AND, one may well ask, what’s so great about “interactivity” anyway? What’s wrong with surrendering deferentially to the implacable linear flow of an author’s creative thought, her own particular page-by-page artistic and narrative decisions? All these yields, links, buttons, nets, maps: not only are they vexing novelties, sometimes they seem more compelling than the text itself, as though the ancillas of book culture – the tables of contents, the indexes and appendixes, the designs and jackets and headers – might have swallowed up the stuff inside. If it takes so much effort just to struggle with procedures, how can one find time to appreciate style, voice, eloquence, character, story? And what do you mean, you can’t take it to bed with you?
- I’m still in the process of trying to find something that will read XSPF files.
I tried it sometime in the last year and it still needed a lot of work.
Ditto. Plus…I go back and forth between thinking Firefox apps are the shit and Firefox apps are like totally screwed. They are definitely a cool hack. Plus I think the apache people have moved all their efforts to something new which means some of the stuff SB leans on will never get improved unless SB does it itself, and my guess is things like XPCOM are pretty big projects (note: i do not actually know if SB uses those specific moz projects). Finally, it doesn’t seem to have a single, compelling reason to exist (though it does have a slew of small ones). Like their marketing quote is “the firefox of media players”. The difference is, IE was sucky abandonware when FF came along, big time, and there basically was no useable browser for linux and the mac was pretty dicey. I’ve got my issues with iTunes, but…it definitely isn’t horrible, and Apple is actively working on it and making it better (ok, different?).
If I was the dudes from SB, I’d be real worried about like…I don’t know how to make it clear. Its like the ‘music manager’ app has a couple parts: dealing with files and metadata and so on, and then actually turning streams of bits from various places into noise. It seems to me that media organization chunk is like a super webified domain: its all about links, metadata, sharing, whatever. Its of the web. There’s only one hiccup: historically, storing your whole mp3 pile on the dubs (or ‘in the cloud’ as the negahippies say) has been impractical for a variety of reasons. Even if we charitably assume that persitence’s peskinesses persists (perspicacious readers may disagree), it might end up being easier to give an essentially web-based app access to your disk files and offline compatibility (with some unholy mixture of flash, HTML5/Slingshot, FF3…its in the pipe) than it is to give your desktop app the pro’s of the web. Desktop apps aren’t generally made of links.
As to the actual file-playing, the flash runtime is already everywhere and can handle it. Basically I feel like this is another one of those areas where world of the web is expanding into the desktop app’s strongholds faster than the desktop app is making progress in the other direction, and the problem itself is growing faster in the web-friendly direction than the desktop-friendly one.
Fremen
Fur inhibits sweat-induced cooling, and furry animals generally have other ways to lose heat. In humans, Dr. Jablonski argues, sweat glands evolved as body hair vanished, allowing optimal cooling of the enlarging hominid brain…
This is at least the second time in the last few days I’ve read something about the whole human homeostasis being dependent on losing hair and being a necessary pre-req for a legit brain.
Does it seem like there’s an extraordinary amount of “Hmm…this is our big engineering problem right now…THIS IS HOW NATURE (ESPECIALLY THE BRAIN) WORKS!” Like when distributed systems were getting big in the mass culture, there was all types of Steven Pinker / Daniel Dennett mass-science articles about how that was like the brain. When I was a kid, it was the parallelism / Danny Hillis scene. Now its all heat dissipation, in processors, pocket gadgets, vehicles. I remember reading something about how in olden times, when hydraulics and stuff were just being invented, people wrote books about how the ventricles of the brain were basically hydraulic reservoirs/pumps and the nerves were hydraulic lines that motivated the limbs. If, in a few years, there’s lots are articles about how like bees and ants are really good at solving complex problems with large numbers of simple threads and the coordinating of them is a Hard Problem Elegantly Solved then we’ll know. Maybe I just got Erlang/OTP on the brain from reading that Sam Ruby post.
Now and then a fellow gets to thinking about it. Not often, though. Which is a good thing. For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it’s like a piece of machinery: it wont stand a whole lot of racking. It’s best when it all runs along the same, doing the day’s work and not one part used no more than needful. I have said and I say again, that’s ever living thing the matter with Darl: he just thinks by himself too much.
Of Goats and Men
Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release “lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ‘cause it won’t count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy.
–Joel Spolsky
The Pages program was originally more of a page-layout program than a writing tool. The new version attempts to fix this imbalance with a less artsy word-processing mode. But the effort is only partly successful. It still de-emphasizes some writer-friendly features. For instance, its auto-correct function is much weaker than Word’s. Another example: In Word, to see how many words your document contains, you just glance at the bottom of the screen. In Pages, you must dig down into a submenu to find the answer. The command for showing invisible formatting marks also is harder to find than in Word.
–Walt Mossberg, reviewing iWork.
that there is outstanding.
OK what’s extra crazy about this is that i just went to check this crazy-ass page again, AND THIS SECTION HAS BEEN UPDATED WITH NEW EXAMPLES!