BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 31, 2006, 10:03AMReality Revisited
So the Reality Check 2.0 post from a couple of days ago got quite a response. It obviously hit a nerve on both sides of the spectrum regarding Web 2.0.
A couple of thoughts: First, I was pretty surprised at how many people agreed with the piece. Most of the readership of Basement.org are technophiles themselves, so I expected more defensive arguments.
The other thought is a bit more subtle. Reading over many of the comments, I think people are equating (or at least mixing up) good practice, good innovation and the evolved philosophy that has evolved out of Web 2.0 thinking with automatically translating into fail safe business models. I think that's a dangerous leap to take and I don't think the defenders of the trend should consider a different level of scrutiny. Good ideas and practice don't equal a sustainable business model...necessarily.
Above all else, it's about breaking through to the rest of the world. Whether you use Web 2.0 or 9.0, that's the Holy Grail. And it's a very hard thing to pull off.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 30, 2006, 08:55AMLightbox JS 2.0
Lightbox, very nice AJAX/Javascript slide show generator, just went 2.0. It's now got "fancy pants transitions."
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 29, 2006, 09:11AMReality Check 2.0
Does anybody out there use Rollyo? How about Newsvine? 30 Boxes? I'm not going to even bother asking if anyone has a Eurekster Swicki up (or what exactly a Swicki is for that matter).
I think it's really important to occasionally step out of our own bubble and assess whether or not all this "stuff" is really breaking out of our world and into the rest of the world. Ironically, the most un-Web 2.0 platform of all, Myspace, defies all logic.
So how is Web 2.0 doing generally? If you use Alexa to chart out some of these startups, you often see prettty rocky mountains. Typically, there's an initial spike around the buzz of a release of some sort (what I like to call the "Honeymoon" or "Techcrunch" phase), and then things settle down.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. They could settle down to some solid, sustainable numbers. However, if we put aside the fact that just about all of these ventures charge no money, all we've got to hang our hat on is a growing user base (for the purpose of advertising and such). Unfortunately, except for a select few, nobody's really on that path. Take a look at a few charts:
As you can see, it's not that easy to get on a growth path and keep going. As for those spikes? Well, that's just us (the technophiles) screwing around and playing with this stuff. Of course, there are some exceptions but they're few and far between (Netvibes seems to be on a nice path).
In any respect, it's all relative. How are all these ventures doing against the survivors of Web 1.0? Mind you, I don't think it's fair to compare Rojo to eBay for a handful of reasons. How about we compare stats from the sites that report and blog on all this stuff (Engadget, Boingboing, Techcrunch and Lifehacker) against an old school player: Cnet:
I know it's kind of hard to read, but take my word for it, the aqua line in the graph is Cnet.
Of course, all this comparative analysis is anecdotal and isn't meant to prove anything concrete. The real point of all this is to shed some light on how we can get caught up in our own noise. Your grandma doesn't know what tagging is. Your uncle is not using Rollyo. People on the street are not using Gmail. They're using Hotmail.
There's one other point worth making about all the Web 2.0 zaniness. Prior to and since Google bought Writely, everyone's been talking about how software as services are going to change the game. I think that's a bit ambitious. I think it's going to be increasingly difficult to prove out that people really want to their applications, and more importantly, their private data out on the Web. Furthermore, the entrenched players are not going to give up territory that easily. Take a look at this movie of the upcoming Office 2007 suite. It's going to take a lot of Ajax to compete with that.
This post could easily be written off as one long bitch session. It isn't meant to be one. I think for companies to succeed, it's worth highlighting how hard the game really is and who else is playing. More importantly, it's important to focus on how we get past our technical circles and penetrate the general population. It's a very difficult nut to crack. Just ask the Old Guard, it took them years to get there..and they're not about to give it up so easily.
A Complete Guide To Web Analytics Solutions
Conversationstarter.com : A Complete Guide To Web Analytics Solutions.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 28, 2006, 10:46AMAlertbear RSS Reader
Alertbear is a "river of news" (whatever the hell that means) feed reader. It displays updates off your taskbar as they come in.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 27, 2006, 08:27AMAjaxWrite Doesn't Use Ajax(?)
