“blogs”

...says Aaron Swartz nostalgically. And I say so myself too. And I ran away from it too at the first chance. And I don’t regret it too.

Annzah’s was the first blog I read, back before there was a word for blogs themselves. A belle with a knack for writing, drinking, geeking, musicking, and partying—all with flair—, she used to blog her life at glitterkitty.net/anna: living and growing up in Sweden, her many girlfriends (wives, she called them), her parents (she’s a single child), her extended family, going through one strange boyfriend, moving to London, reading, cooking, clubbing, living with the second (webdesigner!) boyfriend, working at a bar and a clotheshop, getting hurt—falls, car-accidents (hates cars), whatnot—a surprising amount of times, and starting an English major. Her candid blog got her intermittently into trouble and after many false starts she finally changed to LiveJournal, where she blogs very different stuff, far too far and in between.

She was somewhat obsessed with Suede^WP (whom I know thanks to her) and used many of their songtitles for her posts. Today Suede’s Saturday Night^MP3 played randomly and I missed her suddenly, with a vengeance. “Having a public voice can make you a non-stranger, even to people you have never met.” This is a post to her.

Blogs are many different things to all of us, but sometimes, if the stars align just right, they can be empathic enzymes of sorts. They have been.

I’ve been plowing through Humanized today and though it’s been somewhat less interesting than I thought it would be (perhaps my expectations^ELZR were just too high), here are two very worthy text scraps:

This personal description still has me happy—it gives me the hope^ELZR Friedman talked about at the end of his MIT lecture—and, well, befuddled. I mean, how can you do so much in so little time, how? I found it on the about page of Humanized, a collaborative blog on interface design and business-to-be. (He is the son of Jef Raskin^WP btw, that explains some of it.)

Aza Raskin
President

Aza brings over six years of interface design and consulting experience to Humanized. He gave his first talk on interface design at his local San Francisco chapter of SIGCHI at the age of 13, got hooked, and has been speaking ever since. By the age of 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; by age 19, he was coauthoring a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; and at age 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Aza has also done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with honors in math and physics. For recreation, he does Judo, speaks Japanese, and invents in his lab. He also enjoys playing the French Horn^WP, which has brought him all over the world as a soloist. Be warned: Aza is an incorrigible punster, so please do not incorrige.

On the flip side, it cheers me up that such blatant^A geniuses (read the entire about page for the rest of the profiles) are interested in my chosen area too. Interface design will be the art form of the twenty-first century. Mind my words.

Blogger’s own (lousy) spellchecker says blog’s a spelling mistake (and helpfully suggests bloc, Bloch, blows, or bloke instead). Ironic, ain’t it?

Btw, haven’t you felt Blogger has been pretty much abandoned lately? It’s feeling untended and clunky lately, not that it ever was particularly elegant—it’s just that obvious errors aren’t being corrected, obvious improvements (webcraft advances by the minute) aren’t being implemented.

This is from Douglas Crockford’s Survey of Javascript (never program JS without your Crockford!). I thought it quirky at first, surprisingly helpful later. (Emphases added.)

Short-circuit logical operators are a well-known, simple idiom in several languages, but they can sometimes be confusing to read, specially when nested. What I want to point out here is that next time you have to go through code that uses them, try reading them as guard or default, as the case may be. You’ll grok^EE them immediately, trust me.

Isn’t it striking, the power of names?

Overview and Detail. The pair keeps coming up whenever you start pondering on interfaces, interface patterns, interface & information design, and well (why won’t be grand?) space, time,^ELZR and thought itself. Achieving both—the ancient dream of simultaneity—is one of the deep purposes of any media creator, from writers^EE to interface designers, and though it may be a humble example, The Secret Lives of Numbers—an interface to the results of a crazy study of the search-engine popularity of every integer between 0 and 1 million¹—is a superb one.

Click to view a 3.15-Mb PDF critique of the interface (right-click and select Save Link As to download)

As for the credits:

If you believe in geniuses you’re in for a treat checking out the three URLs above—each of them’s one. Martin Watenberg in particular, has some of the most intriguing information visualizations I’ve ever seen.

¹ Though owing to limitations of internet bandwidth only data for the first 100,000 are provided online.

I just discovered Jensen Harris’s—Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office “user experience” team—wonderfully interesting Office User Interface Blog. It deals mostly with the new interface to Office 2007 and—boy—are they cooking some sweet, major stuff!

Ribbon

Ribbon & Contextual Tab

Ribbon & Gallery

(The video’s from the Nice for Mice: Menu Tabs post,
where a high quality version is available.)

There’s something deep about Riya, the new image search engine, that bugs me. It reminds me a lot of a group in my university that was developing a digital whiteboard back in 2002. It was a fascinating technology, and, these being the days of Minority Report^{WP, IMDB}, I was infatuated with the possibilities. The thing was expensive and bulky, but allowed for some really sweet, unprecedented interaction with the computer not that far from those of said movie.

The little I’ve read from Bob Parson’s blog I’ve usually disliked. I neither like his writing style, nor his personal one, nor his blunt self-promotion, nor his ego. His life experience has been so different to mine, he usually arrives at conclusions my optimistic naivete vehemently rejects. That said, I respect the man, I like GoDaddy (despite its in-your-face disinformative commercialism), and I keep an eye on him.

His newest post, My rules for success in business and life in general, is actually quite good. Two fragments from it in particular redeem every minute I might have wasted reading the man, they are good: