Extra Future

Phil Nelson's blog and outboard brain storage

Posts

TONIGHT: Dancing Bear Benefit for Lorraine in #Sweatshop

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Eliza Gauger:

The nose is all wrong, but this graceful creature is nonetheless my
friend Lorraine, who has just suffered a grievous accident in which
she fractured her spine. She is a dancer and a model and is now
bedridden, totally unable to support herself. Tomorrow I will be
running a tipjar marathon in which I paint portraits of her all day,
and collect donations on PayPal for her medical bills.

“Dancing Bear” means Eliza paints as long as people keep money in the tip jar. Seriously, she will paint forever if you keep giving her money. Once it’s going, you’ll be able to watch/interact on USTREAM.

Top tippers will get one the paintings themselves, or one of two $50 gift cards to Clockwork Couture, purveyors of fine Steampunk wearables.

Posts

The Venture Brothers Season 4 Opener Post-game

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Premiered last night at midnight. I grabbed my copy from iTunes (for some strange reason, there are no torrents), but you can watch it the legal way on adultswim.com. That is an order. Things of note based upon my first viewing:

Spoilers follow

  • No Monarch in the season opener. Feels weird.
  • I have a feeling the CGC-grader-as-timestamp was someone’s 4am miracle.
  • Possibly the longest post-credits sequence in the show’s history?
  • I’m expecting for a fan remix that puts the story in chronological order. I guess you’d need a torrent for that, though, and the show is MIA on the main trackers.
  • Here’s the real cover to Marvel Comics #1, faithfully reproduced in the episode. ComicsPriceGuide.com says this issue is worth $360,000 for a CGC-graded 9.6 copy.

Overall, though, bravo. This is Jackson and Doc’s growth spurt as storytellers, and we’re all being made witness to it. I can’t wait for more.

Posts

Using la petite url With A Custom Short(er) Domain Name

Phil Nelson 1 Comments

Since I introduced the ability to us a different domain for your shortened URLs in la petite url 1.5, I’ve had several email inquiries about how to set it up. With that in mind, I’ve put together the following tutorial, which I hope will help those of you who need a push in the right direction.

Step 1: Buy Your Domain

The first step we’ll be taking to set up a domain name for your la petite url links is the most important: Registering a domain name to use. It can be anything you like, but I’d personally follow these guidelines that I just made up:

  • It should be, at a glance, vaguely related to your “main” domain name. extrafuture.com uses exfu.ws. ignorethecode.com uses http://ignco.de. Be clever, but not too clever.
  • Stay away from weird TLDs, especially sketchy country ones. You don’t know when Asscracklvania is going to change the rules regarding their domain name registration, and then you’re out of luck with a bunch of broken links, which is the precise problem you’re using la petite url to combat.
  • Try to stay under 5 characters not including the extension. Every extra character is chipping away at the advantage of a “shorter” domain.
  • If you use GoDaddy to register your domain, I get a small kickback, and that would really make me happy. You want to make me happy, right? I thought we were friends.

The above are not hard rules, they’re just suggestions. Do whatever you feel comfortable with.

Step 2: Configuring The New Domain

If you manually control your web hosting like some kind of nerd, you can simply set the new domain name (in my case http://exfu.ws) as an alias for your main domain name (in my case http://extrafuture.com, ‘natch). If someone else is in charge of your hosting, this is exactly what you need to tell them:

Dear {Support Team For My Web Host},

I have purchased the domain name {your short URL domain name}, and would like it to be configured as an alias for my other domain {your main domain name}. In short, requests to {your short URL domain name} should be treated the same as requests to {your main domain name}.

Thank you,

{Your Name}

Maybe you should send them a present, too. At any rate, be kind to your support minions, for one day your life may depend on them. They will probably tell you that you need to configure the DNS of your new domain to point to their servers. Here’s a tutorial on how to do that if you registered with GoDaddy, which I had nothing to do with.

If you know how to do this in the various Control Panel softwares that are out there, let me know. I have no idea, because I don’t use ’em.

Step 3: Tell la petite url About Your New Domain

This one is easy as pie: Log in to your WordPress site, then go to Plugins, look for “la petite url”, then click “Settings” under it’s name. In the la petite url settings page, look under “Domain settings.” Click the “Custom domain” circle, and next to that enter in your new domain name, minus the http://. For me this would be “exfu.ws”. Once you’ve done that, click “Save Changes”, and wait for the changes to be applied. It’s only like a second. Don’t be so impatient. Ah, there it is.

You should be all set, now. If you have problems, concerns, or comments, address them to one of the contact methods listed at the top of this site.

Posts

Preliminary Notes on Apple’s Recent “It’s Only Rock and Roll” Music Event

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In no particular order:

  • App recommendations: Wholly necessary, but we aren’t out of the woods yet regarding App Store curation. I bet there’s a good deal of money to be made just doing that: Curating collections of apps. Boing Boing got huge during the blog boom for curating other blogs, why wouldn’t it work for applications on a still-new platform? Someone’s going to get rich digging down on serious Touch applications.

  • iPod Touch No camera, no mention of 3GS-type speed bump. Kinda got the shaft. I can’t think of a single good reason for not including a camera that doesn’t involve trying to trick people into buying a Nano. Surely they aren’t afraid a (not that great) camera is going to steer fence-sitters from the iPhone to the Touch? Update: It’s now come out that the 8gb ($199) iPod Touch has the older, slightly slower, hardware, and all the others in the Touch line have the upgraded “3GS” innards. You’ll notice on the “Compare iPod Models” page on Apple’s site, the 8gb is sectioned off from his higher-capcity and speedier brothers.

  • iTunes 9 Now with more bloat and cumbersome, non-portable, versions of the extra features that people who illegally download albums already get in more useful formats. Still a 32-bit Carbon app. Gruber was right about WebKit.

Posts

Using WordPress Functions Outside of WordPress

Phil Nelson 0 Comments

I’m working on a project that requires the use of WordPress functions (mainly creating users and such) outside of the WordPress installation. After some Google searches of varying specificity, I’ve found a method that appears to work for both WordPress and WordPress Mu. I’ve reproduced it here for my own purposes, as well as yours.

WordPress.org member oranfry posted the following helpful bit of code, to be inserted in the top of the wp-load.php, right after the tag:

global $domain, $path, $base, $admin_page_hooks, $ajax_results, $all_links, $allowedposttags, $allowedtags, $authordata, $bgcolor, $cache_categories, $cache_lastcommentmodified, $cache_lastpostdate, $cache_lastpostmodified, $cache_userdata, $category_cache, $class, $comment, $comment_cache, $comment_count_cache, $commentdata, $current_user, $day, $debug, $descriptions, $error, $feeds, $id, $is_apache, $is_IIS, $is_macIE, $is_winIE, $l10n, $locale, $link, $m, $map, $max_num_pages, $menu, $mode, $month, $month_abbrev, $monthnum, $more, $multipage, $names, $newday, $numpages, $page, $page_cache, $paged, $pagenow, $pages, $parent_file, $preview, $previousday, $previousweekday, $plugin_page, $post, $post_cache, $post_default_category, $post_default_title, $post_meta_cache, $postc, $postdata, $posts, $posts_per_page, $previousday, $request, $result, $richedit, $single, $submenu, $table_prefix, $targets, $timedifference, $timestart, $timeend, $updated_timestamp, $urls, $user_ID, $user_email, $user_identity, $user_level, $user_login, $user_pass_md5, $user_url, $weekday, $weekday_abbrev, $weekday_initial, $withcomments, $wp, $wp_broken_themes, $wp_db_version, $wp_did_header, $wp_did_template_redirect, $wp_file_description, $wp_filter, $wp_importers, $wp_plugins, $wp_taxonomies, $wp_the_query, $wp_themes, $wp_object_cache, $wp_query, $wp_queries, $wp_rewrite, $wp_roles, $wp_similiesreplace, $wp_smiliessearch, $wp_version, $wpcommentspopupfile, $wpcommentsjavascript, $wpdb;

and in wp-settings.php replace all replace all occurrences of =& with =. Then include wp-load.php in your external file, and (in my case) wp-includes/registration.php. You can now call WordPress functions such as wp_insert_user.

Posts

A List of Books & Authors Mentioned In The Ask Metafilter Thread “What books do people proselytize about?”

Phil Nelson 0 Comments

This is a list compiled by careful reading of the recent Ask Metafilter thread “What books do people proselytize about?” The first list are books, the second list is authors that users noted “all” works by. Where an author AND book has been mentioned, I took into account the intent of the poster: “Ayn Rand” puts Rand on the Authors list. “Ayn Rand’s The Fontainhead” puts the book on the books list, but does not add to her author’s list total. Both lists are ordered by mentions. Following Basically, I do whatever Andy Baio tells me. If it entirely possible and even likely that I have made an error or omission in this list. If you feel this is the case, contact me using the Contact link in my sidebar.

Books

  1. Harry Potter – 4
  2. Infinite Jest – 4
  3. The Celestine Prophecy – 4
  4. Twilight – 3
  5. Catcher In The Rye – 3
  6. Atlas Shrugged – 3
  7. Gravity’s Rainbow – 3
  8. The Celestine Prophesy – 2
  9. The Stranger – 2
  10. Ulysses – 2
  11. Dune – 2
  12. The Great Gatsby – 2
  13. The Corrections – 2
  14. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – 2
  15. The Jungle – 2
  16. The Master and Margarita – 2
  17. Lord of the Rings – 2
  18. Starship Troopers – 2
  19. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – 2
  20. 1984 – 2
  21. The Shack – 2
  22. Siddhartha – 2
  23. The Secret – 2
  24. Who Moved My Cheese – 2
  25. The Alchemist – 2
  26. The Long Tail – 2
  27. House of Leaves – 2
  28. The Prophet – 1
  29. The Turner Diaries – 1
  30. Deep Thoughts – 1
  31. The C Programming Language – 1
  32. Neuromancer – 1
  33. The Education of Little Tree – 1
  34. Fuzzy Memories – 1
  35. Battlefield Earth – 1
  36. Dharma Bums – 1
  37. On The Road – 1
  38. The Art of War – 1
  39. The Power of One – 1
  40. Getting Things Done – 1
  41. Thus Spoke Zarathustra – 1
  42. Dianetics – 1
  43. The Giver – 1
  44. The Captain – 1
  45. The Tao of Pooh – 1
  46. Catch 22 – 1
  47. The Watchmen – 1
  48. Stranger In A Strange Land – 1
  49. Les Misérables – 1
  50. The Te of Piglet – 1
  51. Ender’s Game – 1
  52. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – 1
  53. Candide – 1
  54. A Rememberance of Things Past – 1
  55. The Dice Man – 1
  56. Fight Club – 1
  57. V for Vendetta – 1
  58. Story Of O – 1
  59. Magic Mountain – 1
  60. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull – 1
  61. One Hundred Years of Solitude – 1
  62. Prozac Nation – 1
  63. White Teeth – 1
  64. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – 1
  65. Night Train to Lisbon – 1
  66. The World According to Garp – 1
  67. The Woman’s Room – 1
  68. Kundera’s Slowness – 1
  69. Das Capital – 1
  70. Holy Blood, Holy Grail – 1
  71. The Confidence Man – 1
  72. The Giving Tree – 1
  73. State of Fear – 1
  74. Freakonomics – 1
  75. The Teachings of Don Juan – 1
  76. Mutant Message Down Under – 1
  77. Confederacy of Dunces – 1
  78. Manhattan Transfer – 1
  79. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – 1
  80. Notes from the Underground – 1
  81. The Catcher in the Rye – 1
  82. Ender’s Game – 1
  83. Last Exit to Brooklyn – 1
  84. The Little Prince – 1
  85. Crime and Punishment – 1
  86. The Omnivore’s Dilemma – 1
  87. Jonathan Livingston Seagull – 1
  88. The Brothers Karamazov – 1
  89. Eat, Love, Pray – 1
  90. Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas – 1
  91. Rubyfruit Jungle – 1
  92. The Metamorphosis – 1
  93. The Lovely Bones – 1
  94. Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus – 1
  95. The Trial – 1
  96. Nausea – 1
  97. The Fountainhead – 1
  98. Chicken Soup for the Soul – 1
  99. The Crying of Lot 49 – 1
  100. The 4-Hour Work Week – 1
  101. Snow Crash – 1
  102. Contact – 1
  103. The Tipping Point – 1
  104. Foucault’s Pendulum – 1
  105. Jonathan Livington Seagull – 1
  106. The Grapes of Wrath – 1
  107. Crowdsourcing – 1
  108. What Color is Your Parachute? – 1
  109. The Elements of Style – 2
  110. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – 1
  111. Here Comes Everybody – 1
  112. Night – 1
  113. Left Behind – 1
  114. A People’s History of The United States – 1

