The combination of the elegant and versatile WordPress and the ground breaking Kubrick made that possible, turning the democratization of publishing from an idealized concept into a concrete reality.
Tina Daunt, “The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet“, Huffington Post, Jan 8th, 2010
In some ways, technology has reshaped the way I approach and solve problems — forcing me to think in terms of adoption strategies first, rather than always trying to find the simplest, cleanest design, because of the disadvantaged position I occupied as a non-coder.
Chris Messina, “Happy birthday to me! I’m joining Google“, Jan 7th, 2010
I think all of us, non-coders or non-non-coders, could benefit by focusing more on solving customers’ problems, and focusing more on how we get our solutions into customers hands.
Oh, and congratulations Chris on the new job!
The first thing I install when I’m setting up a Mac is Microsoft Windows XP.
I’ll likely never start up Windows again, but I’d like to have it available just in case my need becomes great in this Windoze world. Re-partitioning later could destroy your Mac OS X installation and all your precious data that you have on. Better to get it out of the way right away.
I do a similar thing if setting up a non-Mac desktop or laptop, but there I install Linux Ubuntu, and Windows.
I like to imagine Apple adding to the end of their beautiful Mac setup guide a suggestion to delay playing with your new tool and to install Windows right away. Now that would be awkward.
Or I imagine being able to order from Apple with Windows pre-installed. Makes me laugh, partially because it makes too much sense.
One of my inspirations Simon Willison, as well as his excellent deep analysis on numerous web development issues, provides pithy links and comments in from “elsewhere” on his blog. I highly recommend subscribing to his feed.
Today, he shared this quote from Anil Dash:
“It’s clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we’ll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web.”
Anil Dash, The Web in Danger, Nov 16th, 2009
Oh, how clear it is. As I commented on Simon’s post:
Anil is a VP at Six Apart.
Why do images on TypePad not have file name extensions?
Why are there no export features for Vox?
I could go on… I’ve emailed Anil Dash personally months ago about each of these issues. As has historically been the case with my interactions with Anil, I’ve only got hand waving back.
Here are the Get Satisfaction threads on those two issues:
This is something that gets me emotional. Even if Six Apart did not compete with us (WordPress/WordPress.com/Automattic) in some spaces, this issue is one of my emotional Achilles’ heels.
For all of their tooting about the open web, not only are Six Apart’s main services not open source projects, but they have long outstanding issues with locking in their customers.
Being able to get your content and data out is the greatest fundamental of the open web!
Update (later the same day): Announced today at Web 2.0 NYC, Anil is no longer employed by Six Apart. He is now Director of Expert Labs. I wish him all the best in his new job trying to effect change on the greatest scale.
Jason Kottke’s recent article “One-handed computing with the iPhone” (published yesterday, Oct 29th, 2009) begins:
“The easy single-handed operation of the iPhone [] is not one of its obvious selling points but is one of those little features that grows on you and becomes nearly indispensable. A portable networked computing and gaming device that can be easily operated with one hand can be used in a surprising variety of situations.”
By Spitzgogo_CHEN. Titled "Niece & My Nokia 6230i (by Nikon D70)". CC by-nc. Flickr Hosted.
Jason goes on to describe some of the activities you can do at the same time as using iPhone applications, and the advantages one hand operation has — go read it and come right back.
The article reminds me of a concept that mobile computing buffs Boris Mann and Roland Tanglao suggested to me a few years ago, which really clicked for me.
You hold a phone with one hand.
Seems wicked obvious doesn’t it! It’s sorta what Jason is talking about though. If you use old school phones and dumb mobile phones with one hand, wouldn’t a “smartphone” need to be usable one-handed (or less)?
If I recall, at the time Boris and Roland were educating me about the death of PDAs and stylus based “smart phones”, but it’s just is relevant to the current generation of devices, particularly as Jason describes, these smartphones taking on more roles — camera, gaming, etc.
It doesn’t seem Boris, Roland and my discussions translated into online artifacts, but I did find one silly comment I made early 2007 , “One hand holding and navigation will be interesting, but it is important that it does it well, because I read somewhere that defines a smart phone 
”. The iPhone does it well.
I’ve always gotten a kick out out of see people go from talking on a SideKick to typing with a flick of a wrist, or sidetalking Nokia N-Gage style, but why haven’t these hip tools caught on?
Should we be surprised that easy one handed operation feels good?
I suspect cognitive processes and social norms particularly in public settings play big roles:
It seems to me that it’s only natural.
"Sync Alert" Adding 1 Contact with iPhone OS 3.0 with Mac iTunes 8.2.1 (6)
Makes me laugh and cry a little.
This alert is likely meant to warn that a whole lot of data is being added, modified or deleted as part of a sync. It’s an “oh crap, likely either you are doing some wrong or the software is”.
I’m intrigued that UI Expert Aza Raskin (Humanized & Mozilla Lab) finds this alert the “The first good use of a warning I’ve seen!”
I’m not confident that it is generally helpful. Reading online, it does seem that Mac Sync has been quite buggy historically, so this would likely have been very helpful, but does make me nervous that this alert is a bandaid instead of the needed medicine. I would be interested to find out the use cases, and the scenarios where this has been needed.
Synchronization of data between two (or more) sources is a really hard problem. Well the hard problem is mostly related to conflicts when something is changed in two or more places. Daniel Jalkut once wrote, ‘Every developer faces the decision: “Do I want to be known as the jerk who won’t implement sync, or the jerk who can’t.”‘
I’m not actually syncing, because I don’t use Notes on the Mac (does it exist?). It’s really just doing a backup.
In this case, that is the “Sync Alert” of syncing an iPhone running iPhone OS 3.0 with my Mac over ethernet to iTunes 8.2.1 (6). I’m syncing 1 note.
Assuming that this behavior is generally useful, that I’m receiving a warning when 1 note is being added brings up the most obvious issue. There should be a minimum threshold before this exception behavior is triggered. It shouldn’t be 5% of nothing.
When you’re just starting to sync with your Mac, this could be a fairly high frequency alert. It depends on how quickly you add items; how quickly you get to more than 20 items in a category. You’ll also see this alert again when you start using a new feature (new type of item). This leads to the 2nd issue, the alert and warning language — I’m not seeing any yellow, but I’m sure feeling it. Because it is potentially high frequency, it should be presented and worded as a friendly confirmation.
The 3rd issue isn’t obvious from this screen shot. Another clue that it should be a confirmation is that sync does not continue until you have cleared this alert. This is actually problematic, because the alert is non-modal, meaning you can hide it or bury it under other windows. The worst part is iTunes with it’s animated progress bar makes it look like the sync is still progressing. This alert should at least stay on top of iTunes.
The 4th is I don’t think add, modify, and delete are equal. Adding an item is an easier event to undo then a modify or delete. I can just delete it. If something is modified or deleted, it may be hard to recover the lost information. The different events should have different weights. Adding an item should only trigger an alert if a lot are added.
How many is a lot? That brings me to the 5th and final issue that readily comes to mind. It likely shouldn’t be a percentage at all. How long would it take before 5% is a really big number? Probably not long at all. If I have 1000 business contacts, a sync would have to delete 50 of them for me to be notified. Again assuming this alert offers some protection, by using a percentage, even as low as 5% percentage you are penalizing your most passionate customers. Possibly, it could be a percentage that also factors in things like amount of time since last sync or what operations resulted in the changes, but that would likely get complex quick and I suspect the developers would more quickly find the sweet spot by using a constant number (possibly variable on a curve. I hesitate to recommend user defined variable).
Later in that discussion by Aza linked above, he does add “It could be laid out better, but I like the idea of “uhhhhh, that’s dangerous”. Of course, undo is always better 
”. I don’t think undo would be the silver bullet. I definitely think there is value in confirming changing a large amount of data particularly when the change is destructive, and the need to undo might be overlooked. I just don’t think Apple has polished this implementation.
I feel a bit like I’m playing dirty writing this article now when the next version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard is only a couple of months away. Still, I was hoping this would be resolved with the new iTunes for iPhone OS 3.0. I’m still hopeful that Snow Leopard with it’s attention to polish might surprise me here.
I’m looking forward to the release of the next version of Mac OS X, version 10.6 Snow Leopard this September. As a Software Quality Assurance (QA) practitioner, I find it particularly interesting that this major release is basically a bug fix release — “lots of refinements” and upgrades to the architecture.
The Apple press release from last June includes:
… Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation. …
“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”
Although QA people love this attention to what we are passionate about, conventional wisdom in the software world is that a major release with few new features is suicide, but there are factors working in Apple’s favor.
I don’t find the current version (no snow) Leopard v10.5 to be unstable or buggy, but I know other people have problems with it. There are a lot of user interface (UI) inconsistencies in Leopard among the various Apple applications. I’m interested to see if Snow Leopard sports a more consistent and usable experience.
Apple is selling this upgrade for only $29 US, when their major releases normally sell for $129 US. At $29 Apple customers won’t be looking for much to think they have got a good deal.
Apple’s main competitor Microsoft has created this opportunity. Microsoft Windows costs close to $300. And although Mac OS X only runs on Apple hardware, people’s frustration with Vista’s bugginess and instability has led people to specifically look for a computing experience that address this.
People are hopeful for Windows 7, but it won’t be available until at least a month after Snow Leopard ships. We can expect Windows 7 to have a lot of customer untested technology compared to Mac OS X which looks to be is a very incremental release.
Performance (and polish) is a feature. “Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this. Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this.”, my boss Matt Mullenweg, Velocity 09 Conference Presentation.
Because Apple builds both the software and the hardware, they can release their next generation of computers to immediately take advantage of the upgraded 64-bit stack, OpenCL for graphic card processing, and GCD multi-core processing throughout Mac OS X.
If Snow Leopard is well executed and well received, it will help people be more confident on computers and expect more from their software. It will be a good day for QA geeks.
Now for the part of the Tagged.com story, I really wanted to tell. As I mentioned in “Tagged.com Spam? Phishing? Nice Guys? My Personal Story” I try to look at situations and problems from different angles.
There is a clear opportunity for online email providers and social networking sites to limit the damage of phishing and email spam by giving customers tools to regulate the flow of data.
Yesterday, before New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo suing Tagged.com story broke, I cold emailed a member of the Gmail team:
Gmail could help web security a lot by providing:
1. Authentication (OAuth) to Gmail address book making it clear that you were not providing your Gmail passsword to a 3rd party web site.
2. Default level of access only provided names and salted hashes of email addresses from address book (possibly 3rd party web site part of salt)
3. Allow only a limited number of actual email addresses to be requested in a time period. I’m guessing ~30 would be a sweet spot.That would seem to be one possible solution. If this is not a good solution, I think it’s important for your team to look to tackle the problem described below in another way.
EXPLANATION
[Background information described in my "Tagged.com Spam? Phishing? Nice Guys? My Personal Story"]
I’ve seen similar UI at othe web services, where everyone in your address book is selected by default. I think there is an awesome opportunity for your team to create an experience that works well for your partners and protects your customers from the type of mistake described above and more importantly from malicious sites.
Some of the problems that I think Gmail and other online email address book and social networking sites should at least take partial ownership by:
I don’t think I read the Google Chrome Operating System announcement until after I sent that email. When I did read the announcement, I thought about how empowering and freeing it will be for our computing to be in the cloud, but I also thought about problems like this one, and how many scary things can happen when you are no longer hold the container(the harddrive in your PC) for your information and data. There is a lot of design still to be done to create a safe and friendly experience.
Today, the story broke about the New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo suing Tagged.com . This situation has a personal element.
Brad Stone‘s New York Time (NYT) article today “New York Attorney General Sues Tagged.com” begins:
“Turns out our recent article on the spammy social network Tagged.com …”
Rafat Ali‘s paidcontent.org article today “Social Net Tagged Getting Tagged…Er…Sued By NY AG” begins:
“High time someone asked harder questions: Tagged …”
Laura Northrup‘s The Consumerist article today “NY Attorney General Unfriends Tagged.com, Files Lawsuit“:
“… social networking contact-spamming site Tagged.com. …”
As you can see by how those stories start, there is a lot of bad will for Tagged.com. Some weeks ago I was researching this very topic, but did not find the recent Alina Tugend NYT “Typing In an E-Mail Address, and Giving Up Your Friends’ as Well” article about Tagged.com nor did I find Tagged CEO Greg Tseng response on their blog. In my web searches these were buried by years of complaints about Tagged.com phishing and spamming.
I guess, I should go back to the beginning. June 6th, I receive a Tagged.com invite from a dear older family friend,
“[redacted] sent you photos on Tagged Want to see the photos? Please respond or [redacted] may think you said no
“
Clicking the link did not take me to photos, but instead to a registration form. The registration did not allow proceeding without providing my login to Gmail, and every person in my address book was selected by default to invite before proceeding. ((Another email account, that I don’t use publicly also received the email invite, and since then — coincidentally I hope — has now received it’s first spam email.))
Oh no! I immediately let the family friend know that they signed up for what seemed to be a phishing and spam site and that it was important to change her passwords. The friend was really upset and explained that she received the invite from a professional friend of hers, and was worried for everyone else that might have received it from her.
I didn’t think of it much again until some weeks later, when she described still being bothered by it, how embarrassing it was, and that she didn’t feel confident using the web any more. She had removed all her photos from Flickr. So, I decided to take another look at Tagged.com and that takes us to all the complaints I described finding above.
I checked the Tagged.com’s site, and was surprised to find the board of directors included Reid Hoffman, Founder & CEO of LinkedIn, and two members of the Mayfield Fund: Raj Kapoor and Allen Morgan. All people I deeply respect.
I scratched my head and tried to look at the situation from different angles. I discovered that Tagged.com has rave reviews from a young audience. That the pushy, in your face Tagged.com experience works for this young audience. I guessed that Tagged.com might be tacky enjoyable like MySpace is to many young people.
So, I decided to reach out to CEO Greg Tseng through a mutual connection on LinkedIn. The email took about a week to get to him, and July 7th I received a thoughtful and apologetic response.
The timing of the lawsuit seems really unfortunately for Tagged.com as it seems like they were already in the process of cleaning up their act. I fear that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence against them, and any lawsuit won’t go well.
Update: Read my next article “Gmail’s Opportunity to Help Protect Against Tagged.com Mistake, Spam, and Phishing“. I think it’s at least as interesting part of the story.
I’m a web worker. My work is online, and it all slows to a snail’s pace if I’m streaming or downloading a video.
I have “High-Speed Xtreme-I” which promises “up to” a-lot, but the metered download rate is much, much lower than advertised, about 1.5-2Mb/s up and 0.75Mb/s. Fire up a video download and I’m in slowmo.
I want my favorite online video content delivered to me. Some of it is available on iTunes. Others like WordPress.tv is available on Miro.
Currently, I download a batch at the end of the day, but for my family the web is no fun if I’m downloading video podcasts in iTunes.
Is there a way to self-throttle or meter specific streams, downloads or applications on Mac OS X?
Unfortunately, there is a lot of content that isn’t even available for downloading. Mostly, I imagine because the content is supported by web page ads. I’d pay for that content, why is there no Audible.com for video podcasts? Or is there?
Even if available on iTunes or Miro, there is not even a link back to the online discussion, let alone comments, inline comments and tags (Viddler), and other resources. I would like it all to be pulled into my video player, except for YouTube comments
Am I alone? Any help fellow web workers? Any help from NewTeeVee pros?