Monday, July 31, 2000

Crap, it's hot in our offices today. Apparently the air chillers conked out in the building this weekend and obviously couldn't fire up as they usually do late Sunday night. So, rather than walking into a lovely, air conditioned comfort zone, everyone here is taking advantage of an involuntary, heat-induced weight loss program. According to my Newton's internal thermometer reading, it's currently 31.05° celsius and climbing. That's approximately 87° fahrenheit for my metrically challenged viewers.

Posted 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday, July 30, 2000

See, I told you it wasn't just me. Jason Kottke confirms my suspicions that RealNetworks is indeed the America Online of streaming media. How the hell America Online and RealNetworks became industry leaders is, quite frankly, beyond the mental grasp of this mortal, but that's probably another discussion altogether. I make this comparison not because RealPlayer software is practically as ubiquitous as AOL install discs, but because both parties seem to excel in producing lousy, crash-prone software with confusing interfaces, inexplicable overall user experience, and an innate ability to mangle into oblivion even the simplest task you attempt to complete. More to the point, why is stupid software so popular? My guess is that the sheep don't really care how much manure is mixed into the grain, as long as they get fed once a day.

Posted 9:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday, July 28, 2000

This definitely gets my vote for the most inappropriate news headline concerning the recent crash of the Concorde in France. It's nice to see that Reuters is still using summer interns as proofreaders. Yuck. In case the above reference succumbs to the inevitable linkrot, here's a more permanent PDF version. Forwarded by Mike

Posted 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, July 27, 2000

Writing's On Wall For Mac OS X It looks like Apple is resurrecting the acclaimed Newton hand writing recognition software once known as "Rosetta" in future iterations of Mac OS. Now dubbed InkWell, it appears to have the exact same features as what I use in my MessagePad 2100 right down to the font used in the InkPad window.

But there's more, including a toolbar for configuring keyboard shortcuts via the pen. Once thing I particularly like is the fact that you can customize the "gestures" that control text editing commands. Keep in mind that this isn't the same thing as the Graffiti recognition that's found in Palm OS beasts. I have Graffiti installed on my Newton too, and let me tell you that Rosetta or InkWell or whatever the heck Apple wants to call it, simply beats the snot out of everything else out there. This is handwriting recognition that actually recognizes your handwriting. Printed, cursive, chicken scratch, whatever - not just some alien pictoglyph alphabet.

Posted 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today Jeffrey Zeldman lamented that "books have no links." I don't believe this to be entirely accurate. If a book has a table of contents or an index, you have basic navigational links to other places within the document. This intra-document surfing requires some manual effort in order for it to work properly, but it does constitute linking. Any given page can also have annotations and footnotes which might point to additional information elsewhere on the page or in the document, similar to the way an anchor tag is embedded into an web page. Footnotes more often than not refer to other publications or media. Fortunately, a book can't spawn intrusive pop-up pages containing this secondary information. On second thought, that might actually be quite cool. A bibliography contains links encoded in the form of publishing companies, authors, and occasionally ISBN numbers - all of which point elsewhere, enticing you to gather and absorb more related data. One book comes to mind when talking about linking in hard copy format. The Pinball Effect by James Burke of Connections fame, uses what he terms "gateways" to guide the reader through the interwoven time lines throughout the book.

"...you can read the book the way your teacher once told you not to. You can do this at many points through out the book, when the time line of a particular journey reaches a gateway on the web, where it crosses with the time line of another, different journey. At such a gateway, you'll see coordinates for the location of that other place."

Note that when he mentions "the web" he is referring to the overlapping time lines connecting events in his book, not the internet-based web. I never needed instructions to operate a book before, but for the linking to work (and it is quite a romp to read a book this way) it's well worth the effort. Even if an author doesn't go to the lengths that Mr. Burke did to include deliberate links within the text, they still exist one way or another in nearly every book ever written.

Posted 7:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My wife has been feeling dizzy and off balance to the point of nausea for the last couple of days. We thought it might have been an inner-ear infection or a flu bug of some sort, so she went to the doctor today to get checked out. The doctor said that it may very well be a bug, but it's more likely a minor case of Ménière's Disease. This condition occurs when small, otherwise inconspicuous bits of calcium get tangled up in the tiny cochlear and vestibular hair cells, causing a sensation much like motion sickness. Makes me wish I had a programmable nanobot to dive in and do a little auditory canal housecleaning.

