If the folks behind Leviathan: Warships are as good at writing turn-based strategy games as they are at making trailers for said games then I may have to seriously consider buying Leviathan: Warships when it comes out:

[Via Pop Loser]

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: April 1, 2013 Mobile Usability for Cats: Essential Design Principles for Felines…

Other findings:

• Rapid double and triple taps are common among felines, especially kittens; any response from a multi-tap should be even faster/louder/blinkier than from a single tap.

  [...]

• Swiping is expected to work from any and every direction, so ensure that your targets are extra responsive and include corresponding sounds.
• Animation is especially important, including blinking. In fact, if your site or app doesn't animate, it's pretty much useless.
• • This is a revolutionary finding, considering that blinking has been contraindicated in web design ever since it was #3 on the list of top-10 design mistakes of 1996.
• A sensory-activated "pause mode" is highly suggested, as nearly half the cats randomly stopped what they were doing to lie down on their devices and stretch, nap, or self-groom for extended periods before resuming their tasks.

[Via MetaFilter]

Wiener Apps – 1Keyboard:

1Keyboard to rule them all!

1Keyboard is a virtual bluetooth keyboard application for OS X.

Turn your Mac into a Bluetooth keyboard that works with all of your devices, comfortably type on your iPhone, iPad, Apple TV or game console.

I've only been playing with this for 5 minutes and I'm sold. There's a two day free trial, so I'm going to give this an extended try-out tomorrow evening and then I think I'll be sending Wiener Apps some money.¹

[Via One Thing Well]

1. Unless of course someone with more technical chops than me looks a bit more closely over the next 24 hours and discovers that it's a keylogger in disguise, in which case I'll feel very silly indeed. ↩

David Byrne's account of a recent visit to the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania included an interesting account of the way the museum supplies information about the collection to visitors:

There are no wall labels. None. One is provided with an iPod touch on entry that, via a kind of Mona GPS, can tell where you are. You then tap on a thumbnail of a piece if you want to know more about the art in front of you. "Know more" is divided into various subcategories. Ideas is a sentence or two about the work beyond who made it. Artwank, is, as you might expect, some scholarly essay on the piece or the artist – the symbol for this category is a cock and balls. The Gonzo button usually led to a more personal reaction to the piece from [NOMA founder David Walsh] or Elizabeth Mead, who helped in collecting a lot of the stuff. It might be a poem, an amusing anecdote or something that seems almost completely off topic – like trouble with a boyfriend. Lastly there is Media, which often consists of a casual audio interview with the artist, but sometimes could be something else entirely. [...] If you offer up your email address, the thing will track your visit via GPS and then send you a link to a website showing you what you saw. Here's mine:

You can also find out from this site what you missed – I think I saw most of it.

I think that if I'd travelled all the way back to the UK only to be told by MONA's web site/app that I'd missed out on some exhibit that would have made my visit then I'd be less than thrilled. Best not use that feature unless you're in a position to make a quick return visit, I think.

Other than that, it sounds like a neat app.

I read not one but two pretty good pieces today on the practicalities of developing software. I'm not a software developer by any stretch of the imagination¹ but I have just enough of a programmer's mindset to appreciate the amount of effort it takes to think through all the little bits and pieces that make a bit of software usable as well as functional:

• Hilton Lipschitz has made multiple posts exploring the decisions he made in designing his app TimeToCall. He covers the whole process, from his having the idea to write an app to help users arrange telephone conferences across time zones, right up to the point of polishing minor but important user interface details about translating the phrases used in the Japanese language localisation of the app without breaking his user interface.
• Mark Bernstein posted a piece describing the amount of thought that had to be put into adding a tab bar to Tinderbox. This is more focussed on a single user interface element than the Lipschitz piece: multiply the number of design considerations Bernstein describes for his one feature by the number of steps in the project Lipschitz recounts and you start to realise just how many decisions go into the making of even a comparatively simple application.

Neither article is aimed solely at programmers by any means – Lipschitz and Bernstein both explain in plain English the problems they're trying to resolve and the pros and cons of the different approaches they considered, so I think even people who've never written a line of code in their life will have no problem following either post.

One more, unrelated thing (courtesy of Hilton Lipschitz's Twitter feed). If you have access to a command line, go to it right now and type either tracert 216.81.59.173 (if you're running Windows) or traceroute 216.81.59.173 (for the rest of us.) Then watch and wait…

[Hilton Lipschitz posts via Brett Terpstra. I'm afraid I can't remember where I saw a link to Mark Bernstein's post.]

1. I'm barely a programmer at all. At home, I hack together unholy combinations of shell scripts, Applescripts and Automator actions in an attempt to knock some rough edges off my workflows. At work I make life a little simpler by doing mildly complicated things with data in Excel and VBA and occasionally Access, but this isn't part of the job description. ↩

As her father grew old and frail, Olivia Judson found a very practical way to keep track of how he was doing:

By the time he was 76, my father was frail. His balance was poor and he had trouble walking. He lived alone in Baltimore in a big house full of stairs, and watching him come tottering down those stairs was terrifying. [...] When my brother and his wife invited my father to move in, the invitation was vigorously declined. And we lived in three different cities, far apart.

To try to cope better with this situation, my brother and I created a shared Google calendar – an online calendar in which we could both make entries from wherever we happened to be. Each time either of us spoke to our father, we marked it in the calendar – what time of day it was, how he sounded, what we spoke about. (If one of us called and he did not answer, we marked that, too. Yes, we both have an obsessive streak.)

The focus of the article isn't really about the technology, so much as it is the comfort Judson and her brother could draw from being able to effortlessly share what they knew about how their father was doing. 'Cause in the end it's not about technology, it's about what technology can do for you.¹

[Via The Browser]

1. As I read her article, the nerd in me was thinking that documenting her father's health in calendar notes as part of a freeform account of their latest phone conversation with their father wasn't very efficient. What you'd really want alongside the ability to write a general note is to have health-specific fields so that metadata about mood, mobility, diet and so on could easily be entered, then searched and summarised to allow the user to spot trends. Then I realised that in the age of the quantified self, there are probably umpteen apps for that. The only thing is, I'd imagine that most of those apps aren't geared up for multi-user data entry, since they're meant to be used for checking your own health, not having multiple users track someone else's health. There's probably a gap in the market there for someone to fill. ↩

Three remembrances of Aaron Swartz:

• Cory Doctorow
• Lawrence Lessig
• Philip Greenspun

Craig Mod is excited by the possibilities of Subcompact Publishing:

In 1967 Honda unveiled the N360.

The N360 was a kei, or light style car; a subcompact.

I like to imagine the engineers at Honda huddled together, dumping the sum total of all car design and production technology on our worn, wooden table. Around they gathered and together they asked, "What's the simplest thing we can build with this?"

[...]

The N360 was something an American car company would never dream of producing. You can't blame them though: they had no incentive by which to dream such dreams. Unlike the American automotive industry, the Japanese automotive industry wasn't beholden to industry momentum or legacy. And when you're not beholden to legacy, you can be excessively brazen.

In the software industry we talk about MVPs, or Minimum Viable Products. The N360 was a Minimum Viable Car.

The N360 didn't make it to the States, but the followup – and near equally cute – N600 did. Next came the Honda Civic, then soon after, the oil crisis. We all know how the story goes from there.

[...]

Honda was a nobody in the car industry. But they gained foothold and marketshare by building a car that was more appropriate for many consumers. They had built a subcompact.

So I ask: where are our digital publishing subcompacts?

Mod spends a fair bit of time extolling the virtues of Marco Arment's The Magazine, which I wrote about back when it launched. I've maintained my subscription through the first four issues, but I have to admit that I'm wavering over whether to retain it. The application's virtues remain – it's a beautifully polished application, even if I'd like more control over the presentation of the content that it permits,¹ but the content isn't that interesting to me.

