This cat sitting on top of a roomba vacuum robot is pretty funny. A colleague was telling us how awesome his roomba is and now we can see it for ourselves. As a caption contest I came up with these, all highly original and diverse:

1. “WTF? The sign said rumba lessons!”
2. “Buddy, are you sure this is the rumba? Seems more like robot to me.”
3. “No, no, its left then right then back then back then forward. Rumba not robot!
4. “You suck at the rumba.”

Here is what I woke up to:

Windows 3.1 is being retired, no more licenses to be sold from 1 November 2008. 18 years is a good run for a piece of software. RIP Windows 3.1.

In these modern days, 2008, you can follow every single flip-flop as it happens, in real time, right now. Sometimes before it happens. We watch every train and the slightest wobble focuses us on a possible train smash. If it doesn’t smash it was “a close one” and if it does smash we are thankful we saw it happen as it happened. I’m guessing some people are developing super-hero powers that will allow them to stop a train smash they see happening on Twitter. Otherwise they are just necro-train-spotters.

In all seriousness there is a problem here. Some stories only become stories at their conclusions. You can watch an event and see all the twists and turns and at the end come out exactly where you were when you started.

It’s true that only reading the ending can leave you misinformed, left standing in the shallow end of knowledge. But you can’t and shouldn’t be trying to swim in every stream. You’ll likely just drown and come round to David Hasselhoff giving you CPR and asking you what happened; No idea David, I blacked out trying to swallow the ocean.

The news team are there to aggregate events over time. Distill the twisted path of the crooked politician into an arrow pointing straight at the corruption.

Different events do play out over different periods but you still should be picking an aggregated view. Otherwise go and become a reporter. Maybe only for just one story that is really important to you, the one you want to know “how did it come to be.” When the reporter becomes simply a relay of Here & Now you don’t get much value out of following her. You might as well be there yourself instead of clicking Follow on 900 Twitter users.

ColorZilla has long been a tool in the web developer/designer chest. Even if you have tried and discarded it before you should check out the new version. It includes a DOM Color Analyzer. This traverses the DOM of the current page and returns a palette of used colours. This is useful for learning from well designed sites and also useful on your own sites. You can check colour consistency, simplify your palette and quickly get at colours you’d normally have to hunt through a CSS file for.

Nice feature guys.

Vote.

#voteabama

Rob Griffiths over at Macworld wrote about stopping the page flipping madness on the iPhone. It is a decent point. As you load more and more applications onto your iPhone the flip left/right page model starts to break down.

Above is my simple suggestion. Take the paging model familiar to users from Mobile Safari and modify it slightly. Double tapping any “home” screen on the iPhone should zoom it out and show all the pages (or up to six at a time to retain legibility, with fast scrolling if you have more pages.) Then you just tap on the page you want and it zooms back in.

I thought at first to keep it exactly like the Mobile Safari model and while the page-flipping is quicker and easier it would still be quite a bit of flipping.

Another idea would be to use a compass model. Right now if you tap the bottom right or bottom left of the iPhone home screens it flips the page left or right. Extend that. Put tap-points at each of the compass points (North, North East, East, South East, South etc.) which link off to the corresponding pages. The “home” screen would remain the center of this so you can jump back (by reversing your previous tap e.g. NW would be a reverse of SE.)

This isn’t ideal though. It limits you to seven pages and doesn’t seem as natural as the first idea.

I’ve been using the Firefox sidebar for a few things recently and found it quite usable. Last week my team started using Campfire and it works really well. And then Twitter started becoming more useful to me thanks to SwitchABit.

All in all I ended up with too many separate tabs/windows to monitor easily.

I then rembered that Fluid (the SSB I use for Campfire) supports the BrowsaBrowsa sidebar like plugins. This lets me display two extra websites (Twitter and Google Reader) on either side of the main website (Campfire.) Twitter and Google Reader fit nicely into the narrow sidebars and Campfire fits nicely into the middle area. One problem with Fluid and Google Reader though is that I can’t use the keyboard shortcuts as they are directed at the central pane.

So now I have one window I can alt-tab to and quickly get an overview of my RSS feeds, internal project chat and my Twitter messages.

Part of their style is to lob a thought-grenade and see what it kicks up. This has benefits but it has problems too, primary being a steam-rolling over the nuances of the subject they are tackling.

Ideas.

The saying goes that ideas are worthless, it is the implementation that is worth something. Contrast decided to pick this old nugget up and give it some legs again.

There is some truth and reality in what they say. That having an idea is not going to get you anywhere, that a man must “applies his talents, connections, assets, efforts, knowledge and savvy to an idea to make value can generate wealth”.

Only in “the man that keeps his ideas to himself” do they make a contribution to the discussion. A man who sits on his golden eggs all his life is a poor man. Most of the time.

The argument is simply too simplistic, a bludgeon to a rapier. The man who sits on his golden eggs all his life and yet wisely manages an aura of “the idea guy” can make a fortune. You may detest this man but he is doing well for himself. The same man can sit on a million eggs and release just one to make his fortune.

Even in the harsh light of day are ideas worth more than le “Banque de Bullshit.”

Patent firms never develop ideas. They acquire them and license them. Worth billions.

IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Ford, VW, Porsche, you name it, patent pure ideas and then never develop them. They do it to protect their market, block an attack point and in doing so continue to make billions.

Mad Men stand in rooms and spout ideas they had in the shower. A flurry of underlings scuttle off and make money from the idea. The Mad Men then go onto another idea.

Companies hang on to those who can come up with ideas, make leaps of thought that others cannot. A thousand implementers they can hire from under any rock but the idea man they rarely find.

I cannot tell you the number of times I have read or heard an idea that has inspired me to go on to greater things.

You can apply process and well known formulae to implementation. You can educate implementers and recruit them from every school in the country. You cannot do the same for those who have ideas.

Ideas are art and chaos. They are often chance; right place and right time. Often it takes one idea to reach another idea. They arrive whole or half-formed, or it takes one idea to complete another.

You have nothing to implement without an idea.

And beyond the harsh light of day, ideas are hope.

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

- Thomas Jefferson

Ideas are memes and selfish genes.

I would meet Contrast half-way by saying there are too many people with ideas that go nowhere. Dreams, hopes, plans of world-domination that fizzle and pop. That ideas take determination and discipline. That people leap from half-completed idea to half-completed idea, never amounting to much.

Keep on getting real, Contrast. Keep on inspiring others with your ideas and your acceptance of other peoples ideas.

But ideas are not worthless. They are priceless and are to be used wisely.

[Update]
On reading this the next morning I see I was unfairly harsh on “implementers.” Saying “under every rock” is poor form. Ideas need implementers as much as implementers need ideas. A balanced world is what we should be working toward. Not one where ideas are valued at zero nor one where implementers are valued as expendable. Half of my day job is implementation of the other half of my day job, idea generation.
[/Update]