BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 28, 2006, 02:20PMIs Flickr Protecting Photos From Download?
A friend of mine pointed me to this oddity. If you visit a Flickr page (for example this one) and try to save the displayed image either by dragging it to your desktop or right mouse-clicking "Save Image As...", the downloaded image isn't there.
I'm sure this is pretty easy to hack. It might be some sort of weird layering trick where the image is overlayed with another blank image or something. Regardless, it's sitting there in my browser so it can't be too difficult.
The real question is: why is Flickr even bothering?
Test Accessibility With Graybit
"GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page’s perceived contrast."
Slew Of Adobe Illustrator Tutorials
Mmmm...vectors. I'm a big fan of Illustrator. N-Design has a nice collection of Illustrator tutorials.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 27, 2006, 03:06PMJavascript Charting An dPlotting With PlotKit
"PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support."
LockNote
LockNote is a nice and simple (and free) Wiindows Notepad replacement that adds strong password protection support. The twist: it doesn't require itself to view files. They get saved as exe's that aren't much larger than regular text files.
Yahoo! Babel Fish
One of the oldest translation services around - Babel Fish - has found a new home at Yahoo! The Yahoo! Search Blog has all the details.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 25, 2006, 12:33PMInternet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Now Available
Microsoft has released Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 24, 2006, 10:17AMAJAX Slideshow with Ken Burns Effect
AJAX is obviously no longer fringe. The white-collar freaks at IBM have put out an exhaustively detailed (and fairly technical) tutorial for building an AJAX/XML-powered slideshow replete with the Ken Burns effect.
Creating Power Users
Ask any interaction designer or information architect about the importance of simplicity and their eyes will light up. Anyone who designs front-ends knows full well that its success is measured by how effectively an application’s functionality is communicated. The more complex the system, the greater the challenge to somehow mask that complexity and deliver a usable, simple interface. Applications only feel powerful when we’re able to achieve that marriage: deliver compelling capabilities in as simple a way as possible.
Thankfully, simplicity is well engrained in today’s Web 2.0 mindset. You’ll often stumble on applications with very simple forms, more dynamic experiences and highly focused functionality. Often accented with big fonts and friendly, primary colors, Web 2.0 is in many ways a statement against cluttered design. A minimalist sensibility pervades Web 2.0 – and that’s a good thing.
As Web 2.0 continues to expand and as needs grow, the goal of driving towards simplicity is going to be challenged. A heavyweight CRM tool can only be dumbed down so much, for example. So the challenges to deliver better experiences is going to really be tested as we’re confronted with more complex, involved software.
Beyond the challenges ahead, there seems to be a casualty of all this simplicity: the power user. Yes, power users are a niche population, but they are invaluable to the maturation and evolution of products. They’re a critical feedback loop. They’re also great advocates. Very often, they’ll take the time (often excitedly) to pitch, convince and even train others on a system they’re loyal to.
By putting the user at the center of the design universe, we inadvertantly fall into a sort of trap. Eventually, we want our users to graduate, but so long as we try to please them and, dare I say, “baby” them, the tougher it’s going to be to take them to the next level of proficiency, skill and ideally, expertise.
Google is a great example of this. They’ve done a fantastic job of delivering enormous power through a deceptively simple experience: the non-descript search box. Inadvertantly, they’ve created a loyal user base that is, in effect, spoiled. As Google tries to introduce more services and content, they’re forced to continue to meet that standard. It won’t be easy.
Can we design systems that are both simple (thus not alienating casual users) and yet somehow establish a breeding ground that can create new power users? Better yet, can we entice casual users so much so that they want to invest the time and effort to dig for more levers and switches? Or even better yet, can we slyly introduce more complex capabilities into the “simple” experience such that we’re breeding power users without them even knowing it? Can we train up users through the experience itself?
The moral of the story for me as an experience designer is to somehow bake learning and expertise-building into the experience. Rather than just have a new button show up one day that leads to a whole other cluster of functionality sitting elsewhere, we should try to blend these additional capabilities into the way they currently think about and do things. It isn’t easy, but the result is a more seasoned, empowered user that finds it worthwhile to keep learning and growing their knowledge of a product. I believe that can happen without creating a cluttered, unfocused experience. As designers, we just have to shoot for it.
