Gadgetopia

Desknots: I love this idea.

More and more, when we refer to mobile, what we really mean is “non-traditional computing devices and environments,” a stodgy mouthful that really boils down to not the desktop. Our usage overloads poor mobile to include gizmos like phones, tablets, game consoles, e-readers, even TVs. Let’s give mobile a break. I propose a new catch-all term for our myriad non-desktop screens: desknots.

I really enjoyed this video of a guy who has created a series of tree houses in Oregon.  A lot of the video is about the houses themselves, which is very neat, but I especially liked when he discussed the different mounts he invented to keep them in the trees.

He shows off several of the mounts and attachment points towards the end, and how they move with the tree – when the trees start swaying in the wind, you have to have a mount which allows some freedom of movement.  This is especially true when you’re talking about a bridge between two trees which has to account for movement of both trees.

He even uses the phrase “open source” in there, about how he worked with another engineer to design these mounts, and you can presumably use the same designs.

(One of the tree houses he shows off has what appears to be a full-size, standard toilet.  I’m dying to know how that works.)

Interview with Scott Brinker: This is a good three-minute interview with Scott Brinker about the emerging role of the “marketing technologist.”  Scott has popularized this term, and he explains it in this video.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Scott last week in preparation for a talk at the eZ publish Partner Summit I’m giving in Lisbon next week.  Great guy, with some great insights.

Consumers ignore most apps on their smartphones: This confirms something I’ve suspected for a long time – we’re creatures of habit with phone apps, and we really consistently use very few.

Of smartphone owners, 68% open only five or fewer apps at least once a week, finds a survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Seventeen percent don’t use any apps. About 42% of all U.S. adults have phones with apps, Pew estimates.

“The novelty wears off,” says Pew researcher Kristen Purcell.

Right now I’m thinking about jumping ship from Android to a Windows Phone, so I took inventory of what apps I would have to have to make the switch.  I only came up with three: Spotify, Runkeeper, and Evernote.  (Not coincidentally, I’m a paying customer of all three.) Every other app I use is just assumed to be in there (browser, email, calculator, etc. – the “core” apps) or something I tried but didn’t stick with.

I think games are an exception – people tend to cycle through those a lot.  But for every Angry Birds there are dozens that get played once or twice and then tossed.  And I can’t think of any phone game that would prevent me from switching phone platforms if other reasons dictate a need.

Whenever anyone raves to me about all the apps available for their new phone, I have to stifle the urge to say, “That’s great, but let’s see how many of those you’re using in six weeks…”

Top Italian Scientists Who Failed to Predict 2009 Earthquake Now Face Manslaughter Charges: Here’s a short but thought-provoking article about Italian scientists who publically stated that the risk of a major aftershock to an Earthquake was low.  A few days later, an aftershock killed 300.  They’re now being charged with manslaughter.

Local citizens claimed they had been planning to leave their homes after the smaller quake, but had changed their minds after the committee’s comments. In August 2009, the citizens filed a formal request for investigation, and earlier this month the chief prosecutor stated that his office had enough information to indict the individuals named in the case.

Suffice it to say that this would have a chilling effect on science.  And I think there’s a real difference here between just being wrong, and being clearly negligent.  I’m thinking of the British scientist who allegedly published fraudulent research linking vaccines to autism – that seems like another situation entirely.

Interestingly, another scientist did predict the second Italian quake, but no one took him seriously.

Twitter tattle and the trouble with twitchforks: Great commentary here on what’s a very genuine problem.

[…] social networking militates against thinking for yourself. As the Twitterati jumps on the day’s bandwagon, we are increasingly seeing the unedifying spectacle of what’s been dubbed “twitchfork mobs” – and it can get ugly. Social media is a wonderful tool for networking and communication, but the flip side is that it encourages laziness of thinking. The need to verify information also seems to have been forgotten.

I’m automatically very suspicious of any militant bandwagon  that comes through social media.  Even back to the days of email forwards, my default setting was “it’s not true.”  That applies even more with social media.

