RasterWeb!

In listening to Steve Jobs introduction of Apple’s latest Mac mini with it’s Front Row capabilities,
I heard Steve mention audio, video, and photos. This makes sense, because in this new “digital lifestyle” we are facing a multimedia world, and who cares about text when you can have pictures and sound?

We do… That’s who.

I suppose most people sit in front of the television and don’t want to read. If you put it that way, I’d agree. But what I want – at a minimum – is the metadata. The “info” if you will, as it’s labeled on my Moxi’s remote.

When I first got involved in what was later to be called “podcasting” I think I made a mistake in attempting to force people to subscribe and download without providing a web presence for each bundle of passion. My thoughts at the time were along the lines of “this is how it can work, try it” but I may have fallen short on my thinking.

In contrast, the videobloggers have endless debates about what a defines a videoblog, with most saying it’s video on a blog, with an RSS (with enclosures) feed you can subscribe to, and the normal features of a blog, comments, permalinks, textual descriptions, etc. Right on. (I’ll assume right now that people who do “video podcasting” think somewhat similar thoughts.)

In iTunes most of the metadata, the stuff surrounding a podcast or videoblog post are lost. How do you easily see the tags people used? Get to the permalink? Comment on it? Support the creator with a donation? Luckily, many of these problems are being solved by the new breed of media aggregators like FireAnt and Democracy.

These new aggregators do not just toss the text and present you with audio or video, they make sure that the text (the metadata) is included and presented to you to act upon. Obviously when using Front Row on your TV, following hyperlinks might not be ideal, but seeing the metadata would be, just like I do with the Moxi when I press that “info” button.

Dammit! Let’s not lose that text!

I always enjoy the ramblings of those 37signals folks, even though in the past I’ve often though that many of the things they suggest would not work in the companies that most of us work at. I may have been wrong…

See Getting Real, the book. In the introduction we have this bit:

Getting Real starts with the interface, the real screens that people are going to use. It begins with what the customer actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong.

Since the last big project I worked on had huge functional specs that were largely ignored, I’m starting to thing that we would have done better with pictures and mockups and actual working pages showing how it should have looked and functioned. Instead what we were left with was a horrible mess of an application that does not work.

The one thing that worries me is that at my last job, we did design the interface first before there was working code, and the results then were not too much better. The developers complained about trying to work the design into their applications. Obviously a team (or person) doing everything, all aspects of design and development can work around this problem. That’s probably the lesson to be learned here.

As a footnote to all of this, you might also see What Corporate Projects Should Learn from Open Source, which is also of value for those of use trying our hardest to work smarter against all odds.

Dude, add me to the list of folks who just do not get MySpace.

Yes, I have a profile there, which basically says: I’m only here because people I know are here….

As someone who has worked in the field of design and usability, the site is a complete nightmare. The first time I logged in, I almost fell off my chair. It would give Jakob Nielsen a heart attack. Matt nails it in Myutterconfusionspace. I know the kids love it, and the reason must be because we old folks can’t stand it. But still, I know people my age (or, well, a few years younger) who seem to like it quite a bit.

There’s been talk of MySpace elsewhere as well. Some of the points made were that MySpace is the cool thing right now, and while people who are no longer in their 20’s may actually care about archiving their own stuff on the web permanently (via blog, videoblogs, etc. that they control) the kids only care about today, and never really think about the future.

That last bit is pretty important to some of us. Jay Dedman has this idea of using the web to archive his live, to save those moments for the future so he, and others that know him can look at it, and in the future, look back at it. It’s a great idea, in line with Ourmedia, Archive.org, and what many bloggers are doing. It’s the reason I have archives going back over 8 years here and try really hard not to break that.

Plenty of people believe that MySpace replaced Friendster, and some go as far as to say that Flickr fits into the same category (groups, friends, sharing, etc.) but in the end, I still prefer the independent network created by bloggers. We started this thing in 1997 without any assistance from big sites, just bootstrapping ourselves, and that’s the way I like it. Here’s to the future, in my very own space…

We went over some syncing stuff in Calendar Woes (Part 2), and needless to say, syncing is a major feature, and it’s one we want to work correctly, but sadly, it sometimes doesn’t…

I finally got around to reformatting my drive that had a 20 GB ‘Media’ partition and making it a 40 GB partition. In doing this I backed up my iTunes library, reformatted the drive, then restored my iTunes library. I used ditto to do this, and all files ended up back where they belonged. I lauched iTunes and it found everything just fine. (I won’t get into discussing inodes here, but they probably play some part in what comes next.)

Now that I had all this extra room, and all seemed well, I was happy. Until I decided to sync my iPod. Upon doing so, it seemed to think every single file was changed/updated/modified in some way. So the sync took hours and hours and hours. Hey, at least it worked!

As for the Nokia 7610, I solved one Bluetooth connection problem, and 99% of the time, iSync does the right thing when dealing with calendars and contacts, but every now and then, there is a slight freakout. Today it would not sync, so I ended up deleting the device in iSync and setting it up again (which I should not have done.) This was partly my fault, because for some reason Bluetooth was turned off on my phone. I say partly because I know I didn’t turn it off, so I assume it turned itself off. (?) Anyway, upon getting everything synced up again, iSync thought it was a new device (since I just set it up) and synced everything, which took some time. This time all of the 1-touch numbers (except for one) got unassigned. In the past I’ve managed to lose one or two of the assigned numbers, but this time almost all of them were lost. Sigh…

As much as I love technology and the gadgets that should make our lives easier, it’s sometimes a pain to deal with them…