Multi-touch interactions

Go take a look at some work done at New York University on changing the way we interact with our computers.
Oh, and the videos are distributed using the NYU's Coral CDN network – which I've always thoughts was an excellent free CDN concept.

.mac - Apple / .pc - Microsoft?

So - Microsoft have launched the beta of it's .mac style service. For several years now Apple has been offering a service called .mac available for users of Mac OS X based machines. This has combined backup/file storage, bookmark storage and other useful synchronisation so you can keep your important stuff online, it also has some web storage for some websites (mainly seems to be used for personal blogs and things)... there is an email service, and it even included Virex an anti-Virus software. What has made .mac something that people buy is that it integrates smoothly with the operating system, iLife (the hugely successful so-called 'non-productivity suite') and iWork.
Now Microsoft looks like they are gearing up for Vista to have a symbiotic '.pc' service - the 'Windows Live Ideas' (not so snappy as '.pc' but I'm sure much more trademark-able). It'll have backup, file storage, bookmark ('favorites') storage, web storage (looks like it may be some sort of re-branding of the MSN Spaces or something)... anyone got deja vu yet? Yeah - it would seem that Microsoft has seen the importance of giving users a home on the internet that goes along with their operating system. Just like Apple did, does.
Nice to see that Bill still does things that are original.

Ribbons rather than menus?

I simply cannot believe I missed this discussion, Microsoft trying to improve the usability of their Office applications by using a 'ribbon' style idea.

As Microsoft Office applications become more and more bloated with functionality that only gets used by power users, you'd think that it might be better to really look at the functionality set and consider removing some of it. With so much functionality it does, of course, make it difficult to navigate throught the myriad of menus. I think a good example of this is Apple's iWork applications - just compare the perceived functionality of 'Pages' to 'Word' and 'Keynote' to 'Powerpoint'. They offer totally adequate functionality, at a fraction of the 'bloat' of their Microsoft counterparts.

Remember those 'adaptive interface' menus on Microsoft Office of recent years? Yeah - Office apps would start shrinking the menus and hiding 'infrequently used' functionality. I remember being in close proximity to a group looking at adaptive interfaces - and I happen to agree on the major drawbacks... they don't work when you have a massive number of options. Why do you think Microsoft gave the user the ability to turn them off.

Well the 'ribbon' controls seem to be a rethink about the amount and placement of functionality within the Office products - which can only be a good thing. Listening to Julie Larson talk about this re-think is almost refreshing to hear from a Microsoft person... sounds a little Apple like?

Read more at blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/...

Moving towards a Google powered web?

I'm really not sure if using Google as a distributed proxy style thingy will actually 'accelerate' the web. Maybe I need to find out more about it... but from first impressions this seems to be a combination of proxy technology and a content distribution network (CDN). Maybe this explains why Google was recently buying up all that dark fibre?

Take a look and see what you think: webaccelerator.google.com

Pay peanuts, get monkey hosts

There's been a lot of coverage in UK newspapers and on the BBC Technology site about Alex Tew and his Million Dollar Homepage being allegedly 'held for ransom'. Now, according to the various articles, Alex received an email suggesting that if he didn't pay a quantity of money someone would initiate a Distributed Denial of Service attack. This would be the ransom then. Apparently he didn't, and so a DDoS began on his 'website' (or rather a webpage).
Screams of anguish were clearly to be heard coming from Alex, at least according to the coverage that states both his Hosting company and the UK Police got involved. The Hosting company took at least a week to stop it, at least according to the BBC report.
Wait - that's 7 days. Yes... days. Not hours... not minutes. Days.
Looking closer at who his hosting company is, it appears to be a company that offers 'very cost efficient' hosting packages. Now, I'm ok with companies offering those, after all... there's a need for them. Personal homepages and things. I wonder how much, and what features Alex paid for from them. Sounds like it certainly wasn't 'enterprise enough' to include fairly common anti-DDoS hardware on their network in the data-centre. Someone who is apparently making large quantities of cash but having a hosting package that doesn't take simple steps like anti-DDoS, then getting press coverage about how 'awful' it is - seems a little like crying wolf.
If you are making money from your site, make sure you've got adequate protection from high-tech attackers. There are plently of really good hosting companies where things like anti-DDoS hardware comes as standard with their hosting packages. If you don't know, ask professionals (in his case, his hosting company should have been pro-active - I know the ones I use or spec are, that's learning from experience).

Lock up your Mac!

Another rant about BBC Technology news - this time, I found an article posted on 2005-12-23 entitled 'Give Mac Explorer to the people'. Strap line - "As Microsoft drops the Mac version of Internet Explorer, technology commentator Bill Thompson offers a modest proposal."