In principle, an article extolling the virtues of a wet shave, or the proper way to make a cup of tea could be engaging and fun to read, even to a hirsute guy like me who would quench his thirst with a Diet Coke rather than brew a cup of tea every time; in practice I haven't found them to be so. I'm finding that on average there's one article per issue that I find moderately engaging. It doesn't help that some of the writers, whose work I've read on their own weblogs, are covering very familiar ground. Marco did say early on that he hoped to expand the pool of writers after the first few issues, so I'll probably give it another couple of issues to see if things improve.

Having said all that (and to get back to the ostensible topic of this post), there's no doubt in my mind that the basic model of Subcompact Publishing could well develop in all sorts of interesting ways, freeing up writers to write instead of having to code an application and submit it to someone's app store. It's just a shame that whatever tools people come up with will most likely end up being tied to a specific operating system/hardware type/payment mechanism.

Isn't this a problem the web was supposed to have solved by now?

[Via Marco.org]

1. In particular, I like pagination in my reading apps, dammit! Marco has explained in one of his podcasts that flexible, high-quality pagination is really complicated to do well so for now he's going with a scrolling view. ↩

Ever since Apple introduced the Reader feature to Safari, I've been forced to engage in the same ritual after every update to Safari. The thing is, Reader does quite a good job of rendering a cluttered web page readable, but it insists on doing it using justified text, which looks hideous. The (not very user-friendly) way to fix this was to find the Reader.html file buried inside the Safari application package and add a simple text-align: left; to the CSS embedded in that file and save it. Problem solved, except that after each Safari update you'd almost certainly have to repeat the trick. Better still, in some updates Apple changed the location of the damned file so you'd have to figure out where it lived now before you could apply the fix.

After the update to Safari 6 I found the latest home of the Reader.html file and applied my customary edit, but for some reason Safari ignored the revised CSS and kept on rendering justified text in Reader. In searching for hints as to why this might be happening, I came across a much better answer: CustomReader:

With CustomReader, you can change pretty much any aspect of Safari Reader's appearance. CustomReader's settings panel has a graphical user interface that lets you edit a few basic settings, like body font and background color, with a few clicks. But the true power of CustomReader lies in the Advanced tab, where you can directly edit the custom stylesheet that the extension inserts into Safari Reader. By editing this stylesheet, you can override any of Safari Reader's built-in styles with one of your own.

CustomReader has another feature that may be of interest to some. If you find yourself frequently invoking Safari Reader on a certain kind of page at a specific site – for instance, articles on the New York Times website – you can have CustomReader automatically enter the reader whenever you open that kind of page.

It works!¹ And with any luck it'll keep working after the next Safari update.

1. I do have one small quibble. That 'invoke Reader automatically if you visit a specific site' option requires you to enter an escaped version of the site's address: not www.independent.co.uk/, but //www\.independent\.co\.uk/.+. I understand why it's doing that – using a regexp allows for more flexibility in choosing which subsections of a site should trigger Reader – but surely there could be a simple 'trigger-for-this-entire-domain' option that would do the job for 95% of prospective users. But then, probably 98% of Safari users either don't care about text justification badly enough to see this as a problem that needs resolving, or else wouldn't want to touch the CSS for Reader anyway. ↩

I've never seen a shell quite like Xiki:

Everything is editable text. Type commands anywhere. Edit the output. (Vs. typing commands at the bottom, and read-only output.) Intermix menus, headings, bullet points, wherever you want. Xiki == executable wiki.

[Via The Tao of Mac]

I've watched the demo videos for GRID™ multiple times now, and I'm puzzled. Perhaps it's just a sign that I'm getting on a bit, but whatever the subhead on their web site says I'm not seeing how that's a spreadsheet in any meaningful sense of the word.

Don't get me wrong, GRID™ looks to be slick, and flexible and make it easy to embed all sorts of different types of information in one document¹ but it's more of a free-form mind-mapping tool than anything resembling a spreadsheet.

Which, of course, may just end up proving that what most people need isn't a spreadsheet at all. It's entirely possible that five years from now the founders of GRID™ will be deciding whether they'd rather use some small fraction of their immense pile of cash to buy up Apple or Google or Facebook, while I'll still be writing Excel spreadsheets and wishing I'd downloaded that demo back in 2012.

