BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 31, 2006, 02:09PMClassic Software Splash Images
Take a geeky trip down memory lane with this cool collection of splash screens from various popular software packages. Kind of fun.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 27, 2006, 08:29AMNetvibes Adds Meebo Support
Via Meebo integration, now you can hit all the major instant messaging clients in one of your Netvibes tabs. Very sweet.
IE7 To Be Installed Via Auto Update
Hey if you've got the weapon, why not use it? Rather than sprinkling "Get Internet Explorer" buttons all over the Web, Microsoft is taking the shortcut right to the desktop. IE7 will install via automatic update.
Does anyone know if Firefox will jump from 1.5 to 2.0 via automatic update?
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 26, 2006, 09:35AMTwo Great New Tools From The Arc90 Lab
My colleagues at Arc90 are right to call me a "filthy bastard" for not pointing basement.org to the last couple of experiments to come out of the Arc90 Lab.
First is the deceptively cool Link Thumbnails (example). It's a simple little script that turns your hyperlinks into little screenshots that display on hover. There was some confusion at first as to how this worked. People thought they had to actually create the thumbnail images. They don't. The script actually calls out to a service and automatically retrieves them for you. Very sexy ("Sexy" is one of our goals at the Arc90 Lab). The tool has been Dugg over 1800 times and the response has been great.
A lesser-known but also very cool little experiment is the Image Captions tool (example). This one is pretty sweet too. With a simple script, you can drop images into your flowing text with captions without having to deal with much CSS or div positioning trickery.
The Arc90 team did a great job with these...and there's still more to come! Check into the lab and blog regularly for updates. The easiest way to stay on top is to subscribe to the Lab RSS feed.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 25, 2006, 10:50AM"What's RSS Again?"
Dead2.0 gives us a painful reminder of how the masses still have no clue what RSS is, or more importantly, why we should even care.
He asks his mom what RSS is and her response is just classic. I'm not sure what we need to do to plant that seed and really spread the love about why RSS is great.
Or is it great? And do people really need it? Or...wait. Wrong mindset.
RSS never got the killer application to bring it to the masses. HTML was a brilliant invention but it needed to be packaged up and introduced to the world - thus hiding its complexity. Mosaic and early Netscape did that. RSS doesn't have a Mosaic. When the Web exploded, Netscape was the Web. It wasn't about markup language. In fact, I'm sure most ordinary users, even today, don't care much for the concepts behind how the Web works.
The same goes for RSS. There are many great tools out there - both client applications and web-based, but none have been able to produce the "A-hah!" followed by the "Wow" yet. Can it happen? Will it happen? Who knows...
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 20, 2006, 08:59AMLogopond
File this bad boy under "inspiration" (or something). Logopond displays...logos (submitted ones that is). Neat-o.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 19, 2006, 10:02AM10 Things Yahoo Is Doing WIth It's YUI Library
The Yahoo Interface Blog struts its stuff by showing the many ways Yahoo! is taking advantage of its freely available user interface libraries. As they say on Sportscenter: "useful."
Selling Out The Cool Chaos
Netscape's (via Webloginc) Jason Calacanis has put forth an offer to effectively pay the most active users on Digg, Newsvine, Reddit and the like to post at least 150 link stories up per month on Netscape's Digg-ripoffinspired site. It's worth noting that Netscape is seeing nowhere near as much activity as Digg currently enjoys.
It's a good idea. Calacanis brings a street smart, Brooklyn attitude to the conversation. I'm a Brooklyn native myself and I often bring that realistic pragmatism to my thinking. Mr. Calacanis is right: everyone's gotta eat. A couple of thoughts:
The idealist in me really loves the organic qualities of Digg. I have a friend that works in a public relations firm and she tells me they're absolutely terrified of sites like Digg. They would never go near them because they fear getting "found out." Digg is in many ways an antidote to the existing top-down PR/marketing aparatus. It introduces chaos - a cool chaos - and somehow, order comes of it. By formalizing and paying certain people to do the work, you're transforming this energetic source of ideas and energy and turning it into...yet another content site. In other words, part of Digg's charm is it's anarchy (even if it's not really anarchy). It's not a PR firm. It's not a traditional portal site beholden to a massive media conglomerate. It's loved because it's not all those things.
Maybe I'm just being sentimental. It's sort of like when you're annoyed that your favorite band (that you're quick to point out that you discovered) finally "sold out" and signed up with a major record label. Next stop: Starbucks compilation CD's.
The only other point I'd make is that it's hard to replace motivation and keep the purity of why people do things. I'm all for capitalism but when you replace one motive (a love of sharing things and getting acknowledgement from others) with another (money), something is compromised.
Or is it?
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 18, 2006, 10:17AM3D 2D Racing Games!
As a kid and through a good chunk of adult life, I was really into video games. Now that I'm an...ahem...adult, I've sadly more or less given up on them. I got into the PSP for a bit, but now that I no longer have a commute, I rarely use it.
I also don't think it's entirely my fault. Really great games have very little to do with all the graphical wizardry we see these days. Most games are overwhelmed with Hollywood-style production and unnecessary complexity - thus making it all the more difficult to really convey - or capture - the essence of a really good game. I've played many of the fancy new baseball games, and none seem to capture the essence or sheer fun of the sport as Earl Weaver Baseball, Electronic Arts' 1987 classic for the old Commodore Amiga. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic, but none of today's titles are anywhere near as fun.
With all that said, and with apologies to Gran Turismo 4, I've always loved good ol' classic top-down racing games. This morning I stumbled on a great list of freeware 2D racing games (a la Super Off Road and such). Get your old joysticks out! Or maybe...paddles?
