Slate of Hand
Well, it’s January, and as has become commonplace over the last several years, the public is abuzz with anticipation over a new Apple device. This time it’s a tablet.
I think the single most interesting thing about this unannounced tablet is how pumped everyone is about it, despite its lack of obvious value proposition. When we get new Mac models, we get lighter, faster, and prettier machines. When we got the iPod, we got a whole new paradigm for consuming music. And of course, when we got the iPhone, we got the ability to replace multiple devices with a single, all-in-one device that did everything much, much better.
With this tablet thing, however, I feel like I’m much more skeptical than the press, the fanboys, and everyone else who thinks it’s such a slam dunk to change the world. It’s like the greatness of the iPhone has everyone thinking Apple is somehow going to top that level of revolution with each new market they enter. There has always been a magical quality to the company’s development and introduction of products under Steve Jobs, but I wonder if expectations are a bit too high at this particular point in time.
In my opinion, even if the Apple tablet succeeds, I can’t see how it will have nearly as much impact as the iPhone, the iPod, or the Mac; and if it fails, it will be end-of-lifed or morphed into something else within a few years. I don’t think it will replace the laptop and I don’t think it will totally re-invent anything we currently do on our computers. Whereas the multi-touch interface enabled us to do things we’d never dreamed of doing on pocket devices before, I’m not sure it will do the same for bigger screens.
This, from a guy who sleeps in rose-colored Apple-shaped glasses.
In trying to square my lack of enthusiasm with what I’ve been reading about this thing, I keep coming back to the question: what’s it for?
First of all, I think this device is almost entirely for consumption, and not production. It will be borderline unusable for writing essays, designing posters, making movies, and even sending emails. When you want to produce something, you will not do it with this tablet.
With consumption and severely limited production as the premise, what sorts of things could you do with this device? I see four possibilities that could be construed as compelling:
- Television tethering
- E-publication reading
- Portable video viewing
- Video chat
Television tethering
This is probably the only thing on the list that would singlehandedly cause me to purchase an Apple tablet. I haven’t heard anyone talk about it, but this is how it would go: the tablet comes with a dongle that can connect via RCA/component/HDMI to any television. The tablet communicates wirelessly with the dongle to both send video to it via 801.11N (or whatever shiny, new, faster wireless interface is next) and also to control the TV watching experience. In this scenario, you could use it to relay things like live Hulu streams to your TV or display stored video you bought from iTunes or “borrowed” from somewhere else.
There is also a chance this could be done in concert with Apple TV instead of a dongle, but the clear problem it solves for me is “how can I easily display on television the video that is currently playing on my computer?” Right now, the answer to that is to carry my laptop over to my TV, plug it into an extra input, pop the video player full screen (if I even can), and then walk back over to the laptop every time I need to control something. It’s the critical link that is keeping Hulu and similar services from being a much bigger part of my life.
My feeling is that Apple TV has never done as well as Apple hoped, but also that it is not something the company is going to give up on anytime soon. Part of me wonders if the tablet, among other things, is just a much better form to stuff Apple TV functionality into. If it is, I’m probably in.
Almost everyone who has a Kindle loves the hell out of it. I probably would have bought one awhile ago, but I just don’t read enough books to justify it. Aaron Swartz, on the other hand, with his 132 book per year reading pace, could probably justify owning three (sidenote: WTF Aaron!) (sidenote #2, WTFFFFF JOE!!!). If the Apple tablet did e-books plus a few other things in this list, however, I might be a buyer.
To me, the biggest clue that Steve Jobs cares about this market is that he says he doesn’t. Jobs famously said a few years ago, in response to a question about entering the e-book reader market:
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”
Not only is that statement preposterous, but it flies in the face of the positioning Apple tries to bestow on its products: that they are for intelligent consumers. Guess what is strongly associated with intelligence? Reading. Particularly books. What Jobs really meant by his statement was:
“People are reading fewer and fewer books because they are less convenient than other types of media.”
The first statement is terse, dismissive, and meant to throw the press off Apple’s scent. The second statement is what you will probably hear at the launch event.
