Most of you will be familiar with this phenomenon: an uncle in the family that isn't actually blood related, but everyone calls them "uncle" anyway. Typically, this special kind of uncle is a warm and loving man, the kind you want to consider as part of your family just the same.
Up till two days ago, I too had such an uncle. He was 95 and older than anyone in our entire extended family, and deeply loved by all of us. He was part of our family since long before I was born, but it wasn't until I was in my late teens that I truly learned about who he was—for this man was not just an uncle, he was Edward Schillebeeckx: world-renowned Roman Catholic theologian and author.
Over the years that I got to know Uncle Ed—as he's known in our family—I often felt inspired by him. He was always warm and gentle, kind to everyone around him and despite his age very sharp, alert and comfortable with the technology-driven modernization of our society. If you're familiar with his work—an impressive oeuvre of 42 books and countless of additional contributions—this wouldn't surprise you, as Edward Schillebeeckx was a very progressive Christian.
It wasn't until I was in my 20s that I found out he'd had several spats with the Catholic Church for those progressive views, and it saddened me. Edward was someone who was skeptical of the Catholic dogma, not because of atheist perspectives or a rebellious nature, but because he strongly believed that the duty of the Pope and the Catholic clergy was to express the convictions of Christians in the context of the faith, and not the other way around.
These views got him in trouble as much as they got him worldwide renown—and respect. After all, there are many who criticize the Catholic church, but few who are respected members of the Catholic church themselves.
In 1982 he was awarded the prestigious Erasmusprize; my family was there at the award ceremony, an example of how close we were to him. I was there too, in a way: my mother was only a matter of weeks away from giving birth to me.
Whilst his books are translated in at least 14 languages, he wrote them in Dutch and because of that he won the Gouden Ganzeveer in 1989.
When I got the news of his passing, I cried. I cried because I was sad, for Edward was a beloved part of our family. I cried because I was happy, for his pain was no more and he lived to 95, the age he'd always wanted to reach. I cried because I was hopeful, as he was a beautiful, wonderful and inspirational example of a human being with the right kind of view on religion in society—and I cried out of sorrow, because the world has so few of them to lose.
The way I see it, the world would benefit greatly if more Christians—especially more Christians with influence—had the kind of open-minded, tolerant, respectful and modern views on religion and faith that Edward Schillebeeckx so profoundly wrote about. As for me personally, though, I'd say that any family would benefit greatly from having someone like Uncle Ed be a part of it, bringing warmth and wisdom to everyone's hearts and minds.
Writer-Director James Cameron spent five years developing the technology with which to produce his childhood dream project, Avatar, and with it has come enough hype and press to bring the skeptic out in many of us. Fortunately for him, and us, Mr. Cameron delivers.
If you choose not to see this movie because of the hype surrounding it, you'll miss out on what might be the most visually exciting adventure since the Lord of the Rings films. Avatar is one of those films that you walk out of wanting more, wanting to be a part of it, wanting some of it to be real.
The story is fairly trite, yet told in a beautiful and compelling way. The world of Pandora, on the other hand, is as creatively inspired as the Star Wars universe—and then some. It effortlessly sucks you in and makes you want to be there, and together with the quick pace in which Avatar progresses you'll quickly find yourself not simply watching a movie, but participating in an experience.
Sam Worthington's portrayal of Jake Sully and his Na'vi avatar, with which he starts living among an indigenous Na'vi clan, firmly establishes itself as the ongoing highlight of the movie, but the supporting cast with great roles by Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang and Worthington's Na'vi counterpart Zoe Saldana ensures that this movie is about the people on both sides of the conflict on Pandora, and not simply a showcase of an actor or actress's talent.
With Avatar, James Cameron sets a new standard of cinematic storytelling and special effects—one well worth watching, at that.
Ever since Copy and Paste made it to the iPhone, people have cheered and celebrated its implementation. Okay, perhaps the holiday season is making me exaggerate, but it’s been a warmly welcomed feature to the iPhone OS and it’s certainly been a joy to use. But to call it perfect would be giving it too much credit, too. After all, who hasn’t used their iPhone Notes application as a scratchboard to save a clipping briefly while wanting to copy-paste something else? If you’re anything like me when it comes to using your iPhone, you’ll also have emailed yourself long URLs, large blobs of text or images from your Mac, only to retrieve them and use them on your iPhone. Well, all those workarounds are no longer necessary, for now there is Pastebot for iPhone and iPod Touch, brought to you by Tapbots.
Pastebot is a clipboard manager application for the iPhone with a load of great functionality. It stores text and images and allows you not just to organize them, but to apply all kinds of filters to them. Want to crop that photo you just took? Pastebot can do it. Need to find and replace some string in this long note you wrote? Pastebot can do it. And, since this is the age of sharing, Pastebot will let you share your clipping with others, whether it’s text or an image. Whilst not everything you can imagine is possible to do with text and images in Pastebot just yet, the functionality that’s there is already pretty extensive.
When you first launch Pastebot it gives you a quick little tour that explains the basic usage of the app in a helpful and friendly way, without over-explaining it. You’ll quickly notice that there’s loads to discover as you use the app more, but it’s all done so intuitively and elegantly that you never feel overwhelmed by the amount of options in the app. The user interface has that same kind of polish that you may already be familiar with from the Tapbots team, from either their Convertbot or Weightbot iPhone applications. Everything seems very carefully thought through and designed to help encourage a great user experience.
When you have a Mac, Pastebot becomes even much more valuable thanks to the free Mac companion application: Pastebot Sync. This small utility allows you to sync your clipboard from Mac to iPhone and back. Want to try out a URL on your iPhone? Just copy it on your Mac, open Pastebot on your iPhone and you’re done. Setting up an iPhone to sync with your Mac couldn’t be simpler, and sharing snippets of text between all your Mac and iPhone applications can be an incredibly helpful thing.
In many ways, Pastebot is a content manager for your iPhone and it pulls it off splendidly. If you’ve ever used one of their other apps, you’ll already be familiar with the great quality of Tapbots’ products; if you haven’t, Pastebot is a great and highly useful little app to get introduced to them.
Development on Modernizr continues steadily, and release 1.1 is done and available for download. Newly added is support for localStorage, sessionStorage, Web Workers, applicationCache, new HTML5 input properties and HTML5 Audio and Video formats.
An awful lot has happened the past month in Operating System land. The big names in the technology sector are currently fighting tooth and nail to secure their place of “ruler” in tomorrow’s world of Next-gen OSes, and since I deem a lot of this fighting to be quite silly, I’m dubbing it the OS 2.0 wars—a nod to the “Web 2.0” nonsense of this past decade, where, much like in the OS world, the denominator “2.0” was ill-fitting and misguided.
Sidenote: if you’re old school, please note that I am not talking about OS/2 here. At all.
Tangentially related to these developments was last week’s discussion between Peter-Paul Koch (follow-up), Dion Almaer, John Gruber and myself (and my follow-up), as well as countless others over Twitter. This discussion deliberated iPhone apps versus Web Apps and how they stack up against one another. It was instigated by Paul Graham’s essay, Apple’s Mistake.
The main point all parties in this discussion agree on is that with the addition of Device APIs to WebKit the browser would catapult itself immediately into the position of being one of the next-generation Operating Systems, and it would be great because it would be built on entirely open standards. Yadda yadda yadda.
All of that is just hypothetical talk for the time being. Going on in the real world of right now is the landslide of recent announcements and releases by various companies all competing for a slice of the Next Generation OS pie. A quick summary of which companies and what product(s) they’re working on they hope will accomplish this unrealistic goal somehow.
Microsoft
I suspect many people saw this coming, but Microsoft is now officially positioning Silverlight as the new .Net for developing applications with. Imagine Flash games and websites; now imagine the execution of them in a slightly worse fashion, and now imagine that as, say, your new photo editing software. Excited about that prospect? Didn’t think so.
Microsoft appears to remain as dense as they’ve been the past ten years: trying to get the dominant position in a market by using their same old tactics from the past: copy someone else’s idea, abuseleverage your money to force your product onto people, piss all over the notion of open standards, and somehow again manage to completely forget about concepts such as a great user experience or innovation. Hey, those don’t matter if you have an 85% market share, right?
Google
Sadly, Google is trying too hard to mimic Microsoft even though those tactics only worked for Microsoft in a past where the industry landscape was significantly different, and whose tactics will never work again to any such a lucrative and powerful extent.
First they came with Android, now Chrome OS; the two platforms appear not to share any code or frameworks, so Android developers are at no advantage whatsoever when it comes to developing apps for Chrome OS.
Another area where they confusingly behave just like Microsoft: announce early, release late (and do a crappy job polishing up the User Experience of the product, but I digress). And like all stupid things, Google’s Microsoft-aping also comes in threes: forgo taking control of the full stack, stick to doing the software only and not even play as little a role as enforcing arbiter for your hardware partners. That whole “the hardware guys will figure out their part”-approach must be some surefire way to make great products.
If anyone at Google has ever heard of The Apple Playbook, they sure are keeping their mouths shut very well.
HP, Sony, Dell, etc…
What’s the biggest thing any of these companies have tried to bring to market in recent memory? Netbooks. No, let’s be more specific: Netbooks running either Linux or Windows. In other words, a cheap-feeling OS on cheap-feeling hardware. Yeah, that’ll get customers excited.
These guys are industry giants, and yet they’re behaving like castrated cowards, lacking any semblance of balls to try something on their own. Instead, they just sit around and wait for Google to hand them their next move, not realizing that it steers them all collectively towards the land of irrelevance. The only reason these companies will continue to exist is because not everyone can or wants to buy Apple products—which is totally fair—but they’re slowly relinquishing whatever chances they still have at being an inspiring, innovative and relevant technology company in this industry.
Litl
Leave it to David to make Goliath look the fool; an innovative and ballsy approach at making a brand new computer, complete with its own Operating System. A total break away from the traditional mold of computing devices and operating systems. Who is behind it? Some unknown startup with a small team of 40 people who seem to have come out of nowhere. It’ll take a lot of guts, dedication, vision and hard work to bring about the kind of revolution the Litl computer aspires to create, but I couldn’t be more thrilled to see these people give it a try. I’m keeping an eye on these guys, even if just out of curiosity to see where they go.
Apple
They would only have to start adding aggressive device API support to mobileSafari—which they might do if the hardware becomes powerful enough for great performance it’s in their business interests to do so—in order to have established one next-generation OS automatically: the iPhone and iPod Touch are King and Queen of the handheld device industry in terms of usage, and web apps for them would definitely skyrocket if (mobile) Safari could access more APIs from the device.
As it stands, Apple are happily content being mum on the issue (as always) with regards to the next release of Mac OS X or the next iPhone OS, let alone doing something so outrageously bold with Webkit. They could even be developing a tablet or netbook that might create yet another platform for developers to build for, but if that is the case, it at least seems likely that the device would run a variant of OS X and have the same or similar Cocoa frameworks again, making it much easier for developers to get onboard. Google, Microsoft: you hearing this?
Palm
Poor Palm. They did a great job with WebOS and the Pre, and they’re actually doing some of that device API-work for WebKit I mentioned with Apple. They still have some performance and User Experience polishing to do before they can really compare to Apple, but already they’re suffering from declining Pre sales and a partner that doesn’t really help out.
I applaud Palm for their WebOS vision and execution, as well as their willingness to bet the company on this, but perhaps Webkit simply isn’t quite ready just yet to be a full-fledged Operating System, no matter how much work you put into extending it for that purpose. Timing, it seems, is against them. The big question now is if they’ll last long enough to ride the wave when it finally does come.
RIM
Research in Motion is a big fat N/A or Not Applicable until they get their act together. They produce myriad devices with each their own OS, no centralized application store and—worst of all—bafflingly varying experiences for the use between each phone. The only “RIM Experience” I can recall from using their phones might as well not have had the I and M capitalized.
Adobe
Attempting to get the Government to use Flash and PDF so that they maintain a foothold. It’s not really an Operating System effort per se, but clearly Adobe would love forFlash to be some next-gen OS derivative for the Web, at least.
The one thing that Adobe has accomplished (with their acquisition of Flash) is owning what is perhaps the world’s largest consistent runtime environment. Sure, “the Web” is really the world’s largest platform, but in that regard we really should say “the browser”, and no browser has (nor has ever had) a bigger, cross-platform market share than Flash has. Unlike the browsers, Flash is the same on Windows and Mac, whether it’s in IE, Firefox, Safari or Opera.
Unfortunately, it’s also equally crappy in all of them, and since it lives on the platform of Open Standards, its proprietary nature will continue to shoot Adobe in the foot. Flash, like Silverlight, cannot become a next-gen OS simply because it has the worst of both worlds on the best of both world’s platform. But unlike Silverlight, at least, they have a huge market share.
And that brings us to the last one for today: Facebook. What started as a college students-limited social network has become a massive, 350-million users rich application platform. They’re still focused on bringing people together, but it’s hard to deny that their application platform kind of overshadows that effort by now. Facebook is the Operating System with the friendliest face—your own. A more anthropomorphized rendition of what an OS could be would have to sprout legs and start calling me pet names, for one.
But then I believe the next release of Farmville already has that feature.
Conclusion
It’s perfectly obvious there won’t be just one OS that will dominate an entire tech landscape the next 15-20 years, and I don’t think any of these companies is gunning for that. What worries me is not any of the criticisms above, but the fragmentation of what was once more or less one industry. It is both a blessing and a curse for someone like me, who wants to create software products and websites for people to use. This fragmentation is healthy in that it creates strong competition and forces companies to keep up and innovate more, or fall by the wayside. Conversely, it’s creating many more choices for consumers and developers, and too much choice is bad.
The only thing I’m actually concerned about in all of this is how many companies and, in particular, analysts and investors focus on market share statistics. Let’s make one thing really clear here: (OS) market share is a metric that mattered in the ‘90s. Today, not so much anymore, especially given the impending fragmentation of our industry. Nowadays, all that market share numbers do is contribute to attracting developers, but they’re far from the only thing that does anymore. The iPhone had a 0% market share and already, before the SDK was even announced, it attracted thousands upon thousands of developers.
Make a great product that your customers absolutely love to use, ensure that it does whatever its purpose is really well, and make sure to do all that in a way that is (very) profitable. Those are the key facets to doing something worthwhile in this industry; everything else is just colored bubbles.
Last.fm are doing a fantastic 2009 Zeitgeist, with interesting juxtapositions of your own music listening habits to those of the entire world and much more. The first week lists the most-listened-to artists positions 40–21; I already can't wait for the next two weeks.
When I started thinking about my road trip across the USA, I realized one thing early on: a GPS unit for my Nikon D300 DSLR camera would be rather useful. After all, when driving thousands of miles across a continent and taking photos regularly, it's really handy to have GPS data on the photos in case you ever want to do something nice with that later on.
I explored the scarce GPS add-on options online and eventually found the DawnTech di-GPS Mini 2L. They've since replaced the product with the di-GPS Mini 3L, so I've added notes throughout the review to addresses notable differences.
DawnTech is a Hong Kong-based company that does free shipping, even overseas, and their prices are comparable, often cheaper, to the camera manufacturers' own brand-name GPS unit. More importantly, the DawnTech products seem to work a little better.
The di-GPS Mini 2L connects to your camera via the 10-pin circular connector and comes with a strap clip. Its form factor itself is designed for it to fit on your camera's hot shoe, which is where it sat for most of the time with me. This does prevent you from using a hot shoe flash unit, so when you need to put one of those on you end up with the GPS module dangling (very) inconveniently against your left hand. This can be alleviated a little with the strap clip, but that was no use to me as I use a camera grip / hand strap [Amazon kickback link] which is a much more convenient solution for me to carry the camera around with.
The GPS dongle itself is small and light and has three states: off, always-on and auto-on-off, the latter meaning it'll turn on and off along with your camera. The 2L has a red LED light that flashes when it's trying to get a GPS signal, and is solid when a position is acquired. The 3L appears to use a solid green LED when it has a position, but this is just speculation since this product isn't shipping yet.
When I got my GPS module I immediately tried it out by taking a walk to my favorite pastry shop in San Francisco and seeing how the GPS fared. I turned it on as soon as I got outside and about a block later it had found its position. I kept it on while going inside the shop and was pleased to see that it kept the GPS location there, allowing me to capture Thorough Bread's delicious almond croissants in full geo-tagged glory.
The real test, however, came when I started the road trip.
My first day of driving started in the late afternoon and most of it ended up taking place under the quiet cover of night; it wasn't until I hit the road from L.A. to Phoenix that I put the GPS through real significant use. For the entire 400 mile drive I had the GPS unit on, testing its drain on the camera's battery while traveling and constantly updating its position. I was fairly pleased with the result: it definitely drained a significant part of my D300's battery, but I had plenty left to shoot some photos with that evening.
My road trip involved nightly battery recharging—sometimes out of necessity, sometimes just as a precaution, so the next day allowed the biggest stress test on the GPS: a 1,000 mile drive from Phoenix to Austin.
With the GPS on for most of the day, my D300 had lost about 85% of its battery due to constant location updating of the GPS module. This seemed pretty good to me, actually: a 1,000 miles in a single day is far, far more than most anyone will ever drive, and I still took photos along the way (most of which weren't interesting enough to upload to Flickr). To have even a shred of battery life remaining after that seemed quite good.
Throughout using the GPS module in L.A., Phoenix and Austin I also learned more about how fast the GPS acquires its position when you turn it on. This depends vastly on where in the world you are, it feels like. Be it open sky, inside a building but near a window, or in a car or train, the GPS can sometimes acquire a brand new position within half a minute, and at other times under similar conditions it can take over a minute.
When you walk into a building or go through a tunnel or what have you, it's to be expected that your GPS loses its position and signal. The 2L is not as good as the new 3L in this regard, as the latter stores the last fixed position and re-uses that much more intelligently when it loses a signal. A quick run into a (larger) building won't force a total re-sync, whereas the 2L sometimes, albeit not that often, forgets where you are and retrieves your location anew.
On the whole, the DawnTech di-GPS Mini 2L module was a great addition to my photography arsenal whilst traveling. For me, it was worth the small investment to get the vast bulk of my photos geo-tagged automatically, and with such great precision. Now that the 2L has been superseded by the 3L, which features some great usability improvements, I heartily recommend it for anyone looking to add (moderately affordable) GPS-tagging to their photos. For Nikon users at least, this is a great little product.
Neven Mrgan, whom you may recall did the Pie Guy web app game I mentioned in last week's article series, has made a 3D CSS demo. Pandy only uses CSS 3D Transforms—no Canvas, WebGL or anything. Just straight-up HTML elements and CSS, with some JavaScript for the Touch events interaction on your iPhone (it has no Click events, so on Desktop Safari you can't interact).
A couple of people have asked me about the Social Network icons in the right column of my design: where I got them, how I made them, if they can "steal" them, and so forth. I'll discuss all three below, but those who just want to use them for their own site can now download the 10 icons in Photoshop PSD format and be done here.
Still reading? Fantastic. Let's get started.
Where did these icons come from?
When I began work on my site's current design, I ran into a problem pretty quickly: the "Web 2.0 icons"—as I started calling them for simplicity's sake—were not exactly available in any form suitable for my design.
Some of the social networks had good PR sections with various incarnations of their logo available for (free) use, but most of them either did not or they didn't have a logo I could use readily. For the sites I couldn't find a usable logo for, I started sifting through their HTML code in search of Apple Touch icons. Those were often more useful in terms of image dimensions, being closer to what I needed, as well as design.
Still, I was missing a couple. Twitter, for instance, had no logo for download in their PR section and their Apple Touch icon was not at all suitable for my purposes. In such cases, I simply took the largest version of the logo I could find and worked with that. Speaking of…
How did I make the icons?
Sadly (for me), almost every icon I found was not usable right off the bat. Even the ones I found in nice alpha-PNG format were insufficient. I had to process them, which turned out to be extremely painstaking: in order to separate the logo itself from the background color it rested on, I had to manually reproduce every single anti-aliased pixel in each logo. Yes, I really did do pixel-for-pixel manual Anti-Aliasing. If anyone knows of a process to do this automatically in Photoshop, please tell me because a lot of time was spent searching the Web for an easier technique to do this.
I could have, of course, tried getting in touch with PR representatives of each social network and ask if I could get an unaltered, clean PSD of their logo somehow, but I suspected that would be an even more harrowing process.
Suffice to say, after many hours of pixel-pushing in Photoshop I ended up with ten nicely anti-aliased, isolated, transparency-friendly versions of the logos of my most-used social networks. They allowed me to create the nice Elsewhere tabs you can see on the right in my site, which look their prettiest when you view and hover over them in Safari.
Can I use them on my own site?
You sure can! I crafted a separate PSD containing just the logos, set in separate layers atop a background palette of the same colors I used as backgrounds for each respective icon in my site. I also added an empty layer in the PSD file containing the drop shadow Layer Style that I used, so if you want to add that same shadow you can just copy-paste the Layer Style. This is especially relevant for the Dopplr logo and background, for instance.
There's a download link to the PSD file above, or simply click this big fancy image to download the ten icons and use them on your own site. If you use them, a mention for my efforts would be nice, but is not at all required.
Enjoy!
Update: two small disclaimers: first, I take no credit for the creation of the logos themselves nor are these versions officially sanctioned or approved by the networks. Second, the Dopplr and Flickr logos are slightly adjusted in that for the first, I stacked the six squares and for the latter I added the white circle. Both of these adjustments were made for usability purposes, but your mileage with them may vary.
