BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 31, 2007, 11:01AMOffline Applications & The Task Of Unlearning
The blogs and the mainstream press is all abuzz about Google Gears. One of the key differences between web applications and desktop applications is the ability to use them offline. With Gears, developers can now tap into an API that allows for local storage (via SQLLite) and syncing of activity without being connected to the Internet. Google Reader is one of the first applications to support Gears.
This was pretty much inevitable and it checks off yet another item that differentiates the web and desktop software. The Financial Times spins it as yet another step towards taking on Microsoft. I think that's a bit of an oversimplification but the point is valid.
As we continue to see the line blur between desktop and web, an often overlooked challenge still exists: getting users to fully understand what's changing and why it should matter to them. The desktop paradigm: files stored in folders that I can "take out", work on and put away, is a very powerful one. Call it what you will, but the ability to control assets locally and then, at your discretion, pass them along others is a deeply-ingrained metaphor that works for most. Yes, there's value in centrally storing a spreadsheet. But there's also a cost in not really knowing where this asset lives. How do I give it to someone else? How do I delete it? How do I move it?
Of course, those of us well-versed in 2.0isms write these questions off as a failure to understand this "new way of doing things." Not so fast. People understand the representation of a file. For just about everyone, a file - whether a spreadsheet or document or image has what I like to call "cognitive integrity." In other words, it is clearly represented as its own "thing." It has a name (i.e. the filename). It has volume (i.e. file size) and takes up something akin to physical space. These perceived characterstics, which seem silly to harp upon as we move towards an increasingly centralized utility computing world, are incredibly powerful. This is partly why I think PDF is still so pervasive today. It's not only about a printable representation. It's about an indisputable representation of something.
Today we sign up and just start doing stuff in a web browser. Files (if they're still called that) don't really move around as much. We just sort of collaborate or share them (sort of). They float in some perceived ether. Tools like Google Gears will help us work offline and it will make a lot of sense for syncing states in an application like Google Reader. But I'd argue that people really want files and folders. They want things in their hands and then they'll send it elsewhere at their discretion.
It'll be interesting to see how designers approach the challenge of helping users grasp and take advantage of the shifts that are occurring today. Before we embark on that path though, we should make certain the value is really there and that it outweighs the unlearning process that will inevitably have to occur.
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 30, 2007, 09:23AMHelp Wanted
For the less informed, I'm a partner at Arc90. We're a New York City-based design and technology consulting firm that is laser-focused on doing cutting/bleedling/leading-edge work in the realm of rich web applications.
We're a small group to date - 24 people - but we're modestly and methodically growing to build the best possible group of technologists, interface designers and software developers.
I've worked in many places over that past 14 years. Big honkin' banks. Rabidly growing Internet start-ups. University research groups. I can say without hesitation that this is the smartest and most dynamic group I've ever worked with. It's a fun, dynamic environment where people are always challenging each other and introducing new ideas and approaches.
You probably guessed by the headline that we're looking to hire. We are. In fact, we're always looking for good people who are passionate about technology to join the team. Of late, we've been on the hunt for a few people that could help fill some gaps:
- Quality Assurance Lead
- Interaction Designer/Graphic Designer
- Flash/Flex Developer
If you fall within any of the above and are:
- bored
- feel unfulfilled (as in "professionally")
- need a change
- are curious as to why New York City is the greatest city in the world
- are interested to work with a great group of people in an open, loose environment
...then by all means, get in touch with us. Send along your resume or just email me with some background on yourself. To be clear, we really aren't looking for people to fit exact positions at Arc90. We're looking for smart, intellectually curious people that love technology. If you fit that criteria, we'd love to hear from you. We're open to various employment possibilities from consulting/contract-based to full-time.
If you're interested, email me directly at rich@arc90.com.
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 29, 2007, 03:15PMGoogle Street View
I used to really dig Amazon/A9's old "street view" on their A9 maps. They since got rid of it. Google has brought it back (in some major cities). It's even better - you can actually turn your little virtual head and look around the street. Fun...and sometimes useful.
Particls
Particls, a desktop application that lets you track news topics via a ticker or popups, went beta today. I'm not sure what to make of it just yet. It looks polished, but I'm still seeking its usefulness (not a good sign, heh).
