“domburi”
7 posts under this tag.
Encroachment is what makes Life interesting.
Daniel C. Dennett WP, EDGE, Freedom Evolves AM
Can’t believe what a coward I’ve been. I guess it wasn’t until I read recently about how Jon Lech Johansen humilliated Hollywood by releasing a program to easily break DVD’s much vaunted DRM (when he was 15 years old), or about “the college droputs that run >youTVpc.com for millions of people on just two low-end desktop computers that I realized how big a wuss I am.
Take Imagery. In a way, I never wanted it to be very popular because I knew I was doing something maybe-legal by scraping Google. I wanted to scrape Flickr and Yahoo! but feared they would be even less likely to see my scraping in a good light. I wanted to create a picture cache to make Imagery much faster and reliable (and to lessen the leech on independent websites) but fretted about bandwidth costs and about whether people would get angry about my caching.
Or take the Spanish dictionary of the Spanish Language Academy. It’s a tremendously useful, gratis dictionary and yet it has a butt-ugly, nonhumane interface. I’ve been bitching about it for years. And I’ve been thinking about giving it a new interface for that long, but, again, what if they don’t like my scraping? (In all probability they won’t. They’re the quintessential staid, monolithic organization.)
A lot of what ifs. But most importantly, so what? So sue me. Well, actually, most important is that I think these scrapings are an overwhelmingly good thing. I see them as a lot of fun—for me, for the scrapees (who’ll get to see how it’s done, ehem), and for the people who will enjoy just how much they never imagined missing. I see them as criticism by example.
So here’s Domburi and here’s NotReality. The idea of Domburi has changed somewhat from its inception (oh, the shame, so many goals not accomplished), it shall now be a collection of search superpowers instead of limiting itself to imagesearching. I believe, with an arrogance that I can’t believe but that I’ve missed, that I have a thing or two to teach Google in its own turf, not just in forgotten backwaters like imagesearching (where Imagery still kicks Google’s ass easily). So I’m starting really tiny now with only a simple redesign of Google search results (there isn’t even imagesearching yet). I’ll be fleshing it out in the coming days, daily, with the daylog here below.
Not Reality, otoh, is still what I’ve always wanted it to be: my webfront for my interface experiments. It’s really simple now but I’ll be improving it daily too.
So please visit the websites, leave your feedback in this post’s comments, and come back often to check out the daylogs—there are loads of interesting things in the pipeline! Thanks for reading.
12-14/May/07
Endless fiddling on Domburi. Collapse of the incrementalism. Obsession with pipe dreams.
15/May/07
Not Reality
Still no attention…
Domburi
Big changes!
- Ajaxed requests. Loading icon. Everything happens on the same page. Title changes. Very lightweight script behind the scenes: the now deprecated but still unsurpassed moo.ajax.
- New one-column format with even results shaded. Results turn yellow on mouse over, which is silly interactivity, but surprisingly pleasant. Entire result is a link. No numbers anymore showing order.
- Displayed URL is now a link that shows results only within the website. This idea from SearchMash, of which I just found out yesterday, and which is a website run by Google where it tries out new interface ideas without the Google brand skewing perception. Very intriguing.
- Displayed URL is now cased smartly. So instead of greysanatomyinsider.com you get GreysAnatomyInsider.com. It extracts the case from the result’s title, uses some general heuristics (like upcasing after a ), and if all fails, it simply capitalizes.
- Results displayed in-page. This had been the idea ever since I decided to expand Domburi from image searching. I wanted to make the whole searching experience feel faster and more like what Ben Schneiderman calls direct manipulation. It has been much harder than I thought and it was this point where I spent most of my fiddling (I also played for hours with the two-columns layout…). Here’s what I ended up with.
- Results seem to open in the entire page, with only the result entry on top. They really open in a full-screen iframe but the effect is surprising. To return to the results you can simply scroll out of the iframe, click the result entry, or…
- Pixelside. This is a strange but crucial feature that even if invisible and initially nonintuitive I find very, very promising: it’s simply a 1px-wide, 100%-height leftmost line. Right now you can click on it when on a full-screen result and return to the resultlist (and from there you can click again on it to return to your full-screen result). It is incredibly fast (in Fitt’s lawWP terms, it has “infinite size”), handy, and habituating—and I imagine lots of cool ways to enhance the feature. The only problem is that crappy IE doesn’t allow leftmost pixels! So I’ll have to make up for it with JS. I cringe with only the thought.
