September, 2006

Remember those classic time-lapse^WP videos of fluid cloudscapes and opening flowers? (Or, to be more uptodate, of girls taking a pic of themselves every three years?^YT.) Well, this is something similar: Justin Frankel^{WP, ELZR}, Winamp creator and one of this generation’s software virtuosos, spent the better part of a year creating an audio-editing program called Reaper, took pictures as the developement months went by and mashed them together into a webpage. Amazing. (via Justin’s blog: c[a,o]s[a,o][s] de justin)

Blogging for dollars is the pretty good, pretty interesting cover article from this month’s Business 2.0 about how the mainstream blogs (MSB?^WP) like Boing Boing, Fark, Metafilter, TechCrunch ^ELZR, Digg or Dooce are monetizing their traffic. Thorough and filled with lots of $ data, what surprised me the most about it was how obviously promotional it was. It’s basically an extended infomercial on blog-advertising, which doesn’t take away that it makes several good insights on media and how technology is turning us into one-man-bands^ELZR, but, still, deliberately mislabeling content is just an euphemism for lying.

In what must be one of its most bizarre moves to date, Google just released a collaborative-tagging game (!): Google Images Labeler. It frankly seems against the company’s algorithmic DNA and I almost dismissed it at first, but perhaps it’ll work… for a while: it’s actually interesting to play but the interest fades quickly. (Via John Battelle)

I can’t remember where I got this notion that Google Finance was just an uninteresting, me-too product¹ from Google, but the prejudice set in without my noticing (as, alas, so many do) and it was strong enough that I hadn’t deigned to pay them a visit until I chanced upon them today.

Here are some screenshots of both Google Finance and Yahoo Finance (the current king of the hill) set to display Google’s stock information. There’s simply no comparison: Google outshines Yahoo “in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars.”^EEM

¹ Perhaps it filtered somehow from the popularish blog GigaOM, who to my utter amazement finds Google Finance “downright tiresome and plain ugly.. clearly.. a me-too move.”

One on the design process, another on prejudices, and another on Ted Nelson^{WP, ELZR} .

This is some fiendishly impressive photoshop.

I believe that an interface that is both modeless and, insofar as possible, monotonous—all other design features being of at least normal quality for a modern interface—would be extraordinarily pleasant to use. A user would be able to develop an unusually high degree of trust in his habits. The interface would, from these two properties alone, tend to fade from the user’s consciousness, allowing him to give his full attention to the task at hand. The psychological effects of totally (or near totally) modeless and monotonous systems is an area of interface design ripe for experimental study.

If I am correct, the use of a product based on modelessness and monotony would soon become so habitual as to be nearly addictive, leading to a user population devoted to and loyal to the product. Its users would find moving to a competitor’s product psychologically difficult. Unlike selling illicit drugs, marketing an addictive interface is legal, and the product is beneficial to its users; in another way, it is just like selling illicit drugs: extremely profitable.

Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface^AM, p68

With modeless he means that “a given user gesture has one and only one result: Gesture g always results in action a.” With monotonous, that “any desired result has only one means by which it may be invoked: Action a is invoked by gesture g and in no other way.”

(It’s surprising how all this can be expressed by saying that we want the relationship between gestures and actions to be a function^WP, and an injective^WP and surjective^WP one at that. In other words, a good interface is a bijective^WP interface. I remember how hard those words were to me my first semester studying Math. Never thought I’d find them again studying interfaces!)

And regarding the quote itself, it’s a tough sell, because it goes against many of my computing prejudices. But Raskin just might be right—in a truly revolutionary way. We’ll find out at Domburi. ;)

Sexy Loners^WP is (or rather, was, it just closed this March) one fetishy, weird, morbid, scabrous, bizarre, twisted, risqué, potentially-offensive webcomic (really, so don’t click ahead and complain about it!) with subtitles to match (Story of my life… got the right girl, got the wrong sexual fetish—I jerked myself today, to see if I still feel. I focus on the stain, the only thing that’s real.—Sometimes I think God hates me, but then I remember that it’s probably because I do strips like this one.—When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers—The biggest threat to otakus is natural selection.—If I really knew a surefire way of getting laid, do you think I would have time to write a strip about it?). It also has the best interface I’ve seen for a webcomic and got me excited all over again at the possibilities of a wikicriticism (see The Lighter Side of Tentacle Hentai or Video Girl Etchi I to see how much the commentary adds to the strips).

Jon Aquino, father of YubNub, is onto something with his idea of deep software:

To my constern, I could only venture Vim, Mathematica, and some tentative candidates to his growing list, so please pay his post a visit and contribute.

There was on the thread, though, one nomination to the title of deep software that I simply can’t skip, because I happen to agree that the nominee is one of the best pieces of software there has been (and its author build it when he was, get this, eighteen; see Rolling Stones article on him) and because the nomination itself is just damn good writing.