Embracing Chaos

An obvious trend in this industry is towards more pervasive internet access with bandwidth steadily increasing. The build-outs of WiMax networks, 3G cellular networks and metropolitan WiFi efforts promise to offer broadband-class connectivity to all major cities in the US within the next couple of years. Suburbs and extended metorpolitan areas will quickly follow. Even airplanes should have reasonable net access before too long — Virgin America will have it next year. In this environment it’s tempting to design products that assume customers will always be well connected. It is certainly easier to build compelling services to users that have…

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Sometimes when I’m using firefox and I open a link in a new window, somebody will ask me “why don’t you use tabs?” I do use tabs, but I use windows as well. I like to group sets of related browser tabs together into OS windows. This organizational structure makes it easy to multi-task. I might be researching something I want to buy, and I’ll have lots of tabs open in a single window with the various options I’m considering and the related research. When I’ve made my choice and have purchased something, I can easily close all those tabs…

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This morning Scoble linked to a leaked video out of google describing some new features to be added to Google Reader. I don’t like re-reporting other-people’s news here, but I can’t leave this one sit because it strikes so close to home for me. The ideas they describe sound exactly like what I’ve been thinking the world needs out of a feed reader — features to manage infoglut using the social network. What I’ve been thinking about building in my copious spare time is a web-based feed-reader that assumes you over-subscribe to feeds. That is, it expects you to “subscribe”…

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Blog engines always display posts in reverse-chronological order. This is appropriate if the content stales quickly and readers are mostly interested in what the most recent thing is. But it’s often unhelpful if you want to use the blog engine to develop a static piece of content. In many such cases, the author wants the reader to consume the content in the order it was written. Examples of content that works better this way include: Stories or fiction Instructional content Reference material For all of these, first-time visitors should be presented with the first post, which would include the most…

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I’m gonna make a guess at to what Apple’s going to announce in August. I’m thinking of the next gen iMacs with huge high-res touchscreens. They’ll support apps like the iPhone has with draggable windows and the cool 2-finger resizing thing and all that. It’ll merge Microsoft’s Surfaces technology with the iPhone’s UI and end up with something closer to the UI from Minority Report than anything we’ve yet seen. Or maybe they’re not there yet, and it’ll take another year or two. But this is what I think they should do.

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At Foo Camp this past weekend, I took notes using three different technologies. The results have led me to some interesting conclusions. Here’s what I used: Day 1: I took notes on my Treo Day 2: I carried around my MacBook Day 3: I scribbled in a paper notebook My notes from the first day are brief, but useful. They are generally just names and short phrases. They remind me of things that I found interesting and that I want to follow up on. I used the notepad function in my PDA. It was pretty easy to pop it open…

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I recently started using Outlook 2007 for corporate e-mail as a POP3 client. Since “upgrading” whenever I receive e-mail, the whole system locks up for about 3-15 seconds. Doing something. Who knows what. Task Manager says Outlook has the CPU, but it’s got it with a high enough priority thread that basically nothing else can run. No other office apps. Even Firefox is non-responsive. Now my machine isn’t the switftest deer in the forest. But it’s got a 2GHz processor and 2 GB of ram so it’s not exactly archaic. What takes so long I have no idea. After a…

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A little while ago I heard an interesting story on NPR about collaborative music software. They described a series of websites that empower geographically separated musicians to create music collaboratively. Using sites like ejamming, Musicians can find additional band members, share tracks and mix your own tracks with those of your partners across the net. They even hint at being able to practice with each other live, although I’ve never tried it. All this reminds me of the story behind the fabulous first album by The Postal Service, Give Up. For those who don’t know the story, this fabulous album…

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I’m ready to introduce a little pet project to the world: Offbrain Mobile Memory Services. Right now it’s a very simple web app that just keeps track of lists of things. The only thing that makes it at all interesting right now is that the UI is optimized for display on mobile browsers. It’s modeled after the fabulous mobile gmail interface. Offbrain’s pages are typically between 1k and 1.5k total — they load very snappily on very slow mobile links. (Assuming dreamhost hasn’t swapped the app or the database into virtual memory — a perennial problem with cheap shared hosting.)…

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This morning when my alarm went off it wasn’t the numbing pleasantries of NPR reporters telling me everything wrong with the world. It was a maddening multi-tonal chirp as if a band of crazed robots were about to bulldoze my house to make way for a new interstellar bypass. It certainly woke me up, and fortunately I had a nice yoga practice to restore my nerves. But I spent a few minutes futzing with my Sonos to figure out why it had played its internal “Chime” noise instead of KUOW like I wanted it to. I determined that the problem…

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