- The title (but not the entire result, which is JS triggered) is a normal link so if you want to open results in a separate tab just middle-click or CTRL-click it.
- Strange cool script used. More details to follow. If you’re interested, check out $.
- Works in Firefox, IE, and Opera.
Not tested yet on Safari. Some weird bugs on Safari but it broadly works.
16/May/07—20/Jun/07
10-day trip to the US (haven’t told you about that!) with days way too happily busy. Too many books afterwards (63!) to do anything but read for several wonderful, obsessed days until all the stress and overcrowding of the house finally bring me down. Languishment in captivity.
21/Jun/07
Not Reality
Complete Redesign!
I gotta say, I really, really like it. The new eye-candy screenshots are tremendous improvements but the crucial difference is the new text—sort of modeled on ancient book covers—and how it explains infinitely better what it is that I want to accomplish with Domburi and now PLBRS. Please do read it—it’s extremely short and heavily formatted—and tell me what you think.
Added a Not Reality link to Imagery, btw (and finally dropped publicly the promise of more browsers to come for it, it’s all Domburi from now on). Added Google Analytics tracking.
Domburi
Simple changes.
# Fixed logo to point correctly at home. Thanks volve!
# CSS fiddling for greater clarity, minor improvements, and cross-broswser compatibility.
# Added Google Analytics tracking.
# Height adjustment menu. A simple (though surprisingly troublesome) addition that makes Domburi much more useful, you can now adjust the height of the embedded windows and so can view and compare two or three results at the same time! Imagine this with dragging and width-adjustment…
22 and 23/jun/07
Bad time management. Sorry. :)
24/jun/07
Domburi
Still nothing!
Not Reality
# New Book Section! With great quotes and cool photocovers.
Remember to hard refresh (Ctrl-R) to see the most recent changes!
In computing, the second-system syndrome is a form of sophomore slump that describes the tendency to design the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system as an elephantine, feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks WP in his classic The Mythical Man-MonthWP, AM.
Y’know, I remember reading about the syndrome in Brooks’s book with a smug confidence that it would never happen to me. It did. Imagery was by many accounts a pretty cool thing, but then I tried to outdo myself with its successor, Domburi, and, many, many ineffectual months later, I must admit that I’ve only weird sketches and weirder code to show for my time.
Which doesn’t mean that I’ve given up. It means that we need a new strategy. The all-or-nothing, hail-mary, next-big-thing, under-wraps-until-perfect approach was doomed since the beginning. (I really should have known better.) So the new strategy is to get it all out. As rough and soon as possible.
I’m calling it ”Improv’d Daily!” and it is akin to beta-hoodWP—in that it indicates that the website is still under developement—but it carries the all important mantra of radical incrementalism: every single day there will be at least one new, stand-alone, non-trivial improvement for the website. It won’t be earth shattering every day but it shall always be interesting.
I’m starting the meme with this very blog, which is supposed to be my online self and yet still lags far, far behind of what I want from it. (Domburi will be up in a couple of hours. Domburi up.) This very post will be updated daily with each day’s changes starting now and I have several new goodies to kickstart the kaizen:
8/May/07
# Related Posts section added (when viewing an individual post). Posts are related the more tags they have in common and the more rare those tags are.
# List of comments (accessible from the right sidebar, at the bottom of the Recent Comments header)
# New URLs: http://elzr.com/articles/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/TITLE becomes http://elzr.com/posts/TITLE, which is shorter and sweeter. You don’t need to remember a post’s date now and, what’s more, if there’s no post found with that TITLE, Google comes automagically to the rescue.
# Left sidebar redesign: new headshot, shorter description, just email (putting my phone # up there was always a bad idea, that phone-call confirmed it), new format for the archives.
# Collapsed “for:” tags in a post’s tag list. Much clearer. Tags are also now ordered alphabetically.
# Lots of tiny improvements all over. Like the orange bar atop a single post—neat, huh?—or icons for search (a magnifying glass in the searchbox) and for favorites (a star in favorite articles).
