Life is grand

Silverlight is RIA tech. Right?

We’ve had RIA tech for awhile now. Right?

The web hasn’t yet been rebooted, killed, changed or even shifted by RIA. Right?

RIA has its place but the web isn’t some shiny interface that is delivered to you in proprietary, closed, binary format.

Image concatenation has been around for awhile now but it is nice to have a fully explained article aimed at how to use the technique in web interfaces.

My question though is; favicons. Those annoying 16×16 icons browsers show in the address bar and next to bookmarks.

They are wonderful to see but as a developer of a web interface that wants to use them I can tell you they are highly annoying to support.

Does anyone have a good idea on how to use image concatenation for favicons? Is it workable?

I am skeptical about the consensus from a panel of internet browser developers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera) at the Web 2.0 Expo:

vendors plan to focus on positioning the browser as a development platform.

This just a day after SilverLight was announced which has no firm plans for anything but Mac OS X and Windows support.

I simply think that there will be critical disagreement and interference from corporate requirements. I’m not sure I can imagine Microsoft pushing an Internet Explorer that adheres to a platform standard that allows an app. to run on any operating system the browser can run on. I can see Mozilla and Opera doing that because they have little vested interest in the underlying OS. I can’t see Mozilla or Opera adopting XAML though or Mozilla ditching XUL. They have trouble adopting one Microsoft invented attribute on a minor element.

I also don’t see Adobe in this discussion and they own Flash as well as the upcoming Apollo platform. Flash is not dead and it is widely distributed. Sadly Adobe is not known for playing well with others either.

It is a nice idea but for the foreseeable future there is going to be forking, different platforms and all the joy that goes into developing for different and continually shifting browsers.

A fascinating brief to the news print industry by Oliver Reichenstein:

News organisations cannot continue to ignore the global shift from institutionally controlled media to user controlled media. They have to redefine their processes and face the obvious question: Do we still need old media for news?

There are concepts in there but also pragmatic instructions on what to do.

Letters to the editor is often the most successful section of a newspaper. Why is that? Because web 2.0 is a new fashion that will disappear soon? Or because the curiosity in what real people think is human, all too human?

So true. Web 2.0 is the humanising of the web and the pulling down of the old guard’s walls. Not to destroy them but to include them in our global conversation.

1. Reduce number of banners per page to one.
2. Increase banner size.
3. Distinguish clearly between ads and content.
4. Kill all pop up windows.
5. Forbid animated and amateurish banners.

Funnily enough as much as I think the New York Times Reader is a failure (being a desktop-bound, closed app.) I do think their advertising is excellent. One per page, quality, non-intrusive.

Truth is: We need paper for books, yet we don’t absolutely need paper for news – it is just a nice to have option.

I don’t disagree with this but I think “digital paper” or ePaper can be added to the arguement. Static paper will disappear. Dynamic, reloadable ePaper will replace it (it has already been said ePaper will become cheaper than tree-paper.)

It isn’t that newspapers must go online and dump the physicality of paper. Rather that newspapers become true media two-way channels and allow any device to read their content. ePaper, laptops, mobile phones, TVs, desktop computers, billboards, train station walls and the side of blimps. These are display surfaces on which the news of the world can be read.

I respect the path 37signals has forged in the path few years but I have to say they are really riding the beta hype cycle hard with their upcoming HighRise app. At this point 37signals could launch the app. at the local Bedouin Starbucks and there would be a 5 mile queue outside three days before.

So when I read about the “golden tickets” idea I nearly gagged.

Come on guys, get real.

So it seems the whole Snap Preview outcry is having some effect. TechCrunch has modified how Snap Preview works on their site. Before, any external link would pop-up a little window previewing the site on hover. Now they have moved that feature by inserting an icon to the right of any external links and showing the pop-up on hover of that icon.