Ah, the price of being a buzzword. It turns out that ajaxWrite, Michael Robertson's latest venture, doesn't even use Ajax. Or at least, the ajax that was defined by Jesse James Garrett way back when. It's built primarily on XUL, a cilent-side scriptiong and GUI langauge for the Mozilla platform.
Anyway, it's all just a heap of marketing spin I suppose. But then again, the spirt of these types of apps is to undermine the classic installable applications like Microsoft Office. You're not going to do that by building it on a language that is only supported by Mozilla/Firefox, which is only run by 7% of your typical users.
Technologies aside, it isn't a very good implementation of a web-based word processor. We'll see what they put out on Wednesday.
Yahoo! Toolbar Refreshed
The Yahoo! Toolbar has been refreshed for both IE & Firefox. The IE version has it's own flavor of tabbed browsing.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 26, 2006, 07:12PMCNN.com Redesigns
CNN.com finally gets a redesign. A bit more interactive. A lot more CSS. And from the looks of it, designed against 1024x768 and up.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 24, 2006, 10:52AMCreating Passionate Designs
If you look up the word objective in a thesaurus, you end up with synonyms like:
Making such a suggestion runs counter to the dominant mindset in usability and experience design: learn and understand your users and cater to their needs. The user is the center of the universe. As he should be. What we design and build, after all, is for the user to touch and use. What I’m suggesting here is that while yes, we want users to be happy, the path to that happiness isn’t achieved solely by listening to them and discovering what makes them happy.
One of the most popular design blogs out there is Kathy Sierra’s and company’s excellent Creating Passionate Users. It’s theme is simple: what can we as designers to do to get users excited about the things we design and build? How do we create that passion and loyalty that few products enjoy? Listening to and talking to users is part of it. But I think there’s something else going on.
If a product flatters a user, they get excited about it. It’s complimentary. It makes them feel smart. Beyond the flattery, the user feels an almost visceral connection with how a product works. “It knew what I was thinking.” When that is achieved, loyalty and passion will follow.
From my experience, a compelling design almost invariably taps into something far more instinctive than what a user explicitly desires. Our shared psychology did not pop into existence but is rather a product of millions of years of refinement and evolution. I’ve suggested in the past that we’re attracted to certain objective characteristics in design (rounded corners and open space) and I think there’s a lot more out there that good designers unconsciously leverage.
One of the things I think we seem to forget, as designers, is that we are of the same cognitive lineage – no different than the users we cater to. As a designer, I often find myself shutting out all that user data out as I stare at a blank page. In a sense, I become the user. I then embark on an effort to design something that simply feels right to me. In other words, I try to tap into these basic, common patterns that we all share.
We can suggest with some confidence certain conventions that are fairly universally agreed upon. Certain geometric shapes. Like a square or perfect circle. The notion of symmetry and balance in design is also worth noting. The way colors interact in a design (i.e. color schemes) also comes to mind. Then you’ve got other conventions who’s only evidence of objective appeal lies in their popularity. Rounded corners is an obvious example. The Golden Ratio, Section or Mean is another interesting convention that’s used in art, architecture and many other places. The Golden Ratio is interesting because there’s anecdotal evidence of its existence in nature (e.g. in the symmetry of the human face and body and plant life).
While these conventions are all around us, it’s very difficult to prove that they are inherently good for design. As designers and artists, we seem to subconsiously dip into them. A colleague once told me that you know you’ve got a good design when you just stop. You reach a sort of Zen place where any more touching feels more like tainting. An odd balance is struck.
I’m all for creating passionate users. There are few things more gratifying for a designer than hearing someone not only talk about your work but talk about it with excitement and emotion. I’m convinced that a key way to do that is by creating designs that emulate our shared, basic understanding of how we perceive, process and communicate with the world around us.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 23, 2006, 03:34PMNifty Corners Cube
Yeh, yeh. We all know we love rounded corners, but creating them is still painful these days. Nifty Corners Cube is a solid, scripted implementation that has all sorts of capabilities. Very handy.
RSS for FTP Servers
As tasty as combining chocolate and peanut butter. Deliver out your ftp server's contents via RSS. Be warned, somewhat technical.
ajaxWrite
MIchael Robertson (of mp3.com and Lindows fame) is investing in a new venture that is primarily focused on creating Office Suite-like applications that are powered by Ajax. They've just announced their first release: ajaxWrite.
