2007.10.20
Posted in Technology, The Web at 5:17 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Steve Jobs announced that an iPhone SDK would be available in February 2008, and the media response has been favorable. I think the favorable response is premature, and that there will be many disappointed people in February.
Prior to the launch of the video iPods in 2005, only one company wrote software that ran on the iPod platform. Apple. A few third party developers have been allowed to develop games for the iPods starting with these video-capable models, but remember that Apple was very picky about who they allowed to do this. Many longtime developers who had excellent relationships with Apple were denied this ability. Most still are.
If we forget about the phone part of the iPhone, it’s just another iPod model. The forthcoming SDK will mark the first time in history that Apple will allow all but a few select third parties into the iPod software platform. Why is Apple suddenly willing to give up the tight control they have over their darling hardware platform?
They won’t.
In the announcement, Jobs mentions Nokia’s restriction that applications running on their newest models must be digitally signed. “While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction,” says Jobs.
Apple must now perform a delicate balancing act. If they too require that applications be digitally signed before they will run on the iPod, developers will cry foul. And, someome will write an unlock program that allows unsigned applications to be run anyway. But Apple has all but admitted that they will be somehow restricting access to the platform; they just haven’t told us how yet. Apple won’t open the platform completely. Nobody has asked Apple how open it will be, and Apple isn’t telling anyone either.
There are any number of possibilities, but one thing that isn’t possible is for Apple to pull back the curtain completely. They won’t do it, because then they would lose control over their most valuable asset: the iPod platform.
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2007.02.21
Posted in Board Games, The Web at 1:13 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I’ve listened to a couple of Dice Tower podcasts recently, I’ve also watched a few of Scott Nicholson’s vidcasts at Board Games With Scott. Jason’s recent post prompted me to wonder which people cards from Chez Geek best correspond to the various personalities. So far, here’s what I’ve got:
I’m sorry, Skip Hampton (from the Dice Tower), but you’re definitely the whiner. I realize you’re trying to be humourous, but you come across as merely annoying. Nice try.
As for Scott Nicholson, well, he’s definitely Mr. Gamer. For better or worse.
Nothing else really jumped out at me from a quick look through my Chez Geek and Chez Greek cards, although I did have a few laughs as I rifled through the deck.
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2007.02.09
Posted in Music, Technology, The Web at 7:51 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
According to last.fm, I’ve listened to 20,000 songs since March 15, 2006. And that’s just the stuff that actually got tracked to last.fm, so in reality, I’ve listened to more than that. That’s a lot more than I would have expected in just under a year.
So what’s hot on my iPod these days? Well, if recent history is any indication, it’s Tom Novy‘s dance track Take It. Though I still maintain that Madonna rocks out to Faster Kill Pussycat on her iPod. Unless Miss Thing decides to settle the matter once and for all, I guess we’ll never know for sure.
Part of why I got a last.fm account to begin with was to see the stats on what I actually listen to. Some of the numbers don’t surprise me, but there are a couple that do. Apparently I really like the Chrono Cross soundtrack, because 光田康典 (Yasunori Mitsuda) is my top artist according to last.fm. I listen to that stuff quite frequently at work, which I guess accounts for the fact that it’s what I’m listening to more than 5% of the time.
And considering I was waffling on even buying the damn album in the first place, I would say it turned out to be money well spent.
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2006.12.28
Posted in In the News, Technology, The Web, This Site at 6:37 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Suppose you’re out to buy a new car. You’re kinda partial to Japanese cars, and you’ve done a bit of research, and you’ve narrowed it down to two options:
- A Honda Civic
- A Toyota Corolla
Both cars fit your criteria. You just have to pick one. Here’s the $1,000,000 question: which of the following would pull more weight with you?
- A paid television advertisement for the Honda Civic, which highlights the excellence of its engineering and how fun it is to drive.
- A trusted friend’s informal, unsolicited review of her Toyota Corolla, which she absolutely adores and can’t stop gushing about.