[Via The Tao of Mac]

1. And would probably be horrible to use on an iPhone-sized screen, just because of the way that a grid sprawls across the infinite page and relies on the ability to be able to see a fair number of cells at once to orient yourself. ↩

Usenet at 32:

Usenet is 32 years old. You'd be forgiven for thinking that it's a near-dead, cobweb-covered discussion forum platform, but actually it's more popular today than ever before, and it's thriving as an alternative to Bittorrent. [...]

It's interesting to read about some of the clever ways people are using Usenet to distribute other people's content nowadays, but it's a damned shame that Usenet as a discussion forum stagnated.

Web-based discussions are all very well, but as far as I can see even now there's nothing out there that comes close to the flexibility of a good Usenet client that allowed you to follow a series of discussion groups and use scoring and filtering to show you the threads you'd most likely be interested in and block content from known trolls and idiots.

What I learned on the internet today: iTunes on a Mac¹ lets you filter songs by star rating by typing asterisks into the search field.

1. This might work on the Windows version too, but I can't confirm that. ↩

A Tribute to the Windows 3.1 "Hot Dog Stand" Color Scheme.

[Via Build & Analyze #88]

Jeff Atwood's post about the response of Stack Overflow's users to a request for examples of New Programming Jargon includes some real doozies.

18. Common Law Feature
anonymous

A bug in the application that has existed so long that it is now part of the expected functionality, and user support is required to actually fix it.

I have to admit that back when I was teaching myself Visual Basic for Applications, my work included multiple instances of Stringly Typed functions. Even now, I struggle against the temptation to leave Ninja Comments.

All in all, it's just as well that I'm not being paid to write code.

John Dupuis reviews Nine algorithms that changed the future by John MacCormick:

John MacCormick's new book, Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers, is very good. You should buy it and read it.

Among all the debates about whether or not absolutely everybody must without question learn to program [...] it's perhaps a good idea to pause and take a look at exactly what programs do.

Which is what this book does. It starts from the premise that people love computers and what they can do but don't have much of an idea about what goes on inside the little black box. And then, what MacCormick does is take nine general types of high level functions that computer perform and explain first what those functions really mean and second a general idea of how software developers have approached solving the initial problems. [...]

Sounds like something I'd enjoy. The Kindle edition¹ is quite expensive so I'm not going to rush and buy it now, but I'll certainly be interested in picking up a copy at a reasonable price once it shows up in paperback.

1. Not that I own a Kindle, but I'm quite happy to read Kindle books on my iPod Touch. ↩

Windows (2012) = AOL (1996)?

[Via MeFi user Jimbob, commenting in this thread]

Scott Hanselman on 15 old people icons that don't make sense anymore.

A couple of his selections are spurious, I think. For example, it's true that referring to a group of options of which you can only activate one as 'radio buttons' may be archaic, but how many end users even use that term for those controls? I think they mostly know what control behaviour they signify, which is far more important for all of us, young and old alike.

Similarly with some of the others: it may be that an icon of a screen with 'rabbit ears' is referring to a dying bit of technology, but the form still distinguishes it nicely from an icon for a computer display. I don't think that replacing the TV set icon with, say, the letters 'TV' would be much of a step forward.

I'm sure that 30 years from now several of the icons listed will have been transformed or shifted in their meaning, but I wouldn't like to bet which ones. I think a number of them will stick around until the underlying concepts have been rendered obsolete. Perhaps one day we won't ever cut/copy/paste so we won't need all those clipboard-and-scissors icon sets. Not any time soon, though.

[Via delicious.com/Qwghlm]

Dan Hon's email autoresponse message is – quite literally – an epic adventure.¹

1. Ain't that last line the truth! ↩

Good news and bad news for Mac users.

• Oracle have started producing Java releases for Mac OS X, following Apple's decision to … de-prioritise … updates to their own port of Java.
• Oracle are only supporting MacOS X 10.7 onwards, so those of us still using 10.6 are still at the mercy of Apple's release schedules.

I wondered what software update/new release was finally going to prod me into updating to Lion; I think this might just be it.

[Via Ars Technica]