Is it an improvement? Yes. Is peace and tranquility restored to the interwebs? No. You can’t take a well intended but bad idea, shift it ten pixels to the right and declare the problem fixed. The idea was bad in the first place; admit it, kill the idea and move on. Now when I read paragraphs on TechCrunch the flow of words is broken. Typography is important. Readability is important. Preview links are not. The icon is meant to be subtle in contrast (it is off-white) but it still takes up 16 pixels of width which throws off gaps between words which is a big no-no in typography and readability.

Ah well. You can still disable the damned thing, until you clear your cookies and have to go disable it again.

Awhile back I did a talk on Ajax and wanted to share the presentation with the world. It was pretty low-tech, a link to a downloadable PowerPoint file. You had to have PowerPoint or its viewer and you couldn’t preview the slides.

I also recently attended RailsConf Europe 2006 and collected some of the presentations together. Once again low-tech links to slide files. No previews and with the wide audience I’ll bet many didn’t have PowerPoint.

Not long ago we had the same problem with sharing video. Different formats, no easy way to preview, downloading links and files and what not. Then YouTube came along and suddenly all you needed was Flash and you could upload and view thousands of videos. No codec hassles, what a pleasure.

SlideShare does that but for presentation files. Upload a PowerPoint file and anyone with Flash can view it. That rocks.

TechCrunch gave a good overview and listed a few problems. I’d like to add that SlideShare needs to support more presentation formats (and telling Keynote users to save as PPT is probably not the best idea though it is practical for now.) And not just the standard presentation formats but PDF and HTML too. Loads of the RubyConf speakers distributed their slides as PDF. SlideShare should support that.

Full screen viewing would be good too. I am not sure how they do the conversion but Flash supports vector fine so scaling to any resolution isn’t a problem. You can go full-screen as the comment below suggests and it works well. Also I just noticed two clever features; for each slide the public can comment. So it isn’t just a general comment per presentation. The other feature is that the text of each slide is extracted and shown below the presentation. Very clever and I imagine will make search engines happy.

It is in private beta at the moment but I got an invite pretty easily. All in all though SlideShare is a fantastic idea and works pretty well. Give it a go.

I don’t often read technical books but thought the thin, interesting and good looking Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug would be a good read. A few hours later all the good reviews were proven right. This is an excellent book for everybody involved in user interface design, especially for websites. It is short and too the point with a very friendly tone that is not patronising. It covers a lot of common sense and a lot of usability you may have already read by the likes of Jakob Nielsen and others. But it does it in a thorough and consistent fashion that is well worth reading again.

It also goes a bit into usability testing. Getting people to sit down and test your products. What I really found interesting was how Steve pushed the idea of testing early and often. This reminds me of agile programming and even seems to complement it. Get people in to do usability testing of your product on a regular basis and without the usual usability testing overhead. Not too serious but still useful is the tone he advises. It got me thinking that we could easily fit it into our two-week iteration development cycle and use it for feedback and priority setting.

Hopefully after a few months I’ll be able to report back on how that goes.

Do give the book a read. It is quick and easy but imparts a lot of good information.

How odd is it that I can just tell you that I will write the code tonight or tommorrow and then whenever I feel like it, push a button that makes it available to the entire world? Have you ever worked with a platform like this before?

O’Reilly quoting Mark Lucovsky on developing for the net.

It is something I also love about the web.

I wasn’t sure this was going to work but fantastically it does. Maybe I am ignorant but I think this is pretty handy.

You are working on a local Ruby on Rails app and you have your local webrick server running. Now you want to show your team mate your local copy but on their machine and in their browser.

Normally you run Webrick with ruby script/server and that fires up a server on http://127.0.0.1:3000/.

But to share it with your mate that won’t work (127.0.0.1 is localhost and peculiar to your machine.) Instead you can simply run Webrick like so; ruby script/server -b machinename (where machinename is your computer’s network name.) That will then make your Rails app available to your team mate on http://machinename:3000/. You can put in an IP address instead of a name if you want.

Handy.