Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

Kind of an interactive Mind Map (worth a play)… I loaded my Desktop and it showed me a mess more complicated than my desktop. But if you like Mind Maps you’ll love it…

TheBrain.com

I’m not sure marketing anything as a brain is a good idea. On the sites it says, it works the way you think, which is not necessarily a good idea… think about it.

Isotoma’s Andy launches a site for a consierge service, if you are feeling both over-whelmed and loaded…

Ten: Lifestyle Management, Home Management, Concierge Service: The Power of Ten

I obviously didn’t sign up because it says TEN MEMBERS ONLY... pssht! Obviously not very popular then, I’ll wait till they have eleven.

Whilst browsing Apple’s downloads for something interesting, I found/re-discovered iShell. For anyone who doesn’t know, in the early 90s, before the web happened, multi-media authoring was a big thing…. Multimedia was going to replace telly! Multimedia was going to replace paper (why would anyone doodle when you can add hyper-clicks)… Multimedia was…a bit disappointing.

Anyway, multimedia authoring tools started with HyperCard - a GUI with a scripting language underneath… then along came tools like mTropolis with which you created multimedia just by dragging objects around… and then came… iShell… which is a similarly cool tool. I vaguely remember it being very expensive, but I may be wrong.

Re-discovering iShell… all these years later, I now find that it’s free… it even has a wiki… and having watched the Crash Course video (which has a dollop of educational cringe-worthiness I quite like) it’s VERY easy to put a multimedia presentation together (with complex interaction, buttons that load URLs or forms that post to the web… etc). I found I quite liked working with iShell (compared to making a web site)… the sheer simplicity of dragging n dropping is the crack cocaine of development. You know, deep down, that developing should be as simple as thing but always ends up being about tweaking horrible text files.

The only thing wrong with it is that at the end I have to burn my project onto a CD (remember those?) … Come on Tribal Media guys …add a burn-to-web-site tool (it’s only spitting out a QuickTime file isn’t it?) and a million people will want to use it to create more-than-powerpoint presentations…

And come on guys… how about adding remote media objects, like YouTube videos, GoogleDocs, FTP folders etc….

The multimedia revolution had hidden in it the idea that people wanted to interact with media (whatever that meant). The web sure took a while to get there, but was all about participating in the production of the ( hyper ) media.

Now of course, nobody notices these two big shifts happening every day as they embed a YouTube video in their blog posts, but I still feel there is a whole heap more to come. I still feel like the right tool will unleash a whole new information revolution. You think you’re over-loaded now? It’s going to get worse (and by worse I mean better… and by better I mean more … much more).

Democratizing media/content production is a good thing… but at the moment, there aren’t millions of UK pensioners putting their thoughts and memoirs on YouTube. There will be.

So all we (the people) need is a desktop multimedia authoring environment that takes care of hosting and interaction/feedback/comments for us. Think… iShell (or other) + Wordpress (or wiki) + YouTube (or other). Of course, eventually, the tools will be online, but until then, something like iShell would do the job nicely in bridging the gap until then.

I’ve got a clear picture in my mind of what this would look like, how it would work and how it might make lots of  money, but since when did that count for anything?

Now go play…

Main Page - IShell Wiki

I wonder how much time is wasted trialling Productivity Tools?

This is a Time-line maker… You know I love time-lines. It’s very simple in a MacDraw way but that’s part of its charm.

Apple - Downloads - Productivity Tools - Temporis

Recently my computer crashed and I lost a lot of files, emails, bits and bobs etc. Rather ironically it all happened whilst I was upgrading my computer SO THAT I COULD BACK IT UP PROPERLY… Oh how I laughed… sob! I’m all Time-Machine-ed up now.

Computers, at time resemble Life™ in that a bit of trauma give you an opportunity to get rid of a lot of shit. I was once told that the Chinese glyph for crisis is the same as the one for opportunity, and whilst I later found out that this is not actually true, it didn’t stop it meaning something to me at the time.

So, now that my computer is back in the land of the living, I thought I’d share some of the pain I felt along the way. Yes, having a complete re-install makes your computer MUCH quicker but I keep discovering the odd bits of fluff missing that made my life so much easier… such as…

The Press It Bookmarklet

If you use Wordpress, this is essential… It’s missing from Wordpress 2.5 but I can’t blog without it. I can’t find it online either so here’s my version… which opens in a new window so you can still refer to thing you are blogging about.

New Blog Post (drag me to your browser’s toolbar, then control-click it and change the URL in the Properties)

javascript:window.open('http://www.theotherblog.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?popupurl='+escape(location.href)+'&popuptitle='+escape(document.title)%20,%20'new_blog_post','width=900,height=700');location.href=location.href;

Open Terminal Here

Is a beautiful AppleScript that you add to your Finder window sidebar and does just that. Saves SOO much time.

Text Wrangler

When you want a QUICK text editor that is virtually BBEdit.

Mac Ports

When I last looked it was called Darwin Ports.. anyway… I find this essential. For example, I wanted to download a simple Django tool and found it uses bzr… of course at this point I don’t have bzr.. so a quick install with MacPorts and all the dependencies get installed for me, things like bzip2 etc… I remember in the old days when MacOS X first came out and installing one unix tool then meant installing another and so on… forever… At times it was circular, almost like a prototype lack-of-adventure game with no end.

