Archive for August, 2006
Crossover
There’s something about Editplus that just clicks with me, which is why I find it so difficult to use anything else. Even Smultron which pretty much does everything I’d want a text editor to do is just difficult to adapt to. It does the same things, it’s just… different.
Well there’s just been a release of Codeweavers Crossover for Mac OS X, which allows you to run Windows applications without loading up a virtualisation system like Parallels or rebooting like Boot Camp. So what was a boy to do? Try out Editplus of course.
It’s almost perfect. There was a problem with font selection that I did manage to fix in the end, but what keeps it from being truly usable is that holding down shift and then trying to use the arrow keys to select text actually prints funny characters on the screen instead. I’m not sure if this is down to some sort of odd keymapping bug or something confined to Editplus, but it’s a shame to have an otherwise perfect solution ruined by something so minor.
Still sticking to Windows for now then.
Manipulate
Did you ever just have one of those programming epiphany moments where you wonder why you didn’t think of it earlier, and why you tried to over-complicate everything rather than just going for the simplest solution?
Slightly connected, but not the same, let me tell you two other things I’m coming to realise.
Firstly, data is king. Presentation less so. Users looking for a web solution such as blogs or forums or image hosting want it because they need somewhere to put their data. The average user who wants to start a blog needs a service like Blogger or Typepad because they offer a box to enter their thoughts into, and they offer a way to get those thoughts back out. The user doesn’t need to worry about what might be going on in the background and most of all, doesn’t want to. They just want a data store. What they’re less concerned with is the presentation of that data on the way in, or the way out. Users will put up with all manner of crap user interfaces with no complaints if the software actually does what it’s intended to do, so until the blogging service starts losing their data, they’ll be fine typing into a plain text box only a few rows and columns high. And when the data is displayed, as long as it’s the same words they put in, that’s fine. Some customisation options are great, people have their favourite colours after all, it makes them feel distinct, but the average user is quite happy with the defaults, hence the success of services like LiveJournal.
The lesson, concentrate on data first. Manipulate it to success.
Secondly, integrated user administration systems sound good in practice, but ultimately just create a less usable experience, creating separate administration systems with one single authentication service is better. Logging into one central place to manage options across lots of different sites and services seems like a great way to go, but the resulting system will suffer from identity crisis. Users are normally logging in to perform a single administrative task, like posting a new entry on their blog. Centralised systems clutter their screen with unrelated options, making them drill down through more areas to get to the one they want. Even systems that might try and offer the more regularly used options first fall down when the user shares their time equally between posting on their blog and running their forum.
The lesson, monolithic is bad. Let each admin system speak for itself.
Embedded
I’ve been thinking of releasing Bearscript as open-source, but at the same time I worked my ass off on it and I’d like to get some financial return on that, the two of which don’t necessarily match up.
What’s the business model for a programming language written in Perl, which is easily expandable and editable, ripe for embedding into a web-application to let users get more control than they’ve ever had before - all with the added benefit that it’ll run on any platform and is safe from them doing any damage?
I’m sure there must be websites out there that would benefit from such a system. Anything that has lots of information that users could query in some way. From a blogging system where you give the user more than just HTML customisation, to someone like Amazon who could use it to let users create their own store.
Commercialism
I was in the largest Tesco in Scotland today (Silverburn), and yes, it was very big. Not quite big enough to cause clouds to form on the inside, but I’m sure it’s not going to be long before they build a store that size. It was nice to saunter around such an obvious bastion of commercialism and bathe in the warm glow of capitalism at work.
They had a wide selection of HD TV’s, all of which got the little money spender inside me jumping up and down. I managed to resist the urge, but seeing some of the demonstrations, the best of which were Sky HD and PGR3 on Xbox 360, made me giggle with joy. I’m pleased to say that at the moment having a positive bank balance makes me giggle with joy even more (although that electricity bill didn’t help) so I’m getting pretty good at controlling my spending. It’s been a while since I bought anything of any real consequence, so I’m hoping that my not inconsiderable debt will find itself whittled away over the next 12-18 months to something far more manageable. I look forward to being able to buy a house. And a big couch to go in it.
Fit
I played football in my parents back garden today, with my two brothers and my nephew. At one point I dived to save the ball and realised that this is really a game for young fit people, which means I don’t fit it’s profile at all. When I last played ten years ago I had no ball skills at all, playing it again now, I have even less. I even managed to kick the ball into my own face at one point.
I was also asked four general knowledge questions, all of which I answered correctly, which were asked on ITV’s Love Island to the blank expressions of all the contestants. I found all of them to be really obvious, what about you?
Where was The Sound of Music set?
Where is Ayers Rock?
Where are the Falkland Islands?
Where is Mount Snowdon?
