The preview conference program of Blogtalk is online. I have not yet added myself to the panelists page but I will do that soon.
Monthly Archive for April, 2003
What I like about OS X is that there is extremly good, well crafted and well designed software (at affordable prices). Just to name some: Proteus, Snapz Pro, NetNewsWire, Tinderbox, BBEdit, Spring Desktop, Transmit, Launchbar.
Dave Winer thinks Radio Userland has a better interface for reading RSS feeds:
RSS readers that work like Usenet readers are a waste of time, imho. Aggregators should not organize news by where items came from, just present the news in reverse chronologic order.
Of course I disagree. I was turned off by Radio Userlands HTML-based interface long ago and I switched to NetNewsWire because it offers exactly what Dave considers to be a waste of time. Radio Userland keeps me away from organizing myself. Currently I have 93 subscriptions in 12 categories. That compiles to 400-700 unread headlines at average. And it is no problem, because I can easily decide to read just one category at a time. Radio Userland does not allow me to do that so easy and it has enormous performance problems with large amounts of posts. NetNewsWire takes a fraction of that time to display the headlines. Maybe Dave Winer should try to work with Radio Userland on an average computer once.
Dave Winer is working on Trackback for Manila. Trackback is an automatic reverse linking between weblog entries and was first introduced by MovableType.
There is someone called Bob Bradley working on a implementation Rendezvous for Windows. It is a technology that allows self-configurating TCP/IP-networks and -services. It was outlined by many people under the codename ZeroConf and Apple is the first major OS vendor to include it in MacOS X.
FmPro Migrator – Migrates FileMaker to MySQL and Oracle (including images). [freshmeat.net]
Dave Pollard has posted a blog entry on using weblogs in business. In it, he outlines an enterprise-wide architecture model for using weblogs as a source of intranet content. Quote:
As weblog tools become more powerful and flexible, open sourcing of weblog add-ons increases, and RSS and XML technologies advance and become standard, the justification for migrating centralized knowledge management systems to a weblog-based architecture will grow more compelling. In the meantime, leading-edge knowledge organizations need to be piloting and experimenting with such architectures, if they don’t wish to be left behind.
I took a first look into Typo3 today. I tried to add a user and create a page. I think it is a powerful system, but the user interface is just ridiculous. It’s really something a feature fanatic developer can come up with.
Contribute is nice (and an OSX version is ahead), but it is a client dependent approach.
Is it really ten years? Yes it is. So much happened and I almost forgot the times when there was no Internet at all. Most of the time I was wired and I have seen all the browsers come and go, learned HTML from 1.0 (and stopped caring about new formats when the cost/profit ratio dropped too low). Internet wisdom means you know how to choose technology that you can count on more than one or two years.
Jake Savin is moving forward with Manila. Very good. It was just few weeks ago that I noted Manila was not updated for quite some time.
Lawrence Lee is very responsive to the community if there are ideas how to improve. He also offers quick help if there are problems. What is very encouraging here is that feedback is not only aimed to Dave Winers new aspirations in Cambridge.
»Seb of Seb’s Open Research published his Weblogs & Knowledge sharing surevy over the weekend. Too much infor for me at the mo but well worth a deeper look later.« [James Farmer's Radio Weblog]
I just checked the software update control panel and found the 10.2.5 update to MacOS X is out from Apple.
David Carraher:
»Two current shortcomings of education could could be addressed through weblogging technologies. The former is highly problematic throughout K-12; it is not a major problem in graduate school. The latter remains a problem at all levels.
1. Constraints on Students As Active Producers of Knowledge
2. There is a firewall around the classroom«
David Carraher lists a number of ideas how weblogs could facilitate discourse. Unfortunatly his reasoning is flawed in a very crucial part: the strategy is not device independent. His ideas make sense in a ideal world where everyone jumps into weblogs. Unfortunatly the ideal world is in a parallel universe.
This article is suggesting Apple could probably introduce a G5 processor on the next Worldwide Developer Conference. The G5 chip is a 64 Bit processor and it will offer “performance that will be in the upper reaches of any CPU”. An because AMD does not control the OS their CPUs are running Apple might be in a very good position to squeeze out the last bit out of this chip – and to decide how the G5 chip will be injected into the product line.
Peter Merholz is back after some month of abstinence. He needed a timeout from blogging:
I was also growing increasingly frustrated with the echo chamber effect of weblogs. A meme drifts out there, and then 38 different people post their take on that meme, and they all link to each other, and, as a reader, you bounce from post to post, the semantic feedback growing until it’s deafening.
Well pointed. I don’t read this as a general argument against weblogging (Peter decided to turn back to it anyway). He is describing a very common state of blogging where people in fact do interact with each other very often, but not very direct and thus superficial. My expectation of the close future of weblogs is that -as it always has been- people get creative about it and develop ways to enrich the experience. Trackback (video demo, Quicktime, 9MB) is just an example for a technical way to generate more density in the structure. There will be more to come.
As I said the other day: weblogs are just one technique that has to be combined with others. Whenever critics take weblogs out of this context they are looking at a slice of the story.
PictureMe is just the missing link between iPhoto and the MacOS X addressbook. You can add addressbokk portraits from any picture file via drag&drop. I always wondered why Apple did not include that into iPhoto from the beginning. It’s so obvious.
This document defines the three terms information design, interface design and interaction design.
The Design By Numbers project from John Maeda seems to have a successor: Processing.
»The Processing project was created to introduce a new audience to computer programming and to encourage the audience of hybrid artist/designer/programmers. It integrates a programming language, development environment, and teaching methodology into a unified structure for learning.«
Unfortunatly it seesm to crash Safari/OSX once an example is closed. But yes, it’s Alpha code…
I just gave Phoenix for OS X a try. It seems to be a very nice browser, stripped down to what a browser should have. Mozilla got such a bloated heavy beast. Phoenix still consumes more than twice as much RAM than Safari and still more than Mozilla. It also has some bugs and interface glitches left and does not seem to store the Bookmarks correctly.
Dan Hill about adaptive design. I think he is spot on with this presentation about what design means if everything gets dynamic, multi-purpose, interoperable and connective. These are characteristics that have not been there before and it has already changed how design works.