Posted 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, July 26, 2000

At. Othon. Schnable. Apeklootje. Find out what the rest of the world calls that cute, ubiquitous e-mail address delimiter in Scott Herron's Natural History of the @ Sign. By the way, apeklootje is a Dutch word meaning "little monkey testicle". And damn if there ain't an acute similarity between the two. I suddenly have a whole new appreciation for all of the unsolicited messages that I find jamming up my inbox. Via xblog

Posted 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let me say right of the top that the following confession does not indicate in any way, shape, or form an abandonment my beloved Newton platform. No way, no how. That being said, last night I ventured over to Handspring just to see whether or not they had finally got their act together and were letting Canadians purchase off their site. Honestly, I was only browsing. Ten minutes later, weakened by the candy-like translucency of an orange Visor Deluxe, I waved my credit card like the tattered white flag of a surrendering soldier. Obviously drunk with excitement over my purchase, I stumbled over to PalmGear, bellied up to the peripheral bar and ordered up an EyeModule camera attachment and the requisite Stowaway keyboard. I'll basically have a completely digital system to capture, document, and annotate pretty much anything - that fits in my pocket. And to prove my allegiance is still with my trusty MessagePad, I'm also going to hack the Stowaway keyboard to work via the Newton's interconnect port. Stay tuned for more...

Posted 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Something to keep you busy this afternoon. Brian Nenninger describes in loving detail his "big giant hack" that basically lets you install WebObjects 4.5 under Mac OS X DP4. Via MacNN

Posted 8:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, July 25, 2000

Ars Technica previews the Seti@Home 3.0 beta client, which brings with it even more geeky data crunchiness to help satisfy our ingrained human need to find some alien... something. Any piece of software outside of Photoshop that does cool stuff like "pulse and triplet searches", "gaussian signal fitting", and the ever popular "fast fourier tranformation routines" can live without fear of deletion from my hard drive. Plus, the screen saver makes it look like my Windows box is actually doing something in between complete system failures.

Posted 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, July 24, 2000

More cool geek stories in Tales of Woz's Genius. I really don't have anything to add regarding this article, other than that you should read it. Woz never ceases to amaze me. Via rc3.org

Posted 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm really starting to think that you ought to need a license to use Flash. People don't kill startups. People using Flash kill startups. Not only does this particular company beat its users over the head with a lame Flash intro that seems to go on for slightly less than an eternity, it actually has another version as well. Where the hell is a skip intro button when you need one. Thanks to koby

Posted 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Opera browser becoming a quiet hit. Shhh! Stop rattling all those standards documents around. We're trying to sneak up and scare the living crap out of Microsoft, remember?

Posted 7:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The design of Susan's weblog brings to mind another legal issue that surfaces now and again. How is the Mac OS X look-alike theme for Manila any different than the Kaleidoscope scheme that was summarily kiboshed by Apple a couple of months ago? As I've mentioned before, I think that the availability of any software that enhances or modifies the user interface to look like Mac OS X is actually good for Apple. Spread the word. Share the joy. Historically, Apple has been excruciatingly protective of Aqua, but less so of late. Maybe since the release of OS X is imminently closer than ever, the Manila themes are off the hook. Or perhaps they've just had their hands full keeping the wraps on a bunch of new hardware goodies.

Posted 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Has anyone else noticed the current title text on the home page over at Adobe.com? Yes, after months of speculation and rumor-mongering in the trenches, the shocking truth has finally been revealed. They use templates to design their pages. Who would have thought? In case they've actually looked at their site recently and changed the page by the time you saunter yourself over, here's a screen grab.

Posted 2:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Susan Kitchens has a fresh weblog covering Macster and is documenting her experience in getting the darn thing to work properly, as well as music related discoveries and rediscoveries. Of course, all of this may be moot if the hammer comes down on Napster, regardless of your platform allegiance.

Posted 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday, July 21, 2000

Steve Wozniak is interviewed in Failure Magazine about Apple, the universe, and everything. Of interest are the series of "defunct computer company" questions. Via kottke

Posted 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, July 20, 2000

It never fails. You try something slightly off the curve, and suddenly people are trying to find hairline fractures in your corporate fuselage. Sound familiar? This article seems to think that the Apple's new G4 Cube owes its existance to Steve Jobs in an attempt to relive the past. I'm sure that Stevie Wonderful holds a special place in his heart for the original NeXT Cube, but the anti-beige form factor was not what caused NeXT to abandon its hardware. Maybe since the new Apple machine is essentially self-cooling, its inspiration is related more to the ice cubes in your freezer than to the infamous matte black box.