If you picked B, you’re a winner. Or rather, Toyota is the winner, since you’re busy driving your brand new Corolla.
Here’s the catch. Everybody knows this. Even slow, lumbering multinational corporations have figured this out by now. And so the marketing departments now have some new pages in their playbooks.
Recently, there have been a couple of news items that illustrate the emerging trend of using weblogs as marketing tools:
- Sony has admitted that the website http://alliwantforxmasisapsp.com/ (seemingly now offline) was a fraud, created by a marketing firm that Sony hired.
- More recently, Microsoft gave brand new laptops loaded with Windows Vista to prominent bloggers as gifts. This action has caused at least one blogger to reconsider the ethics of accepting gifts from vendors.
Going back to the original question, there are two key phrases in option B that are the focal points of the new marketing plays: trusted friend and unsolicited review. By creating alliwantforxmasisapsp.com, Sony was looking to trade on the unsolicited review bit. Rather than having a slick, professional, corporate marketing website that just oozed Sony, they tried to create the illusion of an average Joe who was in love with the portable gaming device. On the internet, people sometimes pay more attention to weblogs that appear to be impartial than they do to the manufacturer’s own site. They’re looking for the real dirt, not the corporate line.
Microsoft was trying for a double-whammy – trusted friends giving unsolicited reviews. There are many bloggers who are rather influential with the tech set, and by giving them free review laptops with no obligations whatsoever, Microsoft was hoping that the bloggers would nonetheless feel obligated to write some sort of positive review of Windows Vista. These influential bloggers could easily have a significant impact on the general internet buzz surrounding the launch of Vista.
This whole mess has caused me a moment’s reflection about things I’ve blogged about. Just the other day I was raving about Solio. In my case, I didn’t buy a Solio, but it was a Christmas gift. Furthermore, and I’m sure nobody at Better Energy Systems Ltd. has even noticed that my weblog even exists, let alone has a positive review of their product. I don’t feel any ethical qualms since I’m fairly sure that the person who gave me the gift had no idea I would even want to write about it on my weblog. And as a personal thing, that’s the way I intend to keep things – all of the stuff I write is my own opinion. It hasn’t been bought via bribes yet.
Though I’m not sure I agree with the position Joel Spolsky has taken on the issue. Even without him disclosing the fact that by reading his weblog I’m indirectly contributing to the “Joel gets a Hot Tub fund”, I already knew that. I don’t trust him any less (or any more) for disclosing that, and I still take everything he writes with a grain of salt (as I do with information source).
I suspect that if people generally had better critical reading skills, this whole new frontier of weblog marketing would be less of an issue; the issue would still exist, though, since many weblogs are being written more or less anonymously, and it can be tough to even discover who the source is, let alone evaluate their trustworthiness or authoritativeness. Surrogates like Google Pagerank are helpful as a guide for assigning trustworthiness, but as with everything, the hard work is still up to us humans. And luckily for the marketing companies, that probably won’t change anytime soon.
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2006.11.24
Posted in House and Home, The Web at 8:02 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
A recent experience with a brick-and-mortar store has got me thinking about buying things on the internet, and what sorts of products make sense to buy online.
In this particular case, I’m going to name names. The retailer is Pier 1 Imports, and they have a fairly decent web site (as web sites go for their sort of products). It gets bonus points for the following:
- It has a reasonably complete listing of available products.
- It allows you to check stock at their stores.
- There don’t seem to be a lot of products that are exclusive to the US stores – all of the products I checked were available at their Canadian stores as well.
So far, I’ve come up empty-handed in my quest for two items of furniture: a bench for my front entry hallway, and a laundry hamper for my bedroom. I thought I should check out what Pier 1 had, so I surfed over to their web site.
My laundry hamper requirements are pretty stringent – the physical dimensions have to be such that the hamper is no more than 14″ deep, and it has to fit in with the other bedroom furniture. With the bench I’m more forgiving. I’m looking for something roughly 48″ in length and 18″ deep, although style is more important than size.
While browsing Pier 1′s web site, I found two benches that looked promising, and a laundry hamper that fit the depth requirement and that I sort of liked the looks of. So I checked the local stock, called up the nearest store to make sure they had display models of the three items on the floor, and set off to check them out in person.
It turns out that none of the three are what I’m looking for. The benches looked a lot like the web site, but the upholstery color was different than I was expecting on one of them, and the other had a much higher “lip” than was apparent from the photos on the web site. The laundry hamper was much duller and plainer looking than it appeared on the web site. I was quite disappointed in it in person.
If Pier 1 is guilty of anything, it might by that they wanted their products to look good on the web site so they made sure that they were clean, well-polished, and professionally photographed. No harm, no foul, really. Of course they want to show off the product, but this has a few downsides:
- Color reproduction on web sites in general is not going to be true, less so when the furniture is professionally photographed using non-natural lighting.
- The furniture can be “dressed up” by either choosing the “best” of a given run, high-quality polishing and cleaning, or (very likely) both.
Without going so far to say that these practices are deliberately deceptive, they do lend themselves to a let down when I’ve driven to the store and viewed the pieces in person.
Looking back on this experience, I realize that I would never have bought them online for the above reasons. Something like furniture doesn’t lend itself well to purely online shopping, but online research can be a good tool for narrowing the choices.
The products I do buy online tend to be books, CDs, DVDs, commodity electronics, and the odd mail-order-only thing where I’ve seen one in the real world first. All of these items are mass-produced, and aesthetics aren’t as important as content. I don’t really care what the book’s cover looks like, I’m buying it because I want to read it. And barring a major screwup at the printer, every copy of the latest Harry Potter novel is going to have identical contents.
For almost anything else, I will probably never order it online unless I can somehow manage to find one in the real world and convince myself that the one I’m ordering online will be almost exactly the same as the one I was looking at. Most mass-produced products fit this criteria – I can write down the SKU of the hot new digital camera I’ve been salivating over and find the exact same SKU on Amazon.com to be sure I’m buying what I expect. I can’t necessarily do this with items like furniture since, in many cases, no two pieces are entirely alike.
It also further underscores the importance of trust in any sort of mail order transaction. Sites like eBay try to give an indication of trust, and eBay is quite successful, so it must be doing something right, but when you get right down to it, eBay wouldn’t work if there weren’t an awful lot of trusting (and honest) people out there. I seldom buy things on eBay, and maybe this is part of my problem – I’m too wary perhaps.
The bottom line is that I’ll certainly use the Internet to do a lot of research into a lot of my more major purchases, but I don’t feel I can rely on it 100% as a shopping medium. I’m sure the book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping would have something to say about that if a second edition were published today.
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2006.11.24
Posted in The Web, This Site at 12:07 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Now that IE 7 has been out for a little while, I decided it was finally time to fix a bug that this site had. Notably, the left-hand sidebar was missing in Internet Explorer 7.
The issue has mostly been fixed, although there is a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the screen that I have yet to get rid of.
I have to wonder whatever possessed Microsoft to break backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 6 while simultaneously failing to adhere to more of the CSS standards. I could understand the IE6 compatibility breakage if my stylesheet (which is happily rendered by many other browsers) worked in IE 7, but it doesn’t.
I can only imagine the screams of thousands of web developers who have to update their stylesheets with yet more crud to make sure that they render correctly in IE7 as well as IE6 and then all the other more standards-compliant browsers out there. How frustrating. Why can’t Microsoft get this right? Everyone else (Apple, the Mozilla folks, Konqueror, Opera, and others) seem to have far fewer problems with handling stylesheets. Microsoft’s full of very bright people, so why can’t they spend some time to get this right?
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2006.09.23
Posted in Music, The Web at 12:08 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Don’t get me wrong – I love Amazon as much as the rest of us, and I order both music and books from Amazon on a fairly regular basis. However I was a little disturbed to discover that I actually have two Amazon accounts now.
Let me explain. Once upon a time I was a University student and I used my university e-mail address to create an account on Amazon.ca. Fast forward a few years to when I acquired the wittevrongel.ca domain, I created a new amazon account with my new e-mail address. OK, so I now have two Amazon accounts. No big deal, right?
But somewhere along the line, I updated my old Amazon account to have the new e-mail address. So now I have two Amazon accounts with the same e-mail address. They differ only by password. I’m a little surprised that this is even possible. The two accounts have seperate order histories, seperate shopping carts, and all the rest of it. This confused the heck out of me, since one of my recent orders didn’t show up where I was expecting it to.
I called Amazon to find out what was going on, and they explained that I now have two accounts with the same e-mail address. Worse yet, there’s no way I can merge the two accounts into one. I have to dump one or the other.
As a software developer, I’ve written my share of web applications. I’m not going to claim to be a web application guru by any means, but it strikes me as odd that you can have what amounts to two accounts with the same login on a web site. The software should never have allowed me to change my old e-mail address to the new one when another account with the same e-mail already existed in the system. Or, it should have offered to merge the two accounts (which turns out to be impossible). Now I’ll forever have to be careful about which password I use when using Amazon.ca, or ask Amazon to delete one of the accounts (the one without pending orders, I suppose).
Part of me is curious as to exactly how long I’ve had the two accounts. I’ve been lucky until now in that all of my orders save the most recent one (now two) were from the same account, but I suspect I’ve had both accounts for quite some time now (probably years).
Oh well. I guess this is a lesson learned in application design for me – thou shalt not allow what amounts to duplicate usernames. I only wish Amazon learned that lesson before I got myself into this mess.
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2006.05.13
Posted in The Web, This Site at 3:24 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I’ve had several people comment on the fact that they quite like the design of my weblog, so I thought I’d write a bit about how the design came together.
First off, I wanted to make sure that the site validated as XHTML 1.0 at least, and that CSS was used to style the site where possible. I also wanted a weblog engine that was flexible, easy to maintain, and well-supported. WordPress was an obvious fit for me, because it allowed for very flexible templates, was capable of generating XHTML, and wouldn’t get in my way. As a bonus, it’s free (as in freedom) software.
OK, so now I’ve got the blog engine, but the default theme wasn’t really me. I found a theme I kind of liked (Ocadia by Becca Wei), but it still wasn’t me. For one, I wanted a 3-column layout, and I found the design a little to constraining to tweak to my liking.
So, I went off in seach of the holy grail. Literally. I took the basic 3-column layout presented in that article, and fit it into a really simple (read: ugly) WordPress theme. At first, I tried to sort of merge it in with the Ocadia theme, but this didn’t work so well, so I started a new theme from scratch, using other WordPress themes as a sort of reference. This approach worked much better for me, and I also understood how the theme worked from the inside out, so making tweaks and changes over time has been pretty easy to do.
I decided that I wanted to use a photograph as the basis of the theme, but I wanted to avoid having a blue theme. My last blog had a blue-heavy theme, and I was tired of it, so I was looking for something fresh. I very nearly used a photograph of Pelican Point as the basis for the visual design. I had problems getting a masthead I liked, though, and I was having a really hard time finding colors that worked in a palette of greens and yellows. I’m not a graphic designer, and this just wasn’t working for me.
Frustrated with this project, I went for a walk, and as I was coming home, I noticed a sign that I’ve seen hundreds of times before, and it provided the inspiration I needed. It was one of the signs for Cohos Evamy.
What’s really odd is that the sign looks nothing like any part of my blog. What struck me about the sign is the way it delinated an image and used negative space for impact. This gave me the idea to have a photo in the upper left corner of the page, but leave most of the masthead blank, and use strong lines to separate the masthead from the rest of the content.
Ultimately, the photograph I wound up using in the top-left corner was a photograph of some paper mache peppers I have hanging on a closet door. It’s one of the first photographs I ever took with my Canon EOS 20D. For some reason, the ability to use really rich reds, yellows, and purples in my design really resonated with me.
Armed with the photo and my copy of Photoshop Elements, I set off creating the rest of the images I needed for my theme, and gradually worked them in over time. I also borrowed some style ideas from a number of places. I honestly can’t remember them all. For the most part, I cut and pasted, and scaled chunks of the original photograph to get the basic color elements, then started working them all together. The little push-pin and comment images took a while – I drew them essentially from scratch. All of this took a number of hours in Elements, but I was quite pleased with the result.
And so the first version of my new blog theme emerged over the course of a week or so. The CSS stuff took a while to get all settled – there’s quite a number of styles in there that I really had to fiddle with to get them “just so”.
Through this entire process, I kept the following things in mind:
- Use a simple palette. I only really use 6 basic colors in the entire weblog theme (plus subtle variants): black, white, grey, red, purple, and yellow.
- Use repetition to reinforce the design’s structure. The nature of the blog makes this very easy to do, and it’s quite effective in making the design both appealing and effective.
- Use negative space for big impact in a few places, but don’t waste a lot of screen real-estate with giant margins around things.
These three principles helped to guide me when I was creating the initial version of the blog layout, and kept me with a general sense of what I wanted to accomplish.
After the basic version was done, I was quite happy with the result, but I wanted to make the blog feel a bit more personal. So, I added in the Random Photo thing on the left, which also served to add a bit more visual interest to an otherwise very textual layout. A few months later, I added in the Recent iTunes section, which I think is a kind of fun and interesting window into my personal life – you can see what I’m listening to as I’m listening to it. Design-wise, that little purple musical note was essential in keeping that content easy to read, since it serves as a very small separator.
Really, it was a matter of drawing inspiration from a few sources, then doing a whole bunch of grunt work in text editors, web browsers, and photoshop to bring it all together. I didn’t have a goal in mind that I really drove towards, but worked things out as I went along, letting the design itself drive the process. I’m a little surprised at where I ended up, but really, it was just the natural conclusion to the path I set out down originally. I also learned some new XHTML and CSS kung-fu in the process, which will certainly come in handy in the future.
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2006.04.01
Posted in The Web at 6:21 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Owing to today’s date, I’ve developed a surefire way to separate the wheat from the chaff as far as blogs go.
Real blogs, with worthwhile content, don’t bother devoting an entire calendar day (April 1) each year to fake news that’s supposed to be funny, but merely serves to annoy anyone interested in actual news. I like the occaisional April Fool’s prank as much as the next person, but most of the things posted to weblogs as April Fool’s jokes are lame, and not amusing in the slightest.
For instance, we get crap like OMG! Ponies! from some weblogs. Come on Mr. Malda – isn’t it time you grew up just a little bit? And feel free to go ahead and whine about how it’s your weblog and you can do whatever you want. I’ve moved on to sites where there’s actually some content worth reading.
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2006.03.17
Posted in Music, The Web, This Site at 6:59 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Well, I’ve finally caved and signed up with last.fm.
There were several motivations for doing this. First, I was tired of iTunes’ utter failure to track the music I play at work. Probably 80% of the music I listen to is in remote iTunes libraries, and the iTunes instance hosting the library does not count these “plays” in its stats. This is really uncool, since part of my eventual goal is to discover what I actually listen to (as oppoosed to what I only believe I listen to). With last.fm, I can track my music usage from all of my iTunes instances, even for tracks that actually reside in remote iTunes instances. Yay!
Second, the (ahem) geeky part of me thought it would be fun (even if it’s cliché) to display the songs I’m listening to on my weblog as I’m playing them. Thanks to a handy little WordPress plugin, doing this with last.fm is easy. And you can see the result at the left of this page.
If it says something boring like “not listening”, it means my life has been music-deprived for the past few hours. Perhaps I’m dead, or merely asleep. Or maybe I’m out having fun instead of sitting at home writing lame weblog posts on a Friday night.
In any case, we’ll have to see how this whole last.fm thing goes after it’s monitored my true listening habits for a week or two.
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