Preoccupations

Empowering mobile users

I'm awaiting delivery of a Nokia E70 (All About Symbian preview here, review here). The new Nokia browser is one of the key lures that drew me towards upgrading. (There's a comparison of Opera Mobile/Nokia S60 3rd edition browser here — by Ivan Kuznetsov.) Just came across this (via Timo's del.icio.us link feed) by Bernardo Carvalho on rawsocket dot org:

If you take a look where Nokia is taking the S60 3rd edition browser (please please please do yourself a favor and take a look at that demo), you’ll see that the concept of River is kind of old in itself. Why? Because nobody can, in their right mind, expect the industry to transcode the billions of websites that are out there so we can enjoy them on our mobile phones. What we want to do (and what Nokia is doing in S60 3rd edition) is empowering mobile users with a web browsing application that enables them to view websites just as they would see them in their computers - same user experience, no need for transcoding the content.

I was apprehensive when I wrote: 'We don't need separate mobile sites and, although I use the Opera and Google proxy services, I wish sites didn't "have" to be re-purposed'. After all, I'm an end-user and not at all knowledgeable about the technical difficulties involved. But I'm really cheered to read what Bernardo Carvalho has posted.

Incidentally, that same posting expressed some of the thoughts I'd been having about Dave's river of news and the mobile RRS hacks that have come out recently (eg, BBC-river and NYT-river): 'mobility is being packaged differently so old-time webheads can digest it, now that they are screwing around with their first smartphones and thinking what exactly does it all mean for the industry and their businesses. … For anyone who’s been working with mobility for some time it sounds kind of silly, but actually it isn’t - it means that good minds are joining the fray and something good might come out of it. Stay tuned.'

And also via this one post, Howard Rheingold's Shibuya Epiphany:

My epiphany in Shibuya Crossing led me around the world, to observe street culture, visit development laboratories, seek out industry analysts and sociologists -- anybody who could help me make sense of the technosocial phenomena of smart mobs. In Tokyo, I interviewed teenagers who appropriated mobile texting technology and set off a world-wide industry and grassroots cultural transformation. I also talked with the people who steered NTT's DoCoMo to success in the mobile Internet business at the same time their formidable competitors in Europe and America foundered and failed to connect the mobile telephone's portability and popularity with the Internet's capabilities. In Helsinki, I saw how the cultural appropriations of teenagers had transformed the communication norms of the entire society, met futurists and social scientists who studied the future by looking at what people were doing in the streets today. In Stockholm, I rode around the city half the night with a car full of maniacally devoted gamers, engaged in a location-based virtual combat game involving automobiles, laptops and wireless Internet connections, and text messages to mobile telephones.

Now, I'd never heard of the Shibuya Epiphany before and Bernardo explained more about it in a subsequent post (do read): 'So, back in 2000, standing in Shibuya Crossing, Howard Rheingold saw people looking at their phones instead of talking into them, and that blew his mind. That’s the Shibuya epiphany.'

Technorati tags: Nokia, Shibuya Epiphany, Howard Rheingold, mobile phones, mobiles

Weird feed behaviour

1) I've had to decouple FeedDemon 1.6 RC2 (a beta) from NewsGator: the synching between the two had gone haywire, ever since a problem that developed some time around 28 December at the NewsGator end of things, and it was driving me nuts.

2) More to the point here, apologies to my FeedBurner subscribers: FeedBurner has a range of services on offer — PingShot service and FeedFlare — and, I'm not sure, but changing my options on both of these seems to have set off a riot in that feed, posts reappearing as unread a number of times and (most recently) a strange 'noemail' address appearing entirely unasked for in the headers of posts. I've reset my options within FeedBurner and I hope things will now quieten down again.

For good measure, I've been playing with Technorati tags: in TypePad these have to be entered manually (TypePad's categories are read as Technorati tags, but categories are not the same kind of animal as tags) which is a little bit of work. (Within Firefox, Performancing semi-automates the process for you.) The work's worth it when the tags are read by Technorati, but I'm finding the process more miss than hit. As ever, Dave Sifry is very supportive, but we still haven't cracked the problem. Niall Kennedy at Technorati suggests it may be feed-related, which led me to validate my feed and the feed of a number of blogs. Errors abound everywhere, which made me feel a bit better. I still can't get the Technorati tags to work consistently, though, and the most recent ones have simply gone unnoticed by Technorati's spiders.

Web 2.0. Dontcha just luv it.

Technorati tags: Technorati, FeedBurner, FeedDemon, NewsGator

Nokia's SmartPhone revolution

The Nokia N70 is a fine, fine phone. (I was fortunate to be sent one as part of Nokia's 360 SmartPhone Study.)  Jason Fried sang its praises last month: 'overall the N70 is the best phone I’ve ever used'. Marc Eisenstadt produced a very informative posting of his experiences with one (a 'Swiss-Army Phone') which is also a vade mecum for all phone buyers:

… there are some specific factors you need to consider when purchasing a ‘modern multi-purpose mobile (smart)phone’, and which don’t get mentioned in many reviews … :

1. Grab without thinking: If you have to think twice about whether to carry a gadget with you on Errand X or Trip Y or Meeting Z, then it’s too big. The N70 is an absolute winner on this front …

2. Thumb-centric vs pen-centric operation: if you’re making the jump to a smartphone (i.e. phone with PDA functionality), one key attribute you should consider is whether you prefer to enter short items with your thumb or with a pen …

3. Satisficing beats moving goalposts: when Nobel-prize winner Herb Simon invented ’satisficing’ in 1957, he meant (among other things) that people had a great gift for trimming a search space opting for solutions that were less-than-optimal but ‘just good enough’. Since Moore’s Law means there will always be a better gadget around the corner, and indeed the special-purpose gadgets (MP3 player, camera, etc) will get better even faster than an all-purpose Swiss Army Gadget, you just need to decide on your threshold of ‘just good enough’ acceptability for the features you want, and go for it.

… the N70 is a good all-rounder. The era of ‘jaw-dropping surprises’ is over: the fact that the N70 can do so much of what it does, and so well, ought to amaze us, but our expectations keep growing and we are increasingly hard to impress. … what are my biggest gripes?  Just two:

1. If you are a text-messaging fanatic, you will be unhappy with the N70: the keys are too small, and, most importantly, the ‘Clear/delete backwards key’ is in the wrong place, certainly for right-handed users. For me, this is an acceptable tradeoff given the good screen size and compact size of the phone (all things considered).

2. Scrolling through news/articles/messages/emails of more than, say, 30 lines in length is annoying because there is a ‘discontinuity jump’ as each new segment is rendered, which makes it hard for your brain to ‘do the right thing’, the way it can when scrolling even longish articles on most PDAs. …

So, there you have it.  Now to deploy my new productivity tool (by ignoring it). … Don’t get me wrong, this is one gorgeous phone! By ‘ignoring it’ … I mean ‘letting it blend unobtrusively into my activities, without fuss’.

I agree with Marc on his plus point 1 (but see below) and gripe number 1. As for one-handed (thumb-centric), my experience is that using a SmartPhone when busy makes one-handedness desirable. I'm not yet satisficed (?) with the camera: at 2 megapixel it's much better than what I've had before, but I still long for the day when I can leave my digital camera at home and just take my phone. And I have another gripe about the keypad: the menu/option keys are too close to the green and red (left and right) phone keys and also don't feel sufficiently different to the touch. I've mis-hit these a number of times now.

The N70 does seem to be a huge step on from the 6630 in the clarity of its software. (I haven't tried to work out why, but it immediately felt more intuitive and less like being parachuted into a jungle.) Its ease of navigation and use has encouraged me to run things on it such as LiteFeeds (RSS for mobile devices). I'm pleased with LiteFeeds, particularly as feed-reading on a mobile has been problematic until recently. (FeedBurner Mobile Feed 2.0 is not yet available, but I'd like to try it when it's out.)  Mobile Gmail works well. Audio-only podcasting is a no-no, but video can be done: see here (and there's a pdf guide here).

If I hadn't got the N70, I'd have been looking at the N90 (which Ross has blogged about here) — a far bulkier but very interesting transformer phone. My recent phones (SE P900, Nokia 6630) have been on the heavy side, and the N70's lightness is a delight. (If Christian Lindholm's right, mobile phones will soon be wearable, and the PDA will be a separate item again. And check out Nokia's 770 as reviewed by Russell Beattie and his challenge to Silicon Valley.) However, Ewan Spence's All About Symbian review of the N90 concludes:

To sum up, the N90 is Nokia’s first true cameraphone to focus on the camera, and it’s all the better for it. Yes, the unit has a number of quirks in the design, but the software, the operation and general polish of Series 60 continues, and makes the N90 the high-end phone of the moment in both Nokia’s N range and in terms of smartphones in general. It might be marketed with the camera as its killer feature, but with Series 60 it covers all the bases, and covers them well. Right now, there’s no solid reason to not look very, very seriously at the N90.

