Author: Victor

iPod Design

This iPod design article is an interesting look at the hardware challenges Apple faced. From a user interface perspective there’s only this: ‘ “First and foremost, the product was elegantly designed in classic Apple fashion,” says David Carey, president of Portelligent. “They did product design from the outside in.” Carey says the company had a vision of what the player should be and what it should look like. The subsequent design parameters were dictated by its appearance and form factor.‘

Link courtesy of David Wertheimer.

Published
Categorized as Products

Comment Engines

Just an implementation note…I recently spent several hours researching and trying out comment engines. The various hosted systems like YACCS can be quite nice, but when their servers slow down it slowed my site down. There are some nice PHP systems, but that was a learning curve I wanted to avoid. I ended using SnorComments2, a simple little Perl-driven system. Set up was painless, it doesn’t require any additional Perl modules, the interface is highly customizable, and it even has its own little admin interface.

Within Tinderbox, I set up a Boolean attribute for notes that let’s me turn on comments or not for each note.

Published
Categorized as Blogs

Dublin Core Tempate

Joe Clark points to the oh-so-handy Dublin Core Template. Adding proper metatags to your page couldn’t be much easier, ‘cept for the lack of XHTML support.

In his Dubliners he correctly mourns the lack of Dublin Core metadata in the world. And while his idea of a self-organizing-web-through-metatags theory is fascinating, I don’t agree with his related assertion that Google is a monopoly. Google is just now going mainstream (I recently heard Jim Lehrer on The News Hour joke about finding some info using Google). At one time Yahoo! was the dominant engine, now they’re a Google customer. If Google can do that, so can someone else. If Paypal can beat MS at the payment game, then anyone is vulnerable. Personally I’m rooting for Teoma, if only they’d make the logical next steps.

1fps

Adrian Miles’ first axiom of network video:

legibility is more important than the representation of movement.



Which means that over the web when we have to decrease the size and resolution of video we should also lower the frame rate instead of trying to jam 24fps down the wire. How low can the frame rate go?

…1fps with a continuous intelligible soundtrack.

why only 1fps? because people are much happier people when what they see is able to be seen. who cares if it don’t move much? at least you can see it. this works for all content. and more importantly 1fps works over a domestic modem right now.

Published
Categorized as Video

Topic Maps vs. RDF

Steve Pepper, author of The Tao of Topic Maps (and whose title, incidentally is Information Architect) – makes a concise, interesting comparison of Topic Maps and RDF, arguing for the former. Here’s a few points that struck me:

One key difference – I don’t know if it is the key difference – is that topic maps take a topic-centric view whereas RDF takes a resource-centric view. That, to me, speaks of the LIS point of view vs. the W3C point of view on these matters, focusing on something that can be indexed vs. something that can have a URI.

Because RDF is fundamentally a “framework for metadata”, i.e. for attaching property-value pairs to information resources, it can do the same job as facets. RDF could be used instead of facets, and would arguably provide more power (because of the recursive model and the fact that more metadata semantics, such as datatypes, are pre-defined). But to use RDF instead of facets would mean to lose the connection between the semantic network layer and the metadata, which today is provided for by the fact that facet types and facet value types are topics.

chema, RDF has something topic maps don’t (yet), that is, a standardized way of expressing an ontology and the constraints upon it…Holger will be going one step further (I believe) with a concrete proposal for a topic map schema language….

Ontopia, of which Pepper is the CEO, has published the The Ontopia Schema Language.

Coco Chanel

“Women are not flowers, why should they want to smell like flowers?” – Coco Chanel

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Categorized as People

.htaccess – it slices, it dices

This .htaccess tutorial reveals that this one little file is more than you ever imagined! Password-protect files, redirect files or whole directories, specify error pages, prevent directory listings and hotlinking to images, and more!

Apache web server not included.

go molly

Like some crazy whirling vortex, Razorfish keeps sucking up talented folks. This time its Molly. Yay!

LombardiSearch

In the left column you’ll notice I reinstated the LombardiSearch interface for searching the web. The point is to more easily choose the right search engine for a query based on the engine’s particular search method. In this case I’m using Teoma, Google, and AskJeeves.

Thanks again to Mathew for the Javascript assist.

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Categorized as Search

Independence Day, 2002

They’re selling vegetables on Broadway
A man is runnin’ for the train
Strollin’ down 42nd Street
On our Independence Day
Rub-A-Dub on 57th Street
It’s our Independence Day!
Arm in arm on 82nd Street
On our Independence Day

Published
Categorized as New York

Flamenco links, Summer 2002

The Flamenco Guitar Home Page

On my list of big things to learn someday is Flamenco guitar. I could start with these resources, which are excellent (for example, the combination of transcription, tabulature, and mp3s of early 20th Century recordings). But I know I would just be reinforcing bad technique, never having learned proper classical finger picking. I’m guessing it’s something best learned from a teacher.

When I listen to the samples, I’m slack jawed at the speed combined with subtle stresses and powerful phrasing. And yet of themselves a writer says this:

For flamencos, it is the ability (at whatever level of skill) to accompany a knowledgeable singer (and knowledgeable dancer) who is performing one of the standard forms in a more or less standard way. You don’t have to be very *good* as guitarist to qualify. Many singers in Spain, for instance, knowing only two or three chords, and playing execrably by anyone’s standards, can crudely accompany themselves or someone else. Most wouldn’t claim to be guitarists at all. But they would claim that whatever they’re doing on the guitar is flamenco, not something else. They know the song, and they know what the guitar needs to sound like to go with that, even if they don’t know the guitar itself well enough to pull it off very well.

In this way it reminds me of vernacular architecture.

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Categorized as Flamenco

IA Case Studies I’d Like to See

1. Slashdot. For the interplay of how information feeds into the interface design, how the whole system is tweaked to serve very high traffic efficiently, and the interplay of those two challenges.

2. Classmates.com, for the brilliant-yet-evil way they suck you in, offering you a taste, getting a little info about you, giving you a little more, getting a little money from you, and so on. The lure is very strong; I can understand how they afford all those pervasive banner ads. For students of permission marketing this is a must experience.