Another clear clue that e-publication reading is a large part of the Apple tablet is the flub by Bill Keller of the New York Times a few months ago. Keller’s unauthorized reference to the tablet all but guarantees they have a deal with Apple to display New York Times content on this device. It could be something very simple and uncompelling like a Times Reader app that is offered for free, but what if it’s something more substantial like the New York Times actually subsidizing the tablet if you sign up for a two year subscription to the e-NYT? I’m actually less interested in what the New York Times (and other) content looks like on the tablet and more intrigued by what the economics behind this sort of content delivery look like.
Another question I have about this tablet — if it’s going to compete with the Kindle — is what its equivalent of E Ink is. The Kindle enjoys a whopping one week battery life largely because it doesn’t require a backlight to operate. Currently, all of Apple’s screens are backlit, and unless the company has an answer to that, it may have problems competing head-to-head with the Kindle on pure e-book reading. Or has Apple invented a way to overlay an E Ink screen on the same surface as an LCD screen? That would be ridiculously awesome.
Portable video viewing
There aren’t a whole lot of really great solutions out there for watching video on the go. An iPhone is too small for most people, while a laptop is probably overkill. A tablet with 15-20 hours of battery life and the ability to stand up like an easel might fit the bill perfectly for viewing on a bus, on a plane, in a car, or elsewhere on the go.
I don’t think this benefit alone would sell a lot of tablets, but it would help justify a purchase for some people.
Video chat
I’ve never been into video chat as I find it extremely awkward, but I understand it’s big in the grandparents’ set and every other set where people are potentially far away from loved ones. While I mentioned above that I don’t expect a lot of content production to be done on the tablet, live video capture and broadcast could be a notable exception because it requires you to do nothing but look into the tablet and speak.
A few thoughts on form factor
A lot of my skepticism around tablet computing stems from my belief that the form factor just isn’t as beneficial as it seems. Besides when sitting in a cramped airline seat, I don’t recall many situations in which I wished the bottom half of my laptop would disappear. When I have, it’s always been for high-volume consumption: long form video and long form text. In other words, things that don’t require me to do much of anything besides staring at the screen. Does a market exist for a device that does just these things and not much else? I think the Kindle has proved that at the right price point, the answer is yes. I guess I just don’t consider that as world-changing of a product as other people do. I guess we won’t know until we see it though, right?
As far as actual form-factor goes, I expect something significantly more klutz-proof than the iPhone. My guess is an all-aluminum body with an aluminum panel that covers the device’s screen when closed and folds open to double as an easel when you’re using the device on a flat surface. I expect a solid-state drive as the only storage option but would like to see an SD-card slot as well. 801.22N (or better) wireless is a given, but if this thing has 3G/4G connectivity, it’s not going to be through AT&T. If I had to bet one way or another, I would be on wifi only. If this device is successful, it’s another bargaining chip for Apple when it renews iPhone negotiations with carriers, and I don’t think this sort of connectivity would sell many more units right now.
So anyway, that’s all I have for now. I expect a device that will sell a decent amount of units but fall short of the world-changing expectations placed upon it by people who think Apple will never release another product that doesn’t top its previous one.
Idea: “Record This” Bookmarklet
Lately I’ve been intrigued by situations in which the amount of effort required to complete a task is not overwhelming but it is enough to prevent the task from getting done. The latest example, from a couple of weeks ago, was wine journaling. Sure it only takes a few minutes to pull out a laptop, log into your wine-dot-whatever account and structure a proper review, but unless a few minutes becomes a few seconds, I’m out… and so are thousands of other people.
Minertia is what I might call it… short for a “minimal level of inertia”.
Many companies have succeeded primarily because their products overcome minertia. Twitter is a good example of this. There were millions of people with (purportedly entertaining) thoughts, but none of these thoughts were worth spending more than 30 seconds to publish. Twitter provided a way to turn these idle thoughts into legitimate published communication with 30 seconds of effort, and BAM, they are the hottest company on the internet.
