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I would never have predicted this:
We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:Tog is the man, and they did an incredible amount of user testing (as opposed to just thinking about it,) so I'm sure this is right. On the other hand, I know I'm faster with keyboard shortcuts than the mouse, and I don't think it's amnesia. (via daring fireball)
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers' belief that the keyboard is faster.
People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.
Have to look into this more closely: QuTags - "AJAX for PHP without JAX."
When debugging in PHP I've always used the crude method of inserting echo statements all over the place to print out my variable values. I'm a bit embarrassed to say that I never thought to use syslog() for this purpose. Much more elegant.
These IBM developerworks articles are great.
New, much longer video of Jeff Han demonstrating his giant multitouch interface. I blogged about Han and multitouch back in February of last year. It's all very Minority Report-ish. Obviously, since the iPhone debut, this stuff seems much more mainstream. And it is really cool - but only for certain data sets. For instance, it's hard to see how this augments any text based work. But for manipulating photos it's incredible.
My guess is that Apple is taking this very seriously. Adding coverflow (stolen from iTunes) to the Finder in Leopard makes it hard to think that multitouch isn't coming to all Macs. I expect the next round of laptops to have some sort of multitouch track pad.
And, while not specifically multitouch related, this Apple patent application for keystroke tacility arrangement on a smooth touch surface might offer a glimpse at the solution for touch screen keyboards. I hadn't thought of that route. Could you really deform a screen into something like a keyboard? That would be incredible and would solve the biggest issue with the iPhone. Sounds a little too sci-fi for me to believe it's anywhere near production though.
Interesting, although I'm not sure very useful, interactive CSS generator for styling text. I guess this idea could maybe be folded into a blogging/CMS system.
Longtime Apple appreciator and WSJ columnist Walt Mossberg likes OS X 10.4 Leopard:
On Friday evening, Apple will release yet another new version of OS X, called Leopard, to replace the current version, known as Tiger. I've been testing Leopard, and while it is an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, release, I believe it builds on Apple's quality advantage over Windows. In my view, Leopard is better and faster than Vista, with a set of new features that make Macs even easier to use.Evolutionary, not revolutionary, sounds right to me. Still there's nothing wrong with a little evolution, and there are some cool new features, plus some long standing annoyances have been worked out. Definitely worth the upgrade, but I won't be standing in line on Friday night or anything.
Gmail gets IMAP support. Very cool. Only having POP access was an annoyance, especially on b.'s iPhone.
IMAP allows you to keep your mail account in sync even when you are using multiple clients. So now mail read, say, on the iPhone will show up as read when you later check from your desktop. And mail sent from your desktop will show up in the sent mail folder on your phone.
Apple reported some very high fourth quarter earnings yesterday after the market closed, and, uh, Wall St. liked what they heard. I swear I saw it rise 10% in less than an hour. Apple now has a larger market cap than Intel and IBM. What a world.
The iPhone "is a game-changing product," said Stephen Coleman, chief investment officer at Daedalus Capital LLC.But I think it was really Mac sales that drove the stock up. They were incredibly strong. Over 2 million Macs sold - 400,000 more than in any previous quarter. And that's in a quarter immediately preceding a huge OS release (often people put off computer purchases until a new OS is released since you get it free with a new computer.) Apple is now the number three computer retailer in the U.S. (behind Dell and HP who, sure, sell a lot more but on *much* lower margins.)
Based on income from the iPhone alone, he said, "I expect Apple's earnings to continually grow materially at 50 percent a year, for the next three years."
I think they are at the tipping point, especially with their laptop sales. They can easily gobble up market share percentage points from here. 10% of the global market doesn't seem out of reach. And then, yeah, there's that whole iPod thing. Still, I don't trust the market in general right now and I think I'm going to sell my rather tiny holdings. It's been a very fun ride.
Sensible rules for dealing with broadband congestion and QOS. "So there's your solution."
It just occurred to me that I should record distinct useragents who request robots.txt in the database, and then I could run the referrer logs against this list and come up with, I think, sort of okay human traffic numbers. Maybe filter the robot inserts through a black list of real browser useragents to cut down on the chances incorrect robot identifications.
Would any real robots obeying the robots.txt provision identify themselves with actual broser useragent strings? And how many robots don't request robots.txt? And how many human browsers do? (Hackers seeing where you don't want robots to look? noob web developers looking for examples? Can't amount to much.)
Blacklist (of known human browser useragent) could be compiled similarly by inserting distinct useragents of account holders into the database.
Probably not worth it, but as another barier against false robot id you could check if new identified-as-robot useragent subsequently request javascript files, as probably robots don't request those.
And while I'm thinking about this, distinct IP total numbers might be improved by having distinct IP plus distinct useragents within the same IP. So, for instance, a page requested from the same IP by 2 different useragents should probably be counted as 2 people, not 1 as the "by distinct IP" view would give it. This might be wrong, as I could use Safari today and FireFox tomorrow while still being one person, but I think it's at least as possible that I actually am two people behind a NAT. Distinct IP really gives something more akin to number of households (or businesses) requesting, not number of people.
Javascript implementation of the Tiny Encryption Algorithm. Just need a reference to this for an upcoming project.
Really interesting early HTML 5 client side SQL storage work going on in WebKit. There's an example application page, but you need to be running the latest nightly to use it. I can't wait to play around with this. I keep saying it, but javascript is going to rule the world. Not sure I'm completely happy about that but it sure seems true.
External SATA hard drive dock. Genius.
Excellent news: Jobs announces native 3rd party SDK available for iPhone and iPod Touch development in February.
Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.Nice. That's exactly what I wanted to hear. I was beginning to worry they were thinking they could do it all themselves.
There are a few details that could still make this slightly less than perfect, but we won't know until February. I don't mind the wait, I just hope it is as open as possible. In any case, great news that Apple still gets it.
The broadest claims in Amazon's one-click patent have been struck down. Score one for the side of reason.
I've taken a part time job - supposedly 20 hours a month - at a fairly large magazine website. Basically I'm tweaking CSS and HTML with a little bit of javascript fixing along the way. Not exactly my strengths, but I think I'm good enough now to get the job done. Eventually they want to do blogs and other things that are a better fit, so hopefully it will morph into that eventually. In the meantime I'll at least have a little bit of standardized income. Living job to job is hard on the brain.
I'm going in this afternoon for a meeting, but mostly I can work from home.
I'm not sure it will work, but this is an incredible idea in the "what really simple thing that could make tons of money has no one thought of yet" sort of way: Vidoop Secure
Vidoop's engineers (led by a CTO who is ex-Microsoft) have developed software that finally improves upon the leaky "user name + password" method, replacing it with a process of image recognition based on a grid of pictures displayed on the screen.That's really brilliant. Again, I'm not sure it really solves a pressing enough problem, and getting people to change the way they log in to sites might not work no matter how clever it is. But damn, that's clever.
But here's the really clever part: Vidoop will monetize the process by selling the images in the grid to advertisers for product placement. Instead of seeing a generic car in the image grid, consumers might see a Ford (F) Mustang, or a Prius (TM) . Instead of a cuppa Joe, they might see a tall Starbucks (SBUX)....
Here is how it works: When you register on a new site, you're asked to pick three categories. Suppose you choose cars, planes and beverages. When you log in, Vidoop's image grid pops up with a display of 12 images, pulled at random from Vidoop's database. You never see the same combination of images twice - but there will always be a car, a plane and a drink.
Inside each image is a letter or number, also randomized. The letters and numbers displayed in the car, drink and plane act as a pass code for that single login. Since images and characters are chosen at random, no two logins are ever the same. This curbs the riskiest kind of hacking, says Sontag: "It is impossible to keystroke-record this," Sontag says.
I what is possibly huge typographic news for the web in general, the latest WebKit nightlies now support the CSS @font-face rules.
Attempt at a short explanation: WebKit is the open source engine that powers the Safari browser (but also Opera, Shiira, and web browser in the Nokia S60 platform.) A "nightly" means the very latest version supports this (with new versions compiled every night,) but not yet the latest stable version (so the version with @font-face support isn't shipping yet, but because it's open source you can go and download it if you're brave.) And finally the CSS @font-face rule is a CSS rule that allows web designers to embed custom fonts in a web page. If the local computer doesn't have that font-face it will go to the supplied URI and download the font so it can render the page correctly.
If that doesn't sound like a big thing to you then you're not a graphic designer.
The reality check here is that only TrueType fonts are supported (that's not so bad actually,) and, of course, only WebKit is supporting this standard so far, so you really can't count on this working when designing for the web at large. Still, you can use it, and your pages can look amazing in Safari (or incredibly bad if you're a bad designer I guess,) and then just fall back to Helvetica or some other boring font-face in other browsers.
A List Apart has a good overview of @font-face.
Obviously I've been following and thinking about Adobe and their plans for web development. At the same time I've chosen a different route, with the open web standards of HTML, CSS, and javascript. Adobe Flash and Flex and AIR are some seriously cool tools that give you access to very rich features and, comparatively, a lot of speed. These two different paths are obviously in competition (if not economic, at least for developer hearts and minds,) but they are also closely related. Adobe has clearly been moving to make javascript a first class citizen in it's environments (for instance, you can build AIR apps with all javascript and zero actionscript.)
And this makes me wonder about Tamarin, which is an open source project that is Adobe's contribution to Mozilla. The basic point is to make javascript really fast. Which is great. And great for Adobe since they are now leveraging javascript in their development world.
But I wonder if they are rethinking their decision in light of the progress that projects like EXTjs have made building a development framework on top of pure HTML, CSS and javascript. Sure it will never have all the rich features of the Adobe environments, but some constraints are not always a bad thing (especially where those constraints force you to use the native widgets people expect to see on the web, and to build regular web pages that work the way people expect.) Plus the technology is all open and free for the developer. But there is a real issue, and that's speed. EXTjs (as well as any of the others like jQuery, YUI, prototype/scriptalicious, etc...) apps are slow compared to their rich Adobe conterparts. Really slow in some cases.
In the future, no doubt, this won't matter so much. Our computers will keep getting faster. And then there is Tamarin out there on the horizon ready to supercharge javascript 2. Which brings me back to my question. Why would Adobe want to contribute Tamarin? Seems like a radical speed up of javascript is going to make EXTjs et al much more competitive with Adobe's projects.
Felix Salmon makes the economic case for full rather than partial RSS feeds. Amen. You might also just make the don't needlessly harass people trying to read what you write case, which I guess is what his economic case boils down to.
I'm still not on board, but Adobe is building some impressive web development tools. Their latest release preview (release some time next year) is Thermo, a graphical editing environment aimed at bridging the gap between old style (photoshop) designers and web coders.
You just import a photoshop mock-up of a web page (what can now be more and more thought of as a web application user interface,) and Thermo understands all the layers and provides a 'convert artwork to...' command which automatically converts, say, a dummy text input field from the mock up into a real text input field (or button, check box, combo box, date picker, color field, etc...)
Sounds good for big shops with more graphic know how than web knowledge. Not sure I want all those people being able to compete with me (and it's not clear that Thermo will actually let them and/or if it will just end up enabling a lot of half baked web apps in a Visual Basic sort of way,) but I have to admit that Adobe is cranking out a lot of cool sounding tools.
Destination Moorestown. Due in the second half of 2008, this Intel chip is slated to bring the power of todays desktop computers to your portable devices.
The article also has an interesting post script on the inevitability of the x86 architecture.