Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
I got so fed up of trying to understand what the bloody hell was going on with these forms on my huawei MT820 ADSL modem that I ended up buying another router to control the firewall settings and do a number of other stuff too of course. Hopefully I'll be poping out live mixes again.
When I upgraded to the latest version of Kdenlive a free software non-linear editor which runs on every platform except windows. I was honestly shocked, it was clean, crisp and professional. There's little doubt that open source and free software has somewhat left user experience and interface design concerns closer to the bottom of the pile but this is radically changing. I'm hoping to show some of the new look applications which are worthy of another look and your attention, starting with the new look Kdenlive.
Thanks to Dave Crossland for pointing me to Dave Winer's view on the iphone as a developer platform and its problematic app store model.
The iPhone should have run the same software as the Macintosh. When I first heard about it, I misunderstood and thought I'd be able to write Frontier scripts that ran both on my desktop and the phone. I was a Blackberry user at the time, and I found the idea of a MacPhone truly inspiring. From there, it went downhill, and downhill and downhill. This platform was Apple's revenge on developers. Everything under their control. You couldn't even ship a product that Apple didn't approve of! Obviously that was going to be abused, and it has been, but finally it's become so ridiculous that it's obvious, even to Mike, that it can't work.
I've been through this loop many times, this is Mike's first. The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that's the Internet.
Steve Jobs is the anti-Internet. The Internet is utilitarian, it works, but it's ugly. Jobs's stuff is so beautiful that when taken to its logical conclusion, and he's almost there now, it's so dazzling, so beautiful that you fail to see that it is also useless.
Interesting to see this in my email today. I'm now going to reconsider my rss reader choice after reading this…
You spoke and we listened: in response to customer demand, NewsGator's best-of-breed consumer RSS applications now work with Google Reader. Google Reader will become the online companion to and the synchronization platform for our award-winning RSS reader applications – FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.
In conjunction with this announcement, NewsGator is making changes to several of its consumer RSS Readers. NewsGator will continue to support all its individual end-user applications for enterprise customers. However, NewsGator will continue to develop and support only a sub-set of these applications for free consumer use. FeedDemon and NetNewsWire have new versions for consumers that we encourage you to download as soon as possible. NewsGator’s other individual end-user applications will not continue to be supported for free consumer users after August 31, 2009. Again, all of NewsGator’s individual end-user applications will continue to be supported for paying Enterprise customers.
As part of this transition, NewsGator Online users will need to migrate to Google Reader by August 31, 2009. In addition, NewsGator will no longer support the free versions of NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Go!, and NewsGator’s RSS features (Shared Clipping Feed, Blogroll, Ratings, Headlines, Browser Toolbar, and Desktop Notifier). NewsGator will also continue to support FeedDemon (for Windows) and NetNewsWire (for Mac and iPhone) for all customers – free or paid. If you have questions as to whether or not you qualify as a paying enterprise customer, please contact your account manager.
In one hand Apple get away with almost blue or should it be white wash murder?
Apple has scored a victory in front of the advertising watchdog, with a ruling that it is free to claim its iPhone applications store is superior to a rival service offered by Google.
The Advertising Standards Authority rejected complaints from fans of Google's G1 smartphone that a TV ad for Apple's App Store was misleading.
“Yep, there's an app for just about anything,” a voiceover in the advert said. “Only on the iPhone.”
But in the other hand they weave their new inglorious oppression upon their fans and audience. I certainly couldn't live with it and choose not to.
As has been widely reported at this point, we are very sorry to announce that Apple removed our VoiceCentral app from the App Store. This happened suddenly, swiftly and with virtually no advance notice from Apple.
Repeated emails yesterday to Apple have still been ignored at this point. We did receive a voicemail at our main office from the same Richard who called our competitor. Unfortunately it wasn’t until today that we were able to connect for our “conversation”. The word conversation really doesn’t cover it because what transpired was not informative by design and felt like theater of the absurd.
Looks like a good one….
Forced to play a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse in the chaos of war, an elite Army bomb squad unit must come together in a city where everyone is a potential enemy and every object could be a deadly bomb.
Credit to Miss Geeky for the meme.
I have no idea what happened in the first 2 mixes. Honestly the mixes were dead on, I was playing it loud out of my amp and if it was that off trust me I would have heard it. Anyway, rather that try and fix it, I've left it in because the whole set is a excellent one. There seems to be a bug with the pacemaker or something because after those two mixes everything pans out perfect. Anyway let the mix do the talking, just remember to skip the first two mixes.
I've been quite public about the fact that I'm not very happy with the calendaring of geek events in the UK generally. Upcoming.org pretty much won over eventful in the UK although I thought Eventful was technically better. But the problem is upcoming doesn't really cut it enough, it feels like Yahoo are keeping it around but not really doing much development on it. Then you got the silo of meetup coming back in some quarters and even worst recently Facebook events. Its just a bloody mess and nothing seems to work with each other.