Estimated
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before or not, but the electricity bills I’ve been getting for the past 18 months have been lower than they should have been. This is because nobody has ever come and read the meter, and even the time I phoned up and made an appointment with them, they didn’t turn up. So each quarter when I get the bill in they’ve been estimating it based on previous usage, the only problem is that they’ve been estimating low.
So now I’m switching to a different supplier, something I’m being forced to do by my letting agency, and I had to give a final reading. Turns out that reading is 6000 units higher than the last estimated bill.
The final bill, which clocked in at an impressive £579, was so large that they actually sent me a letter yesterday telling me that it was on it’s way and that it may be larger than I expected, and that they apologised for the inconvenience. Not much consolation it has to be said.
I’ve been really thrifty for the past month or two, so the money is available to pay it, but nothing quite kills your appetite for saving than somebody coming along and taking it all away and giving you no sense of satisfaction or tangible goods in return.
Gratefully
And so begins a long weekend, which is very gratefully received. Three days in which to sleep, relax, and absolutely ignore work as much as possible. I must stop constantly checking email and servers and just start accepting that just occasionally, it is all capable of running itself.
Of course now it won’t.
I’m hoping to play around with what for now I can only refer to as “the project” as we’re still unable to produce a name for it. Were we concentrating on a single medium it may be possible to just take one of the many names for that medium and you know, stick an animal name in front of it or something, but not so much when you’re trying to cover all that is known and good. The structure of the project means that code can be produced at a reasonably fast pace without anything visible ever being seen on the page, which is both a blessing and a curse, so at one point I’ve just got to hope that it all just falls into place.
Smoking
YouTube, the video phenomenon, and now with the kind of bandwidth behind it that makes the thing far more usable than it was a couple of months ago, is slowly becoming overrun with Daily Show and Colbert Report videos. They’re posted on an almost hourly basis, and if you’ve got a favourite bit from either show, there’s a good chance you’ll find it on here. In fact I’m constantly amazed about the footage I can find with just the right search keywords.
The Daily Show hired Dave Gorman a couple of months ago and had him do a section called Poll Smoking, both of which are absolutely hilarious and well worth the 9 minutes of your time to sit through them both. You can find the first one here, about Bush approval ratings, and the second one here, about US Obesity.
Feeling
I’ve been listening to the album from The Feeling tonight, Twelve Steps and Home and I have to say, it holds a certain charm. The single, “Fill My Little World” is the kind of jaunty pop tune that’s been nice to hear over these sunny days, but there’s always a worry that the album is never going to live up to the same level. On first listen however, it sounded pretty good, with plenty of the tracks making a first impression rather than just disappearing into the void.
I don’t think I’m up to doing full reviews of albums just yet, which is why I’m mentioning this here rather than on whatentertainment, but we’ll see.
Streaming
I’ve tried carrying an iPod back and forth to work, but I got fed up because of all the other technology I had in my pockets. I tried using the radio on my mobile phone too, but it required using the headphones that came with the phone because they had the aerial built into them and they were never very comfy. My other problem with the iPod is that I have far more music than any of them can actually hold, then I find it really difficult to decide what subset of stuff to put on there.
Enter Nicecast, an OS X application that can stream the audio from any software on your system, or just the main system audio. Load up iTunes, click Play, click the start broadcasting button in Nicecast and that’s it, one standard MP3 streaming audio station that I can connect to at work with the software of my choice. It even passes on the iTunes track info. I thought it was a little overpriced at $40, but so far it’s handled the job admirably. All it needs now is some way for you to be able to change the track remotely, rather than me having to stick it into a loop of stuff before I leave in the morning.
Afters
I’ve visited a lot of restaurants in Glasgow recently, and I have to admit to being constantly disappointed by the quality of the desserts on the menu. Wagamama’s, where I very much enjoy the noodles and the atmosphere of the place, has a limited choice and a chocolate cake that is simply disappointing. A quick trip across the road to Frankenstein’s however, and you’ll find an excellent double chocolate brownie ice-cream dessert that acts as an excellent accompaniment. So if we’re willing to go elsewhere to finish our meal off in style, why are there no restaurants that sell nothing but puddings? At least, none that I know of in Glasgow.
Maybe I should open one. I’d call it Afters.
Chess
Thinking Machine is a nice online chess game where you can see a visual representation of it thinking before it makes each move. I was doing quite well against it until I made a stupid move that lost me my queen and pretty much any hope of success along with it.
I used to be in the school chess team, which meant occasional visits on weekends to play against other schools in competition. I was never very good, but got to be in the team just because my not very good was slightly better than the not very good of most of the others. It’s all a bit of a haze to be honest, how many competitions I was actually in, but I certainly won some matches if nothing else. And I think maybe got out of a class or two along with it. Odd how even though it wasn’t really that long ago, I can barely remember it.
Busted
I discovered Busted Wonder, a webcomic by Kieron Gillen, probably best known for his videogame journalism, and Charity Larrison, who I don’t know, but who should be known for her awesome art.
Sadly it seems to stop at page 29 (out of 80) with no updates on the horizon, so I’m not quite sure what happened. Comics like this transfer to the web pretty well, and this is a large and easy to read format. I’d be interested to know if anyone is actually making a business out of selling access to them this way, or if they simply find all the pages are downloaded and shared elsewhere as soon as they’ve taken their first payment.
Blurry
I’m starting to find that my eyes are failing me, and not just because I have a habit of sticking my finger into them. I first noticed this during the World Cup, where I found it difficult to read the score in the top left of the screen while sitting on the couch in Andrea’s flat. But now I’m noticing it more and more, flicking through channels brings up the current program at the bottom of the screen and it’s becoming increasingly blurry.
A trip to the opticians is therefore on the cards. But wearing glasses wouldn’t be too bad, it’s just the price of them I’m worried about. I still have a hard time working out why some cut glass and a couple of bits of metal (and they always say it’s the lenses that are the expensive part) can cost £400.
Cooker
I don’t know whether my hand wasn’t quite in the oven glove properly, or whether it slipped out when I went to pick up the tray, but whatever one it was I managed to burn the side of my left hand before dropping the baking tray and my dinner. It was immediately placed under the cold tap of course, but burns are strange things. At first it hurts like all hell whether it’s in the open air or under the cold tap, and the freezing water starts to hurt the non-burnt parts of your hand too. After a while though, being under their feels OK and you think the pain is subsiding, but then you remove it and the air starts to dry off and it hurts like buggery again.
I ended up sitting at the computer for the next few hours resting my hand in a bowl of cold water, where it was almost possible to believe there was no pain there at all. Removing it from the bowl however brought it all flooding back again, until eventually it was well enough for me to wrap a sock bandage around it to keep the air away and have it feel fine. Typing up the end of my Thursday WE article and then publishing it with one hand was a slow process.
That’s the last time I make dinner.
Popper
I’ve been looking for an RSS reader on the Mac which is like Alertbear, but they’re all stuck in this stupid idea that feeds are like email and the application should be designed as such. The closest I found was FeedPopper, which does seem like it was inspired by our seminal work. Unfortunately even though it’s up to v1.8 it’s still very basic, with a dearth of options and enough bugs that after adding my six feeds I was lucky whether or not I saw it ever pop up.
It still amazes me that so few people have cottoned onto the Alertbear UI ideas and how useful that form of reader is for people who only have a few feeds, especially considering the number of people who have emailed me and expressed their admiration for it, and the number of people who complained there wasn’t an OS X version. I’d be perfectly happy if one of the existing mail-style readers would just integrate it as an option. In the meantime either I’ll need to keep trying to persuade Francis to at least knock something simple together, or continue to use Windows for my feeds.
Subscribe
As requested and promised, whatentertainment now has an RSS feed. That’s all I’ve got to say really. Go subscribe.
Clickable
I have a certain amount of forum experience, but I obviously spend far longer using other people’s systems than I do my own. One thing that I’m constantly amazed by, even on the systems that have features that far exceed Chatbear, are user interfaces that look something like this…
< First < 1 2 3 4 > Last >
To start off with, I question the need for First and Last links as it is, I don’t think I’ve ever visited a forum and thought that the first thing I wanted to do was jump to the last page of topics or posts (although granted if I did, I’d want to go back to the beginning again). What annoys me about this is the small size of the links I would actually want to click on, namely the next and previous page buttons. It’s basic user interface design, the common items that people are going to actually click on should be larger and more prominent than those around them, simply because the larger the clickable area is, the easier it’s going to be to use it. But almost every major forum system out there thinks that a single > symbol, likely the most clicked on element of the entire page navigation system, is a big enough element, even when right next to it is a giant link to the last page. It’s not about size either, it’s close proximity to so many other links makes it easy to accidentally click on the wrong thing, especially when forums like to make the page links appear in a 10px font.
I wonder sometimes whether these people are actually using the systems they create.
Poked
I was tired. It was late. And on the way to putting my hands on the keyboard after scratching my face I managed to take my eye with me.
Narrative
I’m thinking of writing a feature for whatentertainment about narrative cartoons. These were the kind of things that were on in the 80’s and perhaps early 90’s that you don’t really get anymore, where they told one story from start of the series to the end, and then that was it, more like a drama than a cartoon. There was Mysterious Cities of Gold, Ulysses 31, Dogtanian and Willy Fogg, but what else? Can anyone suggest any others?