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 23, 2007, 08:32PMGoogle Installing Spyware On Dell PC's
The OpenDNS blog has an excellent write-up on some really um...sorta evil practices that Google and Dell have teamed up to deliver to their customers. In essence, it's spyware. Error URL's are really common with inexperienced users. The redirect leads you to a page full of ads. No help. No suggested correction. Nothing. It's slimy. A huge percentage of computer users have no idea they're looking at advertisements. In fact, Google's ads don't look like advertisements at all. It's just text on a page. No fancy animations or colors. Just a bunch of text that pretty much looks like search results.
Even worse, this tool is buried away in some non-descript application that you have to manually uninstall. As Google continues to grow, they're finding that it's going to have to pay for those precious default settings. Huge numbers of people never change things when they first plug in that PC. So Google has partnered with hardware makers to install toolbars and the like. That's fine and good. But there is a line where you're effectively misleading novice users with ads that look like bona fide search results.
Situps For The Brain
Clay Shirky (an always insightful and sometimes brilliant thinker on technology) has written up an interesting piece entitled The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth. In it, he considers why so many young entrepreneurs are so...young. He asserts that, as we get older and gain more experience, we're less inclined to buy into something potentially revolutionary.
Instead, we brush it off as a mere anomaly. He elaborates:
The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But the experts make the opposite mistake, so that when a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, they are at risk of regarding it as a fad. As a result of this asymmetry, the novice makes their one good call during an actual revolution, at exactly the same time the expert makes their one big mistake, but at that moment, that’s all that is needed to give the newcomer a considerable edge.
For a 37 year-old partner in a relatively young firm that is locked into emerging trends in technology, his perfectly reasonable assertion feels a bit...wrong. While past experience no doubt shapes us, I think there are a handful of factors - some in our control, some not so much - that contribute to the lack of older entrepreneurs.
My own case is an interesting example. Looking back on my professional career, some of my best and most aggressive moves occurred when I was nearing my mid-30's. Even today, I'm sitting on new ideas that I'd love to find the time and money to experiment with and prove out. As Arc90 nears its third year in existence, we're well into one of our own, dare I say bold, product initiatives.
So, why did this all happen for me so late? One word: liberation. Over the past ten years I've worked in large corporations (investment banks and the like) as well as an Internet startup that crashed and burned. But only in the past four years, through both chance and conscious choice, did I break off and work on my own. In 2004, I dabbled with a product that was effectively an RSS news aggregator (only Bloglines was around back then). Eventually, I took some work as an independent consultant trying different things. Soon after that, that ended with the launching of Arc90.
During that period, I met new people, heard new ideas, was confronted with new problems and challenged to come up with new and creative solutions. All the while, I was reading what was happening in technology, closely watching RSS and Ajax emerge from trends into full blown movements. The last four years have been, without a doubt, the most fulfilling and enriching years of my professional career.
Am I the exception, or did my surrounding circumstances play a large part in my "later years" entrepreneurial thinking? I firmly believe that I am not the exception, and that we can consciously do a lot more to keep the creative mind going. I do believe that this is less about the weight of our past experiences and how they drag us down and more about mindset. How do I improve my mindset so that (a) I come up with fresh, new ideas (and keep coming up with them and (b) how do I condition myself to not fear going after them .
I think the above two points are inextricably related. If you have fears, you will undoubtedly stunt your ability to come up with fresh ideas. If the fresh ideas stop coming, when they do arise you'll be far more inclined to crush the rebellion and go back to your routine. So how can we keep the fearless flow of new ideas flowing? Here are some things I try to do that you may find helpful (budding entrepreneurs in your 20's, you can skip over this part):
- Change Your Scenery. If you're staring at the same wall calendar, crystal picture frame and stress ball you got at the last convention all day, every day, you're already losing the battle. Kathy Sierra has a great writeup called Brain Death By Dull Cubicle. In sum, your brain shrinks into a dull gray mass if your surrounding stimuli doesn't challenge or provoke your thinking in any way. If you can, move around. If you own a laptop, camp elsewhere - outside if possible. Take the train instead of the bus. If you can't, rearrange your surroundings as often as possible. Get rid of things. Put new things in place. If we think about the moment you come out of the womb, it is an absolutely massive bombardment of stimuli and the scale effectively goes down from there. Like our muscles, the less we challenge it, the less our brain needs to grow and adapt.