9/May/07
# Crappy day: a minor, bureaucratic improvement to the website became a nightmare. Blog crashing on and off. Domburi will have to wait until tomorrow.
10/May/07
# Blog back!
# Section Cache!: the recent list (favorites, posts, comments), the tags list, and the archive are now cached, making the website much, much faster.
# List of all posts (accessible from the left sidebar, below the Archives header)
11/May/07
# Save to Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, and Stumble Upon when viewing an individual post.
# Tag Cloud!
# js-less Improv’d Daily! Ok, this may not sound like much but it’s important and cool. I use ALA’s CSS Sprites technique.
12-14/May/07
Obsessed Domburi fiddling. Sorry.
15/May/07
# Fixed broken Tag Cloud links (Thanks Aaron!)
16/May/07—20/Jun/07
Big, humongous gap—or vacations—or depression bout. Or all of them together. See chronicle on Domburi’s Improv’d Daily.
21/Jun/07
- Old URLs redirect to URLs to keep with the migration announced May 8. http://elzr.com/articles/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/TITLE now really becomes http://elzr.com/posts/TITLE.>
- Sidebar Redesign: new picture, new welcome copy bared down to its barest Basic EnglishWP essentials, new webapps added to webapp section, new, much better descriptions for most items in the sidebar.
- Daily Improves section in the sidebar for you to keep handy track of my progress—or lack thereof.
- Minor CSS fiddling—like a new, bigger size for small caps type (it could be hard to read at some resolutions and some platforms).
- New 404 page, that is, a new page to aid you when you type in an address that can’t be found. Try it now with http://elzr.com/this-address-is-wrong/. Thanks Aaron!
-
New title for homepage. Since the delta thing is already obscure conceit enough, I decided to convert seconds into more humane time units. 8,321,231s delta is now 96 day delta.
Delta, btw, means something like the divergence (the difference) that has come to pass between two different times, one of which is usually the present—so when I say in this blog’s homepage title that there’s a 96 day delta I mean that I haven’t updated it in 96 days, i.e., me and my digital self have had 96 days to go our own separate ways. This wonderful sense of the word comes from Charles Stross’s Accelerando.
- Unified search into a simple URL, http://elzr.com/search/QUERY, which currently carries a personalized Google search of elzr.com but will eventually change to Domburi. This new unified interface allowed me to finally create a YubNub command for the blog: try elzr (see its man page) at every input box that speaks YubNub.
I love this description of the design process because that’s exactly how it is for me. (Via Kottke)
- Talk to everybody I possibly can about the problem.
- Read everything that would even be remotely related to what I’m doing. Hang charts, graphs, diagrams, and screenshots all over my office.
- Observe user research; recall past research.
- Stew in it all, panic as deadline approaches, stop sleeping, stop eating.
- Be struck with an epiphany. Instantly see the solution. Curse my tools for being too slow as I frantically get it all down in a document.
- Sleep for three days.
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)
This (anonymous) feedback on Imagery just came on Saturday.
If your searches could also generate the academic citations for the images, that would be ultracool for those of us out in education-land trying to teach kids that they do not “own ” the internet without at least giving credit. I know some blog tools do this ( David Warlick’s blog does it).
A person who teaches teachers
and sends them to cool places like this.
Some sort of auto-citation of images is a fantastic idea (as anyone who uses EverNote or Google Notebook will know firsthand) and my gratitude goes to whoever sent it to me, I’d never have thought of it myself. And yet, for a while I almost decided to willfully not implement it:
I strongly disagree with the way citations are usually handled within “education-land”: little more than curtsies one must mindlessly perform to pay respect to others’ property (and it is against such moralistic establishment that I am one of those kids who believes he owns the internet). Citation styles are taught and required simply as one more formal hoop for students to jump.
But citations can be much more than that! They allow readers to recover and rewalk the path the writer followed, and in that they perform an invaluable service to readers, but they can also be immensely profitable for writers too, starting with forcing them to walk paths in the first place (one is so loathe to do the slightest of researches when in the thrall (or duty) of writing, so very prone to simply rearrange one’s prejudices and call it even). Citations make for more rigorous reading and writing—that’s why we should encourage them (not simply because they make, arguably, good fences).
So yes, I thought I saw some of that ownership-based, rote teaching of citations (copyright-instruction) in that email—in a scared flash of exaggeration I glimpsed a DRM image-search engine—and my recoil reaction was so surprisingly strong I thought of deliberately not implementing any sort of auto-quotation. Lawrence Lessig has talked already on the power technology’s architecture has to regulate conduct and the weight of such responsibility was suddenly overwhelming.
Careful thought has shown me the error of my ways. My overreaction to such friendly (and helpful) feedback was not called for. An auto-citation feature in Domburi would be very helpful indeed and will be implemented. But it’ll be tinged with my prejudices and that means it will be open-ended.
2 days ago I had a major breakthrough in Domburi’s interface. I had been racking my brain for several days for a simple, elegant way to provide all the new functionality I had dreamt for it, but the standards I’d set made the task daunting:
Simple and easy to understand
Building (or at least not interfering) upon earlier knowledge
We’ve been using (web) GUIs for decades now, patterns have emerged. To waste them a silly thing would be. Right-click contextual menu, buttons, selection methods, drag & drop, and general link behavior (from one-click-activation to middle clicking on a link to open it in a new tab) are useful patterns we learn early and should be respected.
Consistency
I wanted to have the same interface for thumbnails and full-size images, just like Imagery works now (with almost the same toolbar for both cases).
I’m obsessive with claiming the precious few screen real state I’m able to and profoundly detest what Edward Tufte once called “administrative debris.” The goal is to see at a glance as many images (and nothing more!) as it is usefully possible.
Even onhover interfaces must be extremely discreet, not only for conceptual clarity, but because rendering times can make for a jarring experience.
On the other hand, even if keyboard shortcuts and other tricks & gimmicks are more efficient, I believe it’s crucial for users to be able to get a visual overview of their options.
Modeless
Modes WP can be useful and uncannily efficient—I love Vim—but they take a huge cognitive load to understand and use, and many, many hours of practice for them to become second-nature. They’re prone to frustrating mode errorsWP too.
Text is always a good thing, text and icons can sometimes be an improvement, but icons alone I usually find confusing and useful only for the most trivial of cases. The big problem with text of course is all the space it demands.
I dabbled for a while with tool palettes like those of Adobe Photoshop but in the end sweared off modes of any kind, even graphic ones.
I tried expanding the weird text-toolbar I currently use in Imagery but it proved too constraining.
Jensen Haris’s Office User Interface Blog sent me reeling into the possibilities of ribbons and contextual tabs (GUI innovations in upcoming Office 2007), but though interesting and definitely appropriate sometimes, they can be brutal overkill for such a simple application as Domburi.
In the end, it was clear to me that what was needed was a contextual menu of some sort and a way to activate it graphically (since I wasn’t willing to break the right-click, and other keyboard/mouse combos reeked of inelegance).
I finally found my solution in a little known interface innovation from Flickr (who introduced it only recently in a May 16, 2006 redesign).
They call it a “person menu” but it’s not the menu itself what interests me, it’s the way it’s activated: you hover over someone’s (otherwise undefiled!) buddy image and this obvious sidebutton appears; you click on it and your options to manipulate the image are presented.
This is a natural evolution of the pulldown button ( ), of course, but it allows for a revolutionary array of possibilities. I’ve been playing with the idea for 2 days now and am ready to nominate the onhover sidebutton as one of this decade’s contributions to our shared GUI alphabet: a visual, yet non intrusive, way to activate a context-menu. I’m using it everywhere in Domburi now (the idiom is evolving some impressive refinements!) and it has simplified things further than I thought possible. In the prophetic words of Jeff Han: “the interface just disappears.”
Exciting times!
I’ll be the first to admit I’m lousy keeping my public commitments. The thing is, they really help me clear my head and get some focus, and most of the time, even if I don’t finish on schedule, public shame makes me finish all I originally intended eventually (though usually pretty late). So I’m still a big fan of public commitments but this time I’ll add a novel feature to my schedule: incentives for me to finish on time.
Some background is in order: As I was saying yesterday, there is a big project (the biggest yet!) on the horizon, but before I can tackle it I need to give Imagery the much-promised revamping I’ve been talking about for 49 days now (!). I’ve several things to blame, of course, but by and large it’s the same lack as always: focus.
