Photographs like that remind me that photography can be a very unglamorous and ultimately worthless job. Jostling for position, hoping you get a different shot to the guy next to you with the same gear but taking the same photo in the end. How many recording eyes do we need one moment? When should some step back and let a few cover it?
Of course as any photographer who has taken a photo of [insert famous landmark here] can tell you; the lure of taking the quintessential photograph is enough to push through the “a million people have already done it” problem. Your take, your individual view of something that others see differently.
I still wouldn’t want to be amongst that lot though.
Songbird is your web-browser mashed up with iTunes. The idea is to blur the barrier between music on the web and music on your desktop. If you have ever visited a music website and gone through downloading music files and importing them into iTunes then you’ll know it isn’t as seamless as it could be. Finding music on the web can be a chore too, often in many different formats and presentations. Songbird should make this a better experience.
I’ve been following Songbird for awhile now hoping that it would evolve to meet its promise. In public beta form now it is pretty set in stone and I can no longer continue hoping it will improve. My two main criticisms are that it is slow and that it is cluttered. The new beta skin is meant to be cleaner but side by side with other Mac OS X applications there are too many lines, buttons, trees, expanders, tabs and UI widgets. It looks and works like a blend of Windows and Mac OS X which is not a good thing. The UI needs to be cleaner and simpler. Focus on the music, forget all the clever little bits and bobs that add “just one more button.”
Added to the cluttered UI is a laggy UI. Click a playlist and it takes those few milliseconds longer than you think it should. This is the fine art of UI latency and the generic nature of Songbird’s architecture is putting a lead weight on that speed-of-click. Will the final release be faster? I hope so but it isn’t just about raw speed. UI speed is also about using transitions and magic tricks that make the application feel fast. The iPhone UI is measurably slow but it feels fast. Clever transitions.
Another complaint is the implementation of the browser mashup idea. Some items in the tree change the main viewing area while others unexpectedly launch a new tab in Songbird. The left-hand navigation disappears and you might as well be using Firefox at that point. By using tabs the websites feel disconnected from your music list. I want to see a music website on the right and my music on the left. A simple drag from right to left to download music would work then.
This is the direction Songbird is going though and it is at the maker’s discretion. I assume it works for them. Songbird won’t be replacing iTunes on my desktop and I’ll have to wait for another day to find the right blend of web and desktop music playing.
It was almost like he was catatonic. But then, when called upon in class, he was able, at an early age, to take a fresh, cogent thought that a classmate had made moments before and restate it as if it were his own. I knew then that he had the raw skills to become a truly great middle-management-meeting Olympian.
I’m not terribly interested in the Olympics to be honest. I’d have to follow the exploits of track and field stars in the years leading up to the games to be really interested in these grand finals. And frankly there are more interesting sports; rugby, cricket, tennis, ludo, monopoly and even soccer.
The opening and closing ceremonies are good to watch and the odd swimming event catches my attention but as a friend so kindly puts it; “The Olympics could be held in my back garden and I wouldn’t even bother to get off the couch and open the curtains.”
That, believe it or not, is a piece of music. A series of notes linked together in a graph fashion. Each node can link off to other notes with differing delays, durations and pitch. You can build up some impressive cascading arrangements with this system. Nodal is one seriously strange yet interesting piece of software. Some of the example music pieces look like circuit boards while others remind me of a social graph.
(Nodal doesn’t produce any sound on its own. You need to get the free SimpleSynth midi application to hear anything.)
Chandler is to PIM software what Duke Nukem 3D Forever is to games; hyped, drawn out, long overdue, possibly-vaporware but still fascinating folks around the world.
Unlike Duke Nukem 3D however, Chandler, five years and $8 million in the making, has hit 1.0 and you can download it now. Mac, Windows and Linux are supported.
The idea is that everything is a note. Your emails are simply notes with addresses attached, calendar items are notes with dates and times attached, to-dos are notes with priorities attached. Notes can shift between states and be organised as you want. No longer will your email client force you to copy and paste an email into your calendar client.
That is the idea anyway and I like it. However the year is 2008 and Chandler looks decidedly dated. It is also rather slow, taking noticeable time to shift between notes (and I only have 4 of them so far!) Even longer to switch between the three main views; All, Starred and Calendar.
I’ll spend some more time with it but first impressions are not great. I haven’t found an online web version yet either, something I require for email, calendar and to-dos. I found the Hub which is a decent looking web version of Chandler. It syncs with your desktop software though there are one too many dialog boxes popping up when you do sync.
Two screenshots showing the power of search engines when it comes to driving traffic to your site.
Awhile back my Wordpress 2.0.2 powered blog was hacked and filled with spam links. Google, Yahoo! etc. all quickly dumped my blog from their results. Wherebefore I was getting 2,000 hits a month I was now getting 100. Small numbers but the difference is apparent. I was hacked on the 26th/28th of March and you can see in the top graph the resulting drop.
The other day I upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 and lo and behold the search engines noticed and started showing me in their results again. Traffic is up (though still small.)
The last website I’d think of reviewing would be a newsletter system but Toddle is just too good an example of good website design to pass on by. It is also part of the Tuesday Push series.
Registration is simple; enter your email address. It takes you straight into the system. No passwords, no confirmation emails or age, gender, favourite movie and colour boxes to tick. Toddle does not really need a password, it works by sending the entered email the newsletter which you then forward on. So anyone “hacking” in would only send an email to themselves or to one other person.
Once in you can start creating your newsletter straight away. There is no save button or listings of previous newsletters to choose from (though you can have that if you want). From beginning to end you are working on one newsletter and it is all done from one page. Each template has a few sections with an image, header and body text. Fabulously simple and eminently usable.
Toddle isn’t for power users; it doesn’t have an address book (you send the newsletter from your email client), the templates are set and there is no scheduled sender mechanism. Toddle doesn’t need any of these nor should it ever complicate itself with further features.
For someone like me Toddle does everything I could want in a newsletter system. Beyond being a newsletter system Toddle is an excellent lesson in good website design.
I have finally upgraded this blog from WordPress 2.0.2 to 2.6. Over the next week or so I hope to move the hosting over to my Slicehost server and sort out the DNS. TextDrive have been good to me but I want more control and flexibility.
Leah and Fi came home from hospital yesterday and we spent our first night at home together. The night didn’t go too well at first. If you had been at the 24h Tescos in Waterford around 3am you would have seen a red Volvo wandering around the parking lot and a sleepy dad looking for Aptamil infant milk. Fi had been breast feeding since birth and Leah seemed to be doing well but last night she just wasn’t getting what she wanted. After two hours or so of fretting and crying we brought in the bottle. Leah nearly inhaled the 90ml and promptly fell fast asleep at 4am. She woke again at 7am for another good feed and passed out till 10am for another feed. Hopefully this means a 3 hour cycle which isn’t too bad. She is sleeping now and by 1am should be good for her lunch.
