Omega Point

Blogathon 2009: Catherine’s Safari 4 Review

So I switched to Safari 4 from Fire­fox recently. The end.

Yeah, there’s more, actually.

First, the good parts, the ones that were enough to make me give up Fire­fox:

• It’s fast. Really, really fast.
• Pages you visit get indexed in OSX’s Spot­light. It’s like Google Desk­top for Fire­fox, only not totally ridiculous.
• While Safari doesn’t include sup­port for Firefox-style exten­sions, there are a bunch of cheesy hacks billed as plu­g­ins that look very sim­i­lar to the end-user. Apple has indi­cated they’re going to stop sup­port for these though. Hope­fully, by the time they do, Safari 5 will have incor­po­rated some of the func­tion­al­ity of the ones I like.

  I’m using Glims, Safari AdBlock and Inquisi­tor. Inquisi­tor is fairly rad, actu­ally. It changes how your search results work and adds sup­port for all your favourite search engines, search­ing them all in par­al­lel if that’s your thing. (It’s not mine.)

Now, the parts I hate:

• Select­ing text and right-clicking gives you the usual “Search in Google” option. It appar­ently can’t be changed to open in a new tab by default. So for me, a user who searches lots of strings and opens them in new tabs, I’m forced to Cmd-T new tabs open, copying-and-pasting the text into the search box.
• I’m not used to hav­ing to type a search before I tell Inquisi­tor where to search. In Fire­fox, it’s the other way around: you click the drop­down, select “Wikipedia” and then type what you want to find.

Still, these were not huge com­plaints. If you’re on Fire­fox on OSX, I’d give Safari 4 a try. Want to sync book­marks between the two? (And office com­put­ers, your iPhone, blogroll, etc?) Get Xmarks.

Mind you, I still have no plans to use any­thing but Fire­fox for devel­op­ment pur­poses. For mak­ing sites, Fire­bug is where it’s at. When casu­ally brows­ing, how­ever, I just don’t need to be using half my CPU and RAM to dis­play websites.

Dru­pal
Extension

Fire­bug

I def­i­nitely agree with MacBlogz’ assess­ment: “Safari 4: Three Steps For­ward, One Step Back

http://www.macblogz.com/2009/02/24/safari-4-three-steps-forward-one-step-back/

Blogathon 2009: Infographics, Part 1: Why the CBC sucks

Okay, this is some­thing that has bugged me for a while. Peo­ple who say “inter­ac­tive” when they mean “hard to use” and “Flash scroll­bars”.

While oth­er­wise a com­pe­tent, irri­tat­ingly under­funded news orga­ni­za­tion, the CBC sucks at info­graph­ics. Most of their “inter­ac­tive fea­tures” are just text that requires a lot of click­ing and scrolling to read. That’s not “inter­ac­tive”, guys. That’s “bro­ken”. (In fair­ness, a lot of these come from the Cana­dian Press, which pre­sum­ably also sup­plies these hor­ri­ble clicky things to the two other^[1] Cana­dian news organizations.)

But I digress. A tad.

Yeah, that’s a shame.

This graph of the depress­ing fail­ure that is North­ern Tele­com is pretty good because it ties news and events to stock price over time. There’s still ridicu­lous amounts of click­ing on tiny lit­tle dots though. Mouseover, anyone?

(In fair­ness, there are at least forward/back buttons.)

I find it really bizarre that the two most effec­tive “inter­ac­tive” fea­tures on CBC’s web­site are both incred­i­bly mor­bid: a “where did peo­ple find feet washed up on beaches?” map, and a map of gang hits in Metro Van­cou­ver. (Wow, that map cer­tainly makes the Down­town East Side look quiet. “DTES: Too poor for gang-bangers.”)

Both of these, pre­dictably, use Google Maps, and colour-code the dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of event at that loca­tion. (“Rac­coon paw hoax” or “stab­bing”, for exam­ple.) This con­veys a decent amount of infor­ma­tion with­out hav­ing to select the icon to view addi­tional details. How­ever, you still do have to click the thing to find out any­thing more.

I will say, though, that the effec­tive­ness of both of these hor­ri­ble death maps could be improved by tak­ing time and date into account: per­son­ally, I want to see how long ago those peo­ple down the street got mur­dered in their attic. I mean, really, now. (I remem­ber see­ing a Google Maps mashup that did this, with a slider at the bot­tom. Can any­one help me out with a URL?)

The New York Times, on the other hand, takes online info­graph­ics to a whole new level, rival­ing the qual­ity of their print fea­tures. I’ll explain more about this in 30 minutes.

[1] Yes, seri­ously. (Stu­pid Con­rad Black. Stu­pid CRTC.)

Won’t you be my neighbour?

For the past few years, I’ve lived in a Van­cou­ver Spe­cial, chopped up into a few suites. My entire street, and in fact, most of my neigh­bour­hood is like that, I sus­pect. It’s the sort of apart­ment real­tors and land­lords describe as “cozy”, but it’s decent.

I know a few of my neighbours:

• There’s the autis­tic tween two doors down who throws extremely loud tem­per tantrums.
• There’s the stu­dents on the other side of my house, one of whom once dated a guy who was extremely emo­tional dur­ing sex, to her irri­ta­tion: “I just love you so much.” “Yeah, whatever.”
• My upstairs neigh­bour and her teenage son, whom I do see and speak to reg­u­larly, are nice: she plays golf, he likes video games. Their (great-) uncle lives down the street in what I sus­pect is the first house to be built on that lot. Van­cou­ver is an extremely new city, remember.
• I don’t know the guys next door, but they always have very enter­tain­ing con­ver­sa­tions in Man­darin. One of them fre­quently sings com­mer­cial jin­gles and Frank Sina­tra med­leys. They then argue about them. Once, he was play­ing a flute!

But this all brings me to my point. Today I was think­ing about the fact that it’s actu­ally kind of weird that I do know any of my neigh­bours’ names. Most of us don’t. We live in apart­ment build­ings, or com­mute from the sub­urbs. My street def­i­nitely has more in com­mon with the lat­ter, with its stu­pid wasted space and iden­ti­cal “tech­ni­cally it’s a detached home” houses.

It’s not much, but the view’s amaz­ing.

But worse, we all buy into it. Between my house and my neigh­bours’, iden­ti­cal to my own and built at the same time, there lies approx­i­mately 6 feet of space, more than half the width of my weird, nar­row apart­ment. So what do we do with it? On my half, there’s a two-foot-wide path from the front of the house to the back, a foot of cedar chips, end­ing at a ter­ri­ble, rusty chain-link fence. On theirs, the inverse. Only they have gravel instead of cedar chips.

Bravo, archi­tects. Instead of hav­ing access to a fairly nice shared patio, allow­ing us to sit out in the cool breeze between the two houses, to bar­beque, fix a bike, or do some win­dow­box gar­den­ing, we have an ugly fence divid­ing the space, forc­ing the addi­tion of a buffer zone in the mid­dle, lest we brush up against it and totally get rust par­ti­cles all over our spiffy new bike’s han­dle­bar tape. (Not that this hap­pened to me recently or anything.)

By putting up a bar­rier and main­tain­ing the fic­tion that we can’t actu­ally smell each other’s din­ner, we’ve wasted what amounts to an entire laneway. In some cities, there would be an actual street sign along a gap that wide between two buildings.

This is ridicu­lous, hon­estly. It’s time to stop cater­ing to the idea that enclos­ing a chunk of lawn with a fence is a sta­tus sym­bol. Nobody is helped by this fence remain­ing here. The own­ers of our two houses don’t even live here. It’s not help­ing resale val­ues. Any­one want­ing to buy one of the prop­er­ties and return it to a single-family home would incur tens of thou­sands of dol­lars of con­struc­tion costs, only to be left at a dis­ad­van­tage pay­ing the mort­gage. (Seri­ously, is there any­one in Van­cou­ver who can afford to own a detached home and not rent out a suite?)

With­out the fence, both units would have an extra amenity, appeal­ing to renters. As ten­ants, we’d have more usable space. I could turn my bike around with­out hav­ing to lift it above my head or pick it up on the back wheel.

And most of all, maybe I’d actu­ally talk to the guys across the fence some­time and ask them if they want any help set­tling the argu­ment over the Sleep Coun­try Canada jingle.

#Amazonfail

A few weeks ago, I bought a new Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse to use at home. A friend helped me out, by hav­ing it shipped to her address in Wash­ing­ton to take advan­tage of a really good deal Amazon.com was offer­ing to US-based cus­tomers. I ended up sav­ing some­thing like $60. Sweet. Deal.

So, my first Ama­zon sale com­pleted, I was feel­ing pretty pos­i­tive about them. Until yesterday.

Sun­day morn­ing, I was alerted to news of a some­what poorly-planned deci­sion at Ama­zon: to bet­ter cater to America’s “moral major­ity”, Ama­zon decided to excise the pop­u­lar­ity rank­ings of LGBT books, delist­ing them from search results. Some authors’ books can only be found by search­ing for an unre­lated title and click­ing on the author’s name. Other authors’ entire selec­tions have been delisted.

Accord­ing to a thread on Livejournal’s Meta Writer com­mu­nity, Ama­zon has de-ranked such titles as Broke­back Moun­tain, Tip­ping the Vel­vet and Stone Butch Blues. This  begs the ques­tion: what on earth are these shel­tered, big­oted Ama­zon cus­tomers search­ing for that is going to make them get all red-faced and choke down vomit upon dis­cov­er­ing those books in their search results?

“Well, I never!” they’ll exclaim, spit­tle fly­ing forth, “I wanted to read about the non-gay his­tory of Broke­back Moun­tain! How was I to know it was fictional?”

In his blog post on the sub­ject, Raul (Hummingbird604) com­pares the move by Ama­zon to last year’s “Motrin Moms” deba­cle. He also raises the ques­tion, is Easter Sun­day a good time to be orga­niz­ing a protest? Absolutely. Is Easter Sun­day an okay time for Ama­zon PR to take the day off? Obvi­ously not.

Worse, Amazon’s responses have ranged from “yes, we de-rank adult con­tent” to “uh, it’s a glitch?” They haven’t demon­strated any cohe­sive strat­egy to man­ag­ing their response, and con­tinue to look worse and worse, the longer this goes on.

Since break­ing Sun­day morn­ing, the #ama­zon­fail and #glitch­myass hash­tags on Twit­ter con­tinue to trend highly a day later, invit­ing responses from Amazon’s competitors.

Amidst a flurry of sug­ges­tions that they hold a sale on LGBT books, Pow­ells Books’ Twitt­ter account notes that they will def­i­nitely not cen­sor the pres­ence of LGBT mate­r­ial on their site.

@cin­e­mae­stro That cer­tainly is dis­turb­ing. For­tu­nately, Powell’s will never cen­sor this mate­r­ial #ama­zon­fail http://bit.ly/3Me5Un

about 7 hours ago in reply to cinemaestro

@zenti­nal A GLBT sale sounds like a great idea to me. I will check to see if this is some­thing we can get going #amazonfail

about 6 hours ago in reply to zentinal

By Mon­day morn­ing, the main­stream media was already report­ing on the issue:

• Ama­zon blames ‘glitch’ for removal of gay titles from sales rank­ings, CBC
• ‘Gay writ­ing’ falls foul of Ama­zon sales rank­ing sys­tem, Guardian.co.uk
• Ama­zon web­site cen­sor­ship row, Chan­nel 4

Oh, and per Smart Bitches, Trashy Books’ advice: Ama­zon Rank

Update, April 13, 2:50pm:
An email from an Amazon.com spokesman, repro­duced by the Seat­tle Post-Intelligencer, describes #Ama­zon­fail as “an embar­rass­ing and ham-fisted cat­a­loging error for a com­pany that prides itself on offer­ing com­plete selection.”

The email goes on to say that a total of 57,310 books out­side of the Gay & Les­bian cat­e­gories were der­anked and that they’re in the process of rein­stat­ing them.

So what hap­pened? Did some mid-level man­ager enact some crazy new pol­icy? Can Amazon’s rank­ing and report­ing mech­a­nisms be gamed?

Trackballs: A part of our heritage

In the sum­mer of 2007, I learned I had a bit of an RSI prob­lem when a can of Coke I was hold­ing sud­denly slipped from my grasp and plum­meted to the ground. I couldn’t apply enough pres­sure with my thumb and fin­gers to hold it in my hand.

One short diag­no­sis of ten­nis and golfer’s elbow later, (“Cather­ine, you use the mouse a lot, don’t you?”) my doc­tor ordered me to find a less dam­ag­ing point­ing device. Since then, I’ve mostly relied on my laptop’s trackpad.

That’s all well and good while using my lap­top, but for desk­tops, I needed a bet­ter solu­tion. It’s really just Cirque that still makes USB track­pads, and those aren’t super either.

The Apple iTunes store pro­vides a dozen or so “track­pad” apps, most of which use VNC to func­tion as an input device alone. These let you use your wifi net­work to get your iPhone going as a track­pad. Sur­pris­ingly, this works fairly well, but it really does take gad­get overkill to a whole new level.

So that leaves track­balls. Which is good, because I like them! ^[1]

So beau­ti­ful. So majestic.

Con­se­quently, for the past 18 months, I’ve been using a Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse 7.0, the lat­est ver­sion of the clas­sic ADB track­ball. Kens­ing­ton track­balls are so good, in fact, that some­times I print out trackball-advocacy lit­er­a­ture and go door-to-door, invit­ing peo­ple to hear the good news.

The lat­est ver­sion of the Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse boasts the same four but­tons in a but­ter­fly lay­out, as well as a one-dimensional “scroll ring” around the ball. The ring’s move­ment could be a lit­tle smoother, but it moves eas­ily and is dif­fi­cult to nudge by mistake.

So yes, I strongly rec­om­mend the Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse to any­one, if only because I rely on other people’s con­tin­ued inter­est in track­balls to ensure com­pa­nies keep pro­duc­ing them. Aside from that, track­balls are gen­er­ally fairly good, ego­nom­i­cally speak­ing, and also make it more dif­fi­cult for mouse-only friends to use your com­puter, pro­vid­ing you with ample oppor­tu­nity to look smug. If you’re into that sort of thing, I mean.

For my key­board, I’ve been alter­nat­ing between my Mac­Book Pro and a 2005-series white/clear Apple key­board. I own a Microsoft Nat­ural Pro ergonomic key­board, but I never liked the “mushy” feel­ing of the keys. The last-generation Apple keyboard’s keys aren’t buckling-spring. so it’s no Model M, but they def­i­nitely have suf­fi­cient give and are nicely clicky — within the lim­its of dome-switch keyboards.

Aside from feel, many Microsoft key­boards have a bit of an issue that’s always bugged me: they tend not to detect the left shift key being depressed when char­ac­ter entry keys have already been hit. This makes my hastily-typed smi­ley emoti­cons look ter­ri­ble: ;0

I am pleased to say that Apple’s key­boards have never exhib­ited this problem.

Track­balls: A part of our heritage.

[1] Little-known Cana­dian trivia: the Royal Cana­dian Navy devel­oped the first track­ball back in the 1950s.

How­ever, astute Cana­di­ans will note that this photo from Wikipedia shows the DATAR track­ball assem­bly using flat-head screws, rather than supe­rior, patri­otic Robert­son screws. For shame!

Adventures in self-checkout UI

Part of being me is that basi­cally every pos­si­ble task I decide to under­take in my day-to-day life is com­pletely unac­counted for by city plan­ners, archi­tects, design­ers, doc­tors, soft­ware engi­neers, and so on. Some­times, this is sim­ply due to the fact that I am tall^[1], as in the case of the face-level wall sconce mounted in the hall next to my desk at work, or the fact that every­thing from door­knobs to toi­lets are gen­er­ally too low for me to com­fort­ably operate.

Other times, it’s due to my trade­mark life planning.

Con­sider the fol­low­ing scenario:

I stand in line for the self-checkout sta­tion at the Real Cana­dian Super­store in Metro­town^[2], hold­ing a $4 bag of chips and noth­ing else. Super­store shop­pers will note that this bag is going to end up weigh­ing some­where in the neigh­bour­hood of 1-2kg. In my defense, I’m not aller­gic to pota­toes. So it’s healthy.

Upon actu­ally step­ping up to the machine, I am prompted to enter the num­ber of bags desired. Super­store shop­pers will recall that part of their no-frills pol­icy, they have a suck­ass web­site and charge 3 cents per plas­tic bag.

I select zero bags, pleased to see that what­ever cir­cu­la­tory prob­lem that pre­vents me from using touch­screen kiosks has tem­porar­ily reversed itself. Prompted to scan my item, I do so.

“Please place the item in the bag,” instructs the machine. I do not.

Instead, I toss my chips onto the bag-filling plat­form, trig­ger­ing the weight sen­sor which tells the com­puter that an item has been added to… noth­ing, in this case. The machine prompts me to either scan my next item or to com­plete the sale. I briefly spec­u­late about the num­ber of peo­ple who bring their own reusuable bags to Super­store com­pared to the num­ber of peo­ple who don’t want shop­ping bags because they’re buy­ing the biggest pos­si­ble bag of potato chips before decid­ing that it prob­a­bly isn’t worth attempt­ing to guess whether or not some­one is liv­ing entirely on carbs and trans fats, just to see if they’re more likely to want to com­plete the trans­ac­tion. Besides, I can’t imme­di­ately think of a way to make the “I am done and want to pay now” option any clearer.