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 14, 2006, 09:04AMPassionate Users : Does The US Suck At Design?
The constantly thoughtful and inspiring Creating Passionate Users considers whether the U.S. sucks at design.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 12, 2006, 09:50AMCSS Mania : CSS World 2006 Winners
CSS Mania : CSS World 2006 Winners
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 11, 2006, 01:40PMJavascript Tabifier
A nice, simple (really simple) implementation of tabs via Javascript and CSS.
Battling User Inertia
Everybody loves Google Maps. It's just...cool. The way you can drag and zoom and see satellite imagery and such. Yahoo! Maps Beta also kicks ass, with its overlays of all sorts of mapping data (restaurants, theaters, events, traffic).
But guess what the most popular mapping application is? Good Ol' Mapquest. Mapquest is nowhere near as impressive as Yahoo's or Google's offerings. So why is it still #1?
A recent BusinessWeek article explored why Google is having such a hard time getting any of their other initiatives to gain real traction. Google FInance, with its nifty Flash integration, is a wickedly impressive application. So how does it fare against the other finance portals? It's 40th. 40th.
What is Google doing wrong? Or better yet, is Google doing anything wrong? I think there are few lessons here not only for Google but for all these Web 2.0 startups that are trying to make headway:
- Users get good at something and stick to it. It may not be the best way to do something, but users that invest the time (mainly because there were no other options at the time) optimize their brains around these tasks. The result? They work faster at a less efficient application. Even though a newcomer may have more features and be easier to use, it's not enough. With their existing apps or tools, they know where everything is. They know what all the buttons and levers do. They are experts.
- New features aren't enough. This is a tough pill to swallow. The technical wizardry that went into Google Maps is impressive by any measure. But the hard reality is this: Mapquest does the job just fine. Directions. Finding a location. Maybe make some printouts. 99% of the typical use cases for mapping are covered.
- The rest of the world could care less about technology. As technologists, its so easy to confuse great technology with a great product. A truly great product in fact hides the technical gymnastics and unveils itself as a simple yet beguilingly powerful experience. Amidst all the Web 2.0 buzz, we often lose sight of how little the rest of the world cares about our own little acronyms and buzzwords.
When it's all said and done, I think you can overcome all that and get there one of two ways, or ideally, some combination of the two:
Invention. True invention captivates the masses so much so that "wants" become "needs." The Netscape browser. The Google search engine. These are true inventions because they delivered experiences that were so compelling and unique that they overwhelmed people. People were willing to take the plunge and commit to these products. The interface didn't have to be seamless and easy because the value returned is so strong.
Simplicity. This one is much harder to pull off. Even if you make your offering much easier to use, there's an excellent chance that the existing offerings have already gathered mindshare and recruited "experts." Nevertheless, it does happen. The iPod was not an invention, but it simplified and hid away the nuts and bolts of portable music. Thus opening it up to the masses. Others had previously delivered more technically impressive products, but when iPod came along - it was all over.
You can build good product but when you release it into the wild, it is going to be subjected to the elements. The "elements" aren't only comprised of the typical challenges of a business climate. They also include the raw inertia of existing habits and routines. Overcoming that inertia in both product definition and interaction design will always be a challenging.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 10, 2006, 10:06AMAvailabot Now Available. Act Now!
Do you have that extra-special buddy in your instant messaging buddy list? Do you always want to know when your buddy is online? Too tired to just look up at the screen like everyone else? Is this sounding like the rapid fire questions that kick off a TV infomercial? Then read on!
The Availabot is a little USB-powered toy thingie that stands at a attention when a particular buddy is online and crumbles into a heap when they're offline. Here's a video of the Availabot in action. The product is just a prototype so it isn't actually for sale. Regardless, we can all appreciate it's relatively useless yet oddly appealing qualities.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 6, 2006, 01:52PMArc90 Blog : 10 Reasons We Love Flex
I just wrote up some reasons we're loving Adobe's Flex technology here at Arc90. A worthwhile read for anyone interested in AJAX or rich internet apps.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 5, 2006, 09:29PMThe Harm of Industry Gossip Memes
So the web is all abuzz right now because Amanda Congdon the girl behind Rocketboom, a popular video podcast, will no longer be...booming or rocketbooming (or something).
It's fascinating to watch this unravel in the blogging community. It's an absolute soap opera that I thnk highlights how truly immature the blogging world really is. I enjoy movies, but I don't really care who Russell Crowe is dating (or marrying, or divorcing). I also don't care about how much Colin Farrell got paid for his last movie, or whether he's still with his agent or not.
For me, this highlights a key and rarely spoken of motivator behind blogging: the need to be heard and noticed. Partnerships and work relationships come apart all the time, but in the blogging world you get out there and take your stand. It's cheesy and disingenuine. The community, strangely, jumps on the bone like a pack of rabid dogs. Jason Calacanis has offered Amanda a job at Netscape via an oddly slimy blog entry. Dave and Robert have chimed in.
The general strategy seems to be: take your personal conflicts public and build consensus that way - at the expense of others. Administer the first blow before your opponent knows what happened. It's a strange type of PR attack that the community seems to assemble and riot around rather than just ignore. It's too bad. I think these types of "industry gossip" memes take blogging a step away from the broader population. There are plenty of interesting topics to talk about. Just because people like TV and movies doesn't mean they read Variety.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 4, 2006, 11:55AMFunctioning Form : OSX vs. Vista Development
The excellent UI/UX blog, Functioning Form has a great entry on the behind-the-scenes thinking and motivations behind the development of OSX and Longhorn (Vista). Well worth reading.