- Draw Out Your Sandbox, Then Go Play. Most of us have jobs with responsibilities that consume the great majority of our days. Not everyone has the luxury of the 20% rule that Googlers enjoy. So...create your own. Consciously delineate a playground where you can take risks and play with some cool stuff. You may have to do this on your own time, but so be it. Before you know it, you'll be addicted to the rush of being someplace foreign where you're learning and experimenting with little risk. You're back in school.
- Play With Metaphors This one's a bit tricky. One of the most compelling things about object-oriented thinking is that it's origins are metaphorical. It is, in effect, a collection of tricks that attempts to leverage our understanding of the characteristics of objects in the real world (i.e. objects that have properties and do things) with objects in software building. A great exercise is to take ideas, patterns and notions in a completely different domain and force them into another domain. The result is often nonsense, but on occasion it can fire off all sorts of creative thinking.
- Have A Glass Of Wine. Ok, this one is probably mildly controversial. The philosopher Ovid wrote "Wine gives courage and makes men more apt for passion." I'm not talking about chugging a couple of bottles of wine and chasing it with a box of Cheez-Its. A glass of red wine may well cause you to ramble on (both vocally and in your head) and it may cause to view something with a bolder perspective. Bravado and a mild case of recklessness is something many of us lack in our lives today. That's a good thing in our lives, but a bad thing in our minds. I've heard some argue that other substances like marijuana could do even more. Hell, Steve Jobs supposedly said that taking LSD was "one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life." I wouldn't go that far, but a little nudge is a good thing.
- Exercise The Body And The Brain Will Follow. A run approximately five times a week and I can say without a doubt that some of my best ideas have come up in the last fifteen minutes of a run. I have no clue why this is the case. Maybe all that extra oxygen gets things going a bit better. Try to find the time to work up a good sweat and you'll find that your brain will get in shape tool.
I should probably disclaim that I'm no expert in psychology or anything of the sort. I'm just sharing my own tricks for staying creative and maintaining a more intellectually aggressive mindset. I think the one common theme for me has been: don't stop growing and learning.
Oh, and one last thing...get yourself a juicer.
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 21, 2007, 09:04AMPicFindr
PicFindr is a nice little search tool that hits up numerous free stock photo sites. Built on Flex technology. Not too shabby.
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 18, 2007, 02:58PMVecteezy
I don’t know why I love vectors oh so very much, but I do. “Vecteezy is an index of Free Vectors available for download by some of the best designers around the world.” Have at it.
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 17, 2007, 10:14AMRecruiting For A Richer Web
Last week I talked about how the wide array of tools to build richer web experiences are leaving designers and web production people behind. In this post, I’ll touch on some of the things the companies behind these new technologies – Adobe, Microsoft, and others – can do to lower the barrier to entry for the alienated masses (how’s that for melodrama?).
One thing we can’t deny about the richer web, whether we’re talking about Ajax or Flash/Flex or Silverlight: it’s more complicated than the old Web. We’re shifting from a page-based paradigm to one where user “events” can cause all sorts of interesting things to occur. “When a user clicks here, pull this XML from the server, parse it and display it in this widget over there.” However way you look at it, there’s a lot more going on than “go from this page to that page.”
While developers are attacking this head-on, designers are left in a bit of a lurch. How can designers sketch out, think through and ultimately create these interactions? More importantly, how can we help them leverage the skills and knowledge they have today and build upon them, rather than purge them and start all over again. Here are some things I think can help the cause:
- Keep Supporting CSS For Styling – And Maybe For Layout. The last five or so years has seen an amazing grass-roots movement towards leveraging cascading style sheets not only for styling but also for layout. Adobe’s Flex platform already has limited support for CSS - that’s a great start. It would be great to see the principles of CSS - to separate styling from content – continue to be supported. Beyond look and feel, CSS is often used today for the layout of container elements in XHTML. While it’s broken in some places and requires some voodoo tricks to attain the desired outcome, it’s an important step because it allows the markup to more closely resembe a semantic structure.
