September 25, 2005
Painful upgrade to Movabletype 3.2
Despite Six Apart's warm promises of the easiest upgrade ever, upgrading to Movabletype to version 3.2 is everything but painless. I'm not sure how well their strategy goes, leaving enough users out there without a clue, hoping they will be drawn to buy the most expensive upgrade version with included technical support.
There is some sort of support through the MT knowledge base and the MT community forum, and of course, you can always find bits and pieces on the internet. All sorts of puzzle parts of information are cluttered around on the net, you'll find them in various blogs and wikis online. I don't know how many Google searches I've done already, desperately trying to move forward. It feels like walking in a swamp. Along the way, I have consulted Elise's incredibly helpful tutorial site for various times and spent half a night unsuccessfully trying to make a full backup using TypeMover. It's a plugin that's supposed to backup everything of a Movabletype installation, including all your blog comments, commenters data, categories and everything else that's not stored in a MySQL database, if you haven't turned on dynamic template rebuilds. Speaking of, those don't work either in the case of dense, because in order to make them work, I would have to get access to the Apache configuration. Which is of course maintained by my host, and that is probably the same case with the majority of Movabletype users, since we don't all have our very own web server, hosting our sites from our kitchen desk.
So why am I going through this painful upgrade you may ask? The new features of Movabletype 3.2 are nice, but what is really convincing is its new anti-spam functionality. According to Six Apart, that alone will be worth all the hassle. For the past month I have spent an increasing time with blocking off unsoliticed comments by some very persistent texas casino websites. All the time I kept asking myself if this was some sort of private revenge of Mr. Bush's clan, a personal raid following my continued comments about his failure as politician and leader of the United States.
Six Apart says it's the easiest upgrade ever. But apparently I'm not the only one having problems:
cantoni.org
Blogging: MT 3.2 Final - 500 Error Bites
MovableType Weirdness Again
mistressmaryse in the MT forums: "Moveable Type development team: Your software is the MOST difficult installation that I have ever attempted to perform on my website."
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 10:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 11, 2005
MSN Messenger for Mac OS adds common features
As MacWorld reports, Microsoft has released a new version of its Instant Messenger for Mac OS:
Among other features, Messenger 5.0 now has tabbed browsing and users can simultaneously access corporate and personal Messenger accounts and set a unique user status on each. The personal tab allows users to instant message with friends and family, while support for Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 enables enterprise customers to IM in a security-enhanced manner via the corporate tab with colleagues inside and outside the network.
About a week ago I saw screenshots of the upcoming Internet Explorer for Windows Longhorn, now dubbed Vista (if their lawyers can settle current law suits). It featured tabbed browsing and a couple of other enhancements known from open source browsers such as Firefox. It doesn't really surprise me that Microsoft follows a pattern of what it can do best: Let others invent something, watch how it goes, and once people like it and got used to it, snatch it.
Resources:
Firefox
MSN Messenger
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:21 AM | Comments (0)
Macromedia Freehand is the first to go
CNet reports:
FreeHand, Macromedia's popular illustration tool, has been omitted from the company's upcoming developer suite, dubbed Studio 8. Macromedia executives cited "extensive research with our customers" as the reason behind the decision, and not its impending acquisition by Adobe Systems--which current sells a competing product called Illustrator. Adobe announced in April that it would buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion. A Macromedia representative said FreeHand will be sold and supported as a standalone product for the time being.
The question I have is: Which one will they keep, GoLive or Dreamweaver? Personally, I have become accustomed to GoLive, only because it has a superior interface and richer functionality. But Dreamweaver is obviously the de facto choice among most web designers, especially beginners and those who like its workflow with Fireworks and Flash. I am curious what will be dropped next, despite Macromedia's efforts to proclaim it has nothing to do with its recent acquisition by Adobe.
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2005
Ajax, the new kid on the blog
You may know this feeling. You're at a house party and you go to refill your glas of wine. When you're back the people you were talking to are gone. You look around and join a new group of people. And they look at each other and go silent.
It's not your odor or your tipsiness. It's because you're late. They were talking of a hot topic, but no one wants to introduce you to it, give you a short summary of what they were talking about. But hey, it's just a house party. It's all cool.
Sometimes when I read about new trends on the net I feel like being late to the party. It's like everybody else already knows what they were talking about, only I am asking questions. Being the geek I am, despite my efforts to dissolve that image, this is something that bugs me. I admit it. It's less the fact nobody told me about the new hot topic. It's more like "How could I not see it coming?". Because of course I did see it coming. I was just not paying attention. If you're going with the flow on the internet, if you dig really deep into it, then it's almost impossible to not notice any movement in the developers scene. Still, you may oversee something that's going to be the next star, especially when you don't know what it actually is.
Ajax is the new kid on the block. It's just like that with Ajax: on every blog you read, everybody who is talking about it already seems to know more than you. Some act like they are experts, but don't look for links in their blog entries. Frankly, some of these experts have no clue what they're talking about. I told you, it's just like on a house party.
So what is Ajax? The Amsterdam soccer team? A swiss car? Is it the lesser or the greater Ajax in the Illiad by Homer? Kitchen bleach? Or a fictional company in Mickey Mouse? Ajax may have had many meanings in the past. In future however, it is likely these other meanings of the word will be overheard. At least among web developers, information architects and designers, Ajax serves a different purpose. Ajax is a new hype to be, as more and more big companies are actually adopting the technology. Consequently, blogs are tumbling all over pointing out smart usage of Ajax.
Calling Ajax a technology by itself may be a little bit too much. It's more a smart combination of existing technologies within a set of robust rules. It is a common pattern in web evolution: While big players like Adobe and Macromedia (or now Adomedia or Macrobe) are spending a lot of time, marketing and financial efforts to establish and tigthen grounds for their proprietary technologies, it is the webs nature of evolution that finally comes up with a solution that actually works, using existing technologies, without a plugin.
Programmer Mat Hertel in Germany writes a blog about Ajax. He defines it as follows:
Ajax = Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (+ DHTML)
Ajax programming is an interesting way of bringing real interactivity to web applications by using the proven internet technologies HTML and JavaScript.
You can find some Ajax demos on Mat's website. If you're more experience driven than interested in digging in code, go check out Googles Earth- and Moon-map projects or Amazon's Diamond Search engine.
Resources:
Technorati search on Ajax
Ajax = Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (+ DHTML)
Ajax demos
The Amsterdam soccer team
Ajax, a swiss car
Ajax, King of Salamis in ancient Greece
Ajax, a kitchen cleaner containing bleach
Ajax, a fictional company in Mickey Mouse cartoons
Adobe bought Macromedia
Google earth map and satelite pictures
Google moon map
Amazon's Diamond Search engine.
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:47 AM | Comments (1)
June 07, 2005
It's true.
It was Monday morning and the conference room of the Moscone Center in San Francisco was filled with over 3,800 people, most of them developers. Keynotes of Apples Steve Jobs are always highly anticipated. Historically, it has happened before expectations were running high before a keynote speech of Steve Jobs. Too high sometimes. In some years, the actual news were not able to fulfill the dreams pushed up by rumors and bunch of wishful thinking. Apple is this kind of dreams-come-true company, one of the few that's left, that is about spirit and making things actually happen. At most times Apple has done this in an astonishing yet simple and very elegant sort of way.
It didn't take long until everyone in the Moscone conference room would hold his breath for a second, just moments before falling into applause and laughter, half proudly, half shocked. "It's true." was written in big letters on the black screen of a Keynote slide. The e was shifted down below the line, just like, yes—exactly like in the Intel-logo.
Apple had announced it would shift its entire line of products over to use Intel chips. Not from now on, not tomorrow, but within the next two years. Stocks for Intel and Apple rose that day, for Apple it was 2%. On Tuesday, Apple fell for 8%—not as low as before.
So yes, that means it's a good thing, right? A controversy begun. It had been simmering for a while, caused by the various rumors that had made their way from blog sphere to the surface of Cnet news and the Wallstreet Journal. "It can't be" was the immediate reaction of the community of Mac enthusiasts. Quickly, old experts emerged from respectable Mac veteran sites such as MacNN, finding various reasons why it was never possible Apple would seriously consider such a step.
And yet it has become reality. And there are good reasons why. The first I can think of is business. Jobs made it transparent in clear words when he said "We have great products in line... And IBM just isn't getting us that far...". So it clearly is about the growth and fate of the company. Wether it's also a decision about users is something only the future can tell. But Jobs didn't fall short in making sure everyone in the conference hall understand that Apple is indeed caring for developers and consumers. To put it simple, they made sure this won't fail.
