mea culpa - RSS at PC Forum. http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/010180.shtml#010180 Yes, Dan Gillmor is right. somehow we - that is, I - forgot to mention RSS in our panel discussion of attention management at PC Forum... though at least we *did* have Dave Sifry (and his brother Micah) who did an excellent presentation of Technorati. What can I say? If I were perfect, I wouldn't have an opportunity to improve. And if *we* were perfect, we couldn't do another, even better PC Forum next year.... [EDventure]

HHmmm - I wonder how many times Esther mentioned FOAF?

:-)

And how was Nik Nyholm's network?

Hey... it's my anniversary!. I must admit I had totally forgot that today is the second anniversary of this weblog. Thanks to Dave for noticing.

Dave: needless to say that you are always welcome here, there's still a few places worth visiting in this area, in late April the weather is nice, it's my birthday, on May 1 Slovenia will enter the EU (something you don't see every day) and we are only 19 Euros away from London.
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Sorry to hear that the price on Ryan Air has gone up to 19 from 1.  Also make sure to take Dave to the same Black Squid restaurant you took Dave Weinberger.

Congrats on 2 years - and counting.

Mythtv PVRs for sale. An Aussie company is shipping prebuilt mythtv-based PVRs. These are souped-up TiVo-like boxen built out of commodity hardware with all the features that I want, not just the ones that make the Luddites who run the movie studios comfortable. This analysis of the features (including several features that the manufacturer lamely decided to "hide") makes this box pretty drool-worthy indeed. Link (via /.)

The nerds stroke back.  Needless to say I bet it's UI isn;t as good as TiVOs.

UIs really do matter - BTW.

[Boing Boing]

Community networks: Time to amend Telecomm Act

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled aganst a group of Missouri communities offering telecom services where it is prohibited by Missouri law, it's time to amend the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 to specifically allow communities to do this. If a community can build local public roadways or parks, there's no reason why it can't build data networks for the benefit of all. Other countries understand the benefits of extending shared infrastructure into the digital domain. The U.S. needs to keep up or be left behind. [Service Provider Journal]

I couldn't agree with Scott any stronger. This is something Larry Lessig and the EFF should get behind!

Battle brewing.

With TypePad announcing deals with Loic, NTT-Docomo and Fujitsu - it's clear that Tucows doesn't have the market to itself.  One benefit we'll all see is quicker adoption of new micro-content standards - like OpenReviews and an overwhelming support of - yup you guessed it - FOAF!

Here's Ross' post....

Blogware Secret # 539 Revealed.

Eric Longman: "...now I realize that I can do the entire site on Blogware, which is VERY COOL."

Hah! Beat *that* Typepad! :-)

Now if we could ever get this thing launched we might be on to something!!

Have I mentioned today how much having smart resellers rocks? Enjoy your weekend everyone!

I'm sitting here with Sean Kelly and Lily Cheng, in Microsoft Research. We're checking out the latest social software networks. For instance:

Myspace

Why do I like what Lili and Sean show me? They get me out of my echo chamber. For instance, I haven't been playing with LiveJournal much lately, but it has more than a million people doing some interesting network spaces.

Are you seeing anything online that is cool in weblog/diaries/social software? I'm gonna have lunch with Marc Canter next week. I can't wait to see what he shows me.

Oh, there's a ton of social network people coming to Microsoft next week. I'll write more about that on Monday.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Let's see:

- Midentity - just went v1.0

- MediaChest - is boring

- Orkut - took down stats for good now

- Tribe.net - got a new look

 - Yafro - is hot

One funny thing - Lili emailed tonight asking that I not heckle anyone during her thingie.  :-)  Now I wonder who can be worried?

why is XML good for GUI?

Dan Shafer asks a very good question about Laszlo:

"Instead of direct manipulation of graphical objects to create pleasing interfaces, i get to write XML code (with its extreme overhead burden) to describe how I want the graphical experience to look and feel. And that's a good thing because...???"

I agree that it is counter-intuitive that XML would be a good format for developing graphical user interfaces. I always felt that XML made a mighty fine interchange format -- it's human-readable, almost self-doumenting, and these days if you are working on a large software development project you probably have at least one or two XML parsers already linked in. So... why use it for developing applications?

There are a few attributes of graphical user interfaces that map well to XML:

Graphical user interfaces are inherently hierarchical
Screen real-estate is naturally divided heirarchically. It is convenient for that heirarchy to be represented by the development environment.

