Banapana » word processor

Writing Versus Word Processing

admin — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:12:32 +0000

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.

Desktop/Cloud Hybrid Software Will Win

admin — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:12:08 +0000

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.

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. ↩
I define Web 2.0 sites primarily as user-generated databases with specialized UIs for a data category. ↩
By catch up, I mean synchronize with their online database counterparts—the apparent goal of Google Gears. ↩
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. ↩
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. ↩

Jakob Neilsen Has Been Using Computers for Thirty Years

admin — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 22:38:48 +0000

[ Note to the reader: I actually posted this entry some time ago back before I was working with movable type. I feel many of those entries weren't particularly dated and are worth salvaging, so I am inserting them into Banapana on occasion ] Jakob Neilsen has posted this article at Builder AU discussing his experience with computers, his personal work towards improving usability, and what we might expect from computers by 2034. As a designer I’ve always considered the word usability a little bit dirty. As if saying that you are going to design something should imply that you don’t necessarily want anyone to be able to use it. Design should be enough. Unfortunately, I also understand that more often than not designers allow their verve for aesthetics get in the way of function. And having people like Neilsen around to remind us that design should be about the end-user is not such a bad thing.

Unfortunately this article amounts to little more that vague speculation as to what computers will be able to do if Moore’s “Law”[1] (and other “laws”) continue to progress. The most relevant point that he makes though is that before we hit some sort of shelf in processing power we are far more likely to hit a shelf in our programming prowess. Most programs are old and have been jury rigged in so many ways that their bulk more often than not makes up the difference in processing power and memory space. I’m not sure how big Word is these days, but I feel assured that it’s bigger than a word processor needs to be and does a lot more than a word processor needs to.

It would seem like a real shift in the motives behind program design is in order (did someone say Open Source?). Unfortunately the current motive behind creating most software is (1) make money and (2) make more money selling the same thing repeatedly with incremental “improvements” in features, increase in size and an incremental reduction in speed. Until the motivation changes somehow it seems that we will be stuck with bulky programs that don’t seem to be getting any smarter. I’m talking mostly about commercial software, of course. Some “software” like Google doesn’t seem to have suffered much from feature creep and has actually improved in terms of the content and speed.

Overall, Neilsen is on the track with usability. Computers need to be more accessible and smarter. There’s no question about that. For all our concern with processing power, we (programmers and designers) need to realize that there is probably a lot more we can do with what we already have and that’s really the only way any real improvement in software, web sites, etc. are going to occur.

[1] Is it just me or shouldn’t the law in Moore’s “Law” always be put in quotes. It has always seemed a little silly to call an observation a law when it’s based purely on inductive reasoning. Computers processing power has always doubled, so it will always double. I guess we’ll see.