On to more pedestrian matters though: recording stuff on TV.
I’ll use Tivo as an example because that’s what I have, but this could apply to any DVR, Apple TV, Boxee, etc etc:
Here is how I decide to add a show to the repertoire of things my Tivo records automatically:
- Read about a new show somewhere online.
- Hear or read about it again somewhere else.
- Read about how good it is again and finally decide to do something about it.
- If I’m home, turn on the TV, navigate somewhat laboriously through on-screen menus and search for the show in order to set up automatic recording. If I’m away, go to Tivo.com and use their totally crappy search feature, try to find the program, and if that is even successful, set up automatic recording.
As you can see, this sometimes equates to several minutes of work (I’ve spent over 15 minutes trying to do this on my iPhone). Again, we’re not talking about a huge time investment here, but it’s enough to require steps 1-3 whereas with a little minertia reduction, people might be willing to record shows the first time they hear about them.
What got me thinking about this was an interview with Rex I read yesterday. In it, he mentions Modern Family as the best show on TV right now (I say it’s Dexter or Million Dollar Listing, but whatever). Thankfully, Rex’s interview was about the third time I’d heard this so I bucked up and did step 4. But here’s how much easier it could be:
- Read article on web which contains the name of a TV show.
- Click a bookmarklet to query Tivo, and Tivo spiders the page, highlighting all TV shows it recognizes.
- Click on the show you want, confirm with a little ajaxed-in dialog box, and a command gets sent to your Tivo to create a Season Pass for the show.
The effort would thusly be reduced to under 10 seconds.
As with the wine example, I fully expect someone to leave a comment pointing me to something that “kinda sorta” does this, but not in as optimal of a manner as I described above. Anybody know of something that does this? Or better yet, anyone work at Tivo and want to build this? :)
iPhone App Idea: WineSnap
Don’t let the beautiful bottle fool you… this is terrible wine.
If you’re an iPhone developer, you probably struggle a lot with the issue of effort vs. revenue. In other words, you think you’ve thought of something cool and you don’t mind investing the time to produce it, but you just aren’t sure if anyone will actually pay for it.
Here’s an app that — if well done — I would pay $20 or more for:
Whenever I’m having a glass of wine, allow me to snap a picture of the bottle (or the barcode from the bottle) and within 30 seconds enter some very basic information about it:
- Grade — A through F
- Characteristics — Mild, Strong, Oaky, Fruity
- Optional freeform text comments
Once I hit submit, save this to my wine library database, accessible via iPhone or web browser.
Are there other wine rating apps and services available right now? Definitely. But unfortunately none of them pass the 30 second test. They don’t even pass the 5 minute test. Usually when you’re in the middle of drinking wine — whether at a wedding, a party, at dinner, or in a dark alley — spending 5 minutes typing notes into your iPhone is just not something you’d ever consider doing… and this is the critical void that no one has filled yet.
It should be “snap, select, select, done”. By reducing the effort required to create a personal wine note library to this simple 30 second routine, you’d be enabling thousands of recreational wine drinkers to do something they’ve never been able to do before: actually remember what wines they try and which ones they like. That level of detail, in most cases, is all people really need, and it’s something I am 100% sure many would gladly pay for.
Ok then, who’s going to step up? I’ll be your first sale.
Mail > File to Task…
Perhaps this is already obvious to everyone else who has inbox overload, but I just figured out what I hate about e-mail and task management: they work against each other. Even if you’re the sort of person who diligently creates to-do lists in applications such as Anxiety or Things, any incoming email about your to-do items has nowhere useful to go. You currently have the following options:
- Leave it in your inbox until it’s done. I believe this is the most common and works decently if your load is low. It breaks down big-time when you have hundreds of e-mails on the same subject though and negatively affects your ability to deal with the rest of your inbox as a result. Even when you complete a task under this strategy, you often have to sift through your inbox and delete many e-mails afterwards.
- File it in either a simple or complex folder arrangement. This does not work well for many people, including me, because if something is not in our inbox, we tend to forget about it. Filing is for long-term storage, not easy recall.