Posted 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the interesting statistics that really don't impact you one way or the other department. The most popular news stories and images sent to others by Yahoo! users. I don't know about you, but I'm seeing a consistant theme running through the photographs listed on the page. The world really does revolve around animals, beautiful people, and Alan Greenspan doesn't it? Via evhead

Posted 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As The Apple Turns gets its own domain name, a couple of new site features, and a subtle design update. Questionable interface customization widgets aside, the wonderfully witty writing style is still there, currently commenting on the recent Apple hardware announcements. Did you know that every person attending the Macworld keynote yesterday received a new Apple Pro Mouse? Too bad Apple isn't feeling generous enough to compensate every user who has had misfortune to be stuck using an puck mouse. Now that would be a promotion.

Posted 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An partial answer to Duane's question regarding why Blogger appears to be encoding HTML entities for characters such as the ampersand literally as "& amp;" rather than "&". I have only seen this happen when I use the Mac version of Internet Explorer. This double encoding does not happen when using the Mac version of Navigator or the Windows version of IE to post via Blogger. I know that really doesn't answer your question, but you can either use Navigator or avoid pre-encoding your entities within Explorer when formatting your html snippets. I have a feeling it's a browser encoding issue when form data is posted, rather than Blogger itself. Blogger just stores, displays, and publishes the data that the browser sends it. However, this doesn't explain what Blogger does when you include hard line breaks within the text of your posts. Has anyone else experienced these problems. I have never had any resolution after posting the questions to the Pyra forums.

Posted 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been here in Seattle for three and half days listening to web design and usability experts talk about the past, present, and future. I have gathered quite a few interesting nuggets of information from both evangelists and aggravators alike. Specifically, one common theme has emerged (or perhaps reared its ugly, throbbing head of reality) throughout all of the opinions, facts, random chunks of industry data, and incredibly poorly designed presentations. There are technologies, tools, platforms, and standards available today that solve the majority of the problems in designing for the web and making it vastly more usable and accessible than it has been in the past - just don't use any of them.

Posted 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, July 19, 2000

I know it's middle of the afternoon, but I needed to jot down this observation of something that occured this morning. Besides a cup of coffee, I had a nectarine, some red grapes, and a small container of yogurt for breakfast. After I finished eating, I noticed that my hands smelled distinctly like honey. Nothing I consumed had any hint of a honey-like taste or aroma. I find this to be a very odd, yet strangely refreshing thing.

Posted 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, July 18, 2000

The Mac version of one of the stupidest products ever developed for consumers is now available. Run, don't walk and get your copy of the DigiMarc MediaBridge software and start holding magazine pages up to your webcam like a complete moron today. Does DigiMarc actually believe that people are so lazy that they won't take the time to type in a lousy URL? Maybe, the problem is that there are so many lousy URLs out there rather than good ones.

Posted 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Part of me wishes that I knew more people in the web design community beyond the transient links that we form via email and our weblogs. Back when I was in charge of developing new visual content products for one the previous iterations of the company I work for, I was a regular attendee of MacWorld and the Seybold seminars. Something that made these trips enjoyable was recognizing familiar faces and talking shop with everyone else who happened to be slogging their new digital wares. Even though I've been building sites since 1995, I have yet to experience that same level of familiarity with other web designers and developers. I'm not sure if it's because the web community is more fragmented by nature, or if it's merely the fact that the technology we envelope ourselves in encourages loose, transactional immediacy over slowly-formed permanent relationships. Meeting people face to face isn't always better than an online conversation. In fact, I find it to be a strangely awkward task to accomplish almost to the point of avoidance. However, it is something that I am forcing myself to do, specifically here in Seattle.

Posted 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, July 17, 2000

Live and tired in Seattle. Mike missed the flight, but Rich and I are grooving to the upper-left coast mood. I've been sinking my geek-teeth into the content here at Web Design World after a way too early flight out of Calgary this morning. The highlight so far? An entertaining presentation by the cosmopolitan Mr. Zeldman on CSS. Everything you wanted to know about not being able to use Cascading Style Sheets and more. Lame standards implementation in the browsers, followed by chunks of hacked together code flowing freely in the halls, like so much luke-warm bottled water. More updates to follow.

