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Monday, May 05, 2003 |
Some interesting desktop innovations in....
Some interesting desktop innovations in Microsoft's Longhorn Alpha Preview 3 (the new Windows): Libraries, pivot views, Carousel view and stacks.
- Libraries. "In this build, special shell folders have been replaced, sort of, by a new construct called a library. A library is a virtual folder that intelligently gathers information about files on your system and presents them to the users in a collection. [...] Note that libraries don't actually contain anything physically; instead, they are a special collection of shortcuts, similar to the Control Panel in XP. The files themselves could be anywhere on your system, though most libraries are limited to searching particular folders for performance reasons. As I understand it, the objective here is to transparently shield the user from having to worry about physical disk locations, and it seems like a good idea. [...] Longhorn includes the Document Library, Game Library, Music Library, My Contacts, and Picture & Video Library. [...] The Document Library will logically replace My Documents and is, naturally, a collection of all of the documents on your system. By default, the Document Library collects documents from My Documents, the desktop, and Shared Documents. It does not collect pictures, videos, or images."
- Pivot views. "In Longhorn, libraries can be filtered to display only certain types of content. When dealing with libraries, a filter (or view) is called a pivot. So, for example, you might display all pictures and videos in the Picture & Video Library, but you might want to filter the view by various criteria as well (size, date, whatever); this view of the data is a pivot. You can also modify the default view, or pivot, for each library and determine which physical folders it links to."
- Carousel view. "The My Contacts Library features a new Explorer view style called Carousel. [...] Graphically, an icon representing your user sits at the center of the carousel, and lines, or spokes, branch out from the center towards your contacts. In Carousel view, items can be grouped by various criteria, such as relationships. In the relationships concept, you might have people sorted by family, friends, work, and the like. So you'd see lines radiating out from your icon toward these groups. Items that are logically further away from you (alphabetically, those items that are further from the letter A) will graphically fade as they move further from the center of the carousel (you)."
- Stacks. "In My Contacts, you can arrange contacts by Name, Email, Work Email, Personal Email, Home Phone, Work Phone, or Online Status, but you can also utilizing a new feature called Stacks. Because you can't actually work with stacks in 4015, it's unclear what the feature does, but you can stack contacts by the same list of criteria by which you can arrange them, and you can also unstack them. Stacking and unstacking might be related to the Carousel view but, again, that's unclear right now."
(Enormous quantities of text copy-and-pasted above because I'm never very optimistic about OS preview commentary staying on the www for long.)
[Interconnected]
There is no such thing as something that Microsoft will not copy. It's the embrace and extend Borg - the unstoppable momentum that is Microsoft. This screen shot may look familiar. It has to be. Nothing Microsoft does is innovative - it's all about copying "good enough" and making it their own.
So for every revolutionary effort, there is an evolutionary "good enough" that Microsoft will use. Notice the wiring kit contact manager above. Look familiar? It should.
But that also means that it'll be easy for our mesh to hook up to their .Net world. The concept of a Library with Pivots (or views) in essential. Our the 'My' concept - with individual Carousels and Stacks. I can't wait to copy them!
Amd what's Apple gonna do? We'll just mesh the two worlds together.
New Guestblogger: Karen Marcelo, teleobliteration engineer and code diva.  When I first met Karen Marcelo, my ears were exploding and my guts were melting. Survival Research Labs was performing in a downtown LA alley. Geared up in an industrial protective suit, goggles, and a headset, she was hunched over the radio-control box that steered Flippy Bot ( 2.4mb MPEG movie) -- one of many robots at play that July evening. Flames, smoke, and deafening booms erupted in all directions, and the overwhelming sonic force made my blood ache. I felt nauseous, terrified, exhilarated, adrenaline-intoxicated, all at the same time. But as SRL's resident Internet telerobotics specialist since 1995, this was just another night with the machines for Karen.
I'm very pleased to welcome her to BoingBoing now as our new guestblogger. When she's not coding wireless deathbots with Mark Pauline and the SRL crew, Karen's working on other cool projects. Earlier this year, she completed a three-dimensional, autonomously conversing Prosthetic Head for performance artist Stelarc. She also runs dorkbotSF, a Bay Area tech culture event series for "people who do strange things with electricity." Previously, she served as research staff member in the Distributed Systems Group of CSL at Xerox PARC, and her software engineering projects have earned industry accolades including recognition at the international Ars Electronica festival.
Recently, the SF Bay Guardian named her one of the Bay Area's Ten Sexiest People, because "As every red-blooded San Franciscan knows, there's nothing hotter than a woman who says, 'I like to blow shit up.'" She's the kind of woman who shows up to a 2AM junkyard machine war toting rocket fuel and Chanel no. 5 in the same purse. She's equal shots glam and raw power. Pure punk rock. Poetry in code. Living proof that fembots have already infiltrated our planet -- and that we're better off for it.
And as the guestbar torch is passed, we express special gratitude to first-time blogger Jim Griffin, whose terrific contributions to the guestbar included wireless blog-posts from Antarctica, Finland, and Austria. Thanks in part to the overwhelming reader response he received here, Jim has decided to launch a blog of his own in the coming months at his 62chevy.com site. Many thanks, Jim. BoingBoing will miss you. See you soon in the blogosphere.
Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
Karen and I both help out an organization called QBox - which is dedicated to helping audio performance artists.
About time. Jim McGee: RSS feeds from Corante!.
In news we hope you'll appreciate: Corante now offers RSS for its blogs!
Ad Hominem
Amateur Hour
The Bottom Line
Brain Waves
Connected
Copyfight
Corante on Blogging
Got Game
IdeaFlow
In the Pipeline
Living Code
Many-to-Many
Moore's Lore
Open Mind
We'll be adding links to them from the respective pages over the course of the day - please alert me to any hiccups you encounter. Huge thanks to the WebCrimson crew!
[Corante: Corante on Blogging]
Got an email this morning from Hylton Jolliffe alerting me to this great piece of news. Corante has been publishing some great material; now it's readily available to those of us who prefer aggregators to stay current. [McGee's Musings]
[Seb's Open Research]
Dr. Seb takes time off from celebrating to inform us that Corante has finally gotten it's RSS feed act together. I love the way a community can help it's favorite heroes make-up for mistakes. It's sort of like a self-healing wound.
Congrats to Dana, Jonathan, the many-to-many folks and Hylton - for catching up to where you should have been all along. :-)
Japan's i-mode Personal Content Mov .... Japan's i-mode Personal Content Movement
Proto-blogger Justin Hall & Jane Pinckard have a feature article discussing the huge impact of personal sites designed for i-mode phone browsing in Japan (registration required).
 Most of DoCoMo's traffic these days doesn't come from within their walled garden, but from millions of unofficial sites maintained by individuals. And their concerns are social, not business. Historically new mobile technologies have been marketed to businesses, but i-mode homepages prove that people want to create and not just consume mobile culture.
The "thumb tribe" of Tokyo teenagers have no problems reading content on their mobile phones. In fact it's not unusual to see a whole subway car of them checking their email and checking in with friends after school. They've been the poster children for the wireless revolution - a phenomenon now recognized as "keitai culture" in Japan ("keitai" being the Japanese term for the mobile phone). Each day hundreds of millions of messages are exchanged by these busy socializers.
Pretty much giving DoCoMo a printing press for cranking out yen in the process.
 Emailed entries and long posts like those of Dolphin Masanobu point out the distinction between i-mode home pages and weblogs popular in the west. Weblogs traditionally trade links at a great velocity - many sites seem comprised almost entirely of "have you seen this?" with a link to another web site. Mizuko Ito is a professor of anthropology who has studied modern keitai culture among teenagers for the last few years. She says: "It's hard to think of a blog working fully on a keitai." Since people often read during a subway commute, over a narrowband platform like a mobile phone, they can be guaranteed content from a long downloaded text home page, or a home page emailed to their phone. Much of what is written on these sites might seem trivial, personal matters, the "variety of the mundane", but there is an audience. These i-mode sites are like open letters to friends, or in the Japanese tradition, a shared diary.
Beyond the interesting background of Japanese shared diaries, and some very interesting examples of money-making businesses enabled by the heavy usage of free, personal, diaries. Justin and Jane make a critical observation:
the value of maintaining personal contacts in a potentially alienating environment may have quieter ways of revolutionizing society.
There is a really big clue in there about why social software matters... Cocooning, technology, commute times, and commodity McJobs all put tremendous isolationist pressures on individuals, anything that can lessen those pressures by enabling real, emotional, human, re-connection will thrive.
[Amateur Hour: The "me" in Media]
Jonathan hits it on the head! And Jane and Justin rock.
This article is like an anthem for Jonathan's Corante column. This same "passion" that gets folks sharing their hobbies and making new friends, is what will drive a new form of personal publishing - once media and new tools meet broadband + Home LANs + devices and become as ubiquitous as straw sipping, text based web pages and blogs are today.
Computer/telephone integration: Why don't we expect more?.
SpiderPhone |
SpiderPhone I'm always on the lookout for innovative CTI (computer/telephone integration) tricks that work with our existing hybrid infrastructure. Sure, VOiP's right around the corner, but it's been right around the corner for a long time. Meanwhile, the humble business conference call remains a comedy of errors. One solution that recently impressed me is SpiderPhone. ... [Jon's Radio]
I've often wondered why this killer app wasn't as killer as my intuition told me. Perhaps it's day has come.
The Syndication list now has a code of conduct. This apparently small event could change the way the RSS community works, in a good way. It gave me an idea on the long plane flight from NY to Denver yesterday. Should we codify the idea, perhaps with the help of lawyers, to be a charter that any mail list can adopt? Say what's allowed and not, and be sure everyone who subscribes sees it. [Scripting News]
One of the best things Clay Shiry said in his keynote at O'Reilly ETCON was that on-line communities need constitutions and that the core members get to decide what happens. That's what's happening on the Syndication list.
The consensus seems to be No personal attacks. I myself fell into that trap and I apologized to our SS list. I do it here again. If I feel there's a problem with software - I'll speak up and if it's the management of that software that's the problem - I'll refer to them anonymously - not the individual.
Anyway - it looks like this sort of stuff naturally evolves and it's happening on the Syndication list.
 [ Scripting News] By all accounts, this appears to be a visual post by Dave Winer - Mr. Blogging, Mr. Outliner, Mr. Amatuer journalism and Mr. Open Standards.
This is significant - because if Dave starts doing something, everyone will follow.
In fact - you could call Dave - Mr. Meme.
He has kept his image to 320 pixels wide - which corresponds with his blog's width, but the best part was - the image is so beautiful, the gesture so pure - that the post needed no words.
Thank you Dave for moving the world forward. THIS is what broadband is about! No more straw sipping mentality!
iTunes store: More than 1 million sold. Apple's new online music store sold more than 1 million songs during its first week of operation, and analysts say it shows people will pay for downloads if given the chance. [CNET News.com - Media]
So there's Steve with Alannis and lots of success. But I can't help but wonder what the world would be like with the terms that Apple Music store offers - with better pricing. I guess they'll have lots of "room" to move down - if they need to - later.
 a review of blogging APIs
a review of blogging APIs -> As I was looking again at the space of remote-access APIs for weblog software (working on the XML-RPC Weblog Sync feature of clevercactus), I found that there was no side-by-side comparison of the main available APIs, or list of links of material to read. So here goes, in the hope that it will save time for others in the future. :)
As always, comments & corrections are most welcome! This is a long post, so I've left the meat of it off the main page.
[Audioblog/Mobileblogging News]
Than you to Diego Doval for this timely overview. We're all hoping that Evan and Jason et al do the right thing. And now that SixApart is funded, perhaps we can all move forward - together.
Hmmm - maybe that's what Joi and Dave are up to?
Trying the 'Visual Thesaurus'. I'm amazed by the Visual Thesaurus, but not totally sure I want to run it. This may be a case... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
The online edition has been Gillmored. I can't get it to come up. But it certainly seems intriguing.
Good news.
 Last friday, the département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle of Université de Montréal, as represented by a jury composed of profs. Guy Lapalme (president), Esma Aïmeur (advisor), Gilles Brassard (co-advisor), Marc Kaltenbach (jury member), and Tommaso Toffoli (external examiner, from Boston University) granted me a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
The room was chock full with students, professors, friends, and family members (the department director even had to sit on the floor!). I had to give a 45-minute talk summarizing my research contributions and to field questions from the jury and the audience.
I believe it went reasonably well. Several of my friends and family members were pleasantly surprised to find that they actually understood all of my presentation and the question/answer session that followed. I was really happy to see their faces in the room. Thanks to everyone for your support!!
I am extremely grateful to my advisors, who believed in me and had courage enough to let me go way off the beaten path while supporting and advising me every step of the way. THANK YOU!
Oh, and YULbloggers Karl Dubost and Ed Bilodeau showed up and very competently blogged the event. Both wrote that the experience of being there had made them enthusiastic about doing research. That's cool!
[Seb's Open Research]
Sounds like fun. I wonder if they voted like American Idol or held their thumbs up or down like a Roman Gladiator tribunal.
Of course, the best part was the blogging. This will create (of course) some new phrase that Doc will come up with - my money is on "DocBlogging".
Russell Beattie - one of my favorite folks to read recently - posted this bit on iPods, outlines and UIs. This is why we're emphasizing using our WebOutliner as a structure editor. Outliners are the PERFECT intuitive editor for enabling humans to control the many data structures, complex relationships and convergence issues facing the 'digital lifetsyle' today.
And the best part of it is - that Apple can't claim a patent on outlines! Dave Winer made sure of that!
Thanks Dave - and happy birthday!
iPods as UI Example for Intelliphones.
  
  
Okay, so I'm just about to go to bed and I wanted to post one more thought... I was just chatting to David who was gloating about his new 30GB iPod (bastard!) and he sent me the link to Steve Job's latest keynote - the one where he announced all the music stuff. I missed it the other day while I was at the Symbian conference, but since I never miss a Steve keynote, I decided to check it out.
In the video, Steve just went over the UI of the newest iPod. The simplicity and functionality of that interface is amazing and it makes me realize how complex the current state of Intelliphones are. Like the iPods in the past, the interface is one big hierarchy of options and music choices. It's an Outline! I love outlines. But it's not just my personal tastes, it's a great UI for a newbie. Clean and clear. An incredibly intuitive interface that would be perfect for ANY handheld device aimed at one-hand operation, not just for iPods.
Today I handed off my Nokia 7650 to my wife - and I told her to make sure she tells me EVERYTHING that she runs into while using the phone so I can learn from her about how a new user thinks. I didn't just hand it to her and say "good luck," though, I actually spent an hour or so walking her through the features and tricks of the phone (phone in her hand, just like when you're showing someone something on the computer - they need to drive). So she's a bit better off than a completely new person, but not much. She has to remember stuff like "holding down the 'abc' button while moving the cursor button will highligh multiple records in a list view" and things like that.
Anyways, I don't own an iPod, but I've seen them in action and it seems to be an incredibly better interface for accessing data. Not in a clunky Internet Explorer way, but in an intuitive hierarchy (outline!) way that we all can learn from. Right now my Series 60 phone has 5 main buttons (left task, right task, edit, clear, menu) the nav button (which goes 5 ways: up, down, left, right, push) and the number pad. The menu items are varied and can have sub-menus. The UI is somewhat limited, but still has lists, check boxes, buttons, tabs, etc. laid out in bewildering levels of complexity... sometimes the tabs will show up at the top in some apps so you don't have to go back to the main options list, but other times they don't. Sometimes the options have multiple levels - like the Access Point setup - and you can lose options you know are in there somewhere and end up hunting around for them.
Watching Ana this morning struggle through some parts of what is supposed to be a "simpler UI" for intelliphones then watching Steve Jobs whip through the iPod tonight made me realize how intuitive the iPod menu really is. I'm going to have to take note of that when thinking about design decisions on apps I create for the phone...
And hmmm... I wonder when the "iPhone" is coming out? :-)
-Russ Comment [ Russell Beattie Notebook]
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