- Make use of the “flagging” function in your email app, and flag each incoming message that requires action. This is mainly an improvement upon method 1, but it doesn’t solve a lot of problems.
I’ve given a bunch of different workflows a shot but nothing seems to have struck a chord yet. In popping open Anxiety today for the first time in about a year, I was reminded of how much I like its simplicity. It’s an automatically synching list of tasks and nothing more. You click to add a task and then when you complete it, you click its checkbox and it goes away forever. There’s no tagging, no dragging, and no nagging. It’s basically a half step more advanced than electronic Stickie notes… which I love.
That got me thinking, however, of how a nice simple app like this could play a role in finding the holy grail of time management: a simple solution that both declutters and organizes your information workflow, helps you get things done, and doesn’t require you to learn much or add administrative tasks to your routine.
I may eventually mock this up and screencast it or something but I’m too lazy right now so here it is in a nutshell:
- You receive an email from a co-worker telling you that you are on the hook to provide a mockup for a new product. It is due in a week.
- You click once in Anxiety (or a similar app, or some similar function in your Mail app) to create a task. You call it “Create mockup for Product X” and it instantly shows up in your task list.
- Every subsequent mail that comes in about this subject is either deleted by you if it’s trivial or “filed to this task”. Filing a message to a task removes it from your inbox and places it in some sort of mail folder that is linked to the task you created in Anxiety, Things, or whatever app. The key is how it gets there. Dragging messages in mail applications requires too much precision and mouse movement, in direct opposition to Fitts’ Law. Dragging 100 messages a day to different mail folders is incredibly onerous, especially if you have a ton of mail folders. Instead, inside each message would be a few buttons representing recent tasks you’ve filed messages to. There would also be some intelligence built-in based on subject lines and senders. With one click, you could file the message to any of your open tasks.
- You send off various mockups over the next few days and every time you need to refer to an email you sent or received about the project, you could simply click on the task in the task list and a (smart?) folder would open in your mail application showing you all messages filed against this task.
- You send off your final mockup and check off the task as “done”. The task is removed from your list and the folder full of messages tucks into an archive somewhere, out of sight and out of mind.
To me, this is the ideal workflow of an e-mail/task management system, and I haven’t seen anyone do it yet. Microsoft, of all companies, actually tried something along these lines with “Projects” in Entourage, but the interface got in the way. I’d love to see someone tackle it but with a keener eye towards simpler, more natural interaction. I almost wonder if the entire thing could be done with Mail.app and AppleScript.
Whoever finally solves the problem of inbox overload is going to make a lot of money. This would be a great first step.
Msnbc.com Acquires EveryBlock… Welcome Brother!
News that has been brewing secretly for the last several months finally broke this morning: Msnbc.com has acquired EveryBlock, the most interesting (in my opinion) startup in the hyperlocal news space. It is with great joy that I welcome my colleagues Adrian Holovaty, Wilson Miner, and the rest of the EveryBlock crew to the msnbc.com family to help re-imagine, re-invent, and re-volutionize local news online. You can read several other accounts and descriptions of the acquisition here (msnbc.com, New York Times, EveryBlock, Lost Remote) but I thought I’d provide some color from the standpoint of a founder whose company, Newsvine, was acquired almost two years ago by the same company.
First let me say that the acquisition of EveryBlock is an excellent fit for both companies. Msnbc.com’s focus has always been on national news, a concentration that has made them the most visited news site in the United States for over a year now; more than CNN, more than Yahoo News, and more than most local news sites combined. Leading the national news race is a great accomplishment to anchor your company around, but local news is where most of the disruption is occurring these days, and thus it is fertile ground for innovation. Local newspapers find themselves rich with great journalism, but crippled by legacy distribution and operational costs. Community news blogs enjoy tremendous grassroots energy but very little means to monetize their content. There are a million gusts swirling around in the local news tornado right now, and when the dust finally settles, the landscape will be much different than anyone could have imagined even five years ago.