Having said that… one of my other first installs is MySQLdb, a python module for talking to MySQL. I was surprised to see that when I install it… MySQL gets installed as well… Agh!

Call me wimpy, but the problem with MySQL (for me) is that I don’t think I have ever successfully installed it from source… There is always some bizarre setting not quite right. I much prefer to go get the MySQL MacOS X version, which has a StartUp thingy and actually works.

Apple You Win!

For years I have been battling with Apple, trying to keep a separate “Applications” folder in my Home folder. This is so that when I backup, I’m backing up MY STUFF (I have paid for)… not gigabytes of THEIR stuff (iPhoto, iTunes, Utilities etc).

I’ve now given up doing that and started using the default Applications folder…. sigh! It kinda made sense me…. still does.

Twitter

I surprised myself to find that one of the first things I re-installed was Twitter. It’s quite nice, as you are sitting copying files from here to there to watch “what’s going on in the world” with your friends. It would be quite nice if System Installers asked you who you were (elsewhere) so that whilst installing heaps of stuff you could at least be entertained.

Omni Graffle 2.2

I’m a huge fan of OmniGraffle… but bizarrely I REALLY like an old copy. It may be clunkier than later versions, but it’s simpler. This came installed with my computer so I’m not sure how I will get the Serial Number back for that one.

The Shell

It seems Apple have switched from tsch to bash… which means all my handy-dandy aliases don’t work… I need to add in the right PATHs for python etc.

A Mini Review of Leopard

So… as well as getting a better backup solution, part of the reason I wanted to upgrade to Leopard was to try out the iPhone SDK. I’ve not got round to that… blimey, it’s been five days and I noticed I hadn’t even changed the desktop picture.

• Spaces. Blimey these are fab, but I’m just not in the habit of using them yet. In fact, they sort of happened to me, completely confusing me in the process as to why other windows were disappearing.
• The overall interface is too grey. It looks as if an old Copeland designer has hit Cupertino… retro almost.
• Time-Machine is disney-esque baroque-ness to the extreme. I’m scared I won’t actually be able to use it if and when I need to restore anything… but at least it will be entertaining. I really can’t believe it that it’s taken till now for Apple to take backing your work up seriously.
• iCal is much snappier, Mail is nice (although adding an RSS reader seems a bit mis-guided) and everything is quicker and to me at least… very stable.

I probably have a way to go until my computer is properly bedded in and firing on all cylinders, by which time it’ll be time for a new one.

Crisis = Opportunity. Just because it’s not true, doesn’t mean it’s not true!

Rick sent me a link to this story, MacUser: News: HyperCard takes to the Web, about how one company is providing a service so old HyperCard content (or stacks as they were known) can be viewed on the web.

I’m not sure if this is a good idea really, like listening to 1940s AM radio on your iPod, things have moved on and you’d get a headache from the hiss. It’d be useful from a historical perspective of sorts I guess, but who is going to take the time to bother to upload them, tag them etc? Most high quality HyperCard stacks used external code libraries that definitely won’t work.

Whether this initiative will work, is a good idea or not is by the by, what shocked me was that Rick had heard of HyperCard but had no idea what it was. This is exactly the same as when I discover my daughters have never heard of Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd or Joy Division and they roll their eyes and groan, “Oh no, musical education!” as I warm up my iPod.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all misty-eyed and wax lyrical (is there any other way to wax?) but just for Rick here’s a brief explanation…

• It was made by Bill Atkinson who wrote some other great tools that made Apple what it was. What MacDraw did for graphics, and MacWrite did for wordprocessing, HyperCard did for software.
• It was like a database, but not geeky
• Most of the content was “open”… in that you could poke around and find out how they did it
• It was a drawing tool, that you could, if you fancied, program to draw things
• It was a text editor that you never had to “Save” (I’d kill for this now!!!!)
• It was a book (on Vikings, or JFK or NASA), or a hypertext or a set of cards or all of the above
• It was Black & White (hey.. you can’t have everything)
• … which meant it was quick! (maybe you can)
• It was “interactive”!!! You made buttons that did things.
• The programming language was easy (I don’t think this has really ever happened again)
• It was free (for most of the time)
• You could make pretty much ANYTHING with it (and people did)

It’s the last one that’s important.

Today’s exercise… imagine

Imagine to yourself… I have some tasks to do …no seriously… think about your working day today and let the tasks you will do form a cloud of “getting things done”. You might want to plan your tasks, with a calendar or a to-do list. You might want to log details of tasks or write about them in interconnected detail. You might want a wordprocessor that works in very different way to Word.

During your coffee break, you’d like to fiddle with some software you’ve been playing with to help you run your tennis club/geneology research/whatever… but hey… get back to work!

Getting back to work and your tasks you’d realise than in getting it done, you’d done it your way and you’d created a system. In short, you’d made the computer do what you wanted it to do, only in black and white, but remember, these were the olden days.

The first HTML editor I used was written in HyperCard by Sam Deane in 1994/95. We had a collaborative CMS before most people had downloaded Mosaic!