AjaxWrite alone isn't very impressive. It only works on Firefox and it's feature set pales in comparison to Writely and others. It also has a cheesy feel to it (I can't really put my finger on it). But ajaxWrite is just the beginning. From Michael's blog post:
But ajaxWrite is just the start. We have a library of applications we have been working on to replace most of the standard PC software titles. Every week we will launch a new sophisticated program on Wednesday at 12:00 PST on ajaxlaunch.com.
Dang. A new application every week? That's pretty impressive. As usual, there is no business model around this stuff as of right now. And I'm still not entirely convinced that people really need a word processor in a browser. I think they want their documents to be accessible from anywhere, but I think we need to get past the "Ooooh!" factor of seeing application-like behaviors in a browser and think about the real value it brings - and the potential problems it causes (privacy, security, etc.).
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 22, 2006, 08:54AMFactor CSS
Factor CSS takes in a CSS and spits out a new CSS with "rulesets split, combined, and reordered to "factor out" common declarations." Mmmm...refactoring.
Netvibes Adds 1GB of Storage
Netvibes, through an integration of Box.net, now let's you access 1GB of storage on your desktop. If you throw MP3's up there, it'll just play'em. Sweet.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 21, 2006, 01:27PMParanoid Rich
So the previous posting on Google's impact on privacy got Dugg yesterday (nearly 700 times) and the comments on both Digg and here have been, to say the least, entertaining and somewhat enlightening.
Some thoughts...
First, I'm apparently a paranoid conspiracy theorist who is freaking out for nothing. This may be true. I'm not even going to bother trying to convince anyone otherwise. I'll only look more paranoid.
Nevertheless, the argument often brought up about how our privacy is compromised everywhere (online, credit cards, mobile phones, etc.) and that it's unfair to single out Google has some merit. What I think people are missing about Google is that there is very little prerequisite to using its various services. We have to do a fair amount of work to sign up for a mobile phone or credit card (though it is getting a lot easier). Also, these are very often specialized services. While Amazon is gathering a lot about my buying habits, it's fairly limited to just that.
Google on the other hand is trying to be everywhere. It wants you to search, shop, write, store, email, chat, publish, sms...and the list goes on. They want to be everywhere because they have to keep growing. And they've made it very clear that their ambitions are not small by any means.
The other observation I'd make is how many people (to my surprise) strongly defended Google. It's testament to the loyalty and trust they've been able to generate thus far. People genuinely believe that Google is going to do the right thing. And for me, that's the rub. The "right thing" lies in a very murky, subjective place. Will Google sell your habits and content to a cartel in Central America? Obviously not. Will they triangulate your search habits, documents and emails to deliver a targeted ad? Probably. Is that bad? That's up to the person I suppose. But I'm guessing that for most, they wouldn't even guess that Google was doing such a thing. It's nearly impossible for Google to convey all the things they're doing with our data in a clear and concise way.
So it's up to us to have some faith or simply stay away.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 20, 2006, 02:08PMInternet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview Released
Microsoft released a new version of IE7 today. The IE7 blog has the details.
CSS Tweak
CSS Tweak is a web-based CSS tweaker. Haven't tried it yet. Looks promising.
Mini OPML/RSS Browser : Grazr
We'll let the missing 'e' slide on this one. Grazr is a mini web-based widget that browses OPML & RSS feeds.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 17, 2006, 06:15PMGoogle's Laser-Guided Missiles
PCMag.com has a good summary of a lunch Google's CEO Eric Schmidt gave to journalists recently. He addresses a lot of the Google-related hot topics these days.
On the Writely acquisition, Schmidt brushed off theories that it was a play to compete with Microsoft Office. He said the real purpose of the acquisition was part of Google's strategy to "collect and organize the world's data."
This is pretty frightening to me. The next logical question is: why does Google want to do this? So they can gain a better understanding of who we are, what we want and what we care about. Which begs the next question: why does Google want to collect and organize the things that matter to us? To make them readily accessible for a fee from anywhere? Or is it to deliver more targeted results throughout the Google experience? For example, I search elsewhere away from my documents; Google connects the dots between the content of my documents and my search terms.
I can't help but worry about this insatiable desire to consume, digest, index, study, analyze, extrapolate from and finally act upon the behaviors and artifacts that make up my life. In a word, it's creepy.