Creating Power Users
Ask any interaction designer or information architect about the importance of simplicity and their eyes will light up. Anyone who designs front-ends knows full well that its success is measured by how effectively an application’s functionality is communicated. The more complex the system, the greater the challenge to somehow mask that complexity and deliver a usable, simple interface. Applications only feel powerful when we’re able to achieve that marriage: deliver compelling capabilities in as simple a way as possible.
Thankfully, simplicity is well ingrained in today’s Web 2.0 mindset. You’ll often stumble on applications with very simple forms, more dynamic experiences and highly focused functionality. Often accented with big fonts and friendly, primary colors, Web 2.0 is in many ways a statement against cluttered design. A minimalist sensibility pervades Web 2.0 – and that’s a good thing.
As Web 2.0 continues to expand and as needs grow, the goal of driving towards simplicity is going to be challenged. A heavyweight CRM tool can only be dumbed down so much, for example. So the challenges to deliver better experiences is going to really be tested as we’re confronted with more complex, involved software.
Beyond the challenges ahead, there seems to be a casualty of all this simplicity: the power user. Yes, power users are a niche population, but they are invaluable to the maturation and evolution of products. They’re a critical feedback loop. They’re also great advocates. Very often, they’ll take the time (often excitedly) to pitch, convince and even train others on a system they’re loyal to.
By putting the user at the center of the design universe, we inadvertently fall into a sort of trap. Eventually, we want our users to graduate, but so long as we try to please them and, dare I say, “baby” them, the tougher it’s going to be to take them to the next level of proficiency, skill and ideally, expertise.
Google is a great example of this. They’ve done a fantastic job of delivering enormous power through a deceptively simple experience: the non-descript search box. Inadvertently, they’ve created a loyal user base that is, in effect, spoiled. As Google tries to introduce more services and content, they’re forced to continue to meet that standard. It won’t be easy.
Can we design systems that are both simple (thus not alienating casual users) and yet somehow establish a breeding ground that can create new power users? Better yet, can we entice casual users so much so that they want to invest the time and effort to dig for more levers and switches? Or even better yet, can we slyly introduce more complex capabilities into the “simple” experience such that we’re breeding power users without them even knowing it? Can we train up users through the experience itself?
The moral of the story for me as an experience designer is to somehow bake learning and expertise-building into the experience. Rather than just have a new button show up one day that leads to a whole other cluster of functionality sitting elsewhere, we should try to blend these additional capabilities into the way they currently think about and do things. It isn’t easy, but the result is a more seasoned, empowered user that finds it worthwhile to keep learning and growing their knowledge of a product. I believe that can happen without creating a cluttered, unfocused experience. As designers, we just have to shoot for it.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 20, 2006, 02:44PMMasses And The Machine
There's some buzz going around that Digg isn't such a great model of Internet deomcracy. There are some posts flying around about how Digg is somewhat corrupted. The story itself has actually been dugg on digg over 500 times (as of this posting).
This raises an oddly implicit assumption that we seem to be making about social sites like Digg, Flickr and the like: the entities that house and maintain this information are fair, impartial and mildly benevolent. Just as we hold other publications to a higher set of standards, we've come to expect a certain level of good judgment and prudence by these services.
One could argue that the burden is even higher for such services. Since the content is not a product of any single person's mind but rather that of the community, it's integrity is instantly elevated to near sacred status. Oddly, where humans are expected to fact check and police information that is authored, in the realm of socially-created content, we want humans to stay out of the picture. Only the masses and the machine are trustworthy.
Movable Type Style Generator
Why do all the grunt work when you can generate? The Movable Type Style Generator is a nice wizard-style template builder.
