Notes from Prof. Oliver Wrede on Interface, Interaction and Information Design & more
ProVoc is a free application that allows to learn vocabulary. You can download user generated learning files from the website. It is also possible to store sound files or even videos with words. For a free software this is a very well designed and useful tool.
If there is one word, that could describe what happens in the Ruby on Rails context then it is »elegance«. Just click on the image below to see an elegant screencast of an elegant development framework (Ruby on Rails) with an elegant text editor (TextMate) using an elegant JavaScript technology (AJAX) on an elegant service API of an elegant web application (Flickr):
It took me longer to write this blog post than it took to create this Flickr application shown above (well, at least for the guy doing that demo). I’d like to see a demo of a similar applications that is as much fun to watch from the J2EE or PHP crowd.
There are more screencasts here.
By the way:
If you wonder how the fancy shorthanded MacOS X editor (TextMate) works that is used in so many of these demos – there is an RSS feed with links to screencasts about TextMate as well.
This is very interesting: a multi-user note-taking web-application. Click on this screenshot to get to the 5 minute screencast:
I’d describe Pavel as some kind of “JotSpot Live with tinderbox-ish Notes” (see JotSpot Live and Tinderbox). The secret of the synchron updates of web pages between users is some code called LivePage. It is part of Nevow and that is part of Twisted (which is implemented with Python). Here is an article about Nevow. and some more detailed documentation as well. Twisted has become a grown up in the area of web application framworks. It is extremely powerful as it offers string modules & classes for almost anything you can do with a network attached to a computer. It offers ready made tools for activities many Ruby and PHP developers don’t even remotely heard about! Pavel is just an example.
This weblog has changed under the hood: the code is cleaner. Everything is CSS based. It doesn’t validate yet, but it will. There have been only a few minor tweaks to the design itself. It pushed most of the templating away from Tinderbox and up to the server.
The next step will be to circumvent the HTML export of Tinderbox completely and publish everything directly from a database (by converting the XML file into RDBMS tables). It will also reduce the number of agents (like the ones that collect the weblog posts for each category).
Update 5/29/2006: Some people asked me about how I did the rounded corners. Actually I am using CSS 3 styles for that which is implemented partially in Webkit (Safari) and Mozilla/Firefox. I don’t use any CSS tricks (even if I could).
Tonight there are two Webmontag events in Berlin and Bielefeld. Next week there will be one in Cologne (which I will attend), Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. There is already a bunch of interesting presentations in the pipeline — as always. And interesting people too: Tim Bruysten, Tobias Jordans, Mario Sixtus, Oliver Lauer. A very good way to spent a monday evening with such bright people.
I don’t like at Webmontag events are the lurkers: people that go there just to listen to the presentations and do not tune in the socializing part of it. I don’t know how other people think about it.
James Edwards from Sitepoint.com looks at AJAX and Screenreaders:
There doesn’t appear to be any reliable way to notify screen readers of an update in the DOM. There are piecemeal approaches that work for one or more devices, but no overall approach or combination that would cover them all.
The Mozilla Developer Center offers some information on the work IBM is doing in this area: Accessible DHTML. Also the W3C is working in a design for making dynamic web content accessible one day.
Adobe Labs (former Macromedia Labs) offers a framework called »Spry«. It is a JavaScript library that offers easier construction of AJAX applications. Drew McLellan from the Web Standards Project reviews the framework and concludes:
As it currently stands, the framework is certainly not ready for prime-time, and if it’s the sort of framework you’d otherwise find useful, we’d encourage you to investigate it and offer constructive feedback.
I am not working offline for that and I am also not doing it in one single step. So there will be pages broken and/or looking odd. Sorry.
This change is a preparation for easier future design updates. I also want to make the page more standards compliant.
The diggnation guys are now also sponsored by Barterbee.com. It is some kind of rag-fair online for Movies, Music or Games. You can put stuff in that you want to get rid of. But instead of trading items for real money you get points which you can use to shop new items on Barterbee. The revenue for Barterbee comes from the handling of the transaction: each deal costs a $1 fee the buyer has to pay to barterbee.com.
While trading “points for goods” seems not to be a very exciting concept, barterbee.com in fact offers its own currency that can only be uses on the barterbee.com site. Users can buy points for $1.
But what if you gained 1000 points and you don’t want to buy anything at Barterbee anymore? Can you “trade” your points for money? Probably not. I am not sure if people think that through before signing up such a system.
In an TV interview with Wolf Blitzer Jack Cafferty from CNN’s Cafferty Line points out a fundamental change in the policy. The NSA started to collect massive data of phone calls of every US citizen without any warrant. Jack Cafferty in the interview:
The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and declared the government is doing nothing wrong, and all this is just fine. Is it? Is it legal? Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn’t have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation. Read that sentence again. A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it’s not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says ok and drops the whole thing. We’re in some serious trouble, boys and girls”
There are som many people in the US that probably just don’t care. I don’t know. All I know is if one single institution in the government starts to circumvent any elected representatives then you can’t tell if you still have a democracy or not. It is a serious issue. Saddam Hussein would have loved this: a political system that only appears to be a democracy.
Here are some comments by House members.
Update 6/26/2006: Why NSA spying puts the U.S. in danger