes out, and my site changes.”

Earlier this year Timothy Appnel suggested changes for the next generation to TrackBack.

SXSW has wrapped up for me, although many others will still be out partying long after I post this. I’ve had the chance to meet some interesting people. Some of them I have names and URLs for, some just faces and conversations.

The Future of Blogging panel was good. Tantek Çelik asked a question about the complexity of Friend of a Friend (FOAF), and whether a more human-readable/writable format was needed. The question was not well received by the panel, which took the view that tools (like Movable Type) will be able to hide the sometimes messy details from the user.

But remember that if nothing else, the weblog movement has proved that it is the simple formats that will be successful. RSS 1.0 (RDF-based) was interesting, but it’s dead, and it’s dead because it was too complicated. Similar situation with XML-RPC vs. SOAP. To get to the point of having great tools that hide the protocols, you need to go through a period of hand-coding. The easier a spec is to understand and implement, the more people will adopt it, the more momentum it will have, and the more tools that can build on it.

I took a bunch of notes in some of the more interesting sessions. Originally I had planned on posting them to the SXSWblog Notes Exchange, but alone their value is questionable; they are so interspersed with my own thoughts which need more exploration. Over the next few days I’ll unravel them and post my view on the topics that have threaded through the conference.

Justin Hall on note taking:

Now that I’m practicing more professional journalism, I see less value in a straight recitations of events. I want a summary, with key glowing thoughts brought out, hyperlinked and put in context. Notes are good for article building, but they don’t make much of an article in and of themselves.

Mike Clark is thinking about blogging:

"My weblog is still relatively new, and yet once in a while I find myself reading through some old entries just to see where I was at mentally (and physically). Indeed, I use this form of reflection, and others, as a learning tool. Over time I'll continue to study the history embodied in this weblog as a yardstick for measuring personal and professional improvement."

girlwonder.com might be outgrowing SXSW:

"it's safe to assume that everyone's got some understanding of the more basic issues around these micromedia. could we instead talk about the deeper whys, the implications, the social issues? could we look outward a few years and try to envision the world we're going to be in, as it pertains to us and the aims of this conference?"

I turned this web site into a blog one year ago today. More on that in a few paragraphs.

This afternoon I was sitting in the hall at SXSW trying to organize some notes, and charge up my PowerBook battery. A convention center employee told me and others that we can’t use the wall outlets. He forwarded us to Regina at the utility services booth in the trade show hall, who confirmed that she “owns all the power outlets” in the convention center. Apparently she’d loose money if a few laptop batteries were charged on her watch. She kindly told me about the iMacs in the corner where I could check email. (No thanks.)

I’ve been taking notes and writing up a few thoughts to post later. It’s been a good show so far. David Weinberger gave a great talk yesterday afternoon – well-timed after his and Doc Searls' “World of Ends” essay. It started the conference on the right foot, and I found myself making connections between his view of the web and other sessions.

In the “Doing Good Online” panel, Chris Mandra from NPR Online said: “If you do the best thing you can do, and satisfy yourself, you will satisfy other people.” The web allows communities to form across existing boundaries (nothing new here, but worth repeating). Being on the web is fine, but by itself has little meaning; it’s about adding to the value of the web. Something as simple as posting about your washing machine in a site’s discussion forum, or writing a weblog on wireless networking, or politics, or whatever – all these things add value, if they can be linked (and indexed) into the whole. Do something as well as you can and put it out there.

Maybe the most valuable weblogs, then, are the ones that can focus on a set of topics. Where individual posts or groups of posts can stand by their own when read a year from now. In response to a question from the audience, Weinberger said he didn’t believe that most bloggers include personal information in their writing, as they would in a private journal. A few trips to LiveJournal or a random Blog*Spot site might lead to a different conclusion. But somewhere in all that rambling there will be some great stories, and they have the potential to connect on some level with someone, somewhere.

I wrote most of the above paragraphs during the conference today. When I got home I went to re-read Meg’s “What We’re Doing When We Blog”, only to find out that I had never actually read it. Probably just skimmed. There’s good stuff in it, and the best parts of the “Journalism: Old vs. New” panel today echoed some of it: about weblogs enabling conversations, involving the reader. Dan Gillmor: “My readers know more than I do, and that’s not a threat, it’s an opportunity.”

One year ago I wrote: “Seems an appropriate time to start a weblog, as if there weren’t enough in the world already.” Since then, thousands more have surely been added to the web, and there are still not enough blogs. The challenge for the next year will be finding readers for those new voices – building software to help discover new sites and connect people.

SXSW Interactive kicks off tonight. Wes, against his better judgement, is going to the Linux Top Gun contest. I decided to skip out on the opening night for a variety of reasons, mostly to stay home with family, and because driving downtown just for an hour seemed a little silly.

SXSW is a weird mix of sessions. Here are some of the ones I plan to hit during the conference (my comments in parenthesis):

• David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined (I haven't read the book)
• The Future: User-Centered Design Goes Mainstream (the future design process, with Jesse James Garrett)
• Doing Good Online: Innovative Ideas From Non-Profits on the Internet (moderated by Adaptive Path's Lane Becker, with Cory Doctorow)
• Journalism: Old vs. New (weblogs weblogs weblogs)
• Lawrence Lessig, Building a Layer of Sanity Into the World of IP (superhero)
• Conceptual Firewalls (inequalities and blogging)
• Computers vs. Blackboards: Net Learning or Not Learning? (almost too related to my work)
• Organizing the World's Information (Google employee)
• Deconstructing the Rich Interactive Experience (Flash MX blah)
• Beyond the Blog: The Future of Personal Publishing (Trott and more)
• Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now (haven't read this book either, but a fun way to close out the conference)

There has been some excellent critique of Apple’s UI experiments on Irate Scotsman, Daring Fireball, and NSLog. While moving some books last night I found the following, which you may recognize from Apple’s Think Different ad campaign. Reading it I couldn’t help but think of the posts above.

Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

etc…

The important thing here is that you want to be different and better, not just different. Lately, Apple has been better. The recent failures are so annoying because they got the hard things right (new design approaches to old problems) and the easy things wrong (UI widget consistency).

A follow-up to yesterday’s post. Many people contribute to a film, and not all of them are given direct screen credit. Last month, legendary illustrator Al Hirschfeld passed away. His lines graced the pages of books, magazines, and newspapers including the New York Times, and proved an influence to many future artists. Disney’s Eric Goldberg brought Hirschfeld-esque lines to Aladdin’s Genie and the “Rhapsody in Blue” sequence of Fantasia 2000.

Amid Amidi of Animation Blast writes:

"In honor of Al Hirschfeld's passing last week, here's a reprint of the full-page ad that Disney took out in VARIETY. The ad features a drawing of the Genie from ALADDIN. Lead animator Eric Goldberg had used Hirschfeld's flowing calligraphic line style as inspiration for the character's design."

Thank you Disney. Despite massive layoffs, horrible cheapquels, and a general disregard for their past culture, it’s nice to know that someone there still gets it.

Slashdot points to a Salon article about Andy Serkis (voice and motion reference for Gollum in The Two Towers) missing an Oscar nomination:

"In the end, the answer is no, not because his talents are less significant than those of the supporting actor nominees, but because the work that he has done here is not equivalent. It would be a disservice to the other nominees to compete against the computer-enhanced Serkis, just as it would be a disservice to Gollum to be written off as an accomplishment of acting."

The article is disappointing. While Andy Serkis did a great job, giving him sole credit for the performance would be forgetting all the animators who also brought that character to life. Much of the performance used motion-capture, but many of the most important scenes (such as the “split personality” scene that cuts back and forth between the two faces of Gollum) were entirely keyframed by animators, with just a glance at the actor’s performance for reference.

The real problem is that the Oscar categories need to be updated to include roles that don’t fall into the traditional actor/actress ones. The Annie Awards (for animated films and television) have long had a best voice actor category. The Oscars could embrace that category, and add others such as best lead animator or best character, to pay tribute to the whole team that brought a digital character to life.

I’ve added a list of books I am reading or have recently read to the right column of this web site. Just a friendly reminder to stick your head over the walls of RSS-land every once in a while.

Of all the things I should be doing, staying up late hacking Konfabulator widgets is not one of them. I started building one to display select headlines from NetNewsWire. It wasn’t until this morning that I noticed there were already some RSS-related widgets available. Still, it could be a fun little hack. The platform Konfabulator is building is interesting, and the app is polished.

Konfabulator is from Perry Clarke and Arlo Rose, whose name you might recognize from Apple and the Kaleidoscope project.

Still, I have to wonder if Konfabulator as a shareware product will be successful. There would have to be a few really compelling widgets to justify the $25 price. See Joel’s Chicken and Egg problems.

It snowed when I was about 5 years old and when I was maybe 10, so I assumed it would snow every 5 years. When you’re young, it’s easy to jump to conclusions and see patterns that don’t exist. Of course it hasn’t snowed since then.

But after a few days of teasing weather reports forecasting snow and ice, I woke up at 4am and stepped out on the back deck to see snow covering the ground. I raised my hands and could feel it falling, lightly. For someone who has lived in central Texas their whole life, this is a big deal.

It all melted within a few hours, but not before I made a miniature snowman with my kids.

Boxes and Arrows article by David Heller: “Ultimately, I don’t see a long term future for HTML as an application development solution.”

Meanwhile, there has been a steady integration of HTML interface behavior into traditional applications. Two years ago, Microsoft published a document titled “Inductive User Interface Guidelines” that made this case in a strong way. It was a result of lessons learned from years of building web applications.

The idea is simple. Despite the lack of mature interface components for web based apps, people understand hyperlinks. (Remember Steve from last month’s Macworld keynote: People only use what they understand.)

Of course it’s more than just hyperlinks – it’s about taking the tasks that you need to do right now out from their hidden places in the menu bar and displaying them in context. No more digging, and it’s text instead of obscure toolbar icons.

But I wonder if something else is going on here. In the studies that Microsoft cites, there is an increased success in solving tasks, but the long-term usability is not measured. I’m talking about the satisfaction that comes from using a well designed piece of software every day. The web style is easy to understand, but it is also heavy on the clicks (repetitive and modal).

Furthermore, the idea can easily be taken too far, and in doing so it jeopardize the consistency of the rest of the interface. Take the Visual Studio .NET installer, which I recently had the pleasure of using. (I’m sure this is true for other Microsoft product installers as well.) It uses HTML-like links for things that buttons are perfectly good for, such as “Continue” on the bottom of a wizard screen.

Jeffrey Veen on links:

"I've often referred to the links in Web pages as windows -- little glimpses out to other destinations. And, as users scan a page while hunting for their next click, they use these windows to make their decisions. The more context you can offer them, I've often said, the more effective their browsing will be."

Contrast this with David Heller’s article promising the end of HTML. As the Veen quote suggests, HTML can be effective and powerful when used properly. Throwing out accepted web interface conventions in favor of Flash front-ends would leave a mess of “fancy” but otherwise non-standard and unusable interfaces until new best practices could evolve. Likewise, merging HTML-like interfaces into traditional applications probably only makes sense for a minority of applications.

Oh no.

AP: NASA Loses Touch with Shuttle Columbia:

"NASA declared an emergency after losing communication with space shuttle Columbia as the ship soared over Texas several minutes before its expected landing time Saturday morning."

CNN: Columbia shuttle breaks up over Texas:

"Police in Nacogdoches, Texas, reported 'numerous pieces of debris' both inside the city limits and in Nacogdoches County."

Listening to NPR this morning: “Eerie quiet at Kennedy Space Center.”

I remember a few years ago, seeing the shuttle pass over Austin. We went outside, and it seemed half the neighborhood was also out in the streets, looking up. I wondered aloud if we’d be able to see anything. We squinted at the clouds, and other imagined dots in the sky. And then, the sky lit up – a huge streak across the sky as the shuttle passed. An amazing sight.

