Finally Frontier has been released as open source package:
This is a fresh start for the Frontier kernel, the technology under Manila and Radio UserLand, and in the future, possibly many more useful system and network applications. We’re releasing the code under the GPL, the rationale for this is explained in the FAQ and in the audio blog post I recorded about this event.
There is also a mailing list, a download page and a FAQ.
Frontier is a marvelous concept for a scripting application because everything is integrated in one application: scripts, database, GUI. It is perfectly suited for experimentation and it contains a very easy to learn scripting language (here is another documentation). And because it is open source now it may resurrect the interest of creative developers to enhance the system on a very low level.
If you are curious you could read the “Golden Rules for Frontier and Radio Userland” piece from March 2001. (You need to skip the Parts about Manila. Also mainResponder.root is not yet available – so the web server is there – but there is no logic yet that processes an HTTP request).
Potentially a future version of Frontier will make it possible to develop with scripting languages inside this application.term
Published on
September 25, 2004 in
Tools.
More blogging sidecar tools arrive:
Userplane’s Audio & Video Blogger service is an easy-to-use system allowing the creation of audio and video recorded messages for use in blogs, websites and email.
The Userplane AV Recorder application will automatically detect your camera and microphone, and allow you to record up to a 10 minute recording. Each recording is streamed from the Userplane servers, and can be copy-and-pasted into your web media.
Published on
September 25, 2004 in
Tools.
Napster was not only hot because of the easy sharing of MP3 files – but also because of finding interesting music in libraries of people with similar taste. Now that Napster is dead the P2P-netowkrs have taken over – but they don’t really offer something that comes close to Napster.
So what other ideas people come up with to break the dominace of the music industry about music marketing?
Audioscrobbler (http://www.audioscrobbler.com/) offers plug-ins for most audio players out there and it will automatically notify the service about the songs you recently played. The aggregated playcounts of songs of all audioscrobbler users are compiled to industry-independent charts. Together with the unmatched audio previews of iTunes Music Store it could become a new hobby for music lovers to hunt new music.
The audioscrobbler charts are better than anything we have seen to date, because not the amount of sales of a single tune is counted but rather the amount of plays!
Published on
September 25, 2004 in
Tools.
There is a little iPhoto Plug-In that allows direct export to Flickr. It works as export filter and is used to upload images (but not manage uploaded images). So the best image collection management application meets the best online image sharing application. Bravo!
Here is a site that contains descriptions about creativity techniques:
Below are listed a number of creativity techniques to help with creative thinking. Like most tools these creativity techniques all have their good and bad points. I like to think of these creativity techniques as tools in a toolbox in much the same way as my toolbox at home for DIY. It has a saw, spanner, hammer, knife and all sorts of other things in it, they are all very useful, but you have to pick the right tool (creativity technique) for each job. We will try and provide a little guidance along with each tool to let you know whether it’s best used for cutting paper or putting in nails.
Julian Elve describes how he uses Weblogs and Wikis together:
I’ve found the writing style that has started to evolve since I had this combination of tools is to scatter thoughts around the wiki-spaces until some juxtaposition forms that is sufficiently clear to create a blog-entry. The blog-entry becomes a picture of my thinking at a point in time and therefore essential to mapping out some kind of path. The state of the wiki pages continues to evolve — by looking where there is activity you can see which parts of my mental associations are currently to the forefront of attention.
I am on the edge of adding an overarching wiki space to the filtering blogs we use to support seminars. Thoughts like these will help to identify a good practice.
Published on
September 17, 2004 in
Tools.
Adam Curry and Dave Winer started a series of two-head radio talk show called “Trading Secrets“. You can download the first show (60 MB). They talk about politics and some IT stuff.
The show is basically like a long phone call. Dave calls via Skype from USA with his Windows laptop while Adamy Curry records the joined Skype audio output and his own microphone with Wiretap (free from Ambrosia). Audio HiJack is another utility that allows recording from various sources.
OS X has a very good Audio architecture (called CoreAudio) that makes it possible to route sound between applications and devices and hook in filtering applicaions. Detour is an application that allows to route sound output from various applications separate devices. Another interesting tool for this is JackTools. JackTools is like Detour but unlike that it has a low-fi user interfacce but can route sound from one source to multiple outputs. Soundflower from Cycling’74 offers virtual devices for mixing. All this can work together.
A good resource for Audio on MacOS X is osxaudio.com.
Anyway Adam fiddled around and cam to no satisfactory solution with software only. He is talking about his approach on his audio blog called Daily Source Code. His solution is based on the Digidesign MBOX hardware.
Published on
September 6, 2004 in
Politics.
Martin Brampton from Silicon.com doubts that software patents are rarely as innovative as the simplistic argument for patents would suggest.
A parallel debate is being fought in science. Governments have sought increased commercial involvement with university research, but the price has often been proprietary control over new ideas. Many academic scientists are opposing this trend, believing that the advancement of knowledge is a collaborative and public venture.
Update:
Here are two examples of software patents that describe Interface design ideas:
6,785,865: “Discoverability and navigation of hyperlinks via tabs (A user may discover and navigate among hyperlinks through the use of a keyboard. For example, a user may press a tab key to discover and navigate to a first hyperlink that is part of a hypertext document.)” [Microsoft]
6,784,354: “Generating a music snippet (Systems and methods for extracting a music snippet from a music stream are described. In one aspect, the music stream is divided into multiple frames of fixed length. The most-salient frame of the multiple frames is then identified. One or more music sentences are then extracted from the music stream as a function of peaks and valleys of acoustic energy across sequential music stream portions. The music snippet is the sentence that includes the most-salient frame.)” [Microsoft]
Did someone “invent” something here? I would say no. The Tab key is a functional element of the invention “keyboard”. It is a very basic idea to assign functionality to keys and to enhance operation of software or to manipulate on-screen options. So, to assign navigation functionality to the tab key is a convention not an invention. But if a patent prohibits interface design following a convention, then these patents are destructive.
Also: the idea to compensate low network capacity by allowing to play snippets of a larger file is following a very general idea of selective representation. Downloading a single web page instead of the whole site is quite the same. A kid could contemplate such a principle without costly research. Again this is no invention but it is rather a logical consequence of the network, web and interface principles. Fair enough that Microsoft could implement this in a copyrighted software, which I think is enough protection for this “idea”.
The “Future of computing” presentation at the Museum for Communication went well although only few people appeared (among them was Jochen Robes from weiterbildungsblog.de who happened to read about it here). Jochen suggested I should have advertised the event more on my weblog, but I assume this wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
I will have to add some background links to the Wiki space later.