- Long Live XHTML (Sorta). I’ll pose this suggestion in the form of a question: why do tags like <h1>, <p>, <a> or <ul> have to disappear? Yes, we’re building more software now than content-heavy web pages, but the web is still mainly about content. It’s hard to stomach all these new markup specs that are showing up. It seems nobody bothered to consider extending XHTML. Or how about a conversion tool of sorts?
- Down To The Pixel. One of the great things about web development is you can grab the elements as they are, or you can really dive in and change the look and feel of just about everything without having to write a lot of code. Of course, you can do that with these new technologies but you’ll be confronted with a very steep learning curve. I know that both Adobe & Microsoft are addressing the designer-developer workflow with new tools, but they’re far off from providing the relatively easy granular power the web offers.
- Where’s My Timeline? Developers think in objects interacting. Designers think in time – the experience unfolding as the user interacts with a system. In the old days, a site map could nicely lay out the world that a user can traverse. With all this new interactivity, it’s getting a lot harder to “map out” the possibilities. Adobe has done a great job of attacking both sides: the Flash timeline for desingers, the Flex object model for developers. Now they just have to somehow bridge the gap between the two. In the past, the hand-off was “production-ready” front-end: xhtml, css, images. What’s the hand-off gonna be here? Can a designer map out the different pieces and get them ready for wiring?
Looking at these trends, I can’t help but wonder two things: is Ajax the answer? (I’m not convinced it is) and, what happened to the standards bodies? Is this stuff moving too quickly to really step back and consider drafting a standard that everybody can agree to? The HTML story is telling. HTML happened and it got the head start it needed. That didn’t happen here.
At Arc90, we’re really enjoying Flex as a development platform. Adobe has put a lot of thought into bringing richer experiences to the web, and to developers. I’ve spoken to some people on the Flex team and it’s clear they’re thinking about these challenges.
And then you’ve got Microsoft and Silverlight. When it was announced two weeks ago, you’d think the web was about to immediately change forever. Not so fast. Before anything drastic happens, you need an army to make it happen. Hopefully both companies (and others) will acknowledge and build upon the skills and experience that is out there today.
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 16, 2007, 09:15AMA Nice Autosuggest Package
Yeh, I know there are about 500 Ajax autosuggest implementations out there, but this one over at Brand Spanking New is nicely packaged, documented and it looks darn cool.
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 9, 2007, 10:00AMThe Richer Web & The Death Of Design
One of the things we take for granted about the web development explosion of the past ten years is the opening up of software-building to a far broader population than your classically-trained computer engineers. Graphic designers, information designers, your generally curious tech-savvy computer hacker. They all got to play in this new playground. It didn't require JBuilder or Visual Studio. All it required was notepad, maybe some graphic editing tools, and you were on your way. It was this strange, new place where content and presentation very much drove the building process - often times dominating it.
With very little knowledge or programming experience, you could stare at (X)HTML and just get it. It made sense (more or less). When you did need to hack a bit of interactivity, you could usually find someone's javascript on the web and tweak it or just use it wholesale. About five years ago, a new movement materialized around semantic markup and heavier reliance on CSS. The result has been cleaner, more efficiently produced front-ends where presentation style is neatly separated from content. CSS Zen Garden is a great example of this.
I've often written on this blog about the limitations of the Web to deliver richer, more interactive experiences. I've asserted that, eventually, there would be a move away from this clumsy, page-based model. Almost two years ago, Ajax caught on and richer, more interactive experiences began debuting in web browsers. At Arc90, we leverage Ajax techniques to enhance key portions of the user experience. More recently, we've invested in Adobe's Flash and Flex technologies to deliver richer applications over the wire.
As this migration away from the static web continues and continues to get validated, other players are throwing their hats into the ring. Microsoft has introduced Silverlight (effectively an Adobe Flash competitor) and just yesterday, Sun has taking another crack at it with JavaFX (their earlier attempts to penetrate the rich client space were unequivocal failures).
Each of these platforms have their pluses and minuses. And as we assess this or that platform we're left with an oddly empty feeling: what is all this stuff?
Before all this we had one markup language (HTML), one styling mechanism (CSS) and one scripting language (Javascript). You had a browsers out there that adhered to these agreed-upon standards. Yeh, we had to test across some browsers - but that's looking like a walk in the park compared to where we're headed...
