The tyranny of the tagline; Michael Beirut
The tyranny of the tagline; Michael Beirut on corporate identity and taglines.
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Entries for June 2004
John Gruber on the whole Dashboard/Konfabulator thing
John Gruber on the whole Dashboard/Konfabulator thing. “Bullshit. Dashboard is not a rip-off of Konfabulator.” I concur.
Lawsuit alleges that Orkut (the person) stole
Lawsuit alleges that Orkut (the person) stole some of the code to make Orkut (the site) for Google. I bet Orkut didn’t tell Google about any of this. I wonder what will happen to his further involvement at Google if the allegations are true?
WebOS, Apple-style
Interesting note on Dave Hyatt’s site about Dashboard and the version of Safari that will ship with Tiger (Hyatt is the lead developer on Safari):
[The Dashboard widgets] are Web pages, plain and simple (with extra features thrown in for added measure). Apple’s own web site says “build your own widgets using the JavaScript language”, but that’s sort of misleading. The widgets are HTML+CSS+JS. They are not some JS-only thing.
So Dashboard is perhaps a bit more like IE4’s Active Desktop than Konfabulator (Konfab is pissed at Apple for ripping them off).
His post also hints a couple of times to WebCore changes to faciliate Dashboard features and the RSS/Atom features in Safari: “each widget is just a web page, and so you have the full power of WebKit behind each one… CSS2, DOM2, JS, HTML, XMLHttpRequest, Flash, Quicktime, Java, etc.” and “fixes to WebCore to support Safari RSS and Dashboard”. This is really quite exciting. RSS/Atom parsing will be built right into the OS. With Webcore, Dashboard, and Apache on OS X, the lines are blurring between apps and Web apps. Nothing new (hello, push), but it’s nice to see action in this area.
Threetwoone diagrams of connections between countries, people
Threetwoone diagrams of connections between countries, people in the bible, large corporations, etc.. It’s like the works of Mark Lombardi displayed in Visio.
Great response in the Watson/Sun thread
Great response in the Watson/Sun thread. “I grow table grapes. Once I sell a box to NY city, it is gone forever. I want to do what Karelia does. Sell the box to NY city and then sell it again to Sun and write a self serving note telling my customer in NY that he got to look (but not eat) at the box for a few days before I re-sold it to Sun.”
The Morning News introduces their own text ad system
The Morning News introduces their own text ad system. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but it was a bit jarring to encounter a Gawker ad in there this morning.
EFF decides on 10 patents to fight in
EFF decides on 10 patents to fight in their Patent Busting Project. VoIP, personalized subdomains, online testing, and video game emulators are among the patents they’re pursuing.
Coudal redesigns; it’s delightfully self-indulgent
Coudal redesigns; it’s delightfully self-indulgent.
A “the terrorists have already won” randomizer
A “the terrorists have already won” randomizer. A favorite: “If a man can’t attend a rock concert with a fried chicken bucket on his head, that means the terrorists have already won!”
Review of 37signal’s Building of Basecamp seminar
Review of 37signal’s Building of Basecamp seminar.
Dogs for rent in Japan, $25/hr
Dogs for rent in Japan, $25/hr. For more money, overnight rentals are available.
Comparing Atlantas in vintage and contemporary photos
Comparing Atlantas in vintage and contemporary photos. This is darn cool.
UPS to begin repairing laptops for all
UPS to begin repairing laptops for all Toshiba customers in US. “Moving a unit around and getting replacement parts consumes most of the time. The actual service only takes about an hour.”
Article about and interview with Plain Layne creator
Article about and interview with Plain Layne creator. “It was fiction in a hurry.” I’ve been calling it realtime fiction.
Flickr’s calendar view is very very cool
Flickr’s calendar view is very very cool. Seen any other neat ways to display photo albums?
Watson technology sold to Sun
Big announcement in the small world of Mac software developers: Karelia Software has sold the technology behind Watson, one of my favorite OS X apps, to an undisclosed “large company” *cough* Sun *cough*. This means Watson will cease to be distributed at the end of July and will cease being supported on October 5, 2004:
As part of the transition, Karelia is planning on having Watson reach its “end of life” on October 5, 2004. After this end-of-life date, Karelia will not be able to fully support and maintain Watson. (Between now and then, Watson will continue to be fully supported.) Hopefully, by that timeframe, the company will have announced a new product that Watson users should be able to migrate to.
Some Web sites that Watson connects to change frequently, so some modules (see below) tend to break frequently. This means that after the end-of-life date for Watson, some tools in Watson will no longer function. Many other tools, connecting to less volatile Web sites, may work for a long time after that date.
