...more recent posts
In a complete shock that doesn't actually make much difference in my life, Bruce Chizen has stepped down as CEO of Adobe. Wow. A few years ago I was pretty sure Adobe was on a road to no where. And they still might be, but they've made a lot of what seem like good moves to me since then. And now they are poised to really duke it out and be a big force in the future direction of not just the web, but computing itself. Why would anyone step down at this point?
I guess there could be a ton of personal reasons, but it's hard to figure there is a better or more interesting job out there.
htmlSQL : "a PHP class to query the web by an SQL-like language." That is just so wrong. Yet it's perfect. As they say, if you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail. So since I'm comfortable in SQL this seems very useful. Still I know it's just so wrong.
I thought I had blogged about Opera adding support for HTML 5 <audio> and <video> tags which replace the very messy <embed> situation we have now (which is one of the big reasons that embedding video in a web page is mostly done with Flash at the moment.) But I can't find it, so I guess it was one of those many things I almost blogged about but never actually got around to posting. Anyway, yesterday WebKit annouced support as well (WebKit is the rendering engine at the heart of Apple's Safari browser, as well as the open source KHTML - from which Safari was born - plus Nokia's mobile browser and now Google's mobile browser in their new Android mobile OS platform.) And there is some really straightforward javascriptable capabilities:
<script>
function playPause() {
var myVideo = document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0];
if (myVideo.paused)
myVideo.play();
else
myVideo.pause();
}
</script>
<input type=button onclick="playPause()" value="Play/Pause"/>
Nice. I've tried playing around with scripting the embedded quicktime player, and it's a real pain. This seems much better. I've been wondering for a while why Apple has let Flash get such a lead here. I think a lot of developers would rather an HTML / javascript solution, but you basically are forced to use Flash now because it just works.
The premise is that web design is in a polarized state where some people are technicians with skills centering around HTML and CSS (and maybe javascript,) while others are designers with skills in more traditional graphic design like layout, typography, and color selection - and very few "web designers" have feet in both camps. And further, this might be a major reason for poor design on the web - or at least for the dearth of incredible design.
This post walks through a lot of contemporary thinking on both sides of the argument and is packed with links to other great articles and resources. Highly recommended for anyone involved in any way with web design.
Great one hour video of a Google Tech Talk by Alex Wright, "an information architect at the New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages," on the conceptual precursors to the web. We've been building this thing for a long time.
The interesting cast of characters includes Charles Cutter, H.G. Wells, Teilhard de Chardin, Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Eugene Garfield, Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, Andries Van Dam, and Tim Berners-Lee.
Here's Alex Wright's website.
The influence of web applications has made its way into the user experiences of operating systems accelerating the acceptance, by users, of user experiences that can be best developed using web application development stacks (or portable runtimes such as Flash, Slingshot, etc.). This will push the client operating system to a position of irrelevance in time. Yeah, I'll need an OS to run my device, but I won't care which OS because developers are moving up the stack on the edge device just as they've moved up the stack on the server.Interesting.
Fascinating email from 2003 where Alan Kay defines his 1967 coinage of "object oriented" programming.
It is surprising to me how difficult it has been (for me, and I'm sure others as well) to grasp this whole way of thinking. You can hear Kay having this same struggle on a different level when he says "I didn't understand the monster LISP idea of tangible metalanguage then...."
I'm starting to "get it" though. The key to making progress towards understanding is to have the right problem. When my program (which I call Geneva because that's where I had the main idea) was smaller I had no way to grasp what all the fuss was about object orientation. But now that it is much larger, and in some ways unwieldy and even a little bit out of control, I've begun to actually understand (rather than just being able to recite some rote definition of OO.) Having the right problem to carry you through to understanding is key, in the sense that real understanding is similar to discovering the concept for the first time. And you can't discover something if you're not working on a problem.
You learn what you need to know, I guess, and by definition no more. Anyway, back to work.
Looks like Nokia has developed a tactile response on screen keyboard. Basically they put little keys underneath the screen. Interestingly, Nokia concedes that you don't actually type faster than with a traditional on screen keyboard, but they claim it's more satisfying. Apple filed a patent application for something that sounds similar last month.
Big article on the front page of the NYT business section about Andrew Rubin - formerly of Apple, WebTV, Danger (creators of the Sidekick,) and now director of mobile platforms at Google. In other words, he's in charge of the Google phone, which isn't itself a phone but a mobile operating system (a modified version of Linux) that phone handset manufacturers can use to run their products. There isn't any information in the article about the phone because Google is still not talking about it, but if we believe the Wall St. Journal an announcement from them is very near. There will be a ton of press about this, so I guess the Times is just jumping to the head of the line with this background piece on the man running the show.
I have a bunch of thoughts on this, but no time to get them down. Maybe I'll leave some comments here over the next few days. But one thing that really struck me, although it's not touched on in the article, is the extent to which Google and Apple, while competing with each other, may create the perfect storm which disrupts the rather staid telecom industry.
The speculation, especially given Rubin's background, and Google's track record with open eco systems, is that the Google mobile OS will be *very* open to 3rd party development. Telecoms don't necessarily like open products because they are dinosaurs intent on bringing their own destruction with the unholy alliance of closed platforms and user hostile product designs. Apple tends towards the closed side, but is very strong on design (both physical and UI.) I think this might lead to an interesting struggle where the consumer will be the winner.
If it wasn't for Apple and the iPhone, I think the telecoms might line up against Google, and just not permit phones running the Google operating system to connect to their networks. But because of the iPhone's success I think they will be more open to it as the non AT&T operators search for a counter to AT&T's iPhone exclusive. So that's one win. But then, in the other direction, it may well be the case that the openness of the Google platform will tip Apple - which presently seems to be trying to exactly straddle the line - over into the more open camp. Another win for consumers. We get better phones, with better design, more open to outside development - and the cellular operators wind up with less control. I like.
Stephen Fry has a new column in the Guardian, Welcome To Dork Talk, and I couldn't agree more with his first effort:
I hope you'll believe I'm not an unthinking slave to Cupertino. Apple gets plenty of small things wrong, but one big thing it gets right: when you use a device every day, you cannot help, as a human being, but have an emotional relationship with it. It's true of cars and cookers, and it's true of computers. It's true of office blocks and houses, and it's true of mobiles and satnavs. A grey box is not good enough, clunky and ugly is not good enough. Sick building syndrome exists, and so does sick hand-held device syndrome. Fiddly buttons, blocky icons, sickeningly stupid nested menus - these are the enemy.I found this via Daring Fireball who adds some nice thoughts of his own.