Yahoo! MapMaker for Excel
Yahoo! MapMaker for Excel. 'Nuff said.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 19, 2006, 01:58PMSolution Watch : 50 Ways To Take Notes
Solution Watch (solid blog by the way) has a good summary of apps that aid note-taking.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 18, 2006, 05:28PMI Despise James Blunt
The great majority of posts on Basement.org have dealt with things like RSS, Web 2.0, the Semantic Web and the like. Because of this, I was hesitant to post a rant of any sort. But I couldn't hold out any longer. I'd exhausted all of my own social circles yet still felt the need to express myself.
I can't stand James Blunt.
For the unfamiliar, James Blunt is a UK singer/songwriter type that sings mostly ballads. He's our generations Michael Bolton. Woefully cheesy. Devastatingly sappy. Predictably formulaic. Maybe it's because his music sounds like a Kodak commercial. Maybe it's because he's been featured on a Starbucks compilation CD. I'm not really sure.
I am hoping that this post will help start the healing and extinguish the deep, seething hatred I feel towards James Blunt. I'll make it through this. My only fear is that there will be others.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 17, 2006, 09:49AMZixxo : RSS-Powered Coupons
We'll let the goofy name slide...for now. Zixxo delivers local coupons via RSS. Another great use for RSS. Death to weekly sales flyers.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 13, 2006, 12:43PMSneaking Web 2.0 Into The Enterprise
Nicholas Carr's blog Rough Type (an excellent blog by the way) shares some thoughts on a new MIT Sloan Management Review article by Andrew Mcafee entitled "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration."
The article is basically an argument of how many of the pillars of Web 2.0 - tagging, RSS, blogs, wikis - can really help the dissemination and flow of knowledge through enterprises whereas previous efforts have consistently failed.
I generally agree with this premise. We've seen enough over-bloated feature-laden X Management Systems that promise to finally solve the challenge of getting the right information out to the right people in large organizations. The Enterprise world has a lot to learn from some of the basic tenets of Web 2.0: less complexity; highly focused goal-oriented user interfaces, rapid development. Unlike the general Internet population which is more akin to the Wild West, the typical Enterprise's user population is far more focused and the Enterprise itself provides invaluable context to what's going on with in. It's a built-in noise filter.
Nicholas astutely points out a snag in this promise though. Most users are consumers of the artifacts of web 2.0. A small population actually creates the content. Furthermore, those content creators have the best knowledge and the least time to share it. They're very busy. Sure, the techie early adopters will be giddy about it, but the key players will glance over these cute little tools and go back to their routine.
He's right. But I think there are creative ways to address this. One way is to fuse content-generating activities with actual responsibilities. Is there a status update? Put it on the wiki. Don't email a group of people. You can further reinforce this by tying incentives to using these tools. This requires a top-down mandate real vision by management. A rare thing if real money isn't tied to it.
But there's something else we can do. Rather than training people and hoping they'll play with a new tool, we can work within their current toolset and work practice. We can build software that pays attention to how they work. We can, in very subtle ways, introduce simple but powerful tweaks to their current user experiences. If posting to feed were as simple - and similar - to writing an email, the cost is far lower for the user. Couple that with the very real benefits of Web 2.0, you've got a better shot at infusing these things into the work day.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 12, 2006, 09:32AMRoundup of 50 Ajax Frameworks
We all owe Max Kiesler a drink. He rounds up 50 (yes 50) Ajax frameworks.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 11, 2006, 08:13AMFeedback Loop 2.0
You have got to love the twisted little feedback loop that is the Web these days. Last week, I whined like a child that Netvibes' front-end was a bit too cramped. Yesterday, I posted about a neat little tool called Stylish that allowed you to hack at any sites CSS with Firefox.
This morning, I open up Firefox to find that the Netvibes team actually made the changes. It's an oh-so-subtle change, but man it makes a difference. Very cool.
Imagine watching a TV show and phoning into the network and telling them they need to shift their camera angles; or emailing your favorite magazine to tell them that their article layout in their print edition needs to change. Only on the web.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 10, 2006, 08:59AMStylin' Up Firefox
In response to the Netvibes CSS tweak I posted a few days ago, Jon from Wow Factor kindly pointed me to a Firefox extension called Stylish. Simply put Stylish is "to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript. Stylish allows you to easily manage user styles for the application UI, all websites, or only certain websites."