Luckily, we have the option to not use Google. I'm already making choices today. I don't use Gmail. I don't log in to personalized Google. No toolbar or desktop installed. Just search. When I walk into Best Buy, I don't want their sales people knowing a damn thing about me except for what I want them to know. Google's no different. I don't mind the ads, and in all fairness to Google, they seem to genuinely care about informing users about privacy.
Schimdt assured the journalists that there was plenty of growth left in ad revenue. "Better targeted ads" is the secret sauce. I tend to agree. Advertisers would pay more for them. Google is striving for accuracy. We are the targets. The evolution of search ads went from bombs (carpet bombs at first) to missiles. Google sees room for growth in continuing to refine and perfect how accurately an ad can hit its target. The questions that needs to be added to the discussion is: how does that happen? Is there anything Google isn't willing to watch, store, collect, monitor, whatever to meet this end?
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 16, 2006, 02:07PMMicrosoft Live Search And The End of Paging
Last week, Microsoft debuted a major update to their Live family of web-based products. A major part of that release was a revamped search engine. I was toying around with it today and one thing sort of jumped out at me: there are no pages to the search results.
Instead, you're left to either click on an up-down nav control on the right or use your mousewheel. This applies to their images and news searches as well. It's an interesting approach and I'm not really sure of the gains of going to the trouble of implementing search this way. As you scroll, live.com dynamically loads the next set of results (just enough for your current browser window size).
After playing with it for a bit, I think it makes sense. The image search feels a lot more elegant and seamless than Google's or Yahoo's. Unfortunately, I can't you a link example because all this dynamic-ness comes at a price: you can't pass along a query to someone else...sometimes.
Overall, I like it. It feels a lot less like a web destination and more like something I'd like to see in widget form on my desktop. I don't do many exploratory searches. 90% of my searching is because I'm going after something within the first 10 results. As to the quality of results. I don't think I can speak to that just yet. After some cursory use, Google's results still look superior. The home run for me is good search results on my desktop without going to a browser each time. This looks like a step in that direction.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 15, 2006, 09:20AMGoogle : In Your Face!
In the new version of Google Desktop 3 (which is coming out of beta today), Google has introduced a quick way to get a search box in your face. Just tap Ctrl Ctrl and up comes this:
Now I have to admit. This is damn handy as all hell. I complain about Google lots, but I search Google all day long. That search box is the gateway to Google's business - everywhere. And the more prominent, accessible, and readily available they can make it for us, the better for them.
Unfortunately, I don't like the rest of Google Desktop (bloatware in my opinion). If only I could just get this tiny little feature.
One alternative, and a favorite Windows tool of mine, is Dave's QuickSearch. It's a free application that puts a little search box in your tasktray or desktop toolbar. It searches Google and 325 (yes, 325) other search engines and websites. It's very handy.
Just as an observation, I think Google's success is going to rely more and more on further invading the Windows user experience - beyond opening a browser. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I don't know how Google is going to compete with features that come installed on Windows. My guess is a very small percentage of users go and install this stuff (vs. the masses that just plug in their Dell boxes and go).
Performancing Metrics
The freaks at Performancing have released yet another blog tracking tool: Performancing Metrics. Solution Watch has a good summary. It looks promising.
Winamp + Ajax = Mmmm, Tasty
Gabriel Levy is obviously a lunatic. He went and created a web/Ajax interface to Winamp that allows you to control Winamp over a network in any browser. The web version of Winamp looks nearly identical. It supports media libraries, playlists and such. Slick.
I'm guessing this would work over the Internet as well? I'm not sure how it sends the music across (streaming, etc.). If anyone toys with it and finds out, I'd love to know.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 14, 2006, 09:41AMThe Grass Is Greener On The Enterprise Side
James McGovern recently talked about large enterprises and why they don't care about Ruby. He touches on something I've noticed in consulting for large enterprises here in New York CIty.
There's no doubt there exists an invisible wall between the web community and Web 2.0 startups that enjoy using technologies that are more grass roots than Big Corp (Ruby/Rails, Ajax, MySQL, PHP, CSS, etc.) and traditional business that is still heavily reliant on your classic "enterprise" platforms (.Net, Java, Oracle, SQL Server). I think there are a few reasons behind this.