Posted 5:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday, July 16, 2000

Sort of like clockwork, but not really. Every eight weeks or so my hair length hits a wall where it suddenly becomes annoying. Last week the wall was hit, so yesterday I ambled down to the neighborhood First Choice franchise. Sitting down in the barber chair (or should that be stylist chair?), I started explaining what I needed in terms of an updated do. My hair style is anything but complex, and since I prefer to have it shorter through the sides, the logical question from the stylist was: "how short?". Reflecting back on the fact that I rarely get my hair cut more frequently than every two months, I said: "I'm not sure. I think they used a number three last time..." referring to the shag rake attachment numbering system they use for the electric razor. "Nope. Grant uses a number six," came an interjection from across the shop. I turn my head and there stands a stylist that I vaguely recognize as being the one who cut my hair the last time... two months ago. I leave the shop a few minutes later with a tasty summer cut, and a couple of strange thoughts floating around in my head regarding personalized customer experience and the Amazing Kreskin.

Posted 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday, July 15, 2000

Bad analogies, software crashes, awkward moments, and bad vibes. Everything you ever wanted in a technology focused keynote address, and more. I think Steve Ballmer's Ritalin finally kicked in.

Posted 5:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, July 13, 2000

This coming Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of splorp.com and by association, the grantcam. What am I doing to celebrate the blessed event? Since I'll be in Seattle at the Web Design World conference all next week, I'll probably be praying that this vintage server of mine simply stays up and running while I'm away. Maybe while I'm in hobnob mode at the conference, I'll give Mr. Zeldman a big old bear hug for mentioning my site on K10K again. Thanks for the load-testing Jeffery! Maybe I can buy you a beverage next week.

Posted 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, July 12, 2000

Will small miracles never cease? SimCity for Palm is now available in color. Makes me almost want to break down and by a Visor. Almost. Until my will is broken and I end up purchasing yet another piece of pocket-sized hardware, I can still play RemoteTown on my Newton.

Posted 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, July 11, 2000

Can't tell your redirects from your forwards? Curmudgeon's Eudora Fixer replaces the cryptic message status icons introduced in Eudora 4.0 with configurable letters. Via MacNN

Posted 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

George Mannes, the author of this article for TheStreet.com on the proliferation of swooshlike logos in the dot com industry, sent me another interesting logo observation:

"I don't know how you could track this bit o' nostalgia down, but I have the commemorative baseball cap in my possession to prove it: the AOL Greenhouse logo (remember when?) was a green, roughly-drawn "G" swirl. Looked a lot like the Corbis logo w/out the box and rotated 90 degrees clockwise; I remember thinking when I first noticed this that the similarity was highly ironic, given the Case/Gates relationship."

Coincidence, conspiracy, or the product of a creative mind laid waste by the constant exposure to swoosh-embellished logotypes? I wonder. By the way, if anyone has access to a decent scan or digital file portraying the AOL greenhouse logo, my inbox awaits.

Posted 9:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you've been convinced that your current state of questionable health was due to 18 hour workdays and a diet that consists of caffeine and microwavable containers of styrofoam proto-noodles, you were wrong. The real reason you're sick is because that stylus you use with your PDA is a breeding ground for all sorts of nasty, microscopic critters. But fear not for your well being, because germ infested styli are now a thing of the past. Felix Ungers of the digerati rejoice!

Posted 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, July 10, 2000

Once again, Windows-based personal computer manufacturers prove that they're duller than a bowl of cold oatmeal, and that they completely missed the boat with their lame attempts at copying the success of the iMac. Their excuse that consumers now want performance instead of style doesn't mean the marketplace has changed, it just indicates that companies like Dell couldn't figure out how to build boxes that both looked good and could tear the snot out the competition. Apple figured it out.

Posted 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday, July 09, 2000

This is unlikely to become a regular feature, but then again you never know. Please enjoy the serendipitous warning label of the week...

I know what they mean. Every time I hand out a bunch of plastic bags to the kids in the neighborhood, I get this strange constricting sensation in my throat. I just can't figure it out.

Posted 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Living here during the month of July means living with the Calgary Stampede. If you're not familiar with the Stampede, it's billed as "the greatest outdoor show on earth" mainly because "the greatest show on earth" was already taken, and technically most of the event is held outdoors. It consists of a medium sized, mechanically questionable midway, concession stands peddling consumable and even possibly digestible foodstuffs manufactured entirely from animal by-products, rodeo clowns, horse shit, limp fireworks, and a parade that basically shuts off the downtown core for an entire Friday morning. Generally, the population of my home town falls into one of two categories: a) those who can't wait for the Stampede to start because "dammit, I could really use an excuse to go on a 10 day piss-up while wearing undersized denim shirts to the office", and; b) those who could give less than a rat's crap about it. Under closer examination, I've noticed a few subgroups that don't fall distinctly into either of these two primary (and obviously diametrically opposed) categories.

those forced to dress western by their peers
those addicted to miniature cake donuts
those protesting the treatment of rodeo livestock
those who sell cheap thematic curios
those who have children

I guess I fall into that last category, although this year we are skipping the festivities because we have so many other summery things to do. As attractive a calling card the combined smell of corn dogs and manure baked onto asphalt is, I know that the Stampede will still be there next year. Yahoo, dammit.

Posted 9:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now you can have software rasterizer piece of mind while anxiously waiting for the release of actual OpenType format fonts. Adobe has made the fully OpenType-savvy ATM Light 4.6 available as a free download. Via MacNN

Posted 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday, July 07, 2000

Duane offers some excuses for not blogging.

Posted 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Impress your friends. Enlighten your parents. Entertain your pets. Follow the bouncing cursor up and down this list of Must-Know Blog Terms. Conspicuous by their absence are other commonly used snippets such as bookmarklet, post, and the ever popular permalink. I am assuming that most people that read my blog already know what all this fuss is about, but I'm trying to turn others onto blogging by showing them what I do. The rest of the article that surrounds the aforementioned list is a rather good overview of the whole blogging community, spirit, revolution, phenomenon thing as well. Blog on.

Posted 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, July 06, 2000

Magellan is another new Mac email client for those looking to ditch Outlook Express or Eudora. One outstanding feature in this puppy is a multiscript encoding format in addition to unicode which provides much more robust multilingual message support.

"MultiScript fully keeps language attribute of e-mail message and multilingual is available even on mail title and finding feature... You do not have to pay any special attention when multilingual message is to be sent. Magellan will automatically deal with difficult part. You only have to write message and send it."

Nice work on the software, but they might want to drop a bit more coin on the language translation for their web pages.

Posted 9:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Six months after the initial purchase on eBay, Mike just took possession of his yummy-looking 1965 Toyota Stout pickup truck. An impressive online purchase if for no other reason than the fact that the truck had to immigrate to Canada from Washington state. The largest thing I've ever purchased online was my BeBox, or perhaps the Apple Lisa 2/10. But they were both delivered to my door in generously appointed cardboard boxes. Personally, I like the last photo shown in Mike's pictorial the best, showing a full-size auto transport parked in front of his house. You get along well with your neighbors, don't you Mike?

Posted 9:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Something has got me thinking that maybe this is one is just too good give away. Grant Neufeld sent me a suggestion for my domain name of the week page:

andalligotwasthisstupid.com

Smartass vanity placeholder domain, or an irreverant, acid-tongued blog loaded to the gills with offhanded observational commentary on the current cash-out crop of failed e-business models and lame user experiences? You decide. I mean, Fucked Company can't have all the fun now, can they?

Posted 6:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, July 05, 2000

AltaVista now has a streamlined Raging Search version of its Babelfish translator available. Anytime you can avoid the clutter of banner ads and other UI fluff and access pure functionality on a site is alright with me. Thank you AltaVista for giving us the choice. Spread the word.

Posted 8:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, July 04, 2000

Open source cheerleader, Eric S. Raymond shares a few brief observations regarding the Mac culture and its purported interface obsession. At least the Mac has an interface that you can actually get obsessive about.

Posted 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, July 03, 2000

Lying With Pixels talks about near realtime video-manipulation that can be performed on live or taped video content. I find it both incredibly fascinating from a technical perspective and ethically frightening that it's now possible to add or remove anything (or anyone) from supposedly authentic footage.

"So what's the big deal, you ask. After all, Stalin's staff routinely airbrushed persona non grata out of photos more than a half-century ago. And Woody Allen ushered a variation on reality morphing into the movies 17 years ago with Zelig, in which he inserted himself next to Adolf Hitler and Babe Ruth. In films such as Forrest Gump and Wag the Dog, reality twisting has become commonplace."

Sure, we've had the ability and technical means to edit, retouch, and otherwise manipulate static and dynamic visuals for ages, but we haven't been able to do the same to live broadcasts. Until now.

Posted 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah, that feels better. After a brief family-oriented respite, I am back with a topped up fuel cell and a backlog of blogs to cruise and peruse. Maybe it's time to coin a phrase here. How about calling it backblogging? Anyone care to comment on the jargon-worthiness of this potential verb of the future?

Posted 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)