I use the movies feature all the time and it will probably cease operation a couple of months after the end-of-life date. But the FAQ offers hope; a new version built by said “large company” is in the works:
Having a large company create and distribute a Watson-like desktop application to access Web services was a great fit for the vision of Watson. Not only can their reincarnation of Watson function on multiple platforms, they will have the resources and clout to bring more and better content to the desktop. And of course, we’ve worked hard to ensure that the new program will function splendidly on Macs!
And so they are…here’s a weblog entry detailing Project Alameda, a rather Watson-esque that does a bit of search, shopping (@ Amazon), and newsreading. Sun missed the whole Web browser thing, but it looks like they’re going to give the microcontent browser a go. Very interesting.
Konfabulator developer pissed at Apple, says OS
Konfabulator developer pissed at Apple, says OS X 10.4’s Dashboard is a copy of his program. Haven’t there been several Konfabulator-type apps on various OSes before Konf. came along? Anyone remember any of them?
Ashcroft on Big Brother and the Internet
kottke.org reader Andrew sends along this link to an essay called Keep Big Brother’s Hands Off the Internet by none other than the reigning US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, then a Senator from the great state of Missouri:
There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?
The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value. Two hundred years of court decisions have stood in defense of this fundamental right. The state’s interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizens’ Bill of Rights.
That doesn’t sound like the John Ashcroft we know and love. To use the charming language of the anti-Kerry folks, that’s a big stack of waffles. Two things: 1) the sitting President at the time (Clinton) was a Democrat, and 2) this was before September 11th. In politics, the opposition is always wrong and with terrorists running around, hiding in your carry-on luggage and in Internet chat rooms, everyone is the opposition.
I also found this gem from Ashcroft’s remarks on child pornography and peer-to-peer networks:
Peer-to-peer is unlike ordinary use of the Internet, where thousands of users’ computers link to a main Internet server. Peer-to-peer networks allow users, through installation of peer-to-peer software, to go online and connect their computers directly to one another.
You know, in the event of a terrorist or nuclear attack that could take out the main Internet server, we should invent a worldwide network of computers such that the network remains robust when individual nodes are taken out. We could call it the Internet. It’s so crazy, it just might work.
A Singaporean woman texts 36 wpm on her
A Singaporean woman texts 36 wpm on her cell phone, sets world record.
Nicely designed British fruit and veg postage stamps
Nicely designed British fruit and veg postage stamps. They come with stickers to affix to the stamps.
Watch Safari’s RSS reader in action
Watch Safari’s RSS reader in action. Looks pretty slick. Gosh, who would have thought they would put an RSS reader in Safari?
Sneak preview of Tiger, aka OS X 10.4
Sneak preview of Tiger, aka OS X 10.4. Computer-wide search, dashboard widgets, task automation (woo!), smart folders (drool), and a new version of Safari with newsreading capabilities.
Lip Venom and similar glosses plump to
Lip Venom and similar glosses plump to deliver fuller, bee-stung lips.
Plain Layne hoax gets some play in the Mercury News
Plain Layne hoax gets some play in the Mercury News.
Hoefler Type Foundry renamed Hoefler and Frere-Jones
Hoefler Type Foundry renamed Hoefler and Frere-Jones. With Tobias’s brother Sasha going great guns at the NYer as their pop critic, 2004 is the year of Frere-Jones.
Donate $5 or more to the National Multiple
Donate $5 or more to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and qualify to win a Gmail acct.. A good cause. Also, the number of people without Gmail accts. must be approaching zero at this point.
Ronald Reagan’s son gives an interview with the NY Times
Ronald Reagan’s son gives an interview with the NY Times. Sometimes the apple falls far, far from the tree.
kottke.org redesign
My long personal nightmare is over. The redesign is live. More or less. You folks in the newsreaders might want to launch a browser and check it out (quaint I know, but humor me).
You wouldn’t know it by looking at it, but I’ve been working on this design for almost two years. You read that correctly. It’s ridiculous. There were two major false starts, I moved across the country, freelanced, got distracted by NYC, spent a month in Paris, got a job, updated kottke.org near-daily, and made incremental improvements to the site, most of which are rolled up in the new design. The biggest reason for the delay was kottke.org itself…adding new features to it (photo albums, remaindered links, book & movie reviews), keeping it updated with fresh content, and not really needing to redo what was a perfectly serviceable design (especiallly with the incremental design tweaks). This design has been a very off and on affair to produce and finish…lots of off and very little on.
So anyway, you’re probably thinking it’s not much to look at. It’s spare, not flashy, and looks a lot like the old design, especially the home page. Here are a few of the changes I made and why:
- The only site-wide navigation is at the top of the page (and repeated at the bottom). Most of the site can be reached easily from those four links (home, archives, about, contact). Tried to make it very simple.
