From Techcrunch's story about the new Facebook iPhone app. Can you spot the irony?
Hewitt just started working on the feature yesterday, thinking it would be something that would come in the next release, after this one. But he was surprised at how quickly he was able to get it up and running and so he tweeted out today, "3GS video uploading for the Facebook iPhone app is a go — didn’t plan to include it in the 3.0 update, but it was really easy to code."
From Peter Bodo's Tennis World blog.
One of the themes emerging from this edition of the Championships is that the Williamses may have gotten better with age, even as they've had to struggle with (or simply endure) waning motivation as the siren song of "normal" life has lured them toward the shoals of inconsistency. The girls may not be as reliably destructive as they once were, but when they paint on their game faces, they may be playing the best tennis either of them has ever conjured up. This may not be true at all tournaments, either, but if you're going to pick one event at which to go medieval on your rivals, this one would be it.
I'm in the middle of re-reading Infinite Jest, and so I can't help but be obsessed with tennis lately, and look at everything through the lens of Enfield Tennis Academy. The Williams sisters :: The Incandenza brothers as Richard Williams :: Himself? (Yeah, on second thought, maybe not.)
I'm very much enjoying iPhone 3.0 and my new 3GS. The new hardware is a great upgrade (faster, smoother, more directionally correct), and there are small details in the new software that are useful and delightful (like locations in the missed call screen).
I haven't built a habit of searching on the phone, though, despite the very clever swipe-to-go-left UI placement of Spotlight. I don't have enough content on the phone to make search worthwhile, and the "normal" mode of navigation through each of the individual apps (Contacts, Mail, iPod, etc.) works well enough (for me). I think I'd be swiping left a lot more if they included a little Google in my Spotlight.
Spotlight should still search my phone first of course. But then it should kick off a Google query, pulling in suggest results in as close to real time as a wifi or 3G connection can allow. And then let me preview small snippets of results (optimized in a mobile / "local" context -- phone numbers, links to locations, definitions, etc.) before launching either a full search (or the result itself) in Safari.
I don't think this was a "whoops, we just didn't think about it" omission from Apple...after all, this is something both the T-Mobile G1 and the Palm Pre feature prominently in their UIs. Instead, I wonder if there were business and/or user experience reasons holding back the feature. On the business side, there's not an insignificant revenue opportunity associated with occupying the default search slot on the iPhone. And from a user experience perspective, you can bet that Apple will want to make the results from the web feel as natural as results from your phone. Google, of course, is already the default in Safari, so if I were Apple I'd be negotiating for a combination of equal or better terms and a more integrated user experience (richer search API set) for Spotlight.
I'm hoping something like this shows up in a 3.x release. I'd use it all the time.
Update (Jun 24 2009): This is what I'm talking about. From the press release about the newly announced HTC Hero:
HTC Hero also includes a dedicated Search button that goes beyond basic search, providing you with a more natural, contextual search experience that enables you to search through Twitter, locate people in your contact list, find emails in your inbox or search in any other area in Hero.
Apple can't be leaving this one alone...
Dan Hill at City of Sound uses the Economist story on the "danger" of the silent Prius[1] as the starting point for a mind-bogglingly fantastic post on automobile noise in cities.
Cities should not be quiet, or only replete with so-called ‘natural’ sounds - whatever that means post-nature, and post-industrialisation - but the urban soundscape is something that could use a little more room for manouevre, dynamically. To be clear, I'm not averse to cars or car noise. Some car noises are hugely appealing. It’s just best experienced as a distinct note and timbre in a richer, more dynamic city symphony, as opposed to the pervasive ambient roar of thousands of combustion engines. This latter has a totalising suppressing effect on urban sound, akin to the scourge of overusing the compressor in contemporary music production. If everything is loud, nothing is.
Go read the whole thing -- it's as if his entire history as a blogger has been leading up to this one post. The illustrations are pitch-perfect, there are some (literally) fantastic ideas about creating new sounds in cities, and some wonderful touches like this...
In that respect, [car] sounds can be considered as something special too. We can more fully appreciate the throaty purr of a 1969 Ferrari Daytona or the brawny roar of a 3.5 litre 1978 Ford Capri or the lawnmower rattle of a 2CV or the saucy throb of an old DS, lifting skirts and all, just as we’ll always appreciate the sizzle and hiss of tyres on wet road.
[1] FWIW, as a Prius owner, the only pedestrians I've come close to hitting are the ones who happen to be wearing white earbuds while stepping out into the street without looking.
The folks at Lostpedia have a great interview with Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, the producers of Lost. I just loooove the fact that the writers / producers of the show actually rely on Lostpedia every once in a while for information about their own show...
You know, obviously one of the questions that Carlton and I get asked very often is like “Is there a Lost Bible that has all the details of the show? Is there a database?”, and our answer to that question is “Yeah we have this guy named Gregg Nations, who is the keeper of all the information”, but there is also a website that is like Wikipedia, that is sort of fan aggregated, that has sort of every little detail about the show ... When we've visited the site we are incredibly impressed with sort of the level of detail. There are occasions where we basically say “What was Juliet's husband's first name?”, and if Gregg is not sitting in his office we will log into Lostpedia to get that answer.
One of my favorite meta-discussions with fellow Lost fans is debating just how much the show's arc has been pre-determined by the producers and writing team, and how much they're making it up as they go along. And yesterday a few of us at the office realized -- if the Lost producers are relying on Lostpedia for information about their own show...is there an opportunity for Lostpedia to hack some misinformation into the show itself? And if that happened, would that information then become Lost canon, which would mean that Lostpedia then needs to treat their misinformation as real information?
Thinking through a self-referential hack like that hurts my head...it's almost like trying to figure out how time travel works.
swings on BART, originally uploaded by y3rdua.
A great shot from a local take on Caroline Woolard's Swing on the Subway piece from 2006. There's a Flickr pool in case it happens again... As the kids say, [this is good].
So I've been slowly making my way through Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica (I'm a laggard), but for whatever reason didn't buy the entire season at once through iTunes, instead purchasing the episodes a la carte either from my laptop or from the AppleTV at home when I had a chance to watch another ep.
Until last night, when Season 2 disappeared from their catalog. I'm sure there's some crazy contractual reason why this happened, but now I'm stuck with one of two options. I can either buy the entire DVD set for the season, which means I'll have paid for the season one and a half times. Or I steal borrow the remaining episodes from a friendly neighbor in order to make my way through the season.
Live by the sword, die by the sword: I bought into the Apple digital media ecosystem, and probably shouldn't be surprised when something like this happens. At the same time, the fact that what was there yesterday, available for purchase, isn't there today makes very little sense to me. Paging Chris Anderson: wasn't this supposed to be the land of infinite shelf space?
As someone who spends an awful lot of time producing words, I find it ironic that even though technology costs have declined to the point where I can have a monitor with enough pixels to word process a document in "2 page side by side" mode at 100% resolution, I rarely, if ever, work in a word processor.
Browser textareas just don't work quite the same way.
I'm a compulsive saver of links. Links I save for no particular reason other than their general greatness I tag on delicious as thisisgood. Here are five recent ones. If they're not new to you, then you can derisively snicker "seen it" and move right along.
I love this new experiment from Ben Brown: Random Reruns.
Making the leap from normal TV to internet TV means you lose the ability to just turn it on. In order to watch something on Hulu, even in the background, I have to search, sort, browse and select through thousands of choices. Do I want to watch a new episode of 30 Rock? Or maybe an old episode of He-man? It takes way too much thinking!
Put in your Hulu username, and Random Reruns will randomly serve up a show from your list of subscriptions. I love anything that injects a little more randomness into the media diet.
This may be old news to all of you, but it was new news to me. While enjoying my morning coffee, up popped this instant message.
Hmm, I'd never heard of this person "ExpeditedCoho." And the message didn't seem like your normal AIM bot, looking to start a chat about hot things. A little Googling turned up that this was the work of Project Upstream.
Project Upstream is an organization dedicated to promoting social ideals through the use of exciting new technology. Our most well-known service is our swarm of robotic fish, which connects AIM users to each other.
Which means that when I replied "Hello, ExpeditedCoho" Upstream connected me to another AIM user in their database, and, presumably, cloaked my username as another *Coho. Randomness ensued:
ExpeditedCoho: I IMed you first. If I deny this later, I'm lying.
msippey: Hello, ExpeditedCoho.
ExpeditedCoho: who art thou?
msippey: michael
msippey: but i'm sure my screenname appears to be something that ends in "Coho"
msippey: we've been randomly connected through project upstream
ExpeditedCoho: wait which michael
msippey: http://project-upstream.awardspace.com/
ExpeditedCoho: i dost not understand
There's a great LiveJournal community all about Project Upstream, with a perfect FAQ.
Q: What cool lingo do you use? I'm so confused!
A: "Salmoning/Trouting/Cohoing" is being IMed by a fishbot (see, similarly: "salmoned"/"trouted"/"cohoed"). "Hatting" is being hit by--you guessed it--a hat bot (also see: "hatted"). "Project Upstream" is the name of the group that created the fishbots. The "Hatmaster"/"Salmonmaster"/etc. we use to refer to the creator of that specific kind of bot, and an "operator" is a person operating the bot (not necessarily the creator).
I love the Internets.
Steve Reich won the 2009 Pulitzer prize in Music for Double Sextet. This makes me insanely happy, and just heightens the anticipation for eighth blackbird's upcoming recording. Until that arrives you can listen to an excerpt at Carnegie Hall's website, or watch eighth blackbird's first rehearsal of the piece on YouTube. Reich was interviewed for NPR's All Things Considered this afternoon; he was typically gracious.
George Lucas and JJ Abrams, originally uploaded by Joi.
"So I just wanted to give you a heads up -- the Lost guys are gonna work in a plot point in Season 5 where one of the characters rewrites Empire Strikes Back. Nothing personal.... but we gotta play to the fans, y'know?"
I'm spending $3.99 to support the makers of this most wonderful promotional video1, and you should too.
I don't have a need for an iPhone application that only publishes Twitter posts, but, like you, I am a thinker, a taste maker and a very important business person, and I have a burning desire to support quality online video starring the guy who shows up to frequently ask something. So please, support quality online promotional video and buy Birdhouse for your iPhone today.
1 Via Techcrunch, where that frequently asking guy appears to have dropped in on the comment thread as "anon." (Hi, anon!)
Anyone who needs to store drafts of 140 character messages for later review is an idiot. The whole point of Twitter is lightweight real-time messaging. If you are actually going to be putting thought into what you are writing, you are probably better off publishing to a real blog, instead of an echo chamber like Twitter.
$3.99 for that piece of junk? I could code that in a day.
You should go do that, anon! That would be fantastic.
Slate is too bored with ER to cover the final episode...
We have approached both staff writers and a series of reliable correspondents, inviting them to weigh in on the final episode and the legacy of the drama's 15-year run. No one wanted the assignment.
...so they're turning the job over to their readers and asking them to file reports on the series finale.
There's a whole mess of interestingness packed into this little nugget (Slate's wink wink nudge nudge that ER's just not good enough for them to cover (but it's fine if their readers do), the attempt at editorial direction for contributors, the obvious and lame poke at Clooney, the fact that I'm sure their readers will do a better job of it than they would have), but I'm just too busy to unpack it all.
Instead, I'm leaving it to you, my readers, to do the hard editorial work for me. Why do you still read Slate? Is Slate right for not covering the ER finale? Should they be paying more attention to culture that's actually popular? Is their editorial voice as grating to you as it is to me? Leave all your thoughts on Slate not covering ER in the comments, and I'll pick the best ones and repackage them as my own content in a future blog post!
I like the Flickr Clock, because it randomly helped me find this gem. Wait for the end, it feels like magic.
The LA Times' Christopher Knight has a fantastic post up on Culture Monster about Sol LeWitt's last public wall drawing, "Wall Drawing No. 1259: Loopy Doopy (Springfield)," installed in the new United States District Court building in Springfield, Massachusetts.
The energy of the piece derives from the way it negotiates the crazy play of its linear twists and turns with the strict rationality of the architectural setting. (The building was designed by Boston architect Moshe Safdie.) On a black acrylic ground, the wide white lines seem to emerge from the surrounding white-walled interior, which merges a rectilinear grid with a compound curve. Buildings can be eccentric, but they must also subscribe to the logic of structural codes -- which an artist can happily ignore. The loopy-doopy drawing, flooded with natural light from the building's glass facade and skylights directly above, takes that fundamental difference and runs with it.
Here's a video that Knight took of the piece...
Knight says it "may be the most perfect union of contemporary art and architecture in the United States. It's our Sistine." I'd love to find an excuse to visit Springfield...
Meetup founder Scott Heiferman's note on the KCET piece Is Anybody Listening:
Why does it take a camera to get people to tell their story? People looking at camera, people looking at screen. There's an odd, passive aversion to actual, vulnerable human f2f confrontation. People telling their story to other people is infinitely scalable. F2F conversation & story-sharing is the most powerful medium. (Not really a medium -- nothing in "the middle".)
Just nabbing this excerpt of Scott's note is a bit unfair; his first point on Is Anybody Listening is "Great piece".
Nathan Heller has a great appreciation of John Updike in n+1. This graf on Rabbit, Run is right on the money...
It's a novel with a strong reactionary strain (a fairly misogynist one, too), but the book is also neurotically ambivalent about which trail to take: the broken Eisenhower-era family or the wayward, libertine, on-the-road life. We empathize with Rabbit, or are meant to, as much as we empathize with his pinioned wife. The book is of a piece with Updike's native beliefs, the idea, as he put it in an interview, "that we are all a party, in one way or another, to a social contract, and when one unit in the social web takes off, there are tugs and breaks he leaves behind him." But Rabbit's quandary—and it's part of the character's tragic nature that he sees the larger meaning of his predicament—is symptomatic of a larger fracture in the culture. The road ahead looks rocky no matter where he runs. These frightening cultural fault lines gave Rabbit, Run resonance and edge—in short, its "news."
I have a post brewing about RSS readers, consuming the interweb and living amongst the links. Not to give the whole thing away, but there are a few sites that I rely on as filters to the web, and kottke.org is one of them. Part of it's the "liberal arts 2.0" editorial vision, which is right up my alley, but the other part of it is that Jason's just a really good blogger.
Case in point: in today's post about Michael Kontopolous' "Machines that fall over," Jason reports that...
I do this too, only I use chairs and my own body and frequently tip over and hurt myself. Anything for my art.
So good.
