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March 31, 2003
bad enough
Following on from yesterday's sprawling rant about Chris vs. technology (part xxx), I've crystallized a few thoughts on the emergence of software.
IAs, IDs, designers generally try and aim for software that is "good enough". We know it's not perfect, but it does most of the things you expect, easily enough for most people to understand it.
We've reached a point, on a number of fronts, where the software is "bad enough". Bad enough to not do what people want, even what it says on the tin, but the mere fact of its existence stops anyone else from developing competition.
I've faced this recently with the P800. There are few developers, and so if there is, say, an IRC app, everyone gets excited and thinks that that problem has been solved. Normally it hasn't - even the software authors admit it - but because of the perception of a solution, no one else tries to come up with something better.
I think every software category reaches this at some point, and it takes a big competitor, with lots of conviction, to shake the market back up again - for example MS coming in and shaking up the Lotus/WordPerfect monopolies. But the situation is getting worse, due to the increasing number of platforms and OSes. Programmers can only learn in so many environments, and UI developers can only create decent solutions in so many interfaces. Money can only be thrown at so many products.
I think blogging and aggregating have reached the point where the current developers are so entrenched in their viewpoints, principles and beliefs (oh, and a huge code mountain) that they can no longer make any radical changes. It'll take a big, huge, new entrant to get them really developing again.
Smartphone development is far from this point. It will reach an initial swell of new development for these devices, and I hope there are at least a few choices for each possible product type. They will all suck. But early adopters forgive that (unless they're a ranty designer trying to actually complete tasks), and the smart developers will learn from mistakes, incorporate user centred design, and know when to throw all that code away.
Just don't be surprised when Microsoft (Nokia etc. etc.) come from nowhere and pull rugs from under your feet.
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March 30, 2003
RSS. Sucks.
In a fit of organisation, and a realisation that reading 140+ blogs by clicking on bookmarks and hoping probably wasn't a good idea, I spent some time getting it all into an RSS reader. A lot of time.
RSS readers suck.
Blogs suck.
Blogging software sucks.
In the end, I settled on NewzCrawler. It offered at least a small section of the functionality I would expect. I'm going to have a play with NetNewsWire soon, as I can only hope that it's seriously better than all the Windows RSS readers out there.
What was I looking for? Something that lets me drag bookmarks onto it. Something that is reasonably intelligent at guessing what I want to do with it. Something I can use at home, at work, anywhere. Something that isn't some cruddy script to try and install on a server. Something that knows me, learns about me, sits in the background and second guesses what I want it to do. Something integrated into my normal browsing, and normal routines. Something easy to add into my routine.
It doesn't exist yet. I have a feeling it never will. I read *somewhere* (one negative point of using an RSS browser - you really will never remember who said what) that people will be reading 10,000 feeds in the next couple of years. I completely agree. However, it will not be called RSS. It will not be called blogging. It will not be supplied by a traditional software firm, or anything that calls itself a software firm currently (at the moment, I kinda wish Microsoft would do an RSS reader, just because I feel we're at the Lotus/WordPerfect horridness stage, with the current players out of touch with real people trying to cope with all this technology).
The newscrawler interface is all over the place. The three pane idea works, but the implementation is muddled, especially dialogue boxes, and some of the multi-step processes. Adding a feed is hard, and the dialogues are random.
Autodiscovery is a great idea. It should work well. It doesn't:
- Many blogs tells the reader just the place on the site (i.e. index.xml) rather than the whole URL. I think some blogging tools do this out-of-the-box. Feedreader barfs on this.
- Some sites have many autodiscoverable feeds. Don't. As there's no way to indicate the primary (best) one, the reader tries and grabs them all. Which means you may get 5 versions of the same feed.
- Some quasi-standard for where the hell your RSS feed lives would improve the situation no end. I get the feeling most blogging software should generate XML automatically, and may even be doing it, but the link has been taken out when designing the templates. There's theoretically no way to guess a feed URL. It's a pity.
- Once I have a feed, I don't want to subscribe to it again. So don't ask me.
More standard gripes - some tools (like weblogs.com) supply bad RSS. Movable Type only syndicates summaries. Which is useless, if you just want to read stuff in the reader. Newscrawler randomly can't read and verify feeds when adding, then has no problems when added.
It seems that a good dose of UCD, and even just testing, would help many of these tools. Developers, get your mum to use it. Heck, just even try to explain what it does. Learn from the cluestick hovering above your head.
Can anyone suggest better RSS readers?
(PS. I still have 49 sites that I can't find feeds for. I think NewsCrawler can handle these as well, but it's going to take a lot more gin and sympathy before I get enough steam up to discover how.)
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first spring clean
The first part of my site spring clean - now with a first stab at a FOAF, GeoURL, and nice buttons from mark pilgrim.
If anyone I know has a nice easy FOAF block for me to add to my file, please mail it to me. It was suprisingly hard to write it, especially the mailbox sha1sums. Earle had a nice script.
Maybe even more content soon...
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March 07, 2003
wireless grazing
I met up with a number of people on Wednesday night, interested in collaborative mapping, geonotation, and hacking location generally - including Zool, Jerakeen, Yoz, Earle, Kake, Stefan, Tom, the headmap people... very interesting, and I'll probably write up more concrete thoughts later.
However, here's a few random ideas. Small ideabites:
- warchalking postcodes
- biofeedback sensor for iPods (true mood music)
A half-formed thought I'd been thinking of that came up:
The problem isn't networking (we've pretty much solved that with 802.11, Bluetooth, GPRS, 3G blah blah blah), it's power. True mobility requires wireless power. Something like a fuel cell is fine if human-attended, but for autonomous nodes you need them to graze on their environment.
My idea was inspired by the fog-catchers in Chile.
They take something that is needed, but in the wrong form (fog into drinking water). We live in a sea of wasted radiocommunications, from 50 Hz hum to the constant bathing in satellite downlinks. Let's take this energy and convert it to useful power. Basically a solar panel that works on all frequencies.
Someone else had heard of bioengineering trees to allow us to convert their photosynthesized energy into electrical power. That would rock.
...and in other news, I've got a P800, like Matt, and it's amazing. Of course, a company-paid GPRS account helps enourmously. Opera makes it even better. True mobile Internet. I'm now investigating auto-blogging, auto-photoposting, and even auto-GPSposting using it. I'm finding it quite hard to use one-handed. It's OK, but I find the jog dial to be a bit too stiff, especially to push in (and not push forwards/back).