Parallels are often drawn between the “web as we know it” and the stacks you would make with HyperCard… and if we take the example above, yes you can use web sites to create content, make to-do lists, create databases etc.. but the web, for me, is not quite as fluid yet. It’s quite a pain to abitrarily pick elements we’d like to combine (text, images, data, processing/programming, tools) and quickly whip them into something we can use…. but it’s getting there.

• Tools like Dapper.net have the illusory promise of being able to get content (but it never quite works for me).
• Tools like Yahoo pipes very nearly let me do what I want with various RSS feeds.
• Wikis are kissing cousins of HyperCard stacks but also very different in that I can’t drag a button into a wiki page.

… the MAIN thing about HyperCard, is that as you sat down to get on with your broing tasks, you were drawn into world of all-consuming possibilities and creativity. Rather than getting on and “getting things done” you explored how and why you were even doing it.

So I guess the web as we know it really IS like HyperCard, it’s a beautiful waste of time.

I’ve always hated virals, the kind of things you get in emails that are supposed to be funny, or even worse half-arsed Flash animations created to promote a product, filled with as much imagination as, er, well, not much… Splat the Bimbo, Splat the MP, Splat the TV Presenter. Like the idiot who, after the success of the $1million web page thought that a $10million web page was a good idea…

Every now and again of course a good one comes along, one worth spreading (like compost) … say the Wonderbra Gorilla drummer girl one, but despite it being mildly amusing for approximately two whole minutes, it doesn’t make up for the other 99.999% (read ‘em… five nines!) of woeful dross.

What I hate most about virals is:

1. They don’t work but I’m sure some idiot in Clerkenwell has stats to prove they do
2. Some idiot in Clerkenwell got paid really money to create it. Can you tell that this one gets me most.
3. They are hardly ever even slightly funny
4. I don’t like them.

.. And so Kevin, in How not to be viral says…

If you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system

…and goes on to list ways of reproducing… so to speak, that include…

• r-Strategy: Lots of seeds
• K-strategy: Nuturing young
• Fruiting: Delicious with a seed in it
• Rhizomatic: Grassroot growth

…which sort of makes sense, but I’d really like examples of each to help me better understand. For example, is blogging r-Strategy or Rhizomatic? Was Flickr a K-Strategy? Apple has to be a Fruiting strategy doesn’t it? And what is an example of Rhizomatic? RSS aggregators maybe… not sure. I like what he’s doing, providing an alternative to Viral and think I agree but I need a bit more flesh on the bones. I guess some examples won’t be products, but will me memes along the line of “sharing statuses” … that cross propogation types… like a hot discussion across many (some connected, some not) blogs.

By the way, I’ve always hated the Rhizome metaphor when talking about hypermedia. Maybe it’s my mildly agricultural upbringing but the way tubers grow or strawberries send out shoots are actually nothing like a network, although strawberries do end up all tangled together much like a router rack. Real world distances, say between a strawberry plant at one side of the field and another at the other just don’t apply to a network. Rhizomes don’t reconnect with their siblings, parents etc the way networks do, lattice-like.

The thing is, I think there isn’t a natural analogy for networks that is a good fit, they’re a new, new thing.

There. Glad to have cleared that one up. The internet isn’t strawberries.

When you boil down the Web2.0 hype, it’s all about tools and the democratisation of tool making.

I don’t know where this idea I have came from (probably Richard Millwood or Sam Deane) that if a tool can be written in itself, then in geek terms, it’s very, very, very cool. It certainly hurts when I think about it too hard.

Here’s a Flex Builder written in Flex… which as it happens, doesn’t work (for me) but hey, that’s a minor detail given the cool factor.

It is cool, when you think about it, that we are entering an era where real people (not just programmers) can create tools for people rather than just create content… empowerment instead of  publication/consumption?

I love bookmarkets because they’re like shortcuts on rollerskates, only less life threatening. When I upgraded Wordpress the “Press It” bookmarklet had completely disappeared, thankfully here it in deep in the Trac site.

Changeset 6903 - WordPress Trac - Trac

It feels good to get my bookmarklet back… I wish it opened in a new window mind.

Note to self: work on my analogies as if my hairy trifle depends on it.

There is actually one reason why visualisation is not more prevalent…. It’s not easy (like concert piano playing).

5 Reasons Visualization Is Not More Prevalent

(via Data Mining)

Bulletin April/May 2008
Peter Morville’s prescient observation that “we do not realize the potential of what we can do until we discover the possibilities”

Head… hurting… quick.. tell me what GNU stands for again…

Go Imran, go Imran!… falling to #93 in the Top Technology Blogs ranking Technology from Wikio.

I like what Wikio have done here, to create a new look on ranking beyond Page Rank and backlinks. I have been mulling over a similar idea which goes…

Given this page as a starting point who are the most important people?

… To achieve this all I’d need would be a sufficiently wide sweep of related, linked to pages and then a mini version of Google’s Rank applied to the small network discovered (taking out YouTube pages, etc). It’s essentially taking other peoples’ ideas (and algorithms) and applying them to a much smaller, hand-picked data set.