A great post from 2007 by Kyle Wilson explains why “software is hard”. Wilson was part of the team that tried to extend the Myst franchise into Myst Online and he is familiar with the folks who worked on the Chandler project. While he seems to believe that software is necessarily, and uniquely, complex, I would argue that many of his observations are applicable to all large projects, especially when they involve collaboration. (And peer-based collaboration seems to fall into some of these problems more than ones organized by hierarchy — shades of the cathedral and the bazaar, I know.)
Archive for April, 2010
In the car this evening Lily asked, “Daddy, when does that show with Stephen Hawking come on?”
” I don’t know. We can check when we get home. Why do you ask?”
“There have been a lot of commercials about it. He says he knows how the world will end. I think I’d like to know how the world is going to end. Don’t you want to know?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t think Mommy knows. She’ll probably want to know, too.”
“I’m sure she will.”
“I think it’s important.”
On the way to school this morning, Lily glimpsed a mourning dove: “Daddy, I saw a mourning dove.” And with that one observation, the following narrative unfolded:
“I think it was Butter, Daddy.” (I had dubbed two mourning doves that frequented our back yard last year, Butter and Garlic. Later, B & G were joined by a half dozen friends, who were all taking advantage of us dumping piles of bird food on the patio. Within a week a hawk turned up on Lily’s play set and the doves were seen less frequently.)
“Do you think our friends are still around, honey?”
“Yes, and they have a new friend, too!”
“Who’s that?”
“Toast!” Peals of triumphant laughter.
As our drive continued, it turns out that Butter and Garlic and Toast occasionally played with a hummingbird, but eventually that friendship disbanded in favor of a fourth mourning dove called Berry Bush. While B & G were boy birds, T and BB were girl birds. The occasional fifth bird, Greckle — who was not a grackle, was also a boy bird. They liked to play games in a field on Mount Vernon, the street on which we travel on the way to Lily’s school, and therefore won’t be far from our new home.
Apple has released guidelines for creating Keynote presentations on a Mac that will be used on an iPad. The highlights include:
- the resolution to use (1024 x 768)
- themes to use (e.g., only the more bland Apple-provided ones)
- fonts to use (anything else reverts to Helvetica)
- a limited set of master slides
- pre-scaled images, with PNG being the preferred format
I don’t own Keynote for iPad, so I can’t make any comments on this or the other restrictions involved. I do own Pages for iPad, and I largely don’t see it utility until Apple comes up with a better way to handle file transfer from the iPad to the Mac. Like the iPhone, users do not have direct access to directories, where files are saved on the iPad is obscured from the user while using the iPad as well as when you are syncing with iTunes. Worse, Apple offers no real way to sync things via their own syncing apparatus on MobileMe. (Others have written about this insanity stupidity. If anyone is interested, let me know and I can add the links to the story here.)
A quick note about two places to go to spiff up your Unix command line: the first is the Unix Haters’ Handbook — link is to a book-length PDF, and the second is to a UnixCraft post on “spicing” up the command line. Spiffing and spicing. It’s all the rage.
In an episode of Modern Marvels on the History channel, the history of agricultural labor was delineated as follows:
- With a sickle, one man could harvest one acre of land a day. This remained the standard from the time of the Egyptians until the sixteenth century when the scythe was invented in what is now modern day Germany.
- With a scythe, one many could harvest three acres of wheat a day.
- With the McCormick reaper, a farmer could harvest twelve acres in a day.
I’m working on a fuller discussion of my use of GoodReader on the iPad that I will post soon, but as I continue to put the Apple tablet through its paces, I thought I would post notes as I go.
First, I should note that I am in fact composing this on the iPad and that typing on it, while in landscape mode, is far easier than I would have imagined. I can actually imagine doing some serious work like this. It’s a little difficult to get the iPad proposed just right in your lap, but once you’ve achieved some ergonomic compromise, you can type pretty well. (Note that I am not a touch typist and so I may be more open to alternative keyboards than better typists are. I know that my typing follows no best practice ever devised.)
Second, the iPad needs a case. Either the Apple case or something like the MarWare EcoFolio case. If you are using this thing around the house especially, it just doesn’t feel quite right to lay it down unprotected — this will make more sense to those readers with children and/or pets. The smooth aluminum back feels too “slidy” and the glass top just a hair too nice and fragile not to have something to flip over it when not in use. Something that stays attached is going to be better precisely because the iPad is so easy to use that you find yourself moving about with it, and chances are you’re going to put it down in a different place than where you started … And where did you leave that slip case.
I bought an inexpensive Kensington slip case to use while waiting for something better to come available — it was $5.99 on Amazon — but using a slip case on the iPad is not the same as using one on a laptop. The primary problem is that the controls of the iPad remain exposed while you are putting the slip case on, and while the unit is inside, and so you can too easily turn it on.