For­tu­nately, the “pay­ing” part goes well and only a mod­icum of grum­bling and frown­ing is required.

[1] (Dude, please stop being offended that I won’t sit in the bus seat next to you. My legs don’t fit in there.)

[2] I am not afraid of Metro­town crowds because I can just push every­one out of my way and they’re usu­ally too bewil­dered to do any­thing. Tragedy of the com­mons, bitches!

OpenMoko: like the iPhone, only Linuxier!

Like most Mac-owning, right-thinking indi­vid­u­als, I’ve been anx­iously await­ing the Apple iPhone, despite liv­ing in Canada, where mobile data rates are unfor­tu­nate, to say the least. Also, the whole “closed plat­form” thing. That and the “how do you dial this with gloves on?” bit. And the fact that there’s no word of any Cana­dian release date, and there’s only two GSM car­ri­ers in Canada any­way… and they both use the same net­work. But hey, it syncs well with iCal and has a real web browser! I want one already!

So enough about prod­ucts whose chief value is mak­ing its user look cooler and more afflu­ent than non-owners! There’s a far more geeky smart­phone just over the horizon!

Behold, Open­Moko! It’s made of Linux! FIC (not that FIC) has spear­headed the open smart­phone plat­form with their currently-almost-released Neo1973 phone being the first capa­ble of run­ning Open­Moko. The actual hand­held looks… cute, actu­ally. Kind of 70s retro, like a non-translucent clamshell iBook.

The fea­ture­set is impres­sive, with WiFi, AGPS and a 640x480 screen, and includes every­thing we’ve come to expect from a smart­phone, save for a cam­era. Accord­ing to the Open­Moko wiki:

“The 2nd gen­er­a­tion Open­Moko device will be intro­duced at this time. We have some­thing spe­cial in the works, but again, you will help shape this device.”

That sounds like a cam­era to me, since one’s miss­ing, but who knows?

The UI seems some­what dated, which is not alto­gether unheard of with Linux, though it will obvi­ously be skinnable in some way — a fea­ture I’d def­i­nitely want to make use of. I’m not totally impressed by the look of the dialer in par­tic­u­lar. I’d like to see some­thing a bit higher-contrast, personally.

I do like the fact that it uses a sim­i­lar multi-touch panel as the iPhone, but isn’t that patented? Oh. Yes it is — but maybe not by Apple.

Per­son­ally, I find the most impor­tant fea­ture of a phone or PDA is ease of use and how well it can sync with my com­puter. I’m eager to see how well the Open­Moko plat­form does among the early adopter crowd, but for now, I think I’ll be hold­ing off on that preorder.

One Laptop Per Child UI

This is really fas­ci­nat­ing. Design stu­dio Pen­ta­gram has devel­oped the look and feel of the UI for the One Lap­top Per Child project. (“Pfft, poor peo­ple… right?”)

They’ve aban­doned the “desk­top” metaphor, in favour of the “zoom metaphor”. This echoes OLPC’s over­all design goals in stick­ing to the basic Chil­dren can quickly switch between dif­fer­ent views to con­nect with other users, or col­lab­o­rate on a sin­gle task.

Other cool fea­tures include the com­plete lack of text labels for icons and UI ele­ments, mean­ing there’s no need for them to be trans­lated for each local­ized ver­sion. Only truly nec­es­sary text must be trans­lated to pro­duce a local­ized ver­sion for a given lan­guage. This com­pletely avoids prob­lems phrases like “la home­page” may pose for non-English speakers.

(Via kottke.org)

Interactivity != better

This may be the least effec­tive use of an inter­ac­tive map info­graphic ever. It attempts to present infor­ma­tion on an impor­tant sub­ject, but it’s very dif­fi­cult to take in due to poor UI and inef­fec­tive use of the map itself.

Why on earth does this tool use the same icon for iden­ti­fy­ing a tar­get coun­try as the but­ton you click on to deter­mine infor­ma­tion about the top 10 coun­tries with female polit­i­cal lead­er­ship and so on?

If I click on a coun­try name, shouldn’t I be able to see it high­lighted? Doesn’t it make sense to see how regions are ranked? I real­ize this isn’t a uni­ver­sity map­ping text­book, but hon­estly now.

When com­par­ing regions, sta­tic maps can be far, far more com­pelling and con­tain much more rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. Cases in point. Bad CBC!