Now until those freaks at Netvibes sober up and tweak their design proper, you can go ahead and drop the CSS changes I suggested a few days ago into Stylish and you're all set. Pretty neat.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 7, 2006, 09:56AMView Source Chart Firefox Extension
The View Source Chart Firefox extension displays source code in a nice color-coded layout for better readability.
Coming Soon : Google Canvas?
Man, I'm all about gossip and conspiracy theory today. No, not that kind of gossip. I'm talking about geeky Gossip 2.0.
Some kids at Google have put out an open source implementation of Mozilla's (and originally Apple's) fine little Canvas drawing capability for Internet explorer called ExplorerCanvas.
Now why would Google go to the pain of creating a Javascript implementation of Canvas? Is it that whole 20%-of-your-time-is-for-whatever thing? Or is Google working on a cross-browser drawing tool of some sort? Or is this a way to break beyond the limited set of GUI elements associated with web apps (you can draw just about anything with this tool)?
Who knows. It's Friday. Nothing wrong with a little dirt now and again.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 6, 2006, 12:07PMNihilist Job Résumé
McSweeney's : Nihilist Job Résumé. Hilarious.
Spacing Out Netvibes
I'm a big fan of Netvibes. It's a highly dynamic portal with all kinds of neat widgets. It's my home page these days. One gripe I have with it though is the way headlines are cramped together. It's hard to distinguish each headline, especially if the words wrap around:
Notice how the headlines look like one big paragraph even though they're actually discrete bits of information. So I decided to whip out the beloved Firefox Web Developer Extension and mess with the CSS. After some digging around, I ended up with this:
All it took was the following bit of CSS tweaking:
.rssItemList li{
margin-bottom: 4px;
/* height: 14px;
overflow: hidden;*/
line-height: 1em;
padding: 1px 0 6px 12px;
border-bottom: 1px dotted #ccc;
}
I've rambled on in the past about the importance of space in laying out information. When you clump stuff together, the information sticks together, and our poor little brains are left with the task of pulling it apart again to make sense of it.
Long live CSS.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 5, 2006, 08:52AMNetvibes Previewing Tabbed Multi-Pages
I'm not sure how I stumbled on this (a link somewhere I think). Preview.netvibes.com is publicly viewable. It's a version of Netvibes that has tabbed pages so you can really go nuts. Hopefully the Netvibes team won't hate me for pointing this out.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 4, 2006, 08:33AMAn Interview With Feedlounge's Alex King
Feedlounge is one of a new breed of web-based feed readers that provides a rich online experience for managing your feed subscriptions. Only live for a few months now, it’s garnered a loyal following of…get this…paying customers. I recently had a chance to have an email conversation with Feedlounge’s Alex King.
How many people were involved in the building of Feedlounge?
It was primarily me and my partner Scott. Brian, an intern at Scott's consulting business, did a bit of work on it too, especially as we were getting started last year. We recently added another team member to focus on performance and scalability and allow Scott and I to return our focus to building a great application.
How long did you work on it before it went live?
We went live with our private alpha release about 5 months after we began development. Our public release on Jan 16th, 2006 was almost exactly 1 year after we began development.
How did you "fund" the development effort? Your own time and/or money? Outside help?
FeedLounge has been 100% bootstrapped by Scott and me. We've absorbed both the soft costs (development time, opportunity cost, etc.) and the hard costs (servers, bandwidth, etc.). We'd had some interest from outside groups in helping us with funding, but for a variety of reasons none of them have gone through.
It's also a little hard to know how best to spend the money if we took it. It we accepted enough capital to bring on additional staff and grow for 6 months, we'd also be risking having to shut down the service after 6 months. By growing organically, we hope to build up both a happy user base and a sustainable service.
If I'm not mistaken, Feedlounge was never a free service after going live. Why didn't you make it freely available, at least at first?
This somewhat goes back to the fact that FeedLounge is funded by Alex and Scott, not a big corporation or VCs with deep pockets. When we first started work on FeedLounge, I had no idea the cost that would be involved in offering a feed reading service. Scott had a much better idea, and I quickly became educated. :)
As we've talked about in some depth in the FeedLounge blog, we ran through both a shared server and a dedicated server during our private alpha before purchasing appropriate hardware. Even on the better hardware, we had to make a number of back-end changes to improve performance about a month after our initial public release.
If we'd thrown open the doors in our public release and allowed anyone to use FeedLounge for free (without the gating affect of being a paid service), we would have overwhelmed our hardware and wouldn't have generated income to allow us to expand our infrastructure.
We do still plan to release a free version of FeedLounge that will be both ad supported and feature limited. However, we will only do so in a manner that is sustainable and supportable. In my opinion, to do otherwise is irresponsible. While we have not announced a timeframe for the availability of the free version, it is something we are working on.
What do you think differentiates Feedlounge from other web-based readers like Rojo and Bloglines?
I think the primary difference is the powerful and efficient reading interface FeedLounge delivers. Traditionally, people have had to choose between a the speed of a native application and the flexibility of being ability to access their feeds from any computer with a web-based feed reader. FeedLounge uses AJAX and DHTML extensively to enable FeedLounge users to read the same way they can in a native application. In FeedLounge, the arrow keys work, the space bar works, page up/down works, there are shortcut keys for marking items read/unread, for flagging and tagging items, for opening and closing feed tags and for changing views. On top of all these features, performance is fantastic and you can still access it from any computer (using IE, Firefox, Safari or Opera) without needing to install anything.
While our interface and user experience are the main reasons our users choose FeedLounge today, we've also begun to expand beyond being a better reading experience. Last week we released TagThru, the ability to pass tags from FeedLounge on to other tagging services (our first implementation allows users to also tag in del.icio.us).
We have a variety of other API style features and additions planned as well.
How did people react when they saw that, unlike 95% of Web 2.0 services out there, this wasn't free?
As we expected, the reaction was very mixed. I'd say there were basically two groups:
- If I see value in it, I'll pay for it
- I'll never pay for anything online, everything online should be free
Did you do any sort of marketing beyond the usual community buzz?
We've been talking about the way in which we want to approach this.
We think it's something we need to do.
So now that FeedLounge is out there, how is it doing? Is it your (and your partner's) full time job?
FeedLounge is doing quite well. People are signing up, posting about it in their blogs and perhaps most importantly giving us honest feedback. From day one we've had open forums where anyone can post (even if they're not a FeedLounge user) and we've gotten invaluable feedback from the users in the forums. More recently, we added a feature voting page where anyone with a forum account can add to the feature list and vote for the features they'd most like to see added to FeedLounge. We're trying to be very responsive to the priorities of our users, as indicated by this list.
FeedLounge is definitely a full time gig for both Scott and I in that we put in 40+ hours/week on it. We do have some other projects going at the same time. For example, I have no intentions of abandoning my Tasks Pro software and have been continuing to develop new features and push out new releases over the last year. Our business plan calls for organic growth of FeedLounge, and we're seeing what we expected.
Do you see it growing in terms of paying users?
Yes, we've seen steady growth since our public release.
Alex, thanks for your time on this and best of luck with Feedlounge.
Thanks, Rich - it's been my pleasure.
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 3, 2006, 09:45AMAjaxAMP
I think I blogged about htis before, but this got a whole lot sweeter. Ajaxamp 3.0 is a Ajax web interface to Winamp with audio streaming. Dang that's cool.
NY Times Redesigns
The NY Times online has redesigned and it looks pretty spiffy. The Editor in Chief blogs...I mean talks about the changes. It's pretty clear that major media is done with resolutions smaller than 1024x768. CNN.com redesigned a couple of weeks ago and now the NY Times. Generally speaking, it's clearly a nod to better semantic based markup and CSS. It's also a clear acknowledgement of the power of blogs as a force. The site is sprinked with blog-ish characteristics (Anil Dash has more on that).
Posted by Richard Ziade on April 1, 2006, 02:09PMThe Ultimate Convergence Device
Cnet has an exclusive preview of a device that will no doubt redefine portability and convergence in personal technology. The E-vri-thin by Convergenics is a true achievement in technology.