Posts

Over the christmas holiday I had an idea and developed the foundation for a small application which involves RDF, a SPARQL endpoint and a bunch of ordinary web pages available in a number of languages. Each page is a representation of a paper document that exists in the real world. Each real document has been assigned a URI like http://example.com/act/31977D001. Thus it represents a non-information resource. What should happen if you enter that URI in a web browser? Well, the server shouldn’t return a HTTP 200 status code. That would imply that the resource is an information resource. ...

Consistency is important when designing interaction with user interfaces. Consistency makes it possible to re-use what you learned in one application in another. Unfortunately there are many application developers that invent their own interaction principles, even when their is an established praxis. But, it is even worse when someone who established the praxis provides an inconsistent user experience. Yes, that means you Apple. Case in point: zooming in and out of a document: ...

Via Tim Bray’s blog I found zestyping’s “Why PHP should never be taught”. In it he provides some interesting PHP code that will be difficult for beginners to understand. 1 $a = 0; $b = "eggs"; $c = "spam"; yields: 1 2 3 4 5 6 a == b b != c a == c a == d b != d c != d (Please note that d hasn’t been defined). In the comments, people freak out and tell him that this behaviour is defined in the documentation. I guess that makes it even worse. ...

When people started making applications available in the browser a number of interaction challenges appeared. How do you launch a web app compared to a desktop app? How do you prevent people from navigating away from your app? The Mozilla people have been hard t work with Prism - basically a customized version of Firefox, which lets you create desktop apps pre-configured to load a certain URL at startup. The desktop app is launched like any other application. Pretty sweet as the user experience becomes more consistent. You can also customize the application icon and other parameters. ...

You disable firewalls, forward ports in the router and put your laptop in the DMZ but iChat AV still fails to make a simple video call. My son does video chat with grandma over Skype and it “just works”. What the hell were Apple thinking with iChat AV? Do they really expect people to follow instructions like these to get a simple video call going? Seems like I’m not alone.

I often install apps to try if they work the way I like. Some stay, some I delete almost immediately. Some of them have built in functionality that alerts you when there is an update available. I find that very annoying. If you have many apps these little reminders tend to pop up all the time. So, I was looking for something to keep tiny apps up to date and found AppFresh. AppFresh will scan your programs folder when you want it to and alert you of any updates it can find. Downloading and installation is automated for most apps as well. ...

Mark Pilgrim writes about the benefits of the easy-to-use package manager in Ubuntu and then feels sorry for his Mac OS-using friends. “But Jesus H. Christ, it must suck giant wet donkey balls to be stuck on an archaic OS where you need to be dropping into the terminal and tweaking configuration files and compiling shit all the time. I hope the translucent menu bar is worth it. " I agree wholeheartedly that a good package manager really makes life a lot easier. At work the other day I was about to begin installing TWiki by following the rather lengthy installation guidelines. As I was on a clean install of Ubuntu 7.10 I fired off a apt-get install twiki and lo and behold, two minutes later the whole thing was there including mysql and a large part of the CPAN library. ...

James Simmons writes about some of the pros and cons of Microformats and RDF (with an extended discussion at InfoQ). On the benefits of Microformats (with which he means Microformats.org-style microformats) he mentions: Designed for humans first, machines second Modularity / embeddability Enables and encourages decentralized development, content, services A design principle for formats Adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns Highly correlated with semantic XHTML I am new to RDF and the semantic web (but have used microformats in previous web projects) but to me the advantages of RDF and RDFa (the “sprinkling” framework) are clear. Microformats may work for a limited set of use cases but I have not yet understood how to use microformats efficiently for the bulk of what I need. However, it is great that a lot of development is going on in the area of embedding machine readable data in documents. Without microformats the pace would probably have been much slower. ...

Update: As many readers now noticed, as of 10.5.2 there is now a preferences setting for the menubar transparency. For some reason Apple decided to make the menu bar in Leopard transparent. With my background image this means that the menu bar will be in a shade of blue. It doesn’t look good and makes my computing environment less comfortable (I’m picky, I know…). Someone created a software hack to remove the transparency. There is also a system setting (thank you Johan) to trick the window manager into thinking it is in older hardware. I am not sure of the side effects so I’m not that keen on installing that. Here is the pragmatic fix: take your background image and paint a white stripe, 21 pixels high, at the top. Problem solved. My menu bar is now easy to read with black text on white background (see picture above). ...

This will be a field day for industrial designers and usability experts. The new ticket vending machines for the Stockholm public transport system have been met with a lot of criticism lately. People are finding them difficult to use and apparently there are very few tickets sold. On top of that they look like the machines seen in parking lots. Oh wait, they are apparently from the same manufacturer. Stockholm public transport has a tradition of being late to the 21st century. Pre-paid tickets are still paper based and stamped by the bus driver. Previously you could buy them directly from the bus driver. However, robbery prompted the public transport authorities to remove all cash handling from the bus drivers, hence the increased need for outdoor ticket vending machines. ...