First and foremost, the decision-makers in large organizations can't miserably fail if they pick a vendor and technology that is widely marketed, established and recognizable. If a Microsoft product fails, nobody will their MIS director "how could you pick them?" In contrast, if they choose some open source XML database and it fails, he's going to feel the brunt of a backlash on that decision. Risk aversion is already rampant in large enterprises and many idiotic decisions are made because people are too conservative with their choices. Throw some homegrown platform into the mix and you've got chaos in their world.
Within the enterprise arena, building is just the beginning of an application's life span. Once released into the wild, maintenance, upkeep, updates dominate both time and money. Large organizations need the peace of mind of knowing that their is a large player behind their solutions; that their people are not only competent but also replacable with others (compare replacing a .Net developer with a Ruby developer); and that many of their tools and libraries are not their own but rather products that have been proven elsewhere. Agile development has its merits, but agile maintenance dominates the enterprise work day.
A final point worth mentioning is the level of complexity often associated with Enterprise applications. Heavy, complex transactions, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, heightened security requirements. These are all important requirements that simply can't be slammed through with a three or four developers without a spec in sight. Documentation is a critical because it's not only a means of communication but an artifact that survives the departures and arrivals of different participants. You can't give a five minute walk-thru of apps of this size.
With all that said, I think enterprises have a lot to learn from agile, web 2.0-style development. The focus on usability. The spirit of "just get something done" that can help offset the common paralysis that exists within these organizations. The ability to look at technology as a means to solution, rather than a shopping cart full of shrink-wrapped vendor products. These are all important lessons to be learned within the enterprise.
One of the things we're seeing today is the bigger players (IBM, Microsoft, Sun) embracing (i.e. "packaging") these trends and providing them to their customers under their own banners. IBM has done a great job of bridging the Linux and Java communities to the enterprise. In the end, I think that's what this is all about: relationships and trust. These organizations have relied upon and want to continue to rely upon their partners to help them make decisions. Let's not forget that technology for most enterprises is a services group. There is no room for experimentation and renegade development efforts that "might fly." They just want stuff to work in a predictable (read: boring) way.
So the Ruby fans shouldn't feel bad if it doesn't penetrate the enterprise. Big business is a pretty boring place. It's more fun to play outside anyway.
Gabbly : Add Chat To Any Page
Add a chat box to any URL with Gabbly. Here it is for basement.org's home page. Pretty nice implementation.
Build Your Own Portal
DHTMLGoodies has both PHP & Javascript code for building those neat, draggable RSS boxes you see on sites like live.com an Netvibes (demo).
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 13, 2006, 08:49AM25 Best Freeware Fonts
25 Best Freeware Fonts (via the mighty Kottke).
AJAX & The Enterprise End-Game
A friend and colleague who runs operations and technology at a financial services firm in New York City recently passed along some thoughts on AJAX in the context of their use in an enterprise.
When you are preparing your future software development strategy, remember that AJAX is not the end game. It's a pit stop on the way to better things.
This may seem obvious to a small group of programmers that understand how to leverage DHMTL and XML/HTTP to do things that most of us never imagined in a page-to-page browser paradigm. However, “popular” press and buzz in the software community glamorizes the use of AJAX as if it is some sort of new frontier. AJAX is not the new frontier. AJAX is a stop-gap. AJAX is one of several creative ways to deal with the extensive limitations of the browser-based world as we know it. Now that we are beginning to overcome the page-to-page mentality, AJAX is a nice toolset to leverage in the near-term while we wait for the big boys to develop something viable that gives us this highly-specialized skill.
Don’t get me wrong, AJAX is great. We deploy it in our business every day. We leverage it the way many other people do to slowly creep away from the painful experience of paging in the browser. However, we leverage it is a transitional platform, not as the end game.
When you surf around the web on the latest AJAX frameworks and implementations, just remember that in the not-so-distant-future, you will be adapting much of your AJAX skillset for something better. In a few years, we will all be chuckling about the use of AJAX for dynamic interaction the way we do about using CGI for transactions. People will still use AJAX and people still use CGI but it’s only a short-term solution.
