Banapana » software http://banapana.com This is your mind on media. Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:24:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Chrome OS Breeds Metaphors and Debate http://banapana.com/uncategorized/chrome-os-breeds-metaphors-and-debate http://banapana.com/uncategorized/chrome-os-breeds-metaphors-and-debate#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:15:44 +0000 Russell Warner http://banapana.com/?p=868 I’m going to do something I don’t often do on this blog and that is jump on the blogging band-wagon that is the discussion of the Google Chrome OS announced today. From MacWorld to the Washington Post, Google has clearly made an impact on the world with its announcement that it will be working on a new operating system that will largely be centralized around the web and Google’s web browser, Google Chrome. But one idea, that’s been fairly pervasive in the conversation: that file systems and other “onboard” applications might go away—seems to point to a new paradigm to computing, and it’s spawned a lot of metaphors in the discussion. It’s also wrong.

My favorite metaphor so far hails from Douglas Rushkoff at the Daily Beast. In his editorial he mentions that the current desktop regime that got its start in the late 70s and early 80s was a development akin to road-makers requiring new cars and car manufacturers requiring new roads. The hardware got faster, so the software got more bloated, so the hardware needed to be faster. On that point, I would have to agree. There’s no question in my mind that some software bloat is totally out-of-control as well as overpriced—so much so that I made a concerted effort to opt-out about a year ago. To this day, Adobe’s software is the only software on my Mac that regularly (and predictably) crashes and I can’t stand that I can’t find an alternative for Illustrator even when I’ve found a great alternative for Photoshop. However, I digress.

The software got more bloated and sloppy and especially-so among some camps but it didn’t have to. There was very little market pressure in the OS industry and that really just made for a feature-focused attitude (read: Vista), rather than a fine-tuning attitude. Snow Leopard (Apple’s latest Mac OS version) will actually decrease the memory footprint of the OS, as well as speed it up during wake up and shut down. So it’s not by necessity that software-makers let their software get bloated, it’s that the bloat stems from misplaced incentives. When your the dominant player in the market, the incentive is to use your economy-of-scale (read more coders) to out-pace the other guy in innovations and features, not clean house. Google won’t escape this incentive. People have already hinted that as the company as moved away from its core technological expertise (search!) the search results are not as good as they used to be.

But this positioning of Google Chrome as an OS, and it’s focus on the network, still overlooks the fact that people view their own media as valuable (and as property) and keeping all your photos on Flickr is not as good as sharing photos on Flickr while still having them in some file archive on a local machine. I would predict that’s never going to change.1 However, I also don’t think that the netbooks that Google Chrome will most likely end up on are any different than iphones (with the exception of being much, much less slick)—they’re not anyone’s first and only computer–they’re certainly not going to become the hub of the media center in a household. And just like with the iPhone and iPod, the model that naturally evolves is a cloud-desktop hybrid. There are layers of privacy to these sorts of hybrids and as people become more and more aware of threats to their media, they will want more protection. That means that some stuff, meant for my eyes only, stays on my computer, in my vault, while other material (like my twitter messages) gets pretty much permanently embedded online.2

I think the metaphor that best suits what will happen because of the Google Chrome OS is not really much of a metaphor at all. It will be a component in an iTunes-like world. I have my music (without DRM now) all on a personal machine. I can back that up. Occasionally, I allow some of it to be streamed to others in my office. I can move it up to an online back-up resource or I can move it to my iPod. (I even occasionally—with the permission of the artist—host a file for Blip.fm.) It’s not all in the cloud. It’s not all on the desktop. It is however rarely on only one device.3 Google wants to run software through the browser and that makes some sense. I think it will force software developers to re-consider their design strategies and worry more about reliability and speed and be more tentative about new features (though I hope they learn how to come out of a beta phase). But I don’t think that will at all change the fact that people will run want to run programs offline. I see no point in an online version Illustrator where I create my art (in utero) entirely online. I don’t want anyone looking at my work in its middle stages. I will want to store things locally and only locally and I don’t think Google plans to stop them.

  1. To understand why I predict that, ask yourself why the DRM dragon has largely been slayed. ↩

  2. That is to say, much like email, if I wanted to pull down all my twitter messages, I’m not sure that I could. There’s liable to be copies in lots of places. ↩

  3. Also, despite some “walled-garden” naysayers of Apple, iTunes has always played mp3s and there are lots and lots of places for my to buy music, other than on the iTunes store. ↩

]]> http://banapana.com/uncategorized/chrome-os-breeds-metaphors-and-debate/feed 0 Writing Versus Word Processing http://banapana.com/uncategorized/writing-versus-word-processing http://banapana.com/uncategorized/writing-versus-word-processing#comments Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:12:32 +0000 admin http://www.banapana.com/interface/writing-versus-word-processing They are clearly not the same thing—writing and word processing. One is an artform, the other a kind of wrestling, or clearly some derivation of manufacturing. I prefer to write as opposed to word process. And in fact, I still mostly (this blog being a glaring exception) write by hand. ((Definitely, all of my fiction is written long form.)) When it came to entering my scribblings into a digital format I long preferred simple text editors to the complexity of word processors. With word processors, I too often found myself distracted by instances of multiple paragraphs suddenly reformatting themselves, cursors leaping off the ends of lines, never being able to zoom in properly on the text, and on and on. For something as simple as a word processor very few companies have ever gotten it right. This is so much the case, that the one program I do use, I don’t refer to as a word processer. It’s just something other than a word processer clearly by design: Scrivener. It is the iTunes of writing. It is what Google was to the web—something to make the whole affair less confusing. The organization tools are awesome. And get this, you just write in text! You format later. And your documents are stored in text! Never worry about losing a document because you used some Mac OS 7 word processor. You can switch into a full screen mode so you can really focus. The best, most awesome interface innovation?—the entry point for the text stays in the vertical center of the screen. I know, it sounds like a mere triviality, but after you use it, you wonder what the hell these word processor programmers were thinking! Don’t take my word, listen to Steven Poole on his blog:

Pretty old-skool, huh? It’s perfect: far less temptation to switch to a browser window, much better concentration on the text in front of you. WriteRoom has a “typewriter-scrolling mode”, so that the line you are typing is always centred in the screen, not forever threatening to drop off the bottom, and what you have already written scrolls rapidly up off the top of the screen, dissuading you from idly rereading it. It’s a bit like the endless roll of typewriter paper on which Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road.

I could go on, but I will let Virginia Heffernan do it more lithely than I would.

]]> http://banapana.com/uncategorized/writing-versus-word-processing/feed 0 Desktop/Cloud Hybrid Software Will Win http://banapana.com/the-hivemind/a-hybrid-standard-for-software http://banapana.com/the-hivemind/a-hybrid-standard-for-software#comments Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:12:08 +0000 admin http://www.banapana.com/tactile-media/a-hybrid-standard-for-software There have been a lot of technology pundits discussing the demise of the desktop—primarily arguing that the desktop is going to get sucked in to the browser. And there has been a lot of conversation about switching from the desktop to “the cloud”—the idea of the network as the computer. In a funny comment in that Wired article I just linked to, Clay Shirky is quoted as saying that when Thomas Watson estimated that the world only needed five computers, his estimate was off by four. It rings true because it is a simple and funny observation, but this new view of the network as the computer is a binary view, problematic because as software engineers still tend to do, the solution takes the user into account second and not first. A user-first outlook for most software demands of it that it be a desktop-cloud hybrid—with good reason. And a desktop-cloud hybrid won’t suck the OS in the browser, it will suck the browser into all the apps that a user has. I want to point out two real successes in this regard first, and then look at gaps in the current software offerings out there.

iTunes

I think the runaway winner of this particular concept category—the desktop/cloud hybrid—has got to be iTunes. On the desktop, it is the ultimate organizer for your music (and video) files. It helps you move from atom media (the CD) to new media (digital). And there are several ways for it to interoperate with your home stereo system (and iPod for mobile use). To paraphrase, iTunes has great local functionaliy. And as far as it’s cloud functionality is concerned, it catalogs and names albums and tracks through CDDB. It allows you to listen to steaming music through its radio function or other iTunes users on the local network; as well as download podcasts. And it lets you outright purchase music from the online store, which in itself is a pretty savvy application. So, iTunes also functions exceptionally in your local cloud and the big cloud.

DRM and monopoly arguments aside, part of iTunes’ success is that it is available to you on multiple computers and multiple devices.1 It’s on the desktop and it’s in the cloud. In fact, it’s more than that. It is local to the computer you are on at the moment, it lets you access your music elsewhere in your private cloud ((your home desktop, work desktop, laptop, ipod, iphone, etc.)) and it operates in the public cloud. And with special regard to the iTunes store, I think it is imperative for software developers to note that iTunes has taken the reverse strategy of many online efforts; that is, rather than move its application to the browser, it has moved the browser into the application.

NetNewsWire

The guys at Newsgator get this too. NetNewsWire (for those that don’t know) is a really nice RSS feed reader for the Mac OS that does a couple of really important things that I’ve already noted here. One, you can set up NetNewsWire on multiple computers (work, home) and they synchronize to each other. To boot, if you’re away from your computers (or in my case, on a PC), you can hit your feeds through any web browser. And it’s interesting to note that NetNewsWire has also moved the browser into its own structure. While you can set up your preferences so that NetNewsWire opens your favorite browser to let you read a full article on a web page, the software will also allow you to open the article’s web page right inside the NetNewsWire display pane. On a large monitor (in my opinion) this is the way to go. It operates locally, letting you read flagged items even if you’re off the net, it operates on your private cloud by synchronizing among your own machines and devices, and it operates in the big cloud.

Email!

Duh. I won’t speak too much to this example accept to point out that unless you’ve switched to the IMAP standard then your email isn’t quite yet the local/cloud hybrid it could be. This is why I primarily think that IMAP is really the standard of the future for email.

Investigating the Gap

Of course, a lot of Web 2.0 applications aren’t things that we need access to all the time.2 I love del.icio.us but it’s a fact that if I can’t get to any pages on the web then I likely don’t need to get to the bookmarks for those pages either. I can’t think of a local use (on my own computer, off the net) for something like Facebook either. These more social kinds of Web 2.0 sites don’t seem to gain value from being anything other than a browser dependent app. But I would still bet that the local/cloud hybrid app that did figure out why you need it locally would beat out the cloud-only apps after a while.

It strikes me that productivty apps—specifically where a user is generating a piece of content for their own use—is really where the hybrid model becomes an imperative. The simplest example I can think of is to do lists. For the Mac there’s a beautiful application called Things that lets you track all your tasks—on one computer. It doesn’t synch with other versions of itself over the net on your other machines, and it doesn’t have an alternate web interface. And web sites like Remember the Milk, Tada, and Todoist all have the problem that they can only be accessed throgh the web and can’t operate locally off the net and then “catch up” later.3 Until either of those desktop/cloud applications accomplish that, for all their sorting and priotizing and color-coding capabilities, they just don’t beat a notebook in my pocket.

Google Apps is great and I keep much of my writing there for convenient access on multiple computers and platforms, but at the end of the day, I have to transfer the writing to some kind of program that will give me the format options that I need. It’s not terribly inconvient but it’s not effecient either. The winner, in my book, will be the word processor that can sync with multiple copies of itself on multiple platforms and still make the text available to the user online when no copy of the desktop app is available.4

And just off the top of my head, another sure winner in this hybrid category would be a merger of Delicious Monster and Amazon—two great tastes that could taste great together.

Going Forward, and Really Forward

It’s just a simple fact that as any technology development gets more complex, the probability of a malfunction increases as well. The idea of always-on internet connections is flawed significantly in this way. Software and data that exists only in the cloud is going to be completely unavailable some of the time. Software that exists only on the desktop is going to squirrel data away in locations that we can’t get to, or in formats we can’t access elsewhere in the cloud. But software that takes the user into account first will make sure that data is available on or off the net, privately and/or publicly, and in standard formats. Software that takes a user’s point of view first will win (in an open competition).

When you think about a really wild augmented-reality future, where Facebook profiles appear over people’s heads on your personal HUD and Google Maps data is laid out over the real world, the value of hybrid local/cloud software becomes much more obvious.5 In the case of a world like that, falling off the network for a moment due to some hiccup in the datastream would result in a literal kind of blindness. It would appear as if half of your visual conception of the world had vanished, and even if it was for only a moment it would have to disconcerting—like losing your real vision for only a second or two would be. Local/cloud synchronization solves this problem.

This kind of data blindness is exactly what results when a user’s personal data doesn’t permeate through the multiple layers of software (and privacy) that an individual user regularly encounters. Users need their content on their computer, on their other computers, on other’s computers, on their platform and on other platforms, on their cell phone, on their iPod, on their TV, and on and on. The idea of cloud computing only partly solves that problem in that there’s only one big cloud. Users really need their own cloud. They need it for senitive data that they need to get on multiple machines. They need it for privacy. And the synchronization of data both locally and in a big cloud backpack ensures the safety of their data. I want my mp3s. But it’s also nice to stream them from my desktop to my laptop or stereo. And a big cloud backup wouldn’t hurt either.

Our content has been moving towards standardization for a while, i.e. mp3s and XML, and the standardization is getting better all the time, but the application interfaces have some catching up to do to really take advantage of that standardization.

  1. I am NO fan of the DRM that Apple is forced to use and have limited my own purchases from the iTunes store to iTunes Plus songs. And I used AppleMacSoft DRM Converter to get rid of the DRM on my older purchases. ↩

  2. I define Web 2.0 sites primarily as user-generated databases with specialized UIs for a data category. ↩

  3. By catch up, I mean synchronize with their online database counterparts—the apparent goal of Google Gears. ↩

  4. For the record, Scrivener is the closest on this track with its use of bundled text files and multiple export options. Being able to synch those text files with other machines I have and, say, a WordPress blog, would cinch it as the best writing application. ↩

  5. For the two best fiction examples of a future like this, see Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End and Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom—I’ll link to them in a little bit when Librarything.com is up and running again. ↩

]]> http://banapana.com/the-hivemind/a-hybrid-standard-for-software/feed 2 Finger Dasher http://banapana.com/its-thinking/finger-dasher http://banapana.com/its-thinking/finger-dasher#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:14:06 +0000 admin http://www.banapana.com/interface/finger-dasher Dasher is a novel piece of software that lets you point at what you want to write. Honestly, it’s kind of difficult to describe without seeing the demonstration. It’s very novel and makes novel use of some simple AI. I wonder if Apple would ever integrate this in to the iPhone? And it would seem to be of great use were it to be integrated into eye tracking software.

]]> http://banapana.com/its-thinking/finger-dasher/feed 0 Back to Basics Software Design http://banapana.com/uncategorized/back-to-basics-software-design http://banapana.com/uncategorized/back-to-basics-software-design#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2005 09:30:00 +0000 admin http://banapana.troped.com/?p=17 Yesterday’s post got me thinking. To sum up, computers are getting faster but software is getting bulkier and slower. While that’s probably a fair generalization, in the world of web browsers, there have been several notable exceptions of late. For years, users have had to choose between Netscape and IE, both of which are notably large for a web browser and not particularly quick at rendering pages. (I’m not linking to either of them, good reader, because I do not endorse them) However, Apple’s Safari was one of the first browsers to come along that bucked this trend, being quick, largely bug-free and very fast. Now for the PC and Mac, Firefox is causing quite a storm. In its recent spate of a massive number of downloads, it has only gained 1% of the marketshare but a million downloads on its first day of release is something to pay attention to. From reading about people who have made the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox it seems clear that people are frustrated with IE and looking for an alternative primarily due to IE’s lackluster security features. I’ve even found several recent stories like this one that point to people who are unplugging their computers from the internet do to their frustration with spam, spyware and viruses, oh my!

It’s always been a secret desire of mine to sue Macromedia for Flash’s antics. No program I have ever worked with has been so completely prone to random crashes and bizarre bugs or mis-documented code. But I’m not just using it for fun. It’s my job. If I’m hired to work in Flash then my lost work and time spent restarting Flash and banging my head against a nearby desk is money out of my pocket (and a health risk). Is it so hard to understand that I feel maybe Macromedia owes me something?

Don’t flip out: I’m just as anti-litigation as anyone. It’s a pipe dream to think that in the current social climate anyone is going to sue a software company like Macromedia and get away with it. But in a rapidly advancing technological world where our lives come to depend more and more on bugs not happening in our computer systems, I doubt the shrug generating quality of bugs is going to last too long.

The truth is, it’s not going to continue. The other shoe is going to drop — maybe soon for Redmond. If common web users are willing to completely unplug from the web or do something as unorthodox as use open source software we may be seeing the beginnings of a technological society unwilling to accept technological glitches as a par for the course.

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