The organizations that succeed in local news will be the ones who respect all of the great journalism and increasingly available data in cities and neighborhoods across the world while creating better ways for people to consume it. If you’re a organization in the local news space — big or small — and you’d like to be a partner in this future, we’d love to work with you.
Another reason I’m excited to welcome EveryBlock into the family is that I think it’s a great family to join if you’re an entrepreneur. When we signed on with msnbc.com almost two years, it was a leap of faith considering that other suitors would have provided different experiences. We knew msnbc.com was the closest to us geographically, so that part couldn’t have been matched, but you never know how you’ll be respected, used, or abused until you’re part of the family. When I read about incredibly smart and likable people like Joshua Schachter selling a great service like Del.icio.us to Yahoo, only to see Yahoo marginalize the product and send Josh fleeing the company like a burning building, it saddens me.
In addition to things going horribly wrong between acquirers and entrepreneurs, a perhaps even more common case is when entrepreneurs leave on good terms the day their contract period is up. For background, when you sell your company, you are usually required to stick around for some period of time until you receive all of the acquisition proceeds. This happens all the time, the most recent of which (that I can recall) being Dick Costolo at Feedburner. Dick’s a great guy, he sold a great service in Feedburner to Google, but he left more or less when his contract was over. There’s nothing wrong with this all… he made a truckload of money and probably wants to blow some of it on gold chains and petrified walrus testicles.
I think when you’re an acquirer though, your real hope is that the employees you are welcoming into the family *want* to work for you after they no longer have to… and that is the situation we find ourselves in right now.
Things, for the most part, are going swimmingly. Although building technologies and services for msnbc.com has slowed our development efforts on newsvine.com a bit, for the time being, Newsvine now serves over 4 million uniques a month; almost four times the traffic we did, pre-acquisition. We’re also distributing more revenue to our great community of writers than ever before. Additionally, there has been some nice cross-media collaboration in the form of Newsvine members appearing on national television and gaining press access the political conventions in 2008. We also have people like Retired Colonel Jack Jacobs and NBC Correspondent Chuck Todd popping in to write articles and answer questions during important events. All of this and we feel like we haven’t even scratched the surface yet.
There’s plenty of unfinished business to do when it comes to building out the Newsvine, msnbc.com, and now EveryBlock communities, and we’re just thrilled to be around to do it. I look forward to working closely with the EveryBlock team in the coming months and welcoming another passionate group of people into the company.
The House Comes Down Today (Right Now in Fact)
I’ll have a more complete post on this later, but the live construction cam of my house demolition is now online. Click here for the latest image (the image will update every minute).
It’s going quick. Watch now while there’s still something left, if you’re interested…
Examining Typekit
Last week brought word of a promising new type solution for the web called Typekit. Created by Jeff Veen and the smart folks at Small Batch, Typekit aims to solve the problem of custom typography on the web once and for all. Unlike sIFR, Cufon, and several other stopgaps before it, Typekit does not attempt to hack around the problem, but to solve it in a permanent way, which is exciting.
As a co-inventor of sIFR, I’ve been getting a lot of emails this week asking what I think of this new effort. In evaluating its promise, it’s important to examine the following characteristics, in order of importance: compatibility, functionality, legality, ease of use, and hackiness.
Compatibility
Compatibility is the most important aspect of any new web technology. If your shiny new method only works in 10% of web browsers, it’s nothing more than a proof-of-concept. It is this reality check that keeps me from getting excited about W3C meetings, Internet Explorer extensions, or anything else that doesn’t apply all browsers in the here and now… or at least the right around the corner.
Compatibility was also what pushed sIFR over the top in terms of popularity, working in over 90% of all systems and falling back gracefully in most others. It also came out at a time, 2004, when there wasn’t a whole lot of tolerance for leaving certain browsers behind or having things look ideal in a few browsers and not so ideal in others.
Typekit appears to be doing ok on the compatibility front, targeting current versions of Safari, Chrome, and Opera natively, the next version of Firefox (3.1) natively, and all versions of Internet Explorer via a “backup” EOT solution. Here’s what the browser share landscape looks like today:
- Works in:
- Internet Explorer: 66.1%
- Safari: 8.21%
- Chrome: 1.42%
- Opera: 0.68%
- Firefox 3.1 or greater: 0.18%
- Doesn’t work in:
- Firefox 3.0 or lower: 22.3%
- Miscellaneous other browsers: 1.11%
So you can see right off the bat that Typekit will work in just over 76% of browsers. Not quite as high as some of the methods that came before it, but it’s extremely important to recognize that the one group that’s keeping Typekit from almost universal compatibility is Firefox. I have no evidence to support this, but I imagine that Firefox users are among the quickest to upgrade, which would seem to suggest that this compatibility gap could be closed relatively quickly. Data shows that Firefox 3 is already used by 11 times more people than Firefox 2, and considering it was released just short of a year ago, this sort of upgrade pattern is encouraging.
Given the above data, combined with how often Firefox seems to annoy me these days with upgrade notices, I expect Firefox 3.1 or greater to be the dominant Firefox version in use one year from now, thus pushing Typekit’s compatibility percentage into the upper 90s fairly soon.
It’s also important to praise what Small Batch has done here on the compatibility front: their killer concept was involving type foundries in web-only licensing and propagating the font files through the standards-complaint @font-face CSS declaration, but they realized their solution would be academic if it didn’t work in Internet Explorer, so they made sure their backup implementation using EOT files took care of all IE users. The lack of this sort of practical thinking is what keeps a lot of great ideas from gaining traction on the web.
I also think that designers these days, self included, are a lot more amenable to things looking great on “most systems” as long as they at least work reasonably on other systems (as long as they look great on the particular system the designer uses). This is a bit of designer bias, of course, but it also represents an increasing desire in the design and development community to leave the old web behind. I still remember how much crap I took at ESPN from validatorians when we decided to leave Netscape 4 — with its 1% marketshare — behind. Now it’s all the rage… and I love it!
Functionality
By all accounts, Typekit will be more functional than any method that came before it. This is quite obviously because it uses a browser’s native font rendering technology. There are some concerns about reliability gaps stemming from downloading fonts off third-party servers, but I believe this fear will prove unfounded. Additionally, I imagine both the @font-face and EOT versions of fonts will come in larger files than sIFR font files (because usually you only embed a subset of characters in a sIFR font file) but with broadband penetration being what it is today, this too will prove immaterial. Additionally, even though sIFR font files may be smaller, the noticeable delay in rendering them probably more than makes up the difference.
Legality
I put legality in the middle of the pack and not at the top because, to my knowledge, there haven’t been any serious legal dust-ups over the use of technologies like sIFR and Cufon. So far, the burden has been on designers to buy the fonts they use before embedding them using sIFR or Cufon, but at the same time, there’s been no clear blessing or condemnation of this practice by foundries or type designers.
The nice thing about Typekit is that it specifically involves foundries and type designers in the process of licensing their fonts for use on the web. When you use Typekit, you know with certainty that what you’re doing has the direct blessing of the people who created and/or marketed the typeface you’re using. This is a nice piece-of-mind upgrade as well as a way of further compensating type designers for giving us the building blocks of web design.
Ease of use
Typekit promises to be easier to implement than either sIFR, Cufon, or any other font replacement technology. I guess we won’t know until we start using it, but it would shock me if it took more than a few minutes to implement, including licensing the font you want to use. sIFR’s second most common complaint other than “it uses Flash and Flash kills puppies” is that it’s a bit difficult to implement. Typekit’s improvement on this front will be more than welcome.
Hackiness
First let me say something I’ve said many times before: the entire world wide web is a hack. Get over it. Secondly, however, any technologies or methods — that work — which serve to dehackify it a bit are welcome. Typekit certainly dehackifies custom typography on the web by leaps and bounds. It was the solution we all knew would come eventually when we created sIFR as a stopgap five years ago. Just about the only things hacky about it are that it falls back to EOT (which, as discussed earlier, is great) and that it uses Javