Tag: web

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Data goes in, Data comes out.

Data Portability

When you’re building a web application (you know, like Twitter, or Flickr, or Facebook, or Last.FM, or Posterous) you obviously want people to put data into it, and you’re going to make it easy to do.

But are you making it easy for people to get their data out of it?

Here’s my simple rules for building a web application:

  1. Make it easy for users to get their data into your system.
  2. Make it easy for users to get their data out of your system.

That’s it. Do number 1, then do number 2, Do not stop in between number 1 and number 2.

If you’re convinced your application is amazing, you shouldn’t have to rely on lock-in to keep people using it. They’ll praise it openly, they’ll become your fans, they’ll shout it to their friends. Anything else is bullshit.

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Pressure Sensitive Web Apps?

I’m quite pleased with our latest input device, the Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch Tablet, and while doing some browser maintenance, I noticed a plugin:

Wacom plugin

So, I set about looking for how I could use this, and found this Wacom page which was… pretty much useless. None of the examples worked. In fact, I get an alert saying the WacomPlugin could not be found. Which is odd, because, well, it certainly appears to be there. After a little testing it seems it doesn’t work in Firefox or Chrome, but does work in Safari. Some “OS Magic” may be sprinkled onto this plugin. Try using this page in Safari if you’ve got a tablet and you should see it outputting some nice numbers.

After a quick search the only example I could find was this amazingly fun drawing app called Harmony that Ricardo Cabello had created and added the Wacom Javascript API to. I managed to create this amazing masterpiece you see below:

harmony

But honestly, it’s really hard to tell if the pressure sensitive part works. It seems to sort of work. I do get different line widths from using the tablet versus using the mouse. I’d like to dig into the Wacom Javascript API stuff a bit more and see if I can get some simple example code to work. Of course it would be great to see it working in browsers besides Safari.

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The end of what?

According to Russell Beattie, it’s the end of Mowser.

I’d never even heard of Mowser. Granted, I’ve not been that deeply involved in the mobile web as I used to be, or as much as Russell has been, but years ago I followed Russell fairly closely. I think around 2003 or so he started reading my blog, and I then started reading his, and I took an interest in what he was doing. In my eyes he was the expert on the mobile web.

But as he says, today, the mobile web is (to many people) an iPhone, and I think that’s ok, and I think iPhone users who have tried to use the mobile web previously would agree with that. I know people who would have never used or even attempted to use something call “the mobile web” but the fact that they now have an iPhone and it has “the internet on it” is all it takes…

I tend to not think of myself as an Apple fan-boy, I do believe they got the mobile internet experience right on the iPhone. Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll get one and see if that changes my opinion.

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Still Hating Flash (sometimes…)

Things I hate about (poorly built) Flash sites: you can’t select the text, you can’t resize the text, my scrollwheel does not work, the controls are too small, I can’t open links in a new tab/window… Basically, I hate losing all the features I am used to my browser having with an HTML site…

Crappy Flash Site I sort of feel like even if it is a crappy HTML site, at least I can still control things like the browser’s scrollbar, or the size of the text, or how links open, and my scrollwheel works! So many (crappy) Flash sites still feel like the author wants complete control over my experience, and they think they know better than everyone else what is good for you. I hate those people. Ok, I don’t really hate them, but I feel like they hate me, or at least they don’t trust me. Argh…..


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Big Media: We can’t link to you…

I first mentioned the Blogging Summit put on by local broadcasters WTMJ 620 on June 12th, 2007 in a post title Citizen Blogging Summit.

The Summit was on June 14, 2007, and I recapped in a post title Citizen Blogging Summit Report.

There is a very good chance that in a few years, those links will still work. There are links to this site that still work nearly 10 years after I first created them. There’s an old saying: Cool URIs don’t change. WTMJ 620 doesn’t get that.

When we were at the Summit, someone mentioned they were re-launching their site in the next few days. The second I heard this, I was pretty sure all the bloggers they invited, who actually linked to the Summit page, would have dead links within a week. I was right.

I’m really hoping they fix this, but as of right now, links to http://www.620wtmj.com/blog_summit.asp get a 404.

And there are links pointing there. I mean, we’re bloggers! You invite us to talk about something, and we will, by linking to it. Will I link to anything on 620wtmj.com again? I don’t know, since there is a good chance it’ll disappear with the next web site re-design.

I might just be a little sensitive about this issue because I’m in the middle of doing some URL re-writing for a site that just underwent a major rebuild. But really, is a permalink so much to ask for? Honestly, I’m pretty disappointed. Just when you think someone is starting to get it, they let you down.