Authors

  1. Ayn Rand – 6
  2. Dan Brown – 3
  3. Michael Crichton – 2
  4. Kurt Vonnegut – 2
  5. David Sedaris – 2
  6. Daniel Quinn – 2
  7. Philip K Dick – 1
  8. TS Eliot – 1
  9. Toni Morrison – 1
  10. William Faulkner – 1
  11. Robert A. Heinlein – 1
  12. Chris Ware – 1
  13. Danielle Steel – 1
  14. Malcolm Gladwell – 1
  15. Tom Clancy – 1
  16. Chuck Palahniuk – 1
  17. Carlos Castaneda – 1
  18. Charles Bukowski – 1
  19. John Norman – 1
  20. Henry Miller – 1
  21. Isaac Asimov – 1
  22. Noam Chomsky – 1
  23. Herman Hesse – 1
  24. L. Ron Hubbard – 1
  25. Michael Pollan – 1
  26. Alice Waters – 1
  27. William Shakespere – 1
  28. C. S. Lewis – 1
  29. Jonathan Safran Foer – 1
  30. Gore Vidal – 1
  31. Jorge Luis Borges – 1
  32. Philip Pullman – 1
  33. Neal Stephenson – 1
  34. Neil Gaiman – 1
  35. Holderlin – 1
  36. Nicholas Sparks – 1
  37. William Carlos Williams – 1
  38. Ernest Hemingway – 1
  39. Isaac Isamov – 1
  40. Hunter S. Thompson – 1
  41. James Joyce – 1
  42. Chuck Klosterman – 1
  43. Thomas Mann – 1
  44. Anne Rice – 1
  45. Vladimir Nabokov – 1
  46. Michel Houellebecq – 1
  47. Ford Maddox Ford – 1
Posts

iPhone Anthology Fiction

Phil Nelson 0 Comments

Warren Ellis’s recent postings about Papernet and my always-on interest in Print-On-Demand gave me this idea, which I’m jotting down here in case I never get to do it.

So you’ve got your iPhone, and they sell tons of old books and comics and even new eBooks. Why not magazines? I’m not talking about Better Homes and Gardens, really, but new, modern, magazine-like content.

I think there’s definitely room for, as example, a monthly sci-fi ‘zine posted on the iTunes store or available as a PDF download for the same, reasonable, price or just post the plain text for free. You could commission new work and pull from the Public Domain or Creative Commons licensed works to fill the thing out, perhaps make each issue themed, with some art for each story. I’m talking Weird Tales or the like. Short stories to read on the ride home. Sell it for a buck or two.

You could even give the thing away, and just sell art prints or print-on-demand copies or shirts or, every 6 months, a nice perfect-bound edition of the previous 6 issues.

All you’d really need is a cover artist and enough time to lash the thing together each month.

Yes, it seems to me like you could make some very interesting iPhone Anthology Fiction…

Posts

App Store Customers Are Neither Bad Nor Good by Default

Phil Nelson 0 Comments

Garret Murray’s most recent post on his blog, the land where posts do not have titles, is about what happened last week with his (lovely) application, Ego. In it, he basically vents about being a single developer caught between a rock (customers angry that something stopped working) and a hard place (Apple’s arcane approvals process). His frustration is completely understandable with regards to Apple, but I think his larger concern is wrong. In the post, he says this:

This kind of thing continually reinforces something I’ve thought about a lot since the App store was released, which sounds horrible to say but it might be true: Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want.

John Gruber thought it important enough to link to the post using that link as illustration, with the title “Are App Store Customers Good Customers?” This time, though, I think the question is already answered: No, not realy. But the App Store doesn’t create Good or Bad Customers, either. Sturgeon’s Law just as well here as anywhere. What the App Store does do is make it very easy for a user to complain when the mood strikes them.

It’s hard not be frustrated when you have to wait for something beyond your control, but the simple facts are these:

  1. Garrett charged money for an application.

  2. The amount of money is irrelevant.

  3. The application sold Google Analytics support in the same breath as support for other applications that have solid developer APIs

  4. In doing so created an expectation that GA support was “stable” and “not likely to break at the whims of Google with no warning.”

  5. You cannot blame any customer for being angry when that happened.

Do I agree that the users leaving many of these comments are probably huge assholes? Yes. Could Apple do more to mitigate the costs for Developers when something goes wrong? Yes. But the frustration that made Mr. Murray write his blog post is the very same kind of frustration that made those customers, assholes or not, write their negative reviews.

More users means more sales means more assholes.

Posts

“What’s The Twitshirt Thing?”

Phil Nelson 0 Comments

Twitshirt launched yesterday (16 April 2009) and provide a service that I’m sure many people would/will give their patronage to: The printing of individual tweets on t-shirts, on-demand. Since the t-shirt is the defining medium of this generation, and vanity publishing is in full vogue, it only makes sense that a business model which combines the two could succeed, and handily. They kinda fucked it up, though.

The problem: Twitshirt did not ask permission to sell the words of the authors of the tweets they printed. The author could opt-out, but that is at best a poor solution. It, without question, should be opt-in.

Today Twitshirt.com is down with a message saying, “We’ve heard your feedback-thank you. We’re reversing the polarity.”

Admitting one is wrong is not an easy thing to do, especially in public. Hopefully a relaunched Twitshirt will do what it should’ve in the first place: ask.

Posts

Presenting Software Features and Understanding User Unrest

Phil Nelson 0 Comments

Adding features to applications is a constant trade-off between opposing forces. Sometimes adding to or changing software can be a hinderance both to the user and the developer in several ways.

Ego, Garrett Murray’s excellent iPhone application, was blocked by Google Analytics yesterday. Since support for GA is one of Ego’s advertised features, paying users are understandably upset. Garrett is a good developer, and I’ve been using his software for years (his application xPad was one of the first non-Apple bits of Mac software I ever purchased) but I think much of the user reaction to this issue was predictable and preventable.

Unlike many of the other stat-tracking widgets used in Ego, Google Analytics does not have an official API with which developers can retrieve data for use in applications. This means that to get the data at all, Ego has to use what I’d (not at all disdainfully) classify as a “hack”; Getting at useful information in an unsupported way. The problem with this is that the average user has no reason to suspect that Google Analytics portion of his $2 iPhone application may stop working without any prior warning. This is a case of the classic “stopped working for no reason” that developers hear all the time. There is a reason, and it’s a pretty simple one, but the user has no frame of reference for it. What’s more,the user has absolutely no reason to know the reason. It’s not their job. They just saw a feature list and clicked buy.

Here’s a screen shot of the features section of the Ego application page on the iTunes store:

ego-features

You can see here that the Google Analytics feature is listed right next to services with officially supported APIs, such as Feedburner and Twitter.

What this says to the user is “these features are equal, and just as likely to work” which we now know isn’t the case. A lot of applications do things like this, and the intent isn’t malicious- the average user just genuinely doesn’t know and doesn’t need to know what an API is, or what has one and what doesn’t.

Since there is no “official” way to include Google Analytics data, the GA widget is a trade-off between feature set and usability. Unofficial means that it’s more likely to stop working “for no reason.” Unofficial means that Google can change whatever they like whenever they like, and you just have to eat it, like Garrett is doing now.

He’s is obviously a smart guy, and I’m sure he weighed the pros and cons of including support for Google Analytics in the first place, but I’m also pretty sure he’s second guessing that decision at least a little bit today. This isn’t to say that he made the wrong one- I don’t think he did- but that the way in which application features are presented to users create expectations for those features that may have unintended consequences for developers.

Posts

On URL Shortening

Phil Nelson 1 Comments

URL shortening has been the subject of much discussion recently, and there is one big reason: Twitter. Twitter has exploded in usage in the last 6 months, and with that has come a sharp increase in both the number of and use of third-party URL redirection services. Bit.ly, TinyURL, Twitpic, and the rest, are just some of the major players in the space. All of them provide similar functions but suffer from the same problems, some of which are outlined below.

The purpose of this isn’t to indict these services, all of which grew out of the need for something very much like what they are. I think that by outlining the issues and benefits, we can gain a better understanding of why we need URL shortening / redirection, and what can be done to improve the practice.

Problems that URL Shorteners Solve

This is what they’re good for.

The Problem of Memorability.

http://example.com/~username/directory/this_page.html

becomes

http://go.to/thispage

The removal of many “slash”es and a “tilde” makes this URL much more accessible. When spoken aloud, the URL is easy to keep in mind. “go to this page.”

The Problem of Awkward or Ugly

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/020530902X/ref=s9_sdps_c2_s1_p14_i4?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1QBB624XETXRNEPDHV6V&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/c82sr4

The link is now more aesthetically pleasing, won’t be as confusing to the tech-unsavvy, and won’t give most URL formatting scripts headaches.

The Problem of Length

http://daringfireball.net/2009/01/applescripts_targetting_safari_or_webkit

becomes

http://bit.ly/BDN6

It’s now shorter, and affords the writer more space on Twitter or in an SMS to comment on the link. The Amazon link in the second example, with a total of 181 characters, wouldn’t even fit in an SMS, or Twitter message.

These are legitimate problems, and each pops up in different circumstances. Memorability is primarily an issue when using free webhosts that do not provide each user a unique domain name, with sensible URLs. Awkward/ugly is an issue with many online shopping services that collect tons of referral and other link data. Length becomes an issue when using a micro-blogging or SMS service, like Twitter. These problems often “stack”, and co-exist.

Problems That URL Shorteners Create

Reliance On A Third-Party

What happens if your URL shortener of choice goes out of business, or changes their URL format some day? It is not out of the realm of possabiltiy that TinyURL, Bit.ly or any of the major players in URL reduction could go the way of 1000s of other web companies. As of today, TinyURL.com claims to have created over 200 million shortened URLs. 200 million is a lot of dead links that could be avoided. Even if the service goes down for a short time, these are visitors and readers and customers that need not be lost.

Obfuscation

One of their prime drawbacks of URL shorteners, this is used for comedic effects by some. The spread of the Rick Roll might not have gone so well if not for the semi-anonimity created by these services. In recent years some (TinyURL, for one) have provided a “preview” mode to guard against obscene or otherwise untoward usage. This is fine, but it isn’t a solution to the real problem. Without context, a URL that starts with http://tinyurl.com/ could literally go ANYWHERE on the internet. Even with a custom name (e.g. http://go.to/thispage) there simply isn’t enough context to know what kind of thing you’re clicking on.

Unnecessary Strain On Networks

This is one is a bit less of an issue right now, but it is gaining steam: The dozens of free, url redirection services are causing network congestion by adding an extra HTTP request to every URL that is processed by them. One by one these are not problems, but by the millions they can make a notable dent in networking throughput, strain on hardware, and eventually, increased costs of keeping networking hardware healthy. Compounding this problem is the recent trend of Twitter clients to “expand” shortened URLs and provide the user with the destination URL, which creates even more unnecessary networking overhead.

My Solution To Some of The Problems Presented Above

Obviously, I can’t just say “stop using URL shorteners”. Nobody would listen, and besides, sometimes URL shortening is necessary or  just convenient. What I’m proposing is that you provide your own shortened URLs.

Use my WordPress plugin la petite url, or another short URL plugin. There’s a Django app, too. Providing a Twitter/SMS-friendly URL format for your visitors and users gives context to your links that would otherwise be lost. The URL http://extrafuture.com/msfxe is not as context-rich as http://extrafuture.com/2009/04/08/on-url-shortening/ but it is markedly better than http://tinyurl.com/ck9df4 or even http://tinyurl.com/onurlshortening. At least the user an idea about where the link they’re seeing might take them.

This is not a perfect solution, and I’m aware of that. If your web site’s URL is especially long, then serving shortened URLs from it will not be useful. In most other cases, serving your own shortened URLs is an option can solve the problems of third-party reliance, length, and obfuscation quite nicely.

Posts

The Safari 4 Beta, Titles, and Ownership Of The Close Button

Phil Nelson 1 Comments

Safari 4’s public beta has a lot of problems, and while it is “beta” software, I have a feeling that many of it’s biggest usability problems are set in stone. For a company as large as Apple, who releases software how Apple releases software, the “Beta” label means that “we’re pretty close to done, here”. They aren’t going to change the UI very much. Stuff like the awful “tabs-in-the-titlebar” is most likely not going to go away. There are some big issues, and to me, these are the biggest:

At A Glance, The User Cannot Easily Find The Title Of The Page They Are Currently Reading

In versions of Safari previous to 4, the tabs were organized in the (thus-far) standard way: below the menu and title bars, like this:

safari_old1

While not optimal, it works. Like any other application, the user can simply glance at the top of the current window to see the title of the page/document they are currently browsing. For comparison, here is a screen shot from Pages, a part of Apple’s iWork suite:

pages

The current document’s name is presented in the top, middle, of the window. This is, as far as I’m concerned, Good. Some might see this as a bad comparison. Pages does not group disparate documents into a single window, like Safari does. That is beside the point, here. The point is that this is what users are used to, because it is how it works in nearly every other application.

Safari 4’s new tabs create this terrifying labyrinth, similar to Google Chrome:

safari_new

Since the tabs are organized not by any set criteria, but simply by the order they were opened in (or a later, user-defined order, which may be just as informal), the user must now distinguish between not only the two type of tabs (the currently active one and the inactive ones) but having done so, has to hope that the title fits within the tiny space alloted to each given page, active and not. You can see how this gets a little crazy if you’ve got more than 2 or 3 tabs open, or Cthulhu save you, multiple Safari 4 windows open. This is Bad. It’s so bad, in fact, that I hope it’s just some kind of placeholder.

The Window Controls Look As Though They “Belong” To The Left-Most Tab In Any Given Window

Again, Safari 3, this time the top left of the window:

safari_old_topleft

The window controls (Close, Minimize, Maximize), while they are integrated with the title bar, are clearly part of the window itself, and not any one tab. Now let’s have a look at Safari 4 again, this time the top left part of the window, with the new-style tabs:

safari_new_topleft

What is the average user meant to make of this? There are now, effectively, two “close” buttons in close proximity to each other, neither of which is separated from the left-most tab. Their icons are different, but not so different that one could easily tell which is which without knowing a whole lot more about the Mac OS than any random user does.

There is plenty more in the Beta that is worrisome, but these are the two big ones, for me. I hope that by making my issues public that it will push Apple to re-consider some of the planned changes for Safari 4’s release, though I doubt it very much.

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This Isn’t Pop: When Video Game Music Inspired By Popular Music Is A Little Too Inspired

Phil Nelson 2 Comments

This is a post carried-over from the blog archives on philnelson.name, my previous site.

Video games have a long and storied history of borrowing heavily from popular music. This post will be updated with samples as I get them suggested to me, which you can do using the information above this post. In each case I have used less than 20 seconds of the songs in question, which I believe to be covered under fair use. If you want to hear the whole song, buy it. I will not provide you with any of them, so don’t ask.

Mega Man X2’s Neon Tiger Stage Music .vs. Guns n’ Roses’ “My Michelle”

Here is the audio file for comparison. First you will hear a snippet from Neon Tiger’s theme, then a small pause, then a snippet from My Michelle. You can, of course, purchase the Guns n’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction from Amazon.com. This, and the following two suggestions, come from this blog post.

Mega Man 1’s ElecMan Theme .vs. Journey’s “Faithfully”

Here is the audio file for comparison. Again, you will hear ElecMan’s music first, then a pause, then Journey. You can (and I encourage you to) purchase Journey’s Greatest Hits album from Amazon.

Mega Man 2’s Flash Man Theme .vs. Chicago’s “I’m A Man”

Here is the audio file for comparison. You can purchase Chicago’s Greatest Hits on Amazon. It’s a good investment.

Robo’s Theme (Chrono Trigger) .vs. Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”

Here is the audio file for comparison. Yes, it was only a matter of time before this descended into a Rick Roll. This one is a bit more tenuous, but it’s definitely noticeable. I would say it’s more of a case of borrowing than the previous tracks, which are a bit more blatant. I heartily suggest you purchase Chrono Trigger if you have never played it. It’s my favorite RPG of all time. The composer of the piece, Yasunori Mitsuda, also did the soundtrack for Chrono Cross, which is one of the most lush and beautiful game sound tracks ever.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) Stage 5 Overworld .vs. The Beatles’ “Come Together”

Here is the audio file for comparison. This is another fairly blatant one, though it’s got some nice touches, and is part of one of the great Konami NES soundtracks.

DOOM (1 & 2) .vs. Various Metal Bands

Here’s a youtube video comparing various songs from the smash-hit first person shooter DOOM to various songs from the likes of Metallica, Pantera, et. al.

Wild ARMs Overworld Theme .vs. Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of Gold”

Here is the audio file for comparison. This one is maybe the most blatant thus far, especially considering the desert context. Morricone wrote the scores for many great westerns, most famously The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

California Games (NES) Title Theme .vs. Louie, Louie

Here is the audio file for comparison. I have a feeling that the basic structure of Louie, Louie is subject of a lot of game homage. Louie, Louie is a most infamous song, with the version done by The Kingsmen making them the subject of an FBI investigation.

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Phil’s Dry Rub Recipe For Pork Chops

Phil Nelson 0 Comments

I find using a teaspoon makes plenty of rub, which you can just mix in a tupperware dish and save for next time. It should go without saying that you need to dry your chops before applying.

  • 2 parts paprika
  • 1 part chili powder
  • 1 part brown sugar
  • 1 part salt
  • 1 part ground black pepper
  • 1 part ground cayenne pepper
  • 1 part cumin

Combine and mix thoroughly. Apply to chops about 15 minutes to 1 hour before cooking. Store in fridge for desired amount of time. Remove and grill, pan fry, or bake. Works well for steak, also.

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No Zombie Is Safe From Chicago Ted

Phil Nelson 0 Comments

As if it wasn’t already easy to love Left 4 Dead, they give me this:

My friends The Urinal Mints have a song titled “Chicago Ted“

According to Urinal Mints frontman Garth Plinko, the phrase stems from a message he (and apparently many others) had read scrawled on a bathroom wall, ending with “No bitch is safe from Chicago Ted.” The Internet’s own Seanbaby reported this phenomenon many years ago.

The Urinal Mints were also featured on issue 6 of Warren Ellis’ podcast, the 4am.

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Formatting An SD Card Fat-16 In Mac OS X For Wii Homebrew

Phil Nelson 0 Comments

If you want to try out the Nintendo Wii Homebrew Channel, you’ll need to do the Twilight Hack. To do that, you need a Fat-16 formatted SD card. Here’s the command to format the card on Mac OS X (1.5 and 10.6):

diskutil partitionDisk /Volumes/WII 1 MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT16" "WII" 1000M

Where WII is the name of the drive. The 1000M at the end is how big you want the partition to be, but if the card only has one partition, it will use the whole card, anyway.

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