The transition phase of two years is accompanied by a number of concepts that make it as smooth and easy as possible, in a very typical Apple-sort of way. Apple has taken all necessary steps to provide help for developers making the shift. Apple knows development of software is all about costs. Apple also knows, a crucial keypoint in making software for the Mac in the first place is having people using it, lots of people, and to never let those users down. And the third keypoint Apple is aware of is psychology. There had been three major transitions in the life of Macintosh already. Not all of them had happened that smoothly, none of them so quickly. This is going to be a major transition from a technical point of view. From a psychological point of view, regarding the user experience, there should be no experience at all—if it is not one that's very much improved.
Apple has set up developer boxes with both, Intel- and IBM-PowerPC-processors. They can't have those incredible G5/Intel machines float around, so of course, they want them back after development cycle. Apple has also prepared its own developer suite called Xcode for a smooth transition. A simple check box is suppused to grant output of binary code that works on both, Intel- and PowerPC-processors. And for the users of Mac OS X, Apple installs Rosetta in its next version of the operating system. Rosetta will translate the binary code on the fly, giving a smooth experience of programs starting seemlessly, even if they have not been compiled for OS X running on Intel. Jobs showed off this new function by using both, Photoshop and the Microsoft Office suite on a Mac with Intel inside.
For the past five years, Jobs said, Apple's Mac OS X had been leading a secret shadow life. Yes, there was a building on the Apple campus in which Apple had secretly developed the version of thes system for the day X, the day when they had to make the switch. It was a plan B solution, some people at Apple had never dreamt it would become true one day.
So what's the conclusion. Will this be a good thing for us? I guess that's a question asked too early. One day we might ask though what would have happened if Apple wouldn't have made this important move.
Additional sources:
Prior to the announcement:
Forbes: Why Apple can't embrace Intel
MacNN: Apple-Intel talks intended to pressure IBM
Associated Press: Markets stay strong on Apple-Intel report
Top Tech News: Apple, Intel Rumored To Be in Talks
Wired Magazine: Apple Switching to Intel Chips?
Information Week: The Dream Of x86-Capable Macs Remains Elusive
Macworld: Analysts: Apple, Intel talks probably not about PCs
After the announcement:
Wired Magazine: Jobs Drops Da Intel Bomb
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 05:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 31, 2005
Cézanne is alive!
The innovative font foundry P22 has announced Cézanne Pro, an improved version of its popular Cézanne font. Cézanne Pro makes use of powerful OpenType features: Letter shapes change randomly, making the font look less homogenous. A text written in Cézanne Pro will give the human eye the illusion to be actually hand written. This shows how far typography has developed in the past couple of years, following the desktop revolution. Unfortunately, most of modern typographic features are still limted to print technologies, since the web has not found a solution yet for practical typographic freedom.
OpenType is a technology standard founded by Adobe, Microsoft and Montotype. So far, only Adobe Software such as InDesign makes use of OpenType, whereas Quark Xpress is still ignoring its powerful typographic features.
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:08 AM | Comments (0)
iPhone or SkypePod?
Engadget picked it up from The Wireless Weblog. Apparently Skype had enough of dealing with reluctant phone companies and hesitant network vendors:
Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom announced the company plans to put out a VoWLAN phone, which will allow customers to connect to the Skype voice network via WiFi. Not too many specifics were given, other than that it’ll be out later this year. Let’s hope they inject it with a little more style than Vonage’s retro-cell aesthetic employed on the UTStarcom F1000, their first offering in the WiFi phone department.
To pull this off, what Skype needs to do right is simple and twofolded. One, they need to make an excellent phone with seamless software/hardware integration. Just like the iPod . Two, they need to be able to create an enormous hype within three to four years, just like the iPod did. Hold on a second.—"Mr. Jobs? There is a phone call for you from Mr. Niklas Zennstrom?.."
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 05:41 AM | Comments (0)
May 22, 2005
Big Google is watching you
Seattle Times Columnist Charles Bermant tells you about Gmail, Google's new email service. It's known that Google scans your email.
There are a lot of reasons some people will hate this, on principle. It is an invasion of privacy, a sneaky way to sell you something, proof that no matter how hip a company may seem, when they get a little success, they start acting like Big Brother.