Graphical user interfaces evolve
While a hierarchy could be effectively represented in a visual tool, arguably more effectively than it is in an XML file, it is the managing the evolution of a application where XML really comes in handy. It is natural for a design to change over time. In response to user feedback, bugs, or simply by realization of the author, an application needs new features, gestures, or an altered composition. When your design is caught in a visual tool with an opaque file format, you lose the magic of a diff. What happened between then and now?

Graphical user interfaces are often built by a team
XML files are simple text files. Media files live separately and can be linked in by name. Designers and coders can work together on separate pieces of an application without the need for complex group-ware solutions. Coders use the tools they are used to for editing and archiving files. Designers can use the tools they are used to for creating and editing art assets and media files.

Graphical user interfaces require structure
Graphical user interfaces need to be split into pieces to be manageable. XML provides a structured framework which makes its fairly easy to divide your work into bite-sized chunks. A common problem in a visual tool is that people "lose" things. It may be hard to figure out what object a script is attached to. An object that is invisible can be hard to discover or manipulate. In a system where all objects and code are encapsulated in simple text files, anything can be found. The inherent structure of an XML file helps organize an application. There are lots of visual tools that offer a tree-view of XML files which make this structure more approachable.

As an aside, for Dan who "still doesn't get Laszlo," there's a whole lot more to Laszlo than XML. What makes Laszlo cool is its constraints system, animation geared to UI design, client-server data model, effective class re-factoring, and more.

Someday there'll be a GUI tool for creating and editing Laszlo applications. Let's face it: typing in pixel coordinates and RGB values is no fun. Ideally there would be a layout tool that directly created and edited LZX files. Most folks at Laszlo design in Illustrator or whatever and transfer pixel and RGB values to the XML files. By the way, this is often what folks do when building UI for desktop apps.  [Sarah Allen's Weblog]

Wanna build a rich media application or service? getting tired of HTML? Don't wanna learn timelines? Then check out Laszlo Systems.

All non-commercial uses get a free license!

Once Again...I Don't Get Laszlo

Posted by Dan Shafer Mar 25, 2004 10:20 am

Here's my reply to Dan (who's an old friend BTW)

Hey dude,

OK - here we go. Here's a specific situation that's going on right now - which should give you the idea of how Laszlo would be used.

Look - it's good enough that Macromedia is copying them so it can't be all THAT bad.



So Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive has what may be or is becoming the world's largest collection of public domain, on-line content. The BBC is making much of their content available and there's all sorts of illegal/shared stuff - but this stuff is legally OURS - ephemeral, historic, artistic, educational, rocking materials - for us all to use. Audio, video, photos, you name it.

The only problem is that it's all hidden behind this butt ugly HTML interfaces and not readily available and useable by us humans. The endusers. But it CAN be accessed and made available via XML.

The Internet Archives has built in support for sending XML to the Laszlo SoundBlox player - and they only had to write that code once. The End-user goes to a page of some specific music, speech, soundtrack, whatever. They bring up the Laszlo SoundBlox jukebox - which then accesses the XML of that music - which (of course) just points at the files on the hard drive.

End-users today click on the URL of the file or a link pointing to the URL of the file - but what's wrong with this picture? ONLY NERDS DO THAT!

Humans use things called jukeboxes. They specify the name of the song, the artist and usually the length of the song. These jukeboxes usually have things called playlists (lots of songs sequenced in a particular order.)

All thjis requires a user interface which the programmers at the Internet Archive can program - but quite frankly they're not designers.

So two things are going on a) they're utilizing a reusable object - and plugging XML into it and b) they're able to use their programming skills to do this - without learning how to program vis a vis a timeline based authoring enviornment.

 

I know this may like heresy coming from the guy who helped crerate timelines in the first place - but time moves on.  There are about 1.5M people who Macromedia timelines, 6M who buy Photoshop and that number is not going to grow substantially.  It;s just to esoteric of knowledge for others to learn.  Too high up teh pyramid

 

But Dan I don't have to tell you that Javascript and scrpting in general has really taken off and that there are 10's of millions of scriptors out there - who know ECMA 2.0 related languages (which Laszlo is an XML o-o variant of.)

I hope you see how this situation is happening times 10,000 across the world of enterprise. Sure animated, interactive ads can and should be authored with timelines - but there are these new webapp, rich media what-sah-ma-callits that are now possible - now that broadband is here - and that ain't gonna happen with timelines.