Sketchy Skechers.com: Today’s DailyWTF is a pretty good one discussing the horrors of the Skechers website and how it’s delivered as XML then transformed via XSLT right in the browser.  Standard WTF stuff, really.

But – lo and behold! – the head of the Skechers web team leaves a comment…and it’s a good one.  He sets forth some of their reasoning, and it starts to make sense.  I’m not totally on-board with all of it, but he makes some great points and it’s totally worth reading, especially if – like me – you have an irrational hatred of XSLT.

[…] here’s the great thing about XSLT— it’s cacheable on your browser. Instead of browsing from page to page to page, each time getting 25k+ of html, we can frontload a lot of that by having you download the XSLT. Once you’ve downloaded the file once, you have the layout for the entire site already cached, and the next page you go to is 2k of XML.

[…] My original thought was— your desktop machine, and very quickly your phone, have just as much CPU cycles available as a commodity server. Why not shift as many cycles to the client as we can while still making it a relatively fast experience?

[…] IE7 and IE8 actually have better support for XSLT transformations than Firefox does.

[…] Is it any more insane than hunting through Struts code, or JSF, etc etc? Now, both our front-end CSS/Javascript developers, and back-end Java (now Scala) coders understand Xpath now, so we don’t run into the “I don’t want to touch that Velocity template” problem.

I really commend this guy for jumping in, and I have to respect his desire to try something new.  Did he succeed?  Well, I browsed the Skechers site and it certainly seems fine to me, so I certainly can’t say he failed.

And serious props to him for jumping into that conversation without being a douchebag and turning it into a constructive discussion.  What a great sport.

Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?: This is an epic answer at Quota to the question of my software development estimates are so consistently poor.  The author has a running analogy of a hypothetical hike from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which looks simple on a map, but is not so simple once you’re on the ground.

OK, that line is about 400 miles long, We can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours per day, so we’ll be there in 10 days. We call our friends and book dinner for next Sunday night. They can’t wait to see us!

We get up early the next day giddy with the excitement of fresh adventure. We strap on our backpacks, whip out our map, and plan day one. We take a look at the map. Uh oh […]

US Online Ad Spend to Close in on $40 Billion: Interesting.

This year, US online ad spending will exceed the total spent on print magazines and newspapers for the first time, at $39.5 billion vs. $33.8 billion. And as online shoots up, the print total will continue to inch downward.

New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who’s accountable?: When Skynet goes self-aware, this is going to be a real problem.

The Navy’s new drone being tested near Chesapeake Bay stretches the boundaries of technology: It’s designed to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, one of aviation’s most difficult maneuvers.

What’s even more remarkable is that it will do that not only without a pilot in the cockpit, but without a pilot at all.

The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone’s ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.

Mega-man: The fast, fabulous, and fraudulent life of Kim Dotcom: Here’s a great profile of Kimble [insert honorific here].

The man once known as Kim Schmitz (and as Kimble, and as Kim Tim Jim Vestor, and finally as Kim Dotcom), now awaiting extradition from New Zealand to face charges of conspiracy, money laundering and copyright crimes in the US, has enveloped his actual life in a cloud of hype and bluster that echo the worst of the dot-com bubble from which he took his new surname. In 2001, the Telegraph called Schmitz “a PR man’s nightmare and a journalist’s dream.”

I loved Kimble back in the day.  I was starry-eyed over his “Kimble: Secret Agent” video, and his supposedly amazing lifestyle (one NSFW image in there).  Kimble was the embodiment of the “anything is possible” vibe at the peak of the bubble when I was a young developer.

Alas, this has all caught up with him.  Kimble currently awaits extradition in New Zealand.

Page layout algorithm improvement: Google has started analyzing the actual layout of pages, and is now penalizing pages that don’t have a lot of content on top.  This is an official Google announcement:

If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

It used to be that search engine crawlers were oblivious to CSS and layout, and just analyzed markup.  Not so much anymore.