I conclude with Bermant on the relevance of this issue. Google's search engine algorythms are applied to my email. So what? Sure I like privacy. But seriously, do you really believe you've got privacy when you're surfing the web?
When the web received the omnipotent label e-commerce not so long ago, and everything was about "Cool... But how do I make money with it?", everybody was concerned about Cookies. They were considered extremely bad, spies on your hard disk, little agents that check your user behaviour and send back that information to the mothership, so next time you're visiting Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, you'll see banners based on that information about you. Bermant continues:
It also bears notice that the same scanning technology is what separates out the spam. And it's not like an actual person is reading our messages, sitting in a dark room and saying, "Charlie is writing about leather, so I'll just hook him up with the Coach Web page." It's done by a machine at the speed of light that doesn't take the time to examine daily minutiae.
There's no other notion but "What's the biggie" in this article. And that's how much of a matter it is--to me at least.
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 01:43 AM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2005
As We May Think
Why did computers come to adopt the GUI as their primary mode of interaction, and how did the GUI evolve to be the way it is today?--A very interesting and deep historic overview of the GUI (graphical user interface). A must read for everyone who's interested in the foundation of Information Architecture and Usability.
Like many developments in the history of computing, some of the ideas for a GUI computer were thought of long before the technology was even available to build such a machine. One of the first people to express these ideas was Vannevar Bush. In the early 1930s he first wrote of a device he called the "Memex," which he envisioned as looking like a desk with two touch screen graphical displays, a keyboard, and a scanner attached to it. It would allow the user to access all human knowledge using connections very similar to how hyperlinks work. At this point, the digital computer had not been invented, so there was no way for such a device to actually work, and Bush's ideas were not widely read or discussed at that time. However, starting in about 1937 several groups around the world started constructing digital computers. World War II provided much of the motivation and funding to produce programmable calculating machines, for everything from calculating artillery firing tables to cracking the enemy's secret codes. The perfection and commercial production of vacuum tubes provided the fast switching mechanisms these computers needed to be useful. In 1945, Bush revisited his older ideas in an article entitled "As We May Think," which was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and it was this essay that inspired a young Douglas Englebart to try and actually build such a machine.
Related Resources:
Interaction Design
Boxes & Arrows
IA Institute Library
IA Wiki
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 07:14 AM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2005
Third party developer bridges gap between Sidekick and Mac OS
The HipTop Sidekick, available with a T-Mobile plan, can now be synchronized with Macs. The software comes from Marc Space, who is also author of software that lets you sync Pocket PCs with Macs. On his website Space describes the features:
The Missing Sync for hiptop synchronizes your contacts, calendar events and to-dos between your T-Mobile Sidekick and Mac OS X's Address Book and iCal applications. The Missing Sync uses Apple's iSync technology to synchronize your data with the T-Mobile Sidekick's Web-based Desktop Interface. Any changes are then transmitted right over-the-air to your Sidekick... Synchronize iCal calendar events and to-do items, Address Book contact information over-the-air.
HipTop's most prominent investor is Apple co founder Steve Wozniak. One was about to wonder when HipTop would finally find time to add Mac compatibility. Rumor goes it was T-Mobile who didn't have much interest in promoting Mac compatibility, since it doesn't exactly match their own policy of cutting down features of devices, compromising abilities to operate with multiple technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier.
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)
September 25, 2004
Find your iPod to find your keys
Speaking of innovations, here is another one. You're gonna love this. It's something that makes your iPod even more useful. Griffin Technology came out with a plugin flashlight for your iPod. Yes, you can find your keys with it now. Isn't that amazing? Now you never have to look for your keys again. You just have to look for your iPod, and then look for that little white thingy that plugs into it, and voila, you have a flashlight and now you can look up your keys. That's a really useful $400 flashlight.
Am I the only one who finds that amusing, or do we all want to go out in clustered groups now, joining the hordes who came late to the iPod shopping party and arm ourselves with a brand new Griffin iPod flashlight? We can test it then and find out if it actually is as useful as promised.
But you know, I shouldn't be that harsh. Cause it's really hard. I mean, what do you do if you're third party developer for an uber-fetish. How can you top functionality of something that does, well, play music everywhere you go? Because Apple doesn't want to come up with a real PDA, you can already put text and your calendar dates on your iPod. So you can look up which date you missed cause you couldn't find your keys.
At least it sounds a lot cooler to say "I didn't hear your call cause I was listening to my iPod", even though that won't bring her back to you.
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)
Skip or Skype
Every now and then, in between inventions like wars for presidency and frappucino light, somebody comes up with an idea that actually will change things. Just most people wouldn't think it would. In most cases it's not even a real invention. Often it's just recognizing something, seeing the time has come and we are ready for it.
Talking over the internet is such a thing. The idea is by far not new. Up to date, there must have been a good dozen voice over internet programs out there, all following their own protocols, all more or less flaky, crashing, disconnecting, worse than cells, but yet attempting to convince people to actually buy and use them. Sound is almost always choppy, most basic functions simply don't work. So how come one might be successful over another, if they're all of the same bad quality? Like with all brilliant solutions, the answer is simple. Even better, it is simplicity itself.
It's Skype, and it's for free. Plus, it works.
Skype sells itself with the line "Internet telephony that just works". That's not really an original line, except for the fact, it's actually true. I have been trying Skype for several times now, calling people online and -- here is the thing that makes the biggest difference -- also calling people in real life. Yes, that is land lines, cell phones, you know, the real world. Forget AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, iChat, Jabber and what else. You may have been fooled for some time, but come on, that was never really chatting! That was typing, dammit. And for every little 'oh!' and 'ah!', for every moan and smile, every blink of our eyes and the grumble in our bellies we had to come up with new incarnations of these ubiquitous smileys. They were never meant to go beyond the tee, you know. All of a sudden, you could find them in email, for christs sake, and an asterisk after an 's' meant something more than just a snake that spits, or something.
Yeah, I'm pushing it a little. I must admit I have been chatting too, or attempted it at least, but it didn't really work for me. Except if I really wanted to talk to someone and I just couldn't do it over the phone. Then it worked, as a beta version of real talking. It worked, but oh how clumsy.
So thank god, someone found out what people have been missing. Someone smart counted one and one together and came up with that little program called Skype. It rhymes with 'hype' -- almost scary how good they are in marketing, isn't it, and then the app even actually works! What an achievement. Hey, Microsofts and Apples across the planet, if you're listening, they did it, and they didn't ask you guys first. They just did what they thought was right, and it turns out more and more people don't think about who did it, if it just works.
Skype is available for all major platforms, it's a free download, and it's connecting to the real world. That's the summary formula of its success. Can you read that, Apple and big Micro, or do I have to repeat myself?
So how good is Skype, you're asking? Well, it works. It's like the first phone. It worked. It didn't look elegantly; it didn't work smoothly, sound was low, far and thin. It was not really amazing as an experience. But hey, the simple fact it worked at all, wasn't that something? That was at least the breakthrough of the century of that time. With Skype, well, I wouldn't go that far. But as long as it works, who cares if it's the breakthrough of the century. What matters is, people will start using it. And the last time that happened, we ended up with something we couldn't live anymore without these days. If you haven't guessed it, it's what you're looking at.
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 02:57 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 11, 2004
How Microsoft does it
Microsoft Wins 'Tabbed Browsing' Patent
This is a perfect example of Microsofts policy: Step 1, let the Open Source community find and develop a technology solution. Step 2, take it and file a patent, permitting its innovators from using it.
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 05:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 05, 2004
OP - What?
In his blog Fishbowl, Charles Miller describes what he sees as flaws of the current version of OPML. My experience with OPML is limited. I have been looking for a notebook application that would run on OS X and allow me to keep track of entries easily for a long time. Among other things, the extensive hoist- and search functions of Hog Bay Notebook were convincing me to give this application a try. So far it has been a very pleasant experience.
Here are a few unique features of Hog Bay Notebook:
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 10:05 AM | TrackBack
OP - What?
In his blog Fishbowl, Charles Miller describes what he sees as flaws of the current version of OPML. My experience with OPML is limited. I have been looking for a notebook application that would run on OS X and allow me to keep track of entries easily for a long time. Among other things, the extensive hoist- and search functions of Hog Bay Notebook were convincing me to give this application a try. So far it has been a very pleasant experience.
Here are a few unique features of Hog Bay Notebook: