Nothing is Linear

Head on over to the new old blog

2012-01-04T10:12:00.003-06:00

Hello readers of this blog. I decided to consolidate so I am now posting at blog.danielsjourney.com -- head over there and update your subscriptions, etc...thanks!

Shit Crayons

2011-04-15T09:40:00.000-05:00

Ian Bogost makes a scathing critique of social games:

Several years ago, Chaim Gingold gave us the useful concept of the Magic Crayon. A magic crayon is a tool that facilitates creativity in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. A magic crayon lets its users breathe life into things.

Some would like to think that all crayons are magic ones. That just any old thing can conjure. But that's not true. The magic crayon has a shadow side.

Some barriers are benign, but others are insidious...

Inspirations like that are not magic crayons, but shit crayons...

Even if creativity comes from constraint, there's constraint and there's incarceration. A despot in a sorcerer's hat does not deserve praise for inciting desperate resilience.

Life is too short to make shitty software

2011-03-15T00:27:00.000-05:00

The other day I wrote:

"What we do is make software. And software is best made by humans who understand each other (and by extension understand the people who use their software). Unless they’re miraculously made up of such humans, organizations make shitty software."

And I just had some more thoughts about that:

I don't want to make or work on software that sucks anymore. Life is too short to work on something that is shit to begin with. Just because a piece of software improves your process or workflow over the paper version you used in the 80's does not mean that it is not shitty software. Just because a piece of software is better than its competition in X, Y and Z ways does not mean that it is not shitty software. Just because a piece of software just like its competition except in that one way you need it to be different does not mean it's not shitty software.

If we are to take our craft seriously, to consider ourselves worthy of our work, to join in a lineage of artisans and, most importantly, enjoy ourselves while we work and work in a way worthy of the life we have been given, then we must make software that is a delight to use, that makes our customer's lives not just seem to be easier, but actually brings them joy in their lives.

It's not good enough to add the features they want or fix the bug they are complaining about or improve the workflow that is still--despite your wonderful technology--a total mess and waste of their precious time.

The problem is most of our "users"...and what a terrible word for these people, these people we have a (for the most part) unseeing yet terribly intimate relationship with...but "customer" is also a horrible word! A customer is someone you exchange money for goods with, not someone who interacts with your product every day and alternatively praises and curses you in abstentia, who scours the internet for advice on how to use your product, who navigates some joyless "customer service" experience in order to better use your shitty product. Usually, the only way the term "user" applies to those who use our software is in its similarity to "drug user"--they have no choice but to use our product, despite a more abundant life calling out to them from outside the boundaries of this myopic experience.

...The problem is most of The People Using Our Software are within an even larger set of boundaries: rules, expectations, norms, mores, groupthink, culture, ignorance...part of the reason we make shitty software is because we live in a frequently shitty world.

The other day I was riding in a group ride on the service road along I-30 in east Dallas and I was looking at all the shit along the road there and I thought of this video:

America Is F*cked.......(Graphically at least) from Jess Gibson on Vimeo.

I don't want this to be a Jerry Maguire mission statement, I don't want this to be a Fight Club deconstruction of society. I don't want to make any more movie references. I just want to make great software and I want to be empowered to do so.

I'm not even going to proof this post. I'm just going to put it out there as it is, incomplete and probably more than a little incoherent...but I'd love to hear what you have to say about this, too.

Good Writing is Good

2011-03-12T13:22:00.001-06:00

Maciej Ceglowski is one of the proprietors of Pinboard and also an amazing writer. His recent post describing technical aspects of the great exodus from Delicious (to Pinboard) has too many gems to capture them all, but here are a couple in case you need convincing when it comes to reading technical blog posts:

Before this moment, our relationship to Delicious had been that of a tick to an elephant. We were a niche site and in the course of eighteen months had siphoned off about six thousand users from our massive competitor, a pace I was was very happy with and hoped to sustain through 2011. But now the Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help.

...

We had always prided ourself on being a minimalist website. But the experience for new users now verged on Zen-like. After paying the signup fee, a new user would upload her delicious bookmarks, see a message that the upload was pending, and... that was it. It was possible to add bookmarks by hand, but there was no tag cloud, no tag auto-completion, no suggested tags for URLs, the aggregate bookmark counts on the profile page were all wrong, and there was no way to search bookmarks less than a day old. This was a lot to ask of people who were already skittish about online bookmarking. A lot of my time was spent reassuring new users that their data was safe and that their money was not winging its way to the Cayman Islands.

That post led me back to idlewords.com to which I was already subscribed, it turns out, but I clicked a random link and read Dabblers and Blowhards a brilliant critique of a book I have actually read:

It's surprisingly hard to pin Paul Graham down on the nature of the special bond he thinks hobbyist programmers and painters share. In his essays he tends to flit from metaphor to metaphor like a butterfly, never pausing long enough to for a suspicious reader to catch up with his chloroform jar. The closest he comes to a clear thesis statement is at the beginning "Hackers and Painters":
"[O]f all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers."
To which I'd add, what hackers and painters don't have in common is everything else. The fatuousness of the parallel becomes obvious if you think for five seconds about what computer programmers and painters actually do.
Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data.
Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.

...it goes on in similar fashion, you should go read it, especially if you've read Hackers & Painters.

New danielsjourney

2011-01-21T19:00:00.003-06:00

Usually a redesign of a one-page site of mine doesn't warrant a blog post, but this story is a little bit more interesting, mostly because of the work it built on. I haven't really told the story of a design before. I'm curious how this will pan out.

I was in my RSS reader last night after an ill-advised after-dinner coffee and saw Naz's post on Weightshift about the personal page...meme? Can we call it that? I had long since moved to a single-serving homepage w/ some text and an image. In the meantime about.me made it a big deal. (Nevermind that Dallas-based Magnt had a better offering since long ago.)

But let's face it, Naz's, and his imitators', looked better. And most importantly, he posted the source on Github. That meant that seconds later I had my own copy of his source on my computer and started replacing his images and text with my own.

It used a script called backstretch to position and size the image, also on Github, which I also forked and modified for my uses. Since I had already decided to use a wedding picture, I wanted to try and at least create two layers so the field grass could superimpose the text box. The original backstretch script could only accomodate one image which it threw far into the back of the document model. That was easily fixed in just a couple lines of code.

That got me thinking about the awesome Github 404 page. Maybe I could parallax the grass! Well I tried applying the parallax plugin to the elements in question and no dice. I tried a new page that didn't use backstretch and applying the parallax plugin there--still no dice. Last night I decided to stick to just the two layers--if someone had a window sized just right, they would notice the grass popping up over the bottom of the box.

Of course this morning I couldn't let it be! I read most of the parallax code and while it was pretty much what I expected, its need to accomodate for all manner of circumstances made it overly complex to just copy and paste to fit my needs. I ended up just hand-coding some simple code that moves the grass in the direction you move your mouse, after doing a single left-right sway once on page load just for good measure.

I'm far too pleased with the end result. Now I am considering trying to get the foreground grass to actually bend as it moves...in the meantime if you haven't you can check it out.

WWIC: Why Wasn't I Consulted

2011-01-06T12:41:00.000-06:00

Ftrain: The Web Is a Customer Service Medium. Paul Ford has been writing on the web longer than most and as usual this piece is excellent:

What sums it up best, to me, is this image published on the blog Kotaku (if you know where the image originates please let me know). The image was posted as a comment on a blog post linking to an article about British computer-industry millionaire Clive Sinclair marrying a younger woman. Here is the image:

Consider what that cartoon means in that context: It implies that the commenter feels—with some irony and self-awareness, I'm sure—that his opinion, in some way, is relevant to the question of whether Clive Sinclair should marry a particular woman. This is, for many obvious reasons, completely insane. And yet there was an image already sketched and available to that commenter so that he could express this exact sentiment of choosing not to be outraged at a situation he read about on the Internet. WWIC in action.

Tableau

2010-12-21T11:55:00.001-06:00

Via BERG: "John Kestner’s Tableau is a nightstand that drops photos it 'sees' in its Twitter feed into its drawer, to be discovered by its owner."

John Kestner is part of the Information Ecology team at the MIT Media Lab, so of course I'm going to gush a bit, but check out some videos of his other projects as well as the rest of his portfolio.

I'm particarly interested in things like the Daydar personal productivity framework.

Good design is as little design as possible

2010-10-06T23:01:00.000-05:00

Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design

Good design is as little design as possible

Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.

There might be more than one school of thought in design, but there is only one school of thought that is right.

Graboids

2010-08-06T22:57:00.002-05:00

Monstrous Wildlife from Frank Robnik on Vimeo.

Minutes to learn. A lifetime to master.

2010-08-04T17:43:00.000-05:00

Take a step and a half backward. Tilt your head to one side. Un-focus your eyes. Close one of them. Scrunch up your face. This sort of dance may seem ridiculous. And yet it's absolutely critical to the process of creation; contemplation. You see this choreography from sculptors at work. We need more of it in software development.

And these instruments ought to be accessible to children as well. Look at the piano for example. An uninstructed child will discover on their own that the keyboard's x-axis relates to pitch, force relates to volume, and if their little legs are long enough they can experiment with sustain. Minutes to learn (albeit badly). A lifetime to master. That's a good goal for new computing tools: intuitive enough to jump in on, but with room to evolve real skill and elegance.

Stewart Smith on The Setup

Multi-Linear

2010-07-31T22:56:00.003-05:00

Multi-Linear Narratives: Letting the Player Lead the Game

Entering a city, a house or any other interactive environment, different people have unique desires which the ideal environment both receives and responds to. This is not so with many games, however. In the most interactive of environments, players are often led, railroad style, down a prescribed path toward fixed ends. In this talk, award-winning game designer Brenda Brathwaite explores this problem and offers some solutions through the use of multi-linear narratives and the role of the un-storied mechanic in creating an experience players believe they crafted.

From the description for an upcoming talk being given by legendary game designer Brenda Brathwaite in San Francisco. If you are within range of my voice and San Francisco, you should try and make this talk and report back to me in detail. (From the comments on the blog it does not seem to be as gender-specific as it may first appear.)

What you really need to go watch as well is her talk How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design.

My interests are returning to game-design, the multi/non-linear nature of which was the inspiration for this blog (it started as a notebook of links and ideas about how to create ARG's and other non-linear narratives). I thought it appropriate that this important figure in game design is speaking about multi-linear narratives at the same time I return to that area as a place of intellectual interest.

One of the original figures from this blog:

Bacn and Toast in Realtime

2010-07-20T13:53:00.001-05:00

I don't have much to add to this at the moment, although given my current involvement with the real-time web obviously I have some thoughts on the matter, but I found this analysis of how social applications are built in contrast to how action-oriented Google applications are built to be rather interesting, particularly this part as it relates to real-time features:

Quora is a dozen people running dozens of experiments in how to optimally use bacn to get people to return to Quora, and how to use toast to keep them there. Bacn is email you want but not right now, and Quora has 40 flavors of it that you can order. Quora's main use of Bacn is to sizzle with something delicious (a new answer to a question you follow, a new Facebook friend has been caught in the Quora lobster trap, etc.) to entice you to come back to Quora. Then, once you're there, the toast starts popping. Quora shifts the content to things you care about and hides things you don't care about in real-time, and subtly pops up notifications while you're playing, to entice you to keep sticking around and clicking around. Some toast is so subtle it doesn't even look like a pop-up notification—it just looks like a link embedded in the page with some breadcrumbs that appear in real-time to take you to some place on Quora it knows you'll find irresistible. For every user's action, bacn's and toast's fly out to others in search of reactions. (Aside: if I were Twitter, I would be worried. Real-time user interfaces are more addictive than pseudo-real-time interfaces; what if Quora took all of its technology and decided to use it to build a better Twitter?) Social apps are action-reaction interaction loops; Google apps are designed just for action.

It's All About Meaning

2010-07-17T13:34:00.003-05:00

All those other things—authority/fame/money/metanarrative—just validate the meaning (or create meaning where there was none). When someone says something is important, what they really mean is that it has meaning. When people do things that we consider absurd or stupid, those things are creating/validating meaning for those people.

This is a similar structure to Lacan's objet petit a*, but in place of our ideal self is the meaning, and in place of the other is the Meaning Validation Device™.

This is important to remember when thinking about motivation—we are ultimately motivated by the meaning.

This is why stories and empathy are so important.

Jamy Ian Swiss at Gel 2009 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

* There are a lot of definitions of what the objet petit a is, the above is my most simple explanation of the definition that best suites my purposes—we seek out an other who reflects back on us our ideal self.

On shipping

2010-07-17T13:19:00.000-05:00

And the next time someone produces an antenna with a weak spot, or a sticky accelerator, you’re more likely to feel their pain, listen to their words and trust their actions than the braying media who have never shipped anything in their lives.

You've either shipped or you haven't. At first this post seemed really pretentious, but its main point (above) is spot on. People who haven't actually finished something are the most likely to criticize those who have.

One of the things that has really been holding me back lately isn't the shipping, it's the fear of what might not happen after I've shipped. Attention is scarse these days. So is decent software.

Nearness

2010-02-20T13:05:00.003-06:00

Nearness from timo on Vimeo.
Nearness explores interacting without touching.

More here and here.

Bad Buzz

2010-02-15T08:35:00.006-06:00

Based on my casual observation of the situation, it seems to me the bad things about Google Buzz [2] [*] were the result of just a couple basic product design decisions that probably felt natural and ingenious to the product designers, based on their usage of Google products as a whole. Of course being Google employees, their usage likely differs significantly from other Gmail users, say nothing of their trust in the company as a whole.

While building software for yourself is a good idea, especially for small businesses or startups, it is dependent on you being a lot like your customers. Once you are building products for yourself inside a giant organization that internally looks a lot different than the outside world, that is when having empathy [2] for your actual customers becomes increasingly important. Especially when you have the resources to actually go and find out, scientifically, what your users are like.

Google is still just a search company, and that piece of their business and experience they get right every time. But they are also increasingly a product** company, and getting a lot of exposure through their products. I suspect that these products are primarily developed by (relatively) small teams of very smart people, whose intelligence has led to a certain self-assurance but whose myopic experience has led to a certain naiveté about how a product will be received in the "outside" world. Buzz feels a lot like Google's version of Clippy. Let's just hope Google is able to turn the user experience ship early and go back to creating products born out of novel innovations and not just internal versions of other company's products.

* There were a ton of intelligent critiques of Buzz and I hoped to link to a few more of my favorites, but I failed to preserve the links or re-find them in a cursory search. Although just now I found this well-written (if wordy) analysis that I think says the same things I just did but in a more business-like, thought out way.

** Their search engine and results presentation is also a product, but for the purposes of this discussion I've categorized it separately.

Postscript: FWIW, I disabled Buzz after about 15 minutes of testing. Had there been a setting to keep it out of my inbox without having to create a filter I might have tried it for a day or two, but the email inbox is sacred, and their intrusion into it was enough of an offense for me to make a quick and final judgement in terms of my own usage of the product.

Just in case you thought I'd forgotten about funny Twitter things

2010-02-14T11:34:00.003-06:00

Puppy Tweets will turn your Pooper into a world-class twitterer

I can't be sure, but @pavdog having had an account since March 18th, 2008, surely he is one of the original dog tweeters.

Corner-of-the-Street

2010-01-28T21:44:00.005-06:00

Down by the corner of the street,
Where the three roads meet,
And the feet
Of the people as they pass go "Tweet-tweet-tweet",
Who comes tripping round the corner of the street?
One pair of shoes which are Nurse's;
One pair of slippers which are Percy's. . .
Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!

Milne, from When We Were Very Young (1924), from tonight's story time.

"Chief Taste Officer" -- I like the sound of that -- maybe "Benevolent Dictator of Design"

2010-01-20T01:09:00.006-06:00

Hire a GOD of UX, not a pixel pusher.

Maybe call them the Chief Taste Officer. You’re looking for someone who is equal parts Steve Jobs, Don Draper, and Seth Godin. Assuming such a person exists (and that you can hire them) they will be responsible for Quality, top to bottom, and they’ll have the power (hiring, budget, creative authority, whatever it takes) to make it happen.

This is a pretty tall order. It may even be impossible. Apple was able to do it, but only because Steve Jobs is a genius who wanted his baby back, and Apple was circling the drain so Jobs was given the time and authority he needed to remake the company.

Can you reinvent a software company by hiring a pixel pusher?

Also:

We’re not all solo auteurs. Collaboration, compromise, and constraints are inescapable when building complicated products. The secret is to make sure that even as work is distributed, ownership of the work’s quality isn’t.

If you’re a software company, your people should have titles like these:

God of Bringing in the Money
God of Servers
God of Programming
God of the User Experience

Show me a company without a designated (and opinionated) “God of UX” and I’ll show you a company that makes crap.

Pop Quiz: Who is your God of UX?

No legendary design on the web?

2010-01-01T18:03:00.004-06:00

Why there are no legendary web designers got me all in bunch earlier today, had to share here. In reply to:

The web is a low resolution, low fidelity, crappy medium.

A quick gut check: Would you ever hang a web design on your wall?

...etc...you can go read the rest of the piece if you want, I replied:

Couldn't disagree more. There are plenty of web designs that I would project onto my wall (or maybe display in a digital frame)--printing them would be impractical because of the low resolution you have at the center of your argument. Also, those sites I would choose to use as art would not be the content-centric ones you mention (although there are some that make the aesthetics of text true art). If all you think of when you think of the web is TechCrunch and CNN then no, certainly not. But there are some amazing artists doing work designed and delivered on the web. Similarly, there are some very famous artists who used low-fidelity technologies centrally in their art.

Your other arguments fall apart equally as fast--looking at a painting is a solitary experience abstracted from our sense of touch and smell, and yet the visual arts is one of our primary artistic forms.

Also, it's 2010! If you are bashing the web based on bandwidth and screen resolution, where were you in 2000, or 1995?

2009-12-28T11:36:00.000-06:00

The dirty little secret about simplicity is that it's really hard to do.

2009-11-11T17:10:00.000-06:00

You can try to win a features arms race by offering everything under the sun. Or you can just focus on a couple of things and do ‘em really well and get people who really love those things to love your product. For little guys, that’s a smarter route.

When you choose that path, you get clarity. Everything is simpler. It’s simpler to explain your product. It’s simpler for people to understand. It’s simpler to change it. It’s simpler to maintain it. It’s simpler to start using it. The ingredients are simpler. The packaging is simpler. Supporting it is simpler. The manual is simpler. Figuring out your message is simpler. And most importantly, succeeding is simpler.

Everything that’s potentially worrying about the real-time web

2009-10-27T11:04:00.005-05:00

Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying about the real-time web by Paul Carr

...what were we all doing? Filming and tweeting and checking in rather than just putting our phones away and enjoying the gig. Why does the world need two thousand photos of the same band on the same stage, all taken from a slightly different angle. That kind of 360 degree imagery might have been useful on the day Kennedy was shot – not least because it would have kept Oliver Stone quiet – but for a Weezer gig?

...And yet this real-time mentality – pictures/tweets or it didn’t happen – continues to seep into every aspect of our lives, both personally and professionally. Whereas once we might attend a conference to watch the speakers and perhaps learn something, today our priority is to live blog it – to ensure our followers know we’re on the inside...

Real-Time is a Collaboration by Kevin Makice

The second key assumption is that the real-time web is an individual activity. It isn’t. Individuals are involved, but the appeal and value of real-time content is in the sheer number of people participating and the wide range of personal experiences they capture.

...With new information comes new skills and opportunity for reflection. We see this happening all the time with the evolving strategies of Twitter use...The value you see today may not be the same value you will see tomorrow. People change.

It would be a mistake to adopt a utopian view and discount Carr’s critique. However, I believe that what will ultimately emerge from real-time web is a Zen awareness in the here and now. The current flaws in this beast can and will be overcome.

And from the comments to the original TechCrunch article:

Too long, please translate into 140 characters. #

It's a Shrodinger's tweet phenomemon. #

I have a two part response to all this, and hopefully it won't take me weeks to compose it, but it will take longer than right now, so for now, I leave these without comment. These will become links to the follow up posts, however:

-- (Everything that’s potentially worrying about) Attention and the real-time web
-- (Everything that’s potentially worrying about) Love and the real-time web

Left vs Right Infographic

2009-10-21T19:05:00.005-05:00

As much as I detest binary analysis of...well, anything, this infographic struck a chord:

This is via the wonderful Information is Beautiful, which comments

This kind of visual approach to mapping concepts really excites me. I like the way it coaxes me to entertain two apparently contradictory value systems at the same time. Or, in other words, I like the way it f**ks with my head.

"It shouldn’t surprise any of us that they stopped caring."

2009-10-19T10:49:00.001-05:00

Our industry has collectively taught average people over the last few decades that computers should be feared and are always a single misstep from breaking. We’ve trained them to expect the working state to be fragile and temporary, and experience from previous upgrades has convinced them that they shouldn’t mess with anything if it works. They’ve learned to ignore our pressures to always get the latest versions of everything because our upgrades frequently break their software and workflow. They expect unreliable functionality, shoddy software workmanship, unnecessary complexity, broken promises from software marketers, and degrading hostility from their office’s IT staff.

From the frequently brilliant Marco Arment.

I have original posts brewing around here, promise; they just take a lot longer to finish than the quick quote-and-link hack.