So where's the aggregator to rule them all? Well there isn't one as such, which is fair enough but it would be great to have some place for certain types. See the problem with upcoming right now is its full of stuff which doesn't interest me at all. Now there is a niffty feature of being able to see events your friends events there going to. Of course theres a ical feed which is great. There are also groups in upcoming but who really uses those?
So whats the solution? Well I'm betting my time on Calagator. Calagator comes after much research into aggregators of events. It works well for Portland and its community, and thats the big difference. Its not just a calendar with events, its built around a community so it accepts many sources of input (iCalendar, hCalendar, Upcoming, and MeetUp) and displays the events in a logical way for many users and thats a lot different that just a calendar on a webpage. We've not quite got it working yet, but its coming soon. In the meantime the Hodge has created wheres the geeks? Its a good start but he and others seem to be building the whole thing from scratch which is interesting. I certainly wouldn't do it that way myself but I can't code for strawberries. It would make more sense to build on top of something like calagator me thinks but hey what do I know. At least wheresthegeeks is actually up and running, so go check it out.
Finally some future stuff to check out. What on earth is Jon Udell doing with his Elmcity project? I kind of get how it works but I'm missing the whole picture or something. So in his own words Elmcity is…
Q: What is the elmcity project?
A: It’s a web-based service that:
Collects online calendar events for geographic communities
Merges information from many sources: Eventful, Upcoming, and iCalendar feeds published by popular calendar programs
Creates network effects using iCalendar (ICS) feeds, in the same way that blogging and microblogging systems create network effects using RSS, Atom, and Twitter feeds.
Does not store events in a centralized database, but rather operates as a hub that merges streams of events and republishes the merged result in a variety of formats.
Is managed by one or more curators in a community, on behalf of everyone in the community.
Runs on, and demonstrates the capabilities of, Microsoft’s Azure platform.
So ok its very clever but the full extent of whats possible is certainly of interest to me. Talking of taking in the full extent of new developments, its worth checking out the IT Conversation podcast about a need for a XML representation for iCalendar. If ical goes XML, geez I'd be a lot happier.
There was a interesting post from some of the XBMC developers recently. It was a tip of the hat to some secret things they have been working towards.
So Webkit integration is pretty obvious, like Boxee's cloning Mozilla into there later builds. Having a browser built in means access to a lot more the web's resources including things which are trapped inside a Flash container. The DirectX port will just be a version which takes advantage of Windows APIs for display. Makes sense seeing how there is already a Mac only port called Plex which takes advantage of that hardware. Its also worth noting Plex already has Webkit build in. The ARM port is something I wouldn't have imagined, but it makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of ARM based systems out there including smartphones and other electronic devices outside of the usual circles. This also means you could make a really cheap XBMC box with basic functionality. I assume PVR intergration will pick up the effort which was spotty in the past. There has been support for TIVO and a couple other boxes in the past but no real long term effort. The video library redesign is also a welcomed change, don't get me wrong its good but it can be much better and there's talk about mixing it with some kind of supplemental tool to control the media better. I had considered writing a XSL to generate a list of what movies I own and there ratings, etc via conduit sync manager.
Everyone is loving Prezi, people are totally raving about it. But I have serious problems with the technology behind Prezi.
As far as I can tell Prezi generates a huge flash file which is bad enough but on top of that is it seems to suck everything into it and nothing much seems to come out. So for example it can injest pdf file, images, text, movies, etc. But can you export to a presentation file which people can take away? Can you export to a printable for format? Can you export to a movie? It doesn't seem very clear from any of the information I have seen. In actual fact you can only export to a format which requires another Prezi player, to play it back! The business model is also worth mentioning, 119 dollars a month for version which includes offline editing but not much else. All the payment grades are tied to there online storage too, which is very expensive for what you get. For example how would you pay for 2gig of storage? Certainly no where up from 30 dollars, which still assumes the offline editor is worth 90 dollars. From a Data Portability angle this is like the spawn of satan surely? And I'm sure from a open source and free software angle, this has got to have Tim Oreilly and Richard Stallman in chills at night? Lastly, what on earth are TED thinking sponsoring this stuff?
I have been thinking maybe some enterprising group of people could take the SVG specification and build a tool which generates these exact same presentations. So first up you can use scripts on every element including the viewpoint attribute. There seems to be a load of things you can do with the Canvas coordinate system. SVG 1.1 has the ability to embed certain multimedia but SVG Foreign Object could be used to place a browser or a complete video within a SVG.
You could imagine a specially made tool which worked like Prezi but wouldn't need to be propitery and locked in. They could even create and sell a player and editor backed with its online space, so the business model isn't totally shattered. Even if a rival tried to create the same, OpenPrezi as I'm coining it would be first to the market and have a wealth of knowledge of what works and what doesn't. Even a track record might go down well. So in my mind, there's no way I will be using Prezi till its a lot more open. I'm sure even I could with a bit of time construct something using the SVG methods I mentioned. I'm not questioning the method or even the concept, it actually reminds me of mood boards. Its the implementation which winds me up.