- The yellow-green thing at the top is a tag. Like the red tag on Levi’s jeans or even the red stripe on Prada shoes. It’s small, out of the way, but when you see it on something, you know exactly what you’re holding in your hands. Some may recognize the tag’s kinship to the one I designed for 0sil8. This is intentional for reasons that will become clear at some point in the (hopefully near) future.
- For transition purposes, the tag is currently that same yellow-green as the header of the last design. It may change color or design at some point.
MostSome pages on the site are valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. CSS for layout. The ghost of Siegel has been exorcised. The cobbler’s children have shoes at last.- Every page is the front page of the site. People dropping in for the first time from Google or from another weblog should be able to figure out where they are from the contextual information in the right-hand sidebar of most pages (monthly archive pages and individual archive pages especially.)
- New about page. I rolled the “about Jason”, “about kottke.org”, and FAQ pages into one page. And (bad) photos of me.
- Speaking of photos, the photo albums now use the same template as the rest of the site. Check out the NYC High Line photos for example. Use the left and right halves of each photo to navigate back and next…the spacebar will also get you to the next photo. (Crap, my JavaScript for spacebar navigation isn’t working on Firefox.)
- Trackbacks are being accepted going forward and are listed on individual archive pages.
- I mentioned false starts above. Late last year, I had an entire design that I’d been working on for almost 9 months (on and off) done in Photoshop, ready to be cut up and coded. It was boxy, had a tiled background, diagonal stripes, drop shadows, and lots of ornamental finishes. It was pretty, clean, lots of personality, a nice design all the way around. And if there’s a dominant visual style (trend? fad?) right now, that’s it (some fine examples here, here, here, and Lance beat it over the head here). I just didn’t want to go there. So I went in a different direction, partially to avoid the crowd and partially to challenge myself. Do you know how hard it is to design text-heavy Web layouts that don’t use boxes? Boxes are the lazy Web designer’s best friend. ;) I felt bad enough relying on all the horizontal rules.
- The site may not work in your old browser. Heck, it may not work in your new browser. Bug reports on modern browsers are appreciated. If you can’t read this, you’re probably using a pile of crap browser like Netscape 4 or Cello or something. Upgrade to something useful. But you’re not reading this, so just ignore what I said. (Wha?)
- Link color went from red to blue. Don’t know why.
- Tweaked the styles on the remaindered links.
- PC users, you’re missing out. This sucker looks great in Safari, Camino, or Firefox on OS X. Lucida Grande. Smooth type. Wundervoll.
- A tour of some of the best/most representative content on the site is available for new visitors or those wishing to peer deep into the guts of the beast.
- The movie section is on hiatus and will return soonish.
Some things I’m not satisfied with yet:
- The archive page. Almost every weblog has one and for the most part, they’re useless. People can’t easily find things (gosh, maybe that entry was in June 2001), it’s not conducive to relaxed exploration…about the only thing that works is the Google search. I’ve not come up with a satisfying answer to this problem nor have I seen anyone else come up with anything that works well. An area for improvement.
- The tour is not what it could be. Why is there a tour and an archive page? And a front page? Seems like some simplification and/or consolidation could be done here.
And now I’ll stop talking. What do you think? Comments, questions, bug reports, and constructive criticism expected and appreciated.
Results of the 2004 Industrial Design Excellent Awards
Results of the 2004 Industrial Design Excellent Awards.
Webloggers, their babies, and all the coolest baby gear
Webloggers, their babies, and all the coolest baby gear.
8th grade final exam from 1895, Salina, Kansas
8th grade final exam from 1895, Salina, Kansas. “Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.”
It feels really, really good to be validated sometimes
It feels really, really good to be validated sometimes.
Nothing puts the personal in personal Web site like cat anecdotes
Poor Bodhi. It’s storming out and he sure doesn’t like the thunder. He was under the tub for awhile and now he’s cowering under the coffee table. I hope he thinks his God is punishing him for shitting and throwing up all over the place the other day.
Kevin Kelly: iPod + rechargable battery-powered speaker = portable jukebox
Kevin Kelly: iPod + rechargable battery-powered speaker = portable jukebox.
Newly discovered IE browser flaw; experts are
Newly discovered IE browser flaw; experts are telling people not to use Internet Explorer. Step 1: Google “firefox”…
The BBC has virtual replays of Euro 2004 goals as well
The BBC has virtual replays of Euro 2004 goals as well. Shockwave required, but the animation is more detailed than the Flash version I mentioned earlier. Don’t miss all the different camera angles.
Costco keeps labor costs down by paying their employees more
Costco keeps labor costs down by paying their employees more. More pay = less employee turnover = more productivity.
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