Now, we've got a lot more to contend with. XAML. MXML. Javascript. Actionscript. C#. JavaFX (whatever that is). Then you've got your whole gadget/widget/pageflake (yes, pageflake) API's out there. It's getting messy folks.
We knew we were going to have to pay a price for all that richness, but I fear the entire industry is going to pay a price. Here's where my fears lie:
- Pick Your Platform. With all these proprietary technologies being pitched, developers are being forced to pick their platform for rich web development. Rather than a single, agreed-upon set of standards, we've now got three (or four, or five).
- What Of The Designers? You can't help but worry about those designer/front-end production people out there. They're no confronted with this whole new set of expectations. Not only is software richer, but the ways to make it richer just got a lot more complicated. Furthermore, there are now pre-requisites to getting going. In the past, you needed notepad (or some replacement. Today, you need an IDE like Flex Builder or Microsoft Expression. The pick-up-and-build aspect of the web is being threatened.
- Bring Back Ugly, Ubiquitous Interfaces One of the web's flaws was a blessing in disguise. Because there never existed a formal forms model or strict interface guidelines, you saw a great explosion in both graphic and interface creativity. Now that various players are pre-packaging interfaces, I fear that we're about to see a wave of awful looking windows forms hit the web as armies of VB developers start hacking together Silverlight applications. This point is related to the previous one: if we leave the designers out of the picture, we can't combat this.
Pimp Out Your Netvibes
The kids at Netvibes can't rest up for a minute. They've extended Netvibes to allow you to customize it in all sorts of ways. A bunch of pre-packaged themes are also available.
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 3, 2007, 08:55AMReal-Time Language Translator Via Ajax
This is kinda, sorta, kinda neat: Ajaxtrans is a real-time translator that will port your text to a bunch of languages as you type.
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 2, 2007, 09:15AMDigg, Napster's Ghost & The Real Revolution
Nothin' like a little drama in the ol'blogo-2.0-social-sphere to go with the morning coffee. Digg experienced a mass revolt in the last 24 hours. In short, someone pointed to an article that laid out the hacking scheme to decrypt HD-DVD (something that was inevitably going to happen). Caving in to pressure from the "owners of intellectual property," Digg promptly took it down...and then took other like posts down...and then started banning users.
A mass revolt ensued. Before you knew it, Digg's front page was flooded with the pointers to the decryption information. Digg HQ had essentially lost control of Digg. There is no editorial staff at Digg. The mob is the editorial staff. Of course there are Terms of Use, but that's just window dressing. The Digg community will determine the terms of use (without the capital letters).
Now that the mob was at the door, Kevin Rose has decided to give in. In his words:
You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
Ouch. So let me understand this: the community/mob has decided (through mass action) that this story should stay up or Digg goes down. Fine. Digg Inc. has agreed to their demands. Fine. Now...who's responsible for the consequences? I can almost hear Rose's above quote ending in a whisper: "...will deal with whatever the consequences.."
This is a tough spot for Digg to be in. If the other mob - the copyright holders - go after Digg, they can try to argue that: "hey, we're just a public forum. We can't control what users put up here. Look what happened when we tried!"
Sound familiar? Napster made the exact same argument nearly ten years ago...and they lost. Ultimately, we're going to have to reconcile editorial control with responsibility. Digg can't argue that they're not responsible because they aren't in control. Ultimately, it's not about being in control, its about being an accomplice; an amplifier.
Napster's primary argument was that they were de-centralized. "We have no servers" they argued. But it turns out they did...sorta. Without getting into the technical nuances, the reason Napster was brought down was because it facilitated and enhanced illegal behavior.
Mobs don't care because you can't really sue a mob. Or can you? Maybe go after the infringing individuals? Or better yet, when that gloomy day comes and Digg Inc. is served with a lawsuit, they should ask the revolutionaries to help out. They'll have the user list after all. If the Digg community is serious about this issue, then they should be co-defendents with Digg Inc.
Now that would be a revolution.
Posted by Richard Ziade on May 1, 2007, 09:12AMDirectory Of Free Online Books
2020ok.com is a directory of free online books and eBooks. Groovy.