“webapps”

Had to resize a photo just now on my macbook and I still don’t know how. Decided it would be easier to find and finally use one of the many online photo editors now available. It was. Which speaks volumes about why the web is the next platform.

Zipping back and forth along Kottke’s Twitter some minutes ago I finally got Twitter. And I smiled. Like I smiled when I finally got Wikipedia (or blogs or Flickr or Facebook or Google or GMail)—a smile of wonderment at the great and totally unexpected.

His observations on it are spot on—no wonder he’s the web pundit par excellence.

Speaking of locality, if you haven’t seen Google’s new Streetside View (like, say, in San Francisco) you’re missing a future shock gasp. (via O’Reilly Radar)

Breathtaking immersion. Eerily reminiscent of Rainbows End^{WP, AM}.

Also not to be missed are Immersive Media’s—one of the companies behind this new feature—richer demos: pannable videos!

Flickr AutoPagination has got to be the coolest Greasemonkey script I’ve seen yet, and, to judge by its code, a really intricate labor of love. It works flawlessly and does exactly what you’d guess: it makes every Flickr page (where it would make sense) “infinitely scrollable”. A cool, handy, and surprisingly stable script.

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


Domburi

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
   
   1. 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…
   2. 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 law^WP 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.
   3. 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.
6. Strange cool script used. More details to follow. If you’re interested, check out $.
7. 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

Domburi

# 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

Not Reality # New Book Section! With great quotes and cool photocovers.

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-hood^WP—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

1. 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.>
2. Sidebar Redesign: new picture, new welcome copy bared down to its barest Basic English^WP essentials, new webapps added to webapp section, new, much better descriptions for most items in the sidebar.
3. Daily Improves section in the sidebar for you to keep handy track of my progress—or lack thereof.
4. Minor CSS fiddling—like a new, bigger size for small caps type (it could be hard to read at some resolutions and some platforms).
5. 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!
6. 
   
   

   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.
   
   
7. 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.

Dasher

Scratch

My Wikipedia investigations of late (I want to propose a major new feature and I’m feeling out the “deep” WIkipedia) uncovered the little known fact that as a registered user you can have a personal stylesheet and javascript file—which means that with a little know-how you can have Wikipedia looking and feeling exactly how you want it—and have this look-and-feel follow you around with your account. If you use the default skin, Monobook^WP, your personal stylesheet and js file are monobook.css and monobook.js. There’s help here.

This opens the door to all sorts of customizing galore—skins, plugins, new features…—and while I still have to dig into it properly, so far I’ve found the amazing Navigation popups script, which pops up a small, smart (meaning it does interesting stuff depending on context) preview of any Wikipedia link you hover onto. Its slightly annoying until you get used to it, but once you do get it into your “work”-flow it’s very sweet—blazingly fast and with tons of handy extra options. Installing it is a snap too, just add one line to your monobook.js.

Being the neophilic¹ I usually am, I don’t usually get scared with technology but I admit to getting the shivers when viewing System One’s screencast. The webapp seems to be something very similar to 37Signals’ Backpack—a web 2.0 CMS^WP that is—only at the enterprise level, and on first blush I almost dismissed it as a staid attempt to bring consumer-level webapps to the office (and, come on, what kind of name is System One?).

It may still be just that, but here’s the idea that blew my mind: search-as-you-write. Not search-as-you-type, which is also called incremental search, and is when you are presented results for a query as you type it; no, it’s, search-as-you-write: automatic, real-time search as you’re writing a non-query—a post, a comment, your thesis, a love letter. You really have to see the screencast to get the feel of it but just think about the momentous, qualitative jump this represents—automatic, ubiquitous polling of the hive-mind. Talk about erosion of the self.

Yes, it’s only a natural progression, but still—let me be nebulously apprehensive today for a change.

A fascinating video—both in message and execution—about this new web (2.0) of ours. Digital video vagaries. Blurring techno typing. Interface po-mo poetry. Speechless show-don’t-tell. (Via Mark Bernstein)