All of the above is critical because within organizations, the time and resources invested in training and education paths is very important. Do we let people tinker and see what happens? Do we start to formally train them? Do we put standards in place? And most importantly, is this the right strategic bet? For most organizations, their technology groups simply take what their vendors hand to them (Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc.).
Above all else, it's important to view AJAX less as an end-game than as a tool in the larger context of delivering richer, more intuitive experiences to our users. To give it more weight than that - i.e. to perceive it as an end in itself - could prove to be a mistake.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 10, 2006, 09:25AMNetvibes Adds iCal Support
Netvibes Adds iCal Support. Groovy.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 9, 2006, 03:32PMGoogle Acquires Writely
The rumors were true. Google has acquired Writely. What does all this mean? Adsense in your documents? Is Google Office (or whatever) coming together? Is everything I type about to be folded into some weird semantic pile of spaghetti that is linked to all sorts of weird "resources"?
Who knows. Congrats to the Writely team. Bring on the $200 Linux appliance! Google's gonna take care of the rest...for free...for now...or something.
The Origami's Last Hurdle
The web is abuzz today with news of Microsoft's new ultraportable PC, code-named "Origami." Jupiter Research has a decent write-up. There’s a lot of chatter going about what the thing really is (and is for). Is it a portable device? Is it for GPS & Multimedia? Is it a new kind of notebook? The questions are justified.
The Origami is really just a scaled-down PC with a touch screen that runs Windows XP. This leaves us with a very wide range of possibilities in terms of what it can do. Yet, amidst all this marketing hype, Microsoft has failed to really deliver any sort of real story. Yes, there exists a chasm between the notebook market and PDA’s. Filling that gap is a business goal – a business goal hardly grounded in solving any real problems for people. Microsoft needs to take a page from Apple and narrowly define the capabilities of Origami. How is this going to make the average person’s life more pleasurable or less painful?
Of course, there are all sorts of possibilities. Reading articles, blogs and syndicated content. Watching and listening to multimedia. Sending and receiving emails. These are all problems that lack a killer device that nails them head on (Apple took care of the portable music market). So while I’m sure many technical hurdles had to be overcome to make this thing a reality, there’s still a lot more to do.
The remainder of that work lies in software, or more specifically, the design of software. Nobody out there makes the distinction between the software on their iPods, the hardware on their iPods, and iTunes. It’s a single cohesive experience that masks all the technical interplay and simply solves a problem. I look at the icons and menus on this thing and I just cringe. The message most people will get is : Who needs a PC with a tiny screen and no keyboard or mouse?
Microsoft needs to take Apple’s lead and solve a real problem; deliver a message around that solution (not the hardware that helped solve it); and follow it with a simple story that gets delivered through a simple interface. No icons. No start menu. Keep it simple and succinct. As a designer, I get excited about the possibilities of such a device, but not in the context of a Windows XP application. I think the narrowed mode of control (touch screen and some thumb controls) is actually a blessing – allowing for a highly focused experience.
Your early adopters and tech heads will enjoy this. But the real frontier is the average Jack and Jill who would see this and within 10 seconds say “Ah!” And only good experience design can achieve that. Only after that last hurdle can innovation become mainstream.
Nice List Of Free Downloadable Games
It ain't all about work and such. Gnome's Lair has a nice list of free games.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 8, 2006, 01:28PMWho Needs Calendaring?
So that not-so-subtle Web 2.0 hype machine has kicked in again. Who'd blame Google? I remember selling a pair of Gmail accounts for $70 a pop on eBay (no joke). Techcrunch has leaked some screenshots of the upcoming Google Calendar.
So allow me to indulge for a moment and ramble on like a bratty teenager...
Who the hell needs a personal calendar? Beyond work (where 90% of us are using Outlook/Exchange), what are people planning exactly? Maybe I need to find more friends and be more social. I don't know. And no, I don't have a need to "share" my calendar with non-work people. If I'm going to a show or meeting people for dinner, email and a few phone calls is just fine.
Let's not delude ourselves folks. We are not in an age of invention. Online calendaring could have prospered years ago when it first debuted. It sort of has in some corners (Yahoo! comes to mind) but there's no way you can tell me that there lies some dormant need among the masses that justifies this newfound interest and invesment in a bunch of calendaring apps.
And Google is no less guilty (or vulnerable). Somebody. Anybody. For the love of all things big and small. Shut your doors and charge $10 a month to see if I'm dead wrong (or if I need more friends).