For Christmas I received a copy of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. I was familiar with his work only from his web comics (the I Can’t Stop Thinking series is particularly good), but never read his books. Turns out, it’s excellent. Probably best enjoyed if you’ve read comics, but I think there’s some good stuff in there for everyone.

McCloud’s “6 steps” (Idea/Purpose, Form, Idiom, Structure, Craft, and Surface) can be applied to many pursuits outside comics. To master the artform you need to progress through each of those steps, but often a comics fan decides he wants to “be a comic book artist.” He starts copying the surface qualities of the work (“look, I can draw Superman”), but rarely does he delve into it enough to go back to the other foundation steps: having a unique idea or purpose for the work, and understanding the form and structure of the medium enough to produce something great.

Building software is not all that unlike creating a traditional work of art. (Odd that I’m including comics in “traditional” art, but there you go.) Crafting the user interface, thinking through the design, layering one piece on top of another. And above all, keeping in mind the problem being solved. It can be creative work, if you approach it that way.

Maybe that is one of the reasons why Cocoa is so successful. By putting the emphasis on up-front user interface design while simplifying some of the coding with a mature object-oriented framework, it opens up application design and implementation to more people. In a sense, allowing people to jump directly to Scott McCloud’s step number 6 (“Surface”, in this case Aqua goodness), and then work their way backwards as they mature as software developers – if they choose to.

What a difference two years made to Brent Simmons:

Oct 2000: "So much of my work is UI work. The command line is a vacation."
Oct 2002: "I love UI programming."

Joel likes Tintin comics.

It wasn’t long after I started programming that I developed a pet peeve with other programmers who don’t feel the user is worth the time to put an extra “if” statement into their code. Here’s an example: “There were 5 result(s) for your search.” Obviously it’s a trivial matter to check if there was indeed just 1 result or some other number of results, and leave the “s” off or not. The “(s)” annoys the hell out of me, and I think it is distracting for most users as well.

Tonight I saw something that tops even that. The web folks over at Tripod Blogs display this bit of brilliance under a blog entry:

In other words, they took the time to put “no” instead of “0”, but left the “(s)” anyway.

It’s been two weeks since I last posted, and with every passing day it becomes more difficult to post something. Why? Because with such a delay I feel that I need to somehow justify it with a great blog post. Just wait another day – then I’ll hit my readers (all 2.5 of them) with something great.

Well, something great hasn’t happened. Instead, I fooled around and added a blogroll to the site, tested Movable Type and Blosxom as possible Radio replacements (not yet), and took notes on things that I’d like to blog about.

I’ve also been thinking about what to do with my recently reacquired domain, metacontent.org. I’ve been looking at TrackBack closer, and the metacontent.org site might make a good general index of recent metadata-related blog posts. It would use the standalone TrackBack implementation and could be pinged by anyone.

In my old NetNewsWire subscriptions, I had a group named “Natural Born Bloggers”. These were mostly old-school bloggers who defy classification, such as Meg with topics that range from web design to cooking, or Dave with technology to life lessons. Apparently I’m just not cut out for that elite group.

The flipside, though, is that I’ve been getting a great amount of real work done.

Safari puts the classic SSL “lock” icon in the window title bar. Here’s a screenshot:

Turns out this is easy to do in Jaguar with Carbon’s HIView system. Since the entire structure of the window (not just the content area) is a view, you can position items anywhere, including the title bar. Apple has published some example code showing how.

Another nice UI feature in Safari is the enhanced drag preview when dragging links:

Matthew Thomas continues to update his thoughts on Safari’s interface and what the new browser means for Mozilla.

John Gruber provides some even longer thoughts on Safari:

"That's not to say that there isn't some utility in breaking the traditional one-window-per-web-page metaphor, but I don't think tabs are the optimal solution. My guess is that Safari's engineers have something much better in mind, and simply didn't have time to implement it yet."

Okay, I’m done with the Safari-related blogging. Tomorrow: something different.

Macworld was a week ago today. A few fun quotes from Steve Jobs:

"This jacket is wicked."
"We put the antennas where they belong."
"You only use what you understand."

Almost every weblog I read has been buzzing about Apple’s new web browser, Safari, but this Macworld also saw updates to iMovie and iDVD. iDVD has has some great new themes, and iMovie has apparently been rewritten in Cocoa (which explains the delay between the last release and now).

It used to be that part of an argument between a Mac person and a PC person might go something like this: “There are way more applications available for PCs than for Macs.” Response: “Well, that’s true, but all the ones that matter are on both platforms.”

In the last two years we have seen a different situation emerge. Innovative apps that are well-designed and focused on a single purpose are appearing for the Mac that have no good counterparts in the Windows world. NetNewsWire, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle come to mind. And Apple is continuing to lead the way by bringing a lot of power to users in the form of iMovie and iDVD. I don’t have numbers to back this up but I think bundling these apps can only help sell machines.

I’ve been using Safari since its release. I don’t miss tabbed browsing, but I do miss Chimera’s ability to store web site passwords in the system keychain. And for no good reason I’ve changed the color of the toolbar icons.

In My Experience: “I still use html tables”:

"Fully abstracting your UI from its content takes skill and time. If you don't follow thru, you can negate much of the benefit you seek to create. Now stop and think. Do you even know what the benefit is that you are attempting to create? Will that value be worth the effort?"

Mark Pilgrim: “Semantic obsolescence”:

"I bought into every argument the W3C made that keeping up with standards, validating, and using semantic markup now would somehow 'future-proof' my site and provide some mystical 'forward compatibility'. How about some fucking payoff now? How about some fucking compatibility?"

There are some good points in both of these. Like many things, there is the “right way” to do something, the way that makes you smile and feel good inside when you leave work, and there is the way that actually works and allows you to implement a solution quickly and move on to what is really important (adding content to a site, improving application features, etc). I tried an all-CSS layout for an Intranet project many years ago where the browser version could be mandated. Sure, that was before Mozilla was done, but even so it’s not an experience I’d like to return to any time soon, just for the sake of doing things the “right way”. There has to be a real need, and that differs from project to project.

A great new blog to start off 2003: The Diary of Samuel Pepys. What an innovative use of the weblog format.

"This site is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in London, England. A new entry written by Pepys will be published each day, with the first appearing on 1st January 2003."

This is also perfect timing for my new year’s resolutions, one of which is to write in my own journal more. (That’s the old cloth-bound, hand-written kind.) I filled the first one up a few years ago, a good portion of that on a 2-month trip to Europe, but my current journal has remained mostly blank.

Congratulations to the site creator for producing such an excellent site. Very polished, clean design, putting hypertext to great use. RSS feeds are also available, under “Other formats” on the about page.

Wow, Dave Winer is applying for a new job:

"As I've been talking with people about this, it's been hard for them to separate me from UserLand, but that's what I want to do. I'm going to get a new job with a new title, and it's going to be quite different from being the CEO of a commercial software company. It's time to set my life in a new direction."

Good luck, Dave. Still digging! :-)

Salon has an article on Tolkien-inspired video games:

"'Immersion does not necessarily require photo-realistic rendering at 60 frames per second and Dolby Surround sound,' says Singleton. 'Imagination can play a huge part, too. Witness how immersive Tolkien's books themselves are. In some ways, the lack of concrete images can be even more evocative.'"

Over Christmas I talked with a relative (who is writing about cell phone gaming) about the possibilities of networked, collaborative games. Without the graphics features of the modern computer, maybe the cell phone will be the perfect place for a new innovative game to emerge. Building a game for a cell phone does not require the army of programmers, designers, and animators that is commonplace for PC games, so a few creative developers could create something unique.

Meg on holiday video gaming: “I was stealing motorcycles and punching cops and doing all sorts of other nefarious things I would never ever do in real life.”