But back to light-and-thin: on the near horizon, the slide form factor N80 looks very interesting indeed. All About Symbian had a preview of an early version of this phone:

… in slide closed mode, the phone at 95.4 x 50 x 23.4 mm is essentially the smallest Nokia S60 phone yet. As a slider it is a few mm thicker than a monoblock such as the 6680, but this is hardly noticeable. It is bigger and heavier (134g) that the other modern S60 Slider, the Samsung D720, but that is a reflection of the extra functionality found in the N80. …

High resolution screen support makes a real difference – physically the screen has not changed in size, but the increased density of the pixels results in a much crisper display. … The new S60 browser, based on Safari's WebCore and JavascriptCore components, is also found on the N80. The 'minimap' feature allows you to see a full page at a glance and navigate around it, while other new features include 'visual history' and support for RSS feeds. … In use, the browser is much faster than Nokia's previous efforts … (and) will start to change the way people think about browsing the web on a mobile device. Previously, sites aimed at PCs were only accessible using SSR (small screen rendering) technologies and this had usability problems since it was always limited by the intelligence of the re-rendering algorithms. Higher resolution screens, together with minimap, mean that it is possible to quite comfortably view any web site on the phone.

A 3 megapixel camera, Flash Lite, improved Java support, Nokia XpressMusic, UPnP and Wi-Fi (to name just a few of its features — possibly Skype connectivity, too!) add up to a very powerful mobile device:

With features such as UPnP (play music on any device anywhere wirelessly), Bluetooth 2.0 (wireless stereo headsets), 3G and Wi-Fi Connectivity (music download/purchase over the air) the N80 is the most feature rich and powerful digital media playback device on the market. Imagine the reaction that wireless headphones, wireless music sharing and playback around the home and over the air song download and purchase would get if they were features announced in a new iPod and you can start to grasp the significance of the feature set of the N80.

The smartphone is often touted as the ultimate convergence device, and the N80 is just one more step along that road. Nokia made it clear they see the N80 at the heart of the digital home with UPnP, with its auto-discovery and remote control properties as the enabling standard. But it is also clear that this is just the first stage and we can expect to see increasing integration with other devices around the home in the future, which will be achieved through the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) 1.5 guidelines (which aims to enhance interoperability and user experience). All About Symbian

I blog all this because I am personally interested in what these slender, hand-held devices can deliver but I also believe that they will alter fundamentally the way schools and students operate. Moreover, although they are as yet so much the playthings of the richer countries these new generation phones have the potential to make the world more equitably connected — and for education that is also very exciting.

Or, if you prefer, as AAS concldues: all this is 'a story of four years of development in which the smartphone has moved from the initial concept smartphone to a series of feature-rich and powerful multimedia computers which will sell 100 million units in 2006. For the consumer electronics industry, it is an unprecedented story of product-line creation, growth and success and one that is largely unnoticed by mainstream technology pundits'.

Technorati tags: Nokia, N70, N80, N90, SmartPhone

Google's 'Blogger Web Comments'

Google's been rather put in the shade of late what with all the hirings and goings-on at Yahoo!. And then they produce this fantastic Firefox extension which 'shows you what bloggers around the world are saying about the websites you are viewing' (Google Blog). It gets the big thumbs-up from Evan Williams.

Mobility issues

We have been thinking about the ways in which pupils and staff in our school will be connecting to the web in the months and years immediately ahead. Both campus-wide wireless provision and the expectation that hand-held devices will be common figure prominently in our planning. The huge success of hand-held devices, in particular mobile phones and their ever-evolving range of roles, may make the latter appear a no-brainer, but the laptop isn't dead yet. Time will come, though, when we take our hand-helds with us around the campus, perhaps docking them back in our studies and using there a standard keyboard/screen combo. (On the integration of WiFi into mobile phones, see, for example, this Time article.)

Some colleagues are concerned about increased distraction in classes when powerful mobile devices become ubiquitous. William Blaze has some interesting thoughts about this, including the idea that laptops are primarily a problem as they can create a physical shield between student and teacher/class.

… there are three main uses for the computer in a meeting or classroom, note taking, distraction and instant research. … Using the computer for distraction is the classic anti laptop in the room case, but I'm not sold. Sure their is a certain dynamic to IM that might pull people farther away from the topic at hand, but just how much does it differ from someone handwriting a love letter, doodling or reading all the small print on whatever they pulled from their briefcase? Any additional distraction the internet might bring is easily offset by what it can add to the conversation, no? I like laptops being in a classroom for about two reasons, google and wikipedia. Fast, cheap information. An in room error correction machine. When used correctly the internet can transform a room from a closed information space, into an open one.

*****

There is no finer enthusiast for the mobile phone than Russell Beattie:

People constantly say, “I just want my mobile to make phone calls,” Right? Well the answer to this is … “Your phone is always with you, wouldn’t it be nice if helped do other things as well? Inform? Entertain? Assist you and remind you? You’re lugging the thing around 24/7 anyways, as long as it’s there it might as well be useful!” This is the thing, most people don’t realize mobile phones can do all that, and most U.S. developers just look at it as an anemic platform unworthy of their time, just like Janne said. But it’s not! It’s this great device sitting idle in the pockets of billions of people, all day every day, just waiting to be put to work! Let’s give it something to do! Now is the time! Russell Beattie

The mobile phone is a PLATFORM now. Get it? Long gone are the days when it was used for just making phone calls … Get used to the fact that mobile phones are now the most important piece of technology in the world. More important than your PC or your television or your iPod. Russell Beattie

Mobility is going to change life as we know it - in some places it has already shaped world events and changed history. The ubiquity of the technology is the key to all of this and the lowly mobile phone is the shape of the box in which all of this possibility is kept in. It’s not the computer or the laptop or the PDA, and it’s not WiFi or WiMax, it’s the modern mobile phone. That’s just the way it is … Russell Beattie

So what makes the mobile phone different from a laptop? Janne Jalkanen:

I was listening to the Supernova 2005 panel on mobility as a podcast, and got progressively angrier at the complete lack of vision from their part: everybody was treating mobile phones as just lighter versions of laptops. Then I also read Charlie's commentary on the same subject, and got rather ranty on another blog. Mobile phones are not just bad browsers on resource-constrained devices with crappy connectivity and non-free voice. This is something we Nokians keep iterating over and over. But as I uttered those words, enraged at nobody in particular, I realized that I lack the proper explanation on what really makes a phone different from a laptop with Skype. And if I can't figure it out, then maybe these people are right. Maybe mobile phones should just be treated like computers with tiny screens?

I have a few explanations, though not many: … mobile phones are mostly background devices, whereas a laptop has a tendency of consuming all your attention, becoming a foreground device. The usage patterns are fundamentally different: a mobile phone is always on, always connected, always with you. It's not a Big Brother, but more like a Little Brother, if you excuse the pun. Another difference I can think of is that a mobile phone is more of a physical object than a laptop is: The mobile phone gets decorated with covers and straps and things; the laptop stays the same …

Charlie Schick:

I definitely see that a pocketable, networked, one-hand operated device is the core of the mobile lifestyle. A laptop can never be a true part of one’s mobile lifestyle. … the phone sits in the background, waiting until you need it. Then - a call comes in, an item comes into view that is great for a video or photo, a calendar reminder goes off - and you make the choice to bring it into the foreground. Successful mobile devices are ones that are background devices that don’t force themselves into the foreground. Background activities can be listening to music, waiting for appointment reminders, carrying snippets of actionable data (contact info, calendar, some notes, a to-do list), and waiting for a call or SMS. Things like video, chat, playing games, and browsing the Web are full-time foreground activities, and, while they can be done while away from the desk, aren’t really things I consider doable while walking or driving, or even for small snippets of time.

… to create an app that is truly geared for the mobile lifestyle, you need to take advantage of the background status of the mobile device and not bring it too far or often into the foreground.

Building "background-ness" into the hand-helds of the future can only add to their value in the classroom.

*****

I took many things away from Marko Ahtisaari's posting about the shared mobile future. One tiny shard from there: the Finnish for mobile phone is 'kännykkä, meaning extension-of-the-hand'. To be this "natural", the phone has much development to undergo. Christian Lindholm has said:

The future of mobility is not a bandwith problem. We have a screen problem and that is terminal. The only way to get around it in small handhelds is to design content specifically optimised for small handsets.

Far too few of the big players are paying attention to mobility issues; Charlie Schick makes this point here. One problem, then, for schools, as mobile devices become ever more common, is that accessing web sites on them is as yet tedious, time-consuming and frequently deeply unrewarding (and expensive).  (Mobile Design has some helpful suggestions about how to adapt your website for a mobile device, prefaced by this: 'Publishing a mobile version of your content is harder than it should be. One significant technical leap must be made in order to give users a seamless experience … device detection, the relatively simple concept of routing different devices to the most appropriate content for that device.')

As things are now, we need to be candid about how we use our hi-tech phones. As far as my experience goes, I'm in broad agreement with Jason Kottke. Thumbs-up to clock, voice and text messaging. Email: last year, I ran my email through a Sony-Ericsson P900, but it was all a bit less than a pleasure. This year, with a Nokia 6630, I haven't bothered, and, like Jason, find that it hasn't mattered. Accessing the web: my preferred device for this is my laptop, too. (If the camera on my phone were better, I'd use it more. I'm eyeing the N90 come Xmas — the turn-around point in my 12 month upgrade cycle).

*****

'Next year there will be more than 2 billion mobile phone users in the world. … Mobile phones today have become ubiquitous, embedded into the fabric of everyday life. They have become a mobile essential. If someone owns a mobile phone today it is likely to be one of the three things that she always carries with her, the other two being keys and some form of payment.' — Marko Ahtisaari. And he goes on:

The mobile platform - because of its scale and its focus on the big human fundamental of social interaction - is a center of gravity for other familiar benefits and functionalities. Think of the clock. Imagine how many people wake up to a phone each morning, how many have stopped using a wristwatch. Or, to take a more recent example, the camera is now moving onto the mobile platform.

The future is definitely mobile. Schools must look to it and work out their strategies now. In fact, Marko's figures are already out of date, as Russell Beattie's post here makes clear ('Yep, we’ve hit the 2 Billion Mobile Phone mark ahead of schedule') — and see update below. Russell goes on, though, to say:

… the 2 billion number gets the headlines, but the real story to me is the penetration rates of faster networks and more powerful handsets. Over the next 18 months we’re going to see a dramatic increase in the number of advanced phones out there, which is really going to be exciting for those of us wanting to use these phones as a platform.

*****

Update (22.9.2005). Important posting that went up yesterday on Communities Dominate Brands. Much made me sit up and take note. Key excerpts:

The research organisation Ovum and the GSM Association released the data on Sept 18, 2005, that worldwide there are now 2 billion mobile phone users. …

Putting the number in context. There are twice as many mobile phones, than there are internet users of any kind. There are three times as many mobile phones than there are personal computers. There are more mobile phones than credit cards, more mobile phones than automobiles, more mobile phones than TV sets, and more mobile phones than fixed/wireline phones. In fact a staggering 30% of the global population carries a mobile phone. Since Taiwan first did it in 2001, today over 30 countries have achieved over 100% cellphone penetration rates, and even laggard USA has gone past the 50% penetration rate. In the most advanced mobile markets such as Finland, Italy and Hong Kong the typical first-time cellphone customer is under the age of 10. It is the only digital gadget carried by every economically viable person on the planet. Younger people have stopped using wristwatches and rely only upon the mobile phone for time. It is the only universal device, and the device of the Century.

Every mobile phone user can be reached by SMS text messaging (ie more than twice the number of people that can be reached by e-mail). Each mobile phone can handle payments (if the mobile operator/carrier decides to enable that ability) … And almost every mobile phone user keeps the mobile phone literally within arm's reach 24/7. Yes, 60% of us actually take the mobile phone physically to bed with us, either to use the alarm feature or to hear incoming text messages.. If we lose our wallet we report it in 26 hours. If we lose our mobile phone we report it in 68 minutes. As to those who are new to these phenomena, no, we don't only use the phone outside. In fact 70% of all phone calls are placed indoors, and a whopping 60% of all data access by mobile phone is done indoors.

… the mobile phone is becoming the evolution target for much of the converging industries. 19% of all music revenues are generated by mobile phones. 14% of videogaming software revenues come from mobile phone games. More cameraphones are sold this year than all non-mobile phone digital cameras ever sold. … there is a big future in the convergence of TV and mobile. … In fact almost all community behaviour is migrating to mobile phones, from blogging (there are more mobile blog sites already than there are regular internet blogsites - but most of the moblog sites are in two languages I don't speak - Korean and Japanese) to videogaming to dating to chat to TV-interactivity such as voting for reality shows etc.

Google homepages

Ever since the appearance of Google accounts, it's been a question not of 'if' but 'when' Google would make fuller use of them. 'My search history' was a stepping-stone en route to what is now emerging, personalised homepages. A Google portal by another name?

Google blog

Comments and thoughts: Jeremy Zawodny, John Battelle. Julian Bond: 'What I want is Google-About-Me, not My-Google. A page for *other* people to see everything I do, not a page where I can do everything. Or as Marc Canter would say, a Digital Lifestyle Aggregator.'

Google local mobile

We were on a roll after we launched Google Local UK last month, and went on to build a mobile web browser version of Google Local for our UK users. Users can now access Local on their mobile by going straight to the Local home page (that's http://mobile.google.co.uk/local) or the Google UK home page (a.k.a. http://www.google.co.uk/xhtml). So we say: step away from that computer. Click a few buttons on your keypad and head to that new Thai restaurant near Piccadilly Circus. If you're slightly disoriented once away from the screen, Local gives you Google Maps and driving directions too. Google Blog

Firefox highs and lows

I have had Firefox crash a number of times now. It seems to stall and fall over when opening certain links (legitimate pop-ups/'open-in-new-window' links). And I'd love to upgrade to the (more) secure new version (1.0.4), but then so many of my much used extensions wouldn't work …

… extensions should be forced to follow explicit, prescribed rules that prevent issues like those so many people have experienced. And if they don't pass the test, they should not allowed to be added to the browser. If that means that Mozilla must limit automatic extension installation only to code that is hosted on its own servers, so be it. Mozilla must actively guard the user experience. It's not enough just to build a light-weight browser that's fast and pleasant to use. To truly compete, Mozilla must deliver the full package of goods.

I've had always wondered whether a completely open-source endeavor like Mozilla will, in fact, be up to the task of properly testing and refining its product. It's not that I doubt the commitment and abilities of the developers and others that work on Firefox. But I wonder whether they have the strength in numbers, and the available time, to get the job done. I don't just want Firefox to be merely the temporary stick that galvanizes Microsoft into a serious upgrade of Internet Explorer. If you doubt the hundreds of thousands of man hours that Microsoft sank into the development of Internet Explorer through the first four versions, you are seriously naive. Nothing but the same level of intensity is going to make this a real two-horse race.

Don't be beguiled by the download numbers. I've downloaded Firefox at least 50 times myself since it shipped. How many times have you? When you get right down to it, Firefox has only a precarious hold on the market. It has attention, and a limited time to prove that we should keep giving it same. Hopefully Google or someone will get into this whole hog and help Mozilla deliver. Scot's Newsletter — May 2005, Part II

Greasemonkey + Google = chaos

Matthew Gertner on Greasemonkey (see my earlier post): 'anything close to widespread adoption is going to create a big mess'.

The Gmail account I run in Firefox with Greasemonkey running + Arantius' Gmail 'delete button' script + Persistent.info's 'persistent searches' for Gmail functions very weirdly. It won't open the Gmail Help window, for example, and in "email composition" mode it won't add hyper-links to text. Disable Greasemonkey, and therefore these two scripts, and all is fine again.

In IE, running Google's latest Google Toolbar, I can't now get beyond 'Loading' when opening a Gmail account. (I used to have no problem, but I guess Google is tweaking Gmail all the time.) Temporarily remove the Google Toolbar, and the Gmail account loads.

This is very quick, on-the-hoof feedback, but it would seem that messing around with browsers and web-services that run therein will create problems for end-users. If even Google isn't getting this right …  A pity: I really like those two Firefox/Greasemonkey Gmail scripts.

(1/ None of the above seems to be anything to do with ad- or pop-up- or script-blockers.  2/ Persistent.info's posting has a disclaimer: 'I happen to work for Google. This script was produced without any internal knowledge of Gmail, and is not endorsed by Google in any way. If you have any problems with it, please only contact me.')

Greasemonkey

Struck last month by Evan Williams saying:

"Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ('user scripts') to any webpage to change it's behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a webpage's style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a webpage's design or interaction."

Well, that's extremely interesting. Ran across it because BlogMarks is offering a replacement for Bloglines' Clip/Blog This function. That is (for users who opt-in) they're replacing a piece of functionality in another web app with their own. Imagine if there was a widespread facility to do that.

Then Mark Pilgrim came up with Butler.

Scoble:

Matthew Gertner: Why Autolink (and Greasemonkey) is evil

"They may provide fleeting satisfaction, but anything close to widespread adoption is going to create a big mess."

Agreed.

Now there's an early version of Greasemonkey for IE.

Merlin:

I’m really fascinated by the idea that a web site (and now, if I understand this right, a web application?) can be munged to your needs and preferences so easily. I’ve sampled from the page of available scripts, and I have to say it’s a pretty mind-blowing hack. (Thank you for "fixing" All Music Guide!)

The implications of things like Greasemonkey and PithHelmet catching on seem far-reaching. Think about the benefits of taking web standards to the next level and making sites that can anticipate and acknowledge your visitor’s preferences from their first visit (via standard DIV names or calls to your public “preferences” file). I wouldn’t begin to know how to make this stuff, but I can definitely see myself becoming a grateful consumer.

Brave new world!

Screencasting

John Udell writes:

… the possibilities of the screencast medium continue to fascinate me. Movies communicate so much more than the obligatory static screenshots you typically find on product websites. I've mostly done long-form screencasts so far. But today's exercise makes me realize that the short film -- which highlights one specific thing and takes no time at all to produce -- is a useful form as well.

This from his post, Linky in action — about his 90 second introduction to Linky, the very useful Firefox extension which 'opens a set of links found on a web page into a corresponding set of browser tabs'.

Screencasting looks interesting. Scott Rosenberg writes that John Udell 'has been pioneering what he calls "screencasting," an unusual sort of online journalism that involves taking over your browser screen with screengrabs and animations while he narrates via the audio track'. I write about Udell's screencast on Wikipedia above (next post). John Udell's guidelines for screencasting (intended to guide those about to work with him on some screencasts) go under these headings: show, don't tell; make it real; keep it interactive. 'I'm still making this up as I go along, but from my perspective these are the key guidelines.'

More screencasts from John Udell promised this year. I would like to explore their use in teaching.

Onfolio 2 beta

I'm trying out this new version of Onfolio. Robert Scoble's take:

Let's be honest. As much as I like NewsGator, RSS Bandit, SharpReader, and FeedDemon (they each have their advantages) the RSS News Aggregator that'll work for the mass market HAS to be built into the browser.

That takes us to today. OnFolio just shipped a beta of their new RSS News Aggregator. It's awesome.

It works on Firefox or IE. It gives Dave Winer his all-in-one-page newspaper view that he's been asking aggregator makers to give him. Lots of fun little features. Search, built in. It's actually a little database running on your desktop. Very nice.

The comments to Scoble's posting are well worth reading.

Firefox & RSS

Firefox 1.0 pre-release is here — with Live Bookmarks:

Live Bookmarks is a new technology in Firefox that lets you view RSS news and blog headlines in the bookmarks toolbar or bookmarks menu. With one glance, quickly see the latest headlines from your favorite sites. Go directly to the articles that interest you -- saving you time.

A site is enabled for Live Bookmarks when you see this icon on the bottom right corner of the browser. Clicking on the icon and selecting an RSS feed will bring up the Add Bookmark dialog. Select 'OK' and you will see Live Bookmarks with the rest of your bookmarks. Many people find it especially convenient to save Live Bookmarks in their Bookmarks Toolbar folder.

Windows sans IE

It can't be done? Well, apparently this ain't true — Crackbaby:

For those of you who may remember, I posted an article a while back about how to remove Internet Explorer from your system which came as the result of Microsoft refusing to help me with this. Needless to say, thousands of people started flooding the sight to see how I did it and now even Microsoft is wondering how I did it. They have asked my advice on how to remove IE from the system. Read on for more details...

Writing for the web

Tim Bray:

The state of Web authoring tools is kind of like the state of what we used to call “Word Processing” twenty years ago when I was getting into this business. If everyone’s going to write for the Web (and it looks a lot of people are going to) we need the Web equivalents of Word Perfect and Wordstar and Xywrite and Microsoft Word, and we need them right now.

Jonathon Delacour:

I’m an advanced content creator who, like Tim Bray, wants the convenience and ubiquity of browser-use together with the advantages of a feature-rich client. ... Why can’t Tim and I have a decent WYSIWYG browser-based editor?

IE and the future

Two pieces published within days of each other explore the weaknesses of IE and the opportunities generated for the future of computing, the web, etc:

Steve Gillmor argues that a faltering and "under-developed" IE has admitted RSS ...

Ben Hammersley, writing in The Guardian Online, echoes Marc Canter and Joel Spolsky:

... what would happen if people's web browsers were capable of running complex applications, with code based on openly published specifications? Two things: first, the operating system would become irrelevant, so there would be no need to upgrade to the next version of Windows, and second, the playing field for everything else would be thus levelled. The majority of Microsoft's business, therefore, could have been threatened if the IE browser team had continued past 2001.

The concept of running applications within the web browser is not a new one, and indeed has been tried before and failed. But today, with a combination of cheaper bandwidth and improvements in storage and clustering technology, things are looking promising. ... Google is a very good example of this. The reasoning behind its new webmail product, Gmail, puzzles many, but makes a lot more sense when you think of it as the first in a line of major web applications built to replace desktop programs. If you start to consider Google's own system as your hard drive, and your browser as your operating system, you might see how Microsoft could be deeply worried. No one would need to keep buying Windows, or upgrading Office if all they had to do was pay Google a monthly stipend for effectively unlimited storage, guaranteed backup and an installation or upgrade process consisting of typing in a URL.

Firefox preferred to IE

This is striking. Following the recent news of a serious Scob attack ...

Kaspersky Labs, a leading information security software developer, announces a new case of mass infection, caused by a combination of malware and unsanctioned access to computer systems. Web servers running Microsoft Internet Explorer (ISS) 5 are affected, and individual computers will become victims when the user views an infected site using Internet Explorer. An unusual method is used to infect victim machines. Web servers are compromised using a JavaScript Trojan, Trojan.JS.Scob.a. It is not yet clear whether the servers have been compromised via a new vulnerability, or an already documented one. When Internet Explorer is used to view a site on an infected server, the Trojan will take control of the victim machine, and redirect the browser to a site containing a PHP script. This is done using an unknown vulnerability in Internet Explorer. A version of Backdoor.Padodor (w, x, y, or z) will then be installed on the victim machine. This spy program enables full remote control over victim machines. Kaspersky Virus News (Saturday, June 26, 2004)

... the Microsoft owned Slate carried this surprising advice:

"Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole," the BBC warned. (Disclosure: Microsoft owns Slate.) CNET reporter Robert Lemos zeroed in on why the attack was so scary. "This time," he wrote, "the flaws affect every user of Internet Explorer." That's about 95 percent of all Net users. No matter how well they had protected themselves against viruses, spyware, and everything else in the past, they were still vulnerable to yet another flaw in Microsoft's browser.

Scob didn't get me, but it was enough to make me ditch Explorer in favor of the much less vulnerable Firefox browser. Firefox is built and distributed free by the Mozilla Organization, a small nonprofit corporation spun off last year from the fast-fading remnants of Netscape, which was absorbed by AOL in 1999. Firefox development and testing are mostly done by about a dozen Mozilla employees, plus a few dozen others at companies like IBM, Sun, and Red Hat. I've been using it for a week now, and I've all but forgotten about Explorer.

Link via Kottke

Browser Wars (again)

Nigel MacFarlane, writing in InformIT, thinks MS 'really hates the web. The new browser war may appear to be about the emergence of Mozilla and friends with their polished eye-candy interfaces, but it's really about Microsoft versus the W3C. Internet Explorer is Microsoft's blocking tactic—never to be properly web-compliant, never to give the W3C a day in the sun—and Longhorn technology is the big-stick alternative being built. One of the purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it.' Scobleizer, who picks up on this, too, says:

Sigh. Even if all that were true (it's not) I'm running Mozilla's Firefox on Longhorn just fine. But, he's right that IE isn't the most up-to-date-with-the-latest-standards browser out there right now. Which is why I'm using Firefox. ... Nigel, you totally missed the boat. Syndication is where the action is. That's what's going to take lowest-common-denominator-platforms (er, the Web) ahead in huge leaps (no matter what platform you like). You should see the traffic graphs for RSS. Doubling every month.