Anyway, many ideas have come to me in the meanwhile. To begin with, I definitely want Imagery to have a memorable, easy-to-pronounce dotcom name and after much brain-racking my creative-assistant-cum-sis, Chef, came up with domburi.comWHOIS, which I loved and was surprisingly available. DomburiWP (usually spelled donburi) is an extremely popular, delicious, and simple japanese dish that has been my top food for three weeks now (when it toppled Pad ThaiWP). The name’s short, memorable, easy to pronounce, and cool. It’ll be Imagery’s new identity. The next step now is to clone Imagery to Domburi and experiment there so that I don’t disturb Imagery searchers (how oh-so-cool to have a user base!). Imagery was always meant as an alpha application and has far outstretched itself already. A major polish is in order (not a rewrite from scratch, mind you!) and you’ll be able to track it from domburi.com (though the page will of course be unstable).
The other important idea was to create something of a brand house for Imagery Domburi and all the related interface projects that are to come. My first candidate for a name was the Interface Institute, which was dotcom available and seemed like fun (considering it’s a one-man enterprise), but I wanted something more risky, more challenging, and that’s how I ended up with  .net—after, of course, that famous quote from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire,
I don’t want reality, I want magic.
seen under the light of this other quote—that might as well be the new company’s mission statement—from Steven Johnson’s indispensable Interface Culture,
The real magic of graphic computers derives from the fact that they’re not tied to the old, analog world of objects. They can mimic much of that world of course, but they’re also capable of adopting new identities and performing new tasks that have no real-world equivalent whatsoever. People who get hooked on computers get hooked for this reason. They don’t become high-tech junkies because their machines remind them of their Rolodexes; they’re junkies because their machines do things they never thought possible. Interface design should reflect this newness, this range of possibility.
I’m tremendously excited about . Once, not long ago, I somewhat secretly decided that I’d someday work at virtual reality, the possibilities of which seem truly mind-boggling (some of you might remember my incoherent ramblings on the subject). To my mind, this seems like a weird early step in that direction—in virtual reality, everything is interface.
But that’s enough intro, here, finally, is my road map:
Start of Project Domburi!—29 July (Chef’s bday!)
Main Goal: Make Domburi IE and Opera compatible.
Punctuality Premium: If I do finish with the above task, I get to buy Getting Real, the book.
End of 1st Week—5 August
Main Goal: Add Yahoo! & Flickr to the list of Domburi engines and do interesting things like split screens and such with them.
End of 2nd Week—12 August
Main Goal: Implement Bento & Disjoint (Cool Domburi surprise features—you’ll see!). Begin writing copy (presentation, FAQ, help, requirements).
End of 3rd Week—19 August
Main Goal: Polishing, beta-testing, polishing. Rinse and repeat. Special attention to things like responsiveness, interaction, smoothness, design, performance, stability. Finish writing copy.
End of 4th Week—23 August
Main Goal: Publicity, more polishing, and more publicity. The hope here is a mention from
TechCrunch.
Tentative Finish—29 August
Project Domburi would be successfully finished now if the website had attained 10 thousand visitors per day, for more than 3 days (not necessarily in a row). If the challenge’s met I earn the Punctuality Premium, if not, I keep promoting and polishing the website fulltime.
Punctuality Premium: Read Replay, Machinery of Freedom, Artful Sentences and the week’s Economist—all told, my idea of nirvana.
End of 1st Cushion Week—2 September
The same review of the previous week: Domburi should have had 3 days with a 10-thousand-visitors-traffic by now. If it does, I earn a (big) Punctuality Premium, if not, I keep at it.
Punctuality Premium: Read Peter Watson’s massive Ideas: a history of thought and invention—with 750 pages (and big sheets at that, with the smallest of margins) it promises to be even more absorbing and challenging (and fun!) than The Modern Mind. Implement quick versions of 3 simple projects: a textviewer, a timetool, and an interface to RAE.
End of 2nd Cushion Week and Definitive Finish of Project Domburi—9 September
Domburi really should have had at least five 10,000-visitors days by now, but if it doesn’t I’ll move (shamefully) to the next project…
Start of Project Maki!—10 September
As always, any help keeping me on track (a simple message or comment or email) would be very very very appreciated. Being a human-timer is easy and fast, and yet rewards with lavish praise. ;)
|
RSS
email
