Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Apple XML formats, oh he went there…

Oh dear, its been one of those things about Apple that we know but no one has really tackled. But Tim Bray on his blog post titled Apple File Formats, went there. Indeed, does anyone remember the terriable cockup of the itunes rss extension? So with that in mind, are we really suprised about what this anonymous person wrote in the comments …

The XML Schema for Keynote 1.0 was not actually developed in house; rather it was designed by a set of highly knowledgeable contractors. For the second round of applications (including Keynote 2.0), the XML Schemas were brought in house to Apple and this is where the headaches started. The schema was changed on an almost daily basis, breaking builds and causing mass amounts of confusion and bitterness. Also, by bringing it in house they lost the use of all this XML expertise that they had for the first version of the file format. There was no thought to standards or conformance at all. Rather they authored the schema in an ad hoc manner to suit their in memory file structure.

To sum up: the second round of file formats were constructed by amateurs.

Sad but true.

Yes very sad! Apple needs to put a little more effort into its file formats like they do with products.

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Changing the small things in software

Influence can be such a subjective thing, but just recently I've been able to shape or even influence the things around me so much more. Maybe that influence has always been there, in each and everyone of us?

So talking about influence and shaping, here's some things which I would like to shape.

Fireant
I've been looking for something to replace Blogmatrix Jaeger for downloading rich media via RSS for quite some time and Fireant seemed to be it. However there are a range of things which I think Fireant should take from Jaeger.

When Jaeger downloads a piece of media it names the file the same as the enclosure. However when Fireant downloads a media file it makes up a random filename like 9CBF0ACB9207FD9079A0342FA98EC69764756802.mp3 which is no good if you want to transfer stuff to your mobile phone via traditional routes (copying a file). Jaeger actually allows you to choose what type of filename you want, say a sequence of numbers, a date and time or just a filename.

Also, Fireant has support for copying files to ipods and psp's but what about removable storage cards, pocketpc, smartphones, etc?

I can understand why Fireant supports Torrents directly, but how about a option to use an external torrent application? I mean how bad is it when you got two torrent applications running at the same time unaware of each other? Yeah a recipe for a lot of trouble. I suggest a simple option which sends the torrent url or file to the other specified torrent application.

OPML import needs work, PocketRSS has a really nice feature which I actually suggest a while ago. It will go and grab a OPML file from a preset URL every week, month or whatever. So this means you dont need to manage two or more subscription lists. See the problem which you realise after a while, is that any blogger can add enclosures to there RSS. This means unless you provide the same list to Fireant, you may miss out on something interesting. Jaeger would actually automaticly download any enclosures from any subscription, there was no distiction between podcasters and bloggers (which I think is the correct way to go about this).
Somewhat related, is the fact that Fireant can be used as a normal RSS reader. This is once again good in theory but its really terriable in practice. It would be great to turn off all subscriptions which dont have enclosures, you know just let Fireant monitor all the feeds but only shows media items.

Blogging applications
I dont know what happened to Flock, but I'm still using a combination of Blojsom's Bookmarklet and Wbloggar. I thought about buying Ecto but I'm wondering why none of the blogging applications support the range of Microformats? And futher to that, if I drag a calendar entry from outlook or sunbird into my blog application wouldnt it make it make logical sense to automaticly create a Hclaendar link? The same should be true of contacts?
Wouldnt it also be great to be able to define some of those meta elements for entries in the blogging application? Say this entry is a certain creative commons licence and uses these tags. This should be common like how you can set the category and define trackbacks in most modern blogging applications.

Social software
I've outlined all my ideas for change in the bank of ideas. Feel free to vote on my thoughts and others.

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To the person(s) who put prisonbreak.s1.ep1 inside of lost.s2.ep1

To the person(s) who put prison break.season 1.ep 1 inside of the lost season 2.ep1 torrent today and yesterday. I was, (lets say it gently) slightly pissed off. This is the kind of thing you see on old school p2p networks like Kazaa not on Bit Torrent.

This is the first time I've ever downloaded something which was labled something else on bit torrent, maybe this is a growing trend? Has anyone else experienced this? I noticed the torrent in question has been removed from the piratebay. But I had already almost uploaded 3 times the contents of the torrent without knowing by the time I had got home today. So sorry to everyone else who was also duked. But to add aditional insult, I also downloaded Prison Break ep1 too, so I ended up with two of the same file. You can tell I was very very pissed off. At least Tom's recommendation for Prison break was a good enough choice to finally calm me down. Certainly no Oz, but interesting none the less. I'm just waiting for Fox to ruin it with some 24 type government propaganda.

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Geek Dinner is back with a bang

So yeah I hear Robert Scoble is back for another Geek Dinner on the 10th December via Ben's Blog. But I've got an announcement to say that I'm currently arranging with Tim O'reilly a geekdinner for thursday 13th October. I'm sure Tim will say yes and hopefully by the time I blog this, he would have agreed already. Lee Wilkins is fully aware of this and is stand by waiting for the final go from myself (just sent him the email).

Obviously he will also be doing some presentations and interviews around the BBC before. So if your a BBC member of staff working on the 13th October, try and keep your calendar clear on that day, so you can either attend a session in White City or Bush House with Tim. If your interested but have never heard Tim talk before, please check out this recommended podcast by Paul

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RSS enabled Windows Vista

PDC 2005 banner

So after a long wait details about Windows Vista's RSS ability are starting to emerge. Amar Gandhi (Group Program Manager of the Windows RSS team) presented “Windows Vista: Building RSS-enabled applications” at PDC 2005 just a few days ago. Sean is planning on putting more details on the Longhorn Team RSS blog soon. But till then I found the powerpoint presentation from Amar Gandhi online. Now if anyone has a video of the demo's that would be great.

On a related tip, Microsoft and Amazon have got together to launch A9 Open search into IE7. Two huge megacorps working together with open standards, this can't be happening? Or can it?

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Why are there so few uk bloggers?

So I was also in the "otherwise NDA’d BBC blog policy meeting" when Tom Coates suggested that the reason why there are few UK bloggers compared to our ummm friends in the states. Ben metcalfe paraphrases

Maybe the reason the UK public are a little behind our Amercian cousins when it comes to being across blogging is because it’s not very ‘British’ for the common man to stand and up and ‘have his say’ on something.

And as you have predicted, I have to agree. But I'm not so sure its quite as simple as to blame our British culture. I feel Geek culture is still kinda of looked down on while America geek culture is much more prolific. I'm not saying that's the only reason either but it like broadband pentration, etc have there part to play in the sum. But lets not forget the ability for the British to quickly change like in the case of House music in the late 80's.

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Tagging up facts with tagfacts?

Just when you thought it had all been done. Dima Kuchin builds TagFacts, a tag based tip, tricks and hints service. I honestly do not know what to make of the service. Its a lot to get your head around. But I can instantly imagine some uses.

For example, I'm always looking for little snippets of XSL, JS or Cocoon code to do certain little tasks. Once I use them, I dont formally store them anywhere. So i'm always looking at my previous xsl to work out how to do something. If its something big, I may put it on my blog. But the small pices are usually lost till I need them again. With TagFacts, I can now store them and retrive them quickly. This is pretty what Dima is doing himself.

Although the appeal is not as great as reader2, it could have some long term appeal and become a place where people look before hitting the newsgroups and forums?

It could become a resource like wikipedia, but in actual fact its the total opposite of wikipedia. See rather then collabative working on the same fact, the collaboration comes from the choice of tags. Tagfacts will work best when you have trusted friends on it, so I could check out how Mr M Kay reverses a XML tree.

There is however something which I cant quite get my headaround. Each fact is so different and could actually be wrong. How is it possible to work whats poplar? There is also no commonality between facts except the tags (in reader2 the isbn is used while in del.icio.us the link is used), this strikes me as quite a difficult thing to keep a track of in the backend. Anyhow, I'm sure Dima has it covered.

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