Harvest : Simple Web Based Timesheets
Harvest is a simple web-based timesheet program. Trial available but it's not free (though reasonably priced).
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 7, 2006, 10:17AMThe Perils of Design Conventions
So I'm clicking away...Channel Up, Channel Up, Channel Up. Cycling through the channels on my digital cable box. 701. 702. 703. 704. While doing this, it dawned on my that this little interaction - skating up and down across a sequential list of channels - is awful.
Digital cable boxes have some amazing capabilities built into them. On-demand ordering. In-line TV guide. Information about programs. Yet we still have channel up and down. Now should flipping through channels go away? Of course not. But there is no doubt there are better ways to easily navigate around the 200 or so channels on a typical cable box.
Why not provide a grid-like listing, nicely categorized, that I can pull up at any time. Why not show me my most frequently visited channels in the same type of listing? In the example below, I don't have to stick to one serial path to get to my channels. For example, from Fox Sports, I can navigate up and down to other channels and jump left and right to Fox News and Cinemax and navigate from there.
The above isn't meant as a specific suggestion to redefine how we navigate TV channels. It's really meant to highlight a danger that designers often overlook when leveraging older design conventions. The original old TV sets had a technical limitation that required you to "flip" through a set of stations by turning a knob. Each snap of the channel knob locked you into another frequency. It was an analog way of tuning to different stations.
The remnants of that interaction still exists today despite the leaps and bounds that technology has afforded. Digital TV is readily capable of doing just about anything, but designers are still locked into the way things used to work. The result is a sort of damaged peripheral vision that hinders us from conceiving of designs that are potentially innovative. It's difficult to wipe the slate clean.
There is, of course, an advantage to leveraging how things used to work even when introducing newer technologies. Your users are already "experts" in channel surfing a sequential number and it's wise to leverage that expertise. The holy grail lies in how we're able to introduce innovative methods of interaction without breaking the already-learned concepts. Agreed-upon conventions are good...and bad.
Some other examples of interaction design conventions that may be an artifact of a previous time:
- The Blue Web Page Hyperlink. This thing has served us well, but we're sort of stuck here. What can we build upon here to accomodate different types of capabilities that have since become popular. Open in a new window? Open in a tab? Open a different media type?
- The Cassette Player Interface Previous song. Rewind. Play/Pause. Fast-Forward. Next Song. Music media formats and CD's can do a lot more than these controls allow. Queuing the next stong is still cumbersome. Organizing playlists is still cumbersome. Rewinding and fast-forwarding is also a remnant of older technologies. It's how you got to the next song. What use cases drive fast-forwarding through a song today?
- The Page-Flipping Paradigm. We're about done with paper yet we still flip through pages to get to more stuff. Financial Reports. Articles. Etc. We've seen glimpses of ways to navigate large information landscapes (Apple's Exposé comes to mind).
As designers, we work hard to make things easy for people. A great way to do that is to leverage what they already know. What we have to be careful with is to not get locked in to current conventions such that we discourage the idea of introducing something new - and potentially groundbreaking. Technology moves fast. We should reset our design thinking every so often and revisit the technologies available and what we can do with them. Invention lies dormant within. We just have to go get it.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 6, 2006, 09:47AMNY Times On RSS & eCommerce
Good article on how RSS is helping retailers reach customers.
Package Tracking With Google Maps
Because we need to visually see where our consumable goods are on a map. Package tracking with Google Maps.
The Problem With "Global Warming"
Seth Godin :The Problem With "Global Warming."
List of Ajax Slideshows
Max Kiesler (cool site by the way) put up an exhaustive list of AJAX slideshows.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 2, 2006, 09:55AMLayout Gala : 40 Canned CSS Layouts
Layout Gala : 40 Canned CSS Layouts. Mmmm. So del.icio.us-able.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 1, 2006, 10:08AMOpen Source XHTML Designs Repository
Oswd.org has nearly 1500 (yes, 1500) CSS/xHTML designs that are shared for free. Have at it.
Old School RSS Hardware Box Thingy
Sophonix' Foxboard is a single-chip Linux box that displays RSS headlines in big, fat, green LCD glory. Soooo retro.
Here she is. Sexy no? :
