sippey.com

a little google in my spotlight?

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...

wasted real estate

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.

misc notes on iphone 3.0

Long time readers won't be surprised to learn that I'm seriously considering installing the beta of iPhone v3 for one single feature alone -- landscape mode in Mail, Notes and SMS. Like many others, I can probably count on three fingers the number of times I've missed not having copy & paste, but every single day there are two fat thumbs that long to romp through the landscape.

Other misc notes on v3:

• Matt Jones is right on the money -- the hardware integration stuff is big news, and an area that's wide open for crazy innovation in all sorts of verticals.

• Mmmm, push notification services. I didn't see any news mentions of developer pricing for that, so I assume they didn't discuss it. This is something to watch: ESPN delivering sports scores is one thing (there are a limited number of sporting events in a year)...messaging apps are another. The use case of real-time messaging notifications (Twitter DMs, IM alerts, etc.) is going to be an interesting one from a pricing perspective, since the volume and timing of those are, by definition, out of the application developer's control.

• In-app purchases are also going to be very interesting from a pricing and user behavior perspective. In their conversation at SxSW, Chris Anderson and Guy Kawaski touched on the psychology of charging even $0.01 v. giving things away for free, and the mental transaction cost involved in making the decision to pay more than zero for an item. The context for that conversation was "the web," so we'll see if the context of "the bright shiny phone" changes that at all.

• I'm assuming that a developer could use the in app purchase mechanism to sell a subscription or bundle of push notification messages. App developers are going to have to get savvy about pricing and business models -- the guys at Pinch Media have to be loving all the things they heard yesterday.

• I'm frankly surprised by the iPod library access APIs -- I'm imagining a whole new slew of UIs for browsing and playing and interacting with your own media. Paul Lamere showed some cool music library visualization stuff from Sun's Search Inside the Music project at SxSW -- I'd love to see some of that work / thinking end up on a pocket-sized multitouch display.

Until all that stuff surfaces, though, I'm gonna be happy with my landscaped keyboard. Because on my phone, I'm all thumbs.

closing the book

My esteemed colleague David Jacobs on reading with the iPhone Kindle app.

I have one major complaint: I found the act of finishing the book unsatisfying; after paging through 4393 "locations" (the Kindle doesn't entertain the conceit of page numbers) I missed the satisfaction of closing the volume one final time. The application resisted my impotent flicks, always returning to the final page.

albums plus apps

Listening to the stream of the new U2 record last week, I was struck by how the most interesting bits of the album were the atmospherics -- not necessarily the usual chiming guitars or Bono's falsetto, but the electronic blips and chimes and patterns and samples that build the intros and undercurrents of tracks like Moment of Surrender and Unknown Caller. I kept thinking to myself "wow, that little bit right there? That would make a great ringtone."

And of course, all of those bleeps and blips will end up as ringtones, legit or not. But it points to an interesting bundling opportunity that Apple's in a unique position to take advantage of: albums plus apps.

As the iTunes music store faces more and more competition from Amazon and other online sources (Facebook + Lala, anyone?), and the core deliverable of the music purchase becomes undifferentiated (DRM-free MP3 256kbps MP3 files), Apple's going to need to compete on a different angle. The device integration angle isn't as strong as it once was (the Amazon MP3 downloader / iTunes integration is pretty damned seamless), and competing on price is difficult when most of what you're selling is available online for free.

Today, Apple's offering digital add ons to album sales through iTunes -- typically these are things like PDF booklets, add-on videos, behind the scenes footage, etc.. But what I keep waiting for are the iPhone specific bundles that provide a platform specific experience for the fan that's tied into the Apple product line. There's no need to sell pre-loaded hardware with the artist's catalog...instead, develop applications that turn any iPhone / iPod Touch into a platform for fandom, and deliver those either bundled with tracks or a la carte...

Miscellaneous product ideas, in no particular order...

• An app that installs a custom sounds set of ringtones / alert sounds that are based on the sounds from the record.

• An app that provides a front-of-the-line concert ticket purchasing opportunities (think what American Express does, but exclusively for iPhone users), and real time tour info -- dates and locations, of course, but also set lists, photos, notes from the artist, comments from fans, etc...

• An app that provides enhanced access to the band's social web presence. Simple registration, userpic badging, exclusive video content, etc. Couple this with geolocation services and the (yet to be released) push notification service and music marketers can reach specific fans in specific locations at specific times for reaching specific fans in specific locations and encourage, well, specific behaviors.

Steve Rubel recently pointed out on this blog three ways that media is innovating with user interfaces -- mobile being one of them. The music industry has a similar opportunity (and, frankly, motivation) for innovation around how to fans can engage with the artists they love. Browsing through the App Store today, there are very, very few artist-specific music applications available. But I can't imagine it will take long for the labels and Apple to capitalize on the hardware + software + distribution channel combination of the iPhone + iTunes.

quickly quelling dissent

Well that was fast.  In less than a day, Google lifts the white label restriction on its OpenID implementation.  "Instead of having our engineers spend time manually maintaining that list of registered sites, we are now taking another step further and removing that restriction so any site can use the API."

latent semantic politics, or red v. blue

Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter today shipped Memeorandum Colors, a Firefox extension and Greasemonkey script that helps you visualize political bias of the sites linked to on Memeorandum.

With the help of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases.

Andy's post is worth reading; as he usually does he describes in detail their methodology for crawling Memeorandum, analyzing link relationships using the Singular Value Decomposition method (on top of NumPy, btw) to discover political bias, and then stitching together a Greasemonkey coloring script using Google Docs, its ability to output XML and some simple XMLHttpRequest. Voila, latent semantic politics[1].

What's incredibly cool is what you see after you install the extension / script.

Memeorandum suddenly became about ten times better for me, because now the discussion links are more interesting than the main stories. The blue and red highlighting make me want to click through to see what a "deep red" blogger is saying about Obama, or a "deep blue" blogger is saying about McCain...and I'm now diving into more interesting conversations.

[1] Hat tip to David Jacobs for that lovely phrase. And I can't believe I actually said "hat tip."

i can't wait to see how newsrooms use the new photoshop

So the one jaw-droppingly amazing feature in the new version of Photoshop has to be content aware scaling, where you can resize an image without squishing or stretching the important pixels.

You have to see it to believe it, so here are a couple of videos: one from Russell Brown (direct link to a reasonably large mov file, via swissmiss), and one from lynda.com (YouTube; faster to load but lower res and lower impact); or you can just check out the features page on Adobe's website.

Personally, I can't wait to see how newsrooms and photo editors take advantage of this new capability. Just imagine the possibilities...

• Is that explosion too far away from the guy who just threw the molotov cocktail, and you want both of them in the frame? It's now easier than ever to move them closer together.
• Want to highlight the "distance" between two candidates at a debate? Just slide them farther apart!
• Want to suggest impropriety between a politician and an intern? Easy! Click and drag and they might as well be sharing a cigar.

I love living in the future, don't you?

viewing the cloud through different lenses

Warning: half-baked stuff ahead.

In this morning's news reader I found two interesting "cloud computing" posts; onefrom from Alfred Spector at Google and one from Werner Vogels at Amazon. And even though it's perfectly clear they were published with completely different intentions, the fact that they were published on the same day gives a lazy blogger like me the excuse to point out the differences. Especially since I think they point to the different lenses through which the two companies view the cloud...

Google's post is about harnessing computer power in the cloud to solve more computationally difficult problems based on billions and billions of data points...

Computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information. Today's Google search uses an early form of this approach, but in the future many more systems will be able to benefit from it.

Amazon's post (well, really Vogels' post, since it's on his personal blog) is about the tools they're giving developers, in particular the new content delivery service. Here's the relevant bit that stood out...

This is an important first step in expanding the cloud to give developers even more control over how their applications and their data are served by the cloud.

This isn't to say that the folks behind Google's App Engine aren't thinking about developer services the way that Amazon is, or that Amazon's cloud group isn't thinking about how they can support the kind of uber-learning that Google is. I'm just watching how the two massive cloud providers are talking about how they see the cloud, because I think the language they use is indicative of the underlying strategy...

what genius is good for

So I like the Genius feature in iTunes and on my iPhone. I like the UI, I like how it removes all thinking from making a list of things to listen to when "Shuffle" just isn't enough, and in a meta way I particularly love how they created a little feature ladder from "Playlist" to "Smart Playlist" to "Genius Playlist." (Of course, a glass-half-full type could interpret that to mean that any playlist that I create myself is a "Dumb Playlist," but I digress...)

Anyway, based on my recent Genius experiences, here are two things that Genius is explicitly good for:

1. Only every once in a while throwing in a Vampire Weekend song. Genius knows that there's no way I could listen to the entire Vampire Weekend album in one stretch (lest I suffer an acute attack of the twees). But a single track shuffled Genius'd in once every 100 tracks can be sort of enjoyable in a "wow what a cute song!" kind of way.

2. More than every once in a while tossing in Broken Social Scene's "7/4 (Shoreline)". Somehow that track is ending up on almost every playlist Genius creates. Thanks, Genius!

Oh, and I was happy to see that the Remote app was updated for Genius support. Now I can be a Genius from my kitchen...if not in my kitchen.

shortcut to create a new email from anywhere from within os x (aka stupid shortcut hack #145)

It's come to this, blogging stupid Mac desktop shortcut productivity hacks. But since "sharing is caring" and I really do care, here's a quick little thing that I'm sharing with you.

Problem: Help! I'm in a random application and I need to send a quick email and I'm just too lazy to mouse or cmd-tab over to mail.app and find that new message button; I want to do it now! Right now! Because every second counts! (And oh -- I'm one of the three people who care about stuff like this but don't already run Quicksilver![1])

Solution: A "mailto:" webloc file and Spotlight.

1. Go bookmark a site in Safari. Any site.
2. Switch to the bookmark management view by clicking Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks
3. Edit the name of the bookmark you just created to "msg" (or "email" or "create an obligation to reply for someone you love")
4. Edit the address of the bookmark to "mailto:" (without the quotes, and don't forget the colon).
5. Drag that bookmark to your desktop, where it will create a msg.webloc file.
6. Then go file it away somewhere in your Documents, since I'm sure you're one of those people who care about what's on your desktop.
7. There is no step 7!

As long as you have Spotlight configured to index webloc files, all you need to do is hotkey your way to the spotlight window and type "msg" (or your trigger word of choice) and voila, instant access to a new email message from wherever you are.

So there, go enjoy your faster emailing.

[1] If you're one of those three people, Hi! We should have lunch sometime.

deliciously new

Congrats to the delicious team on the launch of the new delicious.com. As an active user, I've been looking forward to the refresh for a little while now, and I'm happy to have it live! Here are a few of the things I like...

• Date grouping! It's a simple thing, but it really makes it visually clear how much linking activity I've been doing lately.

• Top ten tags! I'm pretty sure I could have done that before with the controls that were there, but the new look of that right-hand module is clean, simple and straightforward.

• Tag intersection UI! While the visual look implies more of a category > subcategory model instead of a pure tag intersection model, the way they've implemented it will make me much more likely to go to my archives to find things like "small+software."

• Long notes! Yeah, I like them too.

• The launch video! Definitely worth watching, especially if you're one of those people (like me) who likes words moving around on a screen.

And since it wouldn't be fair and balanced without one thing I'm not a fan of, I'll share this:

• I'm not a fan of the new little "person" that's there. I've always loved the simple delicious identity of the blue, black and white favicon; I'm not sure that the bookmark needed to be anthropomorphized.

To date I've shared 1,254 bookmarks on delicious. Here's to the next 1,254!

make a beat, eat the beat

How great would it be to play with the Skittle-based beat sequencer with the kids? How better to teach them about the near infinite glories of what you can do with sixteenth notes and 4/4 time than with a bunch of colorful candies. Make a beat, eat the beat. Yum. (Via Waxy, of course.)

(But you know, come to think of it, a simple sequencer like this would be a great iPhone app, even if you can't eat the Skittles after making your beat. Instead, you could share them online. iPhone as drum machine. See, I knew I had to have an iPhone 2.0 reference today somewhere...)

my head just exploded a little

Check out the video of processing.js running inside a TiddlyWiki.[1] (Learn more and get your own.)

[1] I've always hated the term "TiddlyWiki" because it's so twee it hurts. No, I don't have a better alternative, and this post really isn't about the tiddly-ness, it's more about the processing-ness.

i miss my keyboard shortcuts

There's very little motivation for Microsoft to do this, but oh how much would I love to have all the keyboard shortcuts for menu and dialog navigation be available in Excel 2008 for the Mac that were available in Office for Windows? Being forced to mouse around in Excel to do simple things like insert a row is absolutely infuriating, when in pre-switch times it would be a split second alt-I-R away. Not having these available is turning my trust swiss army knife of business computing into a dull, oversized butter knife.

(Oh, and have I told you lately that when I start a band it will be called Alabaster Whine? Wanna join? I'm looking for a bass player.)

a quick note to the kindle team

Dear Kindle team,

I just finished a week of travel with a new Kindle, and I'm well into reading my third book on it. So far so good -- the screen is very readable, even for long stretches of time; I don't have a problem with the next page / prev page button placement; the little e-ink flash when you turn pages isn't that annoying; and the battery life is great.

The UI for finding and buying books is pretty good, and it will be interesting to watch how you use the limited screen real estate and UI controls as a merchandising advantage as more and more titles come online. I can't imagine using the device for browsing the web or reading email -- the screen refresh is fast enough for reading books, but not for skimming web content.  And while I wish the keyboard were virtual (I only use it when searching the store), I get why it's there and appreciate the tradeoff decision re. price & touchscreen.

A key feature of the device is a simple and elegant way to highlight and clip sections of text -- and once you get the hang of it you find yourself doing it all the time. When reading real books I'm always marking pages or making notes in the margin; the Kindle makes this a quick click and scroll action. But I was surprised to learn that these highlights stay on the device, and don't sync up to your Amazon account. (You can download them with the included USB cable, but who wants to do that?)

So here's the feature request that must be on your roadmap: send my clippings back up into the cloud, where I can copy and paste them for future use. Bonus points for giving me the opportunity to connect my Kindle account to my blog, and have the service automatically post new clips via Atom or MetaWeblog. Extra bonus points for illustrating those with a cover thumbnail, and embedding my Associates code in the URL back to the store.

Best,
Michael

thoughts on the social graph api

Congrats to Brad Fitzpatrick on the unveiling of Google's Social Graph API.  I love that the work he started at Six Apart with OpenID and the open social graph continues on at GOOG.  Brad's video is a great introduction to the API; he is a master of the whiteboard (I've seen it in action many many times), and I love the fact that the first whiteboard scene looks like it's been shot in front of a whiteboard that's eight stories tall.  (Oh, and the line where he says "once we throw away all the links that aren't marked up like this" is perfect.)

Clearly from Google's perspective it's obvious and elegant to have the Googlebot reporting on the graph; if it's public data it's being indexed by Google already, and it encourages the use of simple markup like XFN and FOAF to declare social relationships. But I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of privacy blowback on this when the API starts to get baked into consumer services: "Wait -- Google knows who my friends are, too? How do they know this?" It's going to be incumbent upon social services that are (a) enabling individuals to connect with one another and (b) expressing that connection in an indexable way to make it clear that those relationships are public (if they are) and demonstrate the benefits of those relationships being public (and the risks of exposing relationships you don't want public).  I'm not talking about language in a privacy policy, I'm talking about features that create a better user experience for the data being available.

A short comparative story.  About a year ago there was a pretty significant shift in how normal everyday people thought about blogs.  (I'm not talking about what people in the echo chamber thought about blogs -- I'm talking about people who could care less about the people and service you know and love.)  Perception shifted from "why would I want to put that much information about myself out there" to "I need to do this to own my results page on Google." This wasn't about blogging for SEO, but rather about having control over what information is available about you online. Blogs are an easy way for people to do that, and it's driving the next big wave of adoption.

Here's the point:  connections being discoverable (like they are today -- check out these results for sippey.com) will drive the next wave of adoption of connection creation tools, just like content being discoverable is driving the current wave of adoption of content creation tools.

Three thought experiments, just for "fun."

• Short term: This weekend Six Apart's David Recordon is hosting the social graph FOO Camp; what are the odds that a hack comes out of there to explore relationship strength and/or missing relationships based on this API.  (Hey, Steve -- you're friends with Jerry on these three services, why not on this one?)
• Medium term: How long until this is connected explicitly into my Google profile. It would be trivial for them to ask me to claim sippey.com as my own using OpenID. Search, advertising and all of their social stuff could be customized based on this information.
• Long term: social relationships as an influencer of credit scores?

gmail, iphone and ajax

This is pretty much the definition of a first world problem, but I know I'm not the only one who thinks the new Gmail UI for the iPhone isn't all its cracked up to be. They moved basic transactions like reading and archiving messages into asynchronous calls, and it creates this incredibly disjointed and sluggish user experience. Case in point, archiving a message.

• Steps to reproduce: view a message, touch the archive button.
• Expected result: user is returned to the message list, with that message removed from the list.
• Actual result: user is returned to the message list, with that message still in the message list. After several seconds a banner message appears stating that "The conversation has been marked as read." And then, after several more seconds (longer depending on the speed of your connection, on EDGE I've seen this take at least 10 seconds), another banner message apperas stating "The conversation has been archived."

Look, I'm a big fan of asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Just like I'm a big fan of HTML and CSS. And heck, HTTP for that matter. But the team made the technology they used the lede of the story, which leads me to believe that the requirement wasn't "make Gmail faster for iPhone users, especially on EDGE," but something like "port UI to AJAX."

On the plus side, IMAP setup is now much easier, so maybe I'll switch to that.

software design as performance art

Kai Krause answers John Brockman's question What Have You Changed Your Mind About with an interesting take on the nature of software design.

I used to think "Software Design" is an art form.

I now believe that I was half-right: it is indeed an art, but it has a rather short half-life: Software is merely a performance art!

A momentary flash of brilliance, doomed to be overtaken by the next wave, or maybe even by its own sequel. Eaten alive by its successors. And time...

This is not to denigrate the genre of performance art: anamorphic sidewalk chalk drawings, Goldsworthy pebble piles or Norwegian carved-ice-hotels are admirable feats of human ingenuity, but they all share that ephemeral time limit: the first rain, wind or heat will dissolve the beauty, and the artist must be well aware of its fleeting glory.

(That link there? To the Goldsworthy images? That's what they call "added value.")

sharing is caring

Paul Kedrosky: "Hell, to adapt a cliche, hath no fury like that of a software user whose software newly works the way the documentation says it will."