Apple, America, and a Squeezed Middle Class: Ever wonder why all your gadgets are made in China?  Low wages, right?  Well, it may have started out that way, but since then the supply chain and infrastructure are simply grown up there, and there’s no way to change that.  And since manufacturing involves the physical movement of goods, they need to be close together.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

[…] “Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

The flexibility and availability of the workforce is another huge factor:

Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

[…] The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Why HyperCard Had to Die: This is a well-written polemic that laments the death of HyperCard, around which there’s been a cult of fandom for decades.  In the middle of this post is a lo-o-o-ong set of screencaps that give you a nice introduction to just what HyperCard is (was), so if you’ve never heard of it, you can see what all the fuss is about.

If you already know what HyperCard is, keep scrolling to the bottom where the author explains his view on why HyperCard and Apple are no longer compatible.

The reason for this is that HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the “use” and “programming” of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure.  A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone.  A world in which Apple’s walled garden aesthetic has no place. […]

[Steve Jobs] returned the company to its original vision: the personal computer as a consumer appliance, a black box enforcing a very traditional relationship between the vendor and the purchaser.

Jobs supposedly claimed that he intended his personal computer to be a “bicycle for the mind.” But what he really sold us was a (fairly comfortable) train for the mind. A train which goes only where rails have been laid down, like any train, and can travel elsewhere only after rivers of sweat pour forth from armies of laborers. (Preferably in Cupertino.)

Given the popularity of HyperCard, I’m surprised there isn’t some web-based emulator that hasn’t caught on and ignited the fervor of the HyperCard faithful.  This guy doesn’t think there’s anything, but if it was so successful as an installed Apple product, why couldn’t it work in the cloud?

(I’ve always thought that the best part of HyperCard was the acronym of the International HyperCard User Group, or iHug.  That group may be defunct too, as I couldn’t find a website for them.)

I found this via Reddit, and the comments are worth reading.  Here’s the top comment as of this writing:

Hypercard was the last vestige of Woz in Apple - of the hacker spirit that said development was just another neat thing anyone could do, like drawing and writing. Jobs excised the program because he had never agreed with that spirit. He wasn’t just dispossessed of it; he was its enemy from the start.

He wanted the original Apple computers to be glorified word processors. He went to his grave still viewing ‘his’ computers as appliances. He’s the reason iOS won’t run your ‘hello world’ app unless an unseen authority has rubber-stamped it for use by all ages. He’s the reason OS X won’t install on any computer lacking an Apple logo. His grand contribution to modern computing is that everything is clean and shiny so long as none of you primitive user-types touch anything.

Good riddance, you tightassed marketeer.

If that’s true, perhaps this explains why Woz loves Android so much.

Corey is Blend’s content strategist.  He was asked to write an article for the inaugural issue of Contents Magazine, so he wrote about methodologies and how they apply to content strategy.

Some people may think that methodologies are rigid and don’t fit the free-flowing nature of creativity, but Corey manages to summarize why I pushed him to get our process documented:

In our field, there’s no single set of rules, and there’s no progress without a little bit of guessing and testing. There’s room for wiggling. But before we can wiggle, we need to know how much space we’ve got to wiggle in.

You need to have a baseline – some framework on which to hang your efforts.  If you can step out of line, you can depart for it if you want, but remember that you can’t deviate from something that doesn’t exist.  You need some type of roadmap with a tension that keeps nudging you back onto a known path or else you wake up one morning and find your project wandering through the forest with no idea how you got there.

[…] your methodology keeps you honest. We’re humans, and humans like to skip things. With each step explicitly outlined, you can better decide which steps to skip. You can refer back to the methodology when you’re questioning your process, too.

In the IT industry in general, there’s too much “management by magic” – you don’t know exactly how things happen, but they always work out, sort of.   If you’re good at this, you can get fooled into thinking this is okay, and that projects that run wild are outliers and just the nature of the beast.

At Blend, we’re going to spend a big chunk of 2012 documenting processes, even ones we don’t think need to be documented.