Surfing Mobile Safari
Web browsing in mobile Safari on the iPad is as amazing an experience as many observers commented. There really is something quite … Er, magical? … to touching a link with your finger tip rather than clicking it with a mouse. And all the other features of the multi-touch user experience really come to life on this size screen/UI.
Given this, this lovely touch interface, it boggles the mind that Show Top Sites is not a built-in part of the Mobile Safari interface. There’s room in the toolbar.
The second question mark for Mobile Safari is the lack of Find functionality. Again, there’s room in the toolbar.
More observations as they come.
The great thing about this particular parody is that by its very nature of offering up abstractions it successfully outlines the structure of American narrative film. I can easily see using this in a film studies course.
And, yes, it’s just plain funny.
So, yes, everything “they” say is true about the iPad: you really have to hold one in your hands to feel “the amazingness.” I had ordered a 16GB WiFi model from the Apple Store, but while the shipping date said “5 to 7 days” the estimated arrival date was more like three weeks. While running errands yesterday, I decided to stop by at Best Buy to see if they had anything. Nothing. Nothing except for a 64GB “open box” model the salesman discovered when he went to check on inventory. Hmmm. The top end model for only $629? Why not?
I had to confine myself only to gazing at the thing for the rest of the day while I was at work, since getting any kind of wireless connection on our campus is rather difficult and because I still had my iTunes library at home on our NAS. But once I got it home and synced some media onto and downloaded a few apps, it was time to try the thing out.
And here’s the truly surprising thing, the thing that makes the “amazingness” of this thing: my wife wants one. She doesn’t love technology the way I do. She knows she depends on it, but its functionings and possibilities do not fascinate her. But she immediately got the possibilities of holding a piece of glass in your hands and interacting immediately with UI elements on it.
The thing that really got her is GoodReader, an app so good it’s worth a post of its own. That’s coming tomorrow.
The New York Times has a story on-line about TechShop, a company looking to build, some might say capitalize, on the maker movement. Another way to look at it is that a private company is willing to do what communities used to do for themselves, but forgot: provide a communal space that anyone can use. Once upon a time, almost every town had a community kitchen, where anyone with a big cooking job, typically canning fruits and vegetables, could go. Or many people could go and socialize while working. When I lived in Bloomington, there was a community wood shop where for a few dollars, you could use a decent collection of decent tools.
TechShop aims to replicate that experience, but using a membership model, where individuals pay a monthly fee in order to have access to what appears to be a nice collection of machinery. Who knows, if this catches on we might see communities once again creating this infrastructure as a way to accommodate those who can’t afford memberships in the private sector. Anything that makes making itself more accessible, more palatable, more approachable, and especially more doable is just fine by me.
It’s a bit staggering to think about it, but the season finale of House was shot entirely using a Canon 5D camera. The director loved the experience. The details of the shoot, as pulled from his tweets are:
- The episode was shot at 24fps.
- They used a collection of stock Canon prime lenses (all the L stuff) as well as the 24-70 and 70-200 zoom lenses. (Hey, those are the lenses I have, but, oh yeah, mine are EFS, not L.) These lenses provided some focusing problems, but apparently “cine-style” lenses are already in the pipeline.
- They used plain old CF cards. 18GB cards gave them 22 minutes of footage.
Amazing. For years, the gap between amateur and pro quality gear was considerable. It has closed in recent years, but there was still a gap. The Canon 5D is not exactly something you’re going to find at Walmart — the body is currently priced at $2500 on Amazon — but it’s not beyond comprehension. Why, only a few years ago the folklore concentration at the University of Louisiana invested in a prosumer Canon video camera that was $3500. The 5D is clearly now professional grade, and it’s less. (But in saying that I really am lying, because I am completely leaving out the cost of lenses.)
For those who don’t want to wait for the House episode, you can check out a short film shot with the 5D. (Not the best film, but the cinematography is nice.)
Oh, did I mention the 5D shoots in HD?
According to this post on 9-to-5 Mac, it looks like there is limited support for exporting webapps/RIAs/whatever created in Flash to HTML5′s Canvas element. This is precisely the Adobe I know and love: offering its users, content creators, the chance to develop in their preferred medium. I know Adobe bought Macromedia for Flash, and Flash did, and does, make it incredibly easy to develop a variety of interesting tools and user experiences, but Adobe shouldn’t risk its future by trying to determine what people will create. Adobe is at its best when it’s offering “best of class” tools and IDEs that work for how people want to create.1
There’s a Youtube video from an Adobe demonstration at a conference somewhere, but it’s not so great that I’m embedding it here. Definitely go to the 9to5Mac page if you’re interested.
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And, no, I don’t really don’t know where I stand on the whole Apple doesn’t want developers exporting out of Flash CS5 for iPhone/iPad apps. (And can we come up with a term that covers Universal apps for the iPhone OS platform — that is, those apps that will run on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad? “Universal apps for the iPhone OS platform” is kinda clumsy.) ↩