Ok - first things first - Microsoft officially dropped Mac Internet Exploiter several years ago (2003 actually), the only thing they have said recently is that "you've had your chance to move to something else since 2003 when we told you to do that, you've done that... good, don't ask us about support for Internet Explorer on the Mac ever again". This is nothing new.

Second, to address the points raised in Bill's personal opinion posted on a Journalistic news website -

1) ActiveX is a Windows PC based technology - and so IE on a PC has it. Mac IE has never had it, though this is inferred in the article.

2) Mac IE was never the same as PC IE - sites designed for IE on the PC did not immediately work on Mac IE - this was because Microsoft built it differently. The version number of Mac IE did not mean that it had similar functionality and support as a PC IE with the same version number. For example - Mac IE version 5 was very different from PC IE version 5.

3) Root Certificates - for security all major browsers have information about the root signing authorities of SSL certificates - this allows your browser to 'go secure' (little padlock, or the like) and use HTTPS to encrypt your communications. This is for ecommerce applications like eBay, Amazon, British Airways, EasyJet... and every other selling online. Now, Mac IE had a serious problem with this - first having a serious Root Certificate bug a few years ago (I can't remember the date of that bug, but I can certainly look it up) - causing users of Mac IE to be unable to 'go secure'. Two things from this - many users looked to alternative browsers like Mozilla (at that time Firefox wasn't around) and Netscape. I found many Mac users using Netscape - as it was pre-installed on their Mac next to IE. Since the days of the Root Certificates bug the security and stability of IE hasn't been very good as Microsoft stopped delivering upgrades, merely serious bug fixes. Mac IE stagnated years ago! Also - any open source version of Mac IE would have to negotiate with those root signing authorities to embed their signatures - I have no idea how that would be perceived if only a handful of developers and users were actually using this Mac IE open source.

4) The DOM is broken in Mac IE. Always has been. This, plus a list of other problems (including a major memory leak bug, when using dHTML to re-write the HTML of pages, that can't be fixed by simple patching) really says that Mac IE should be killed off. Mac IE doesn't come anywhere near to supporting the web standards we all shout about these days. An open source development of Mac IE would clear take some time (maybe years) to get the Engine inside it sorted out to bring it to the standards support of Gecko or Konqueror? (Yes, PC IE too - ok, I'll give you that... it's a hundred times better than the Mac IE ever was)

5) Another browser? Look - how many different browsers, with different quirks, do you want? We've got IE (PC only), Gecko based browsers (I class them as one because they use the same underlying layout engines - so that includes Mozilla, Firefox, etc), Opera and Konqueror based browsers (that includes Safari, OmniWeb, etc). That's enough surely? Apart from the current itteration of IE on the PC, the standards support is great... but throwing a new Open Source Mac IE browser into the mix would destabalise things - who in their right mind is going to build a site that works on it when it doesn't support the standards?

Goodbye Mac IE, and good riddence.

Apple's PodCast Chart?

According to this recent article, the BBC are under the impression that Apple's iTunes Podcast chart is the thing to watch to see which Podcasts are popular. According to them...

"While no definitive podcast chart has yet been established, Apple's Top Subscribed Podcasts chart is seen as a good indicator of each show's popularity."

So, can I just ask - 'seen' by whom? Apple's Podcasts chart is still in it's infancy, and considering that it will take some time for most Podcasts to make it into Apple's closed-garden style chart system it is _not_ a good indicator. Also, given that it's iTunes only and isn't open to any other networks, it's likely this will cause similar suffering as the 'Downloads-part-of-the-Official-Top-40 chart' problem did with AIM (a major UK organisation that looks after Independent Music producers/artists/labels of which many don't make it onto iTunes music store as downloads).

I can do design, me.

What better way to celebrate Britain's Presidency of the EU by displaying a flock of sheep swans. That's right, according to this report, the team at 'Johnson Banks Design' was paid £30,000 to do this. (just over $53,000 USD)
Apparently it's to symbolise leadership and the countries pulling together. To me it just promotes a presidency where everyone else rides in the slip-stream of others - an hierarchical team?
It all sounds a bit dictatorial to me.
The EU Flag is made up of stars in a circle, all the stars are the same and because they are in a circle none of the stars is 'above' any other star. The stars symbolise the countries originally making up the EU membership.
What a complete waste of time and money, can we not focus? £30,000 obviously bought some graphical swans, but what about the Common Agricultural Policy or the proposed EU Constitution? (Did someone say 'gravy train', anyone?) More to the point, it doesn't actually say 'who' paid for this - the British Tax Payer or every tax payer in the EU?
Oh, and one of the selling points of this logo is that it's animated - according to the BBC article UK officials proudly pointed out that this is the first time the EU presidency has had an animated logo. Give me £1,000 and I could come up with a logo more suitable.
Sorry for those expecting another Technology Rant... I decided to get a little political today.