...more recent posts
Been buried since early morning, so didn't get a chance to even look at my RSS until now. Amazon released Kindle, an eBook reader. It's really strange. Described as "the iPod of reading." Has an EVDO cellular modem in it to connect with Amazon. It costs $399, but has no monthly charge. $9.99 to download a book. All first chapters free.
And it will surf the web ("basic" web surfing, so might not that great yet) and do email. And $.99/ month for blog subscriptions (RSS?)
This is not going to work, but really interesting / strange / frightening business model to give away the computer and the wireless connection, but then sit as gatekeeper and charge for everything.
Drag and drop sortable lists with javascript and CSS. Been possible for a while, but this is a nice resource. And this is probably the last major piece I still need to integrate in Geneva.
CBS to blanket a big chunk of midtown with free (ad supported) WiFi:
CBS Corporation has announced today that it will "light up" midtown Manhattan with the creation of the "CBS Mobile Zone," a wireless high-speed network enabling New Yorkers with Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones, laptops or other devices to access the Internet for free, and make voice over internet (VOI) calls.
The zone will be from Times Square to Central Park South and from 6th Avenue to 8th Avenue and is a test in partnership with the MTA.
You might be asking what CBS gets out of the deal - ad impressions! New Yorkers who access the "CBS Mobile Zone," will be greeted by an ad-supported homepage that includes hyperlocal content such as breaking local and national news, sports highlights, weather reports, music discovery, wallpapers, ringtones, maps, a social network and the ability to search for nearby restaurants, shops and entertainment complete with geographically- targeted community reviews. Citi and Salesgenie.com(TM) have signed on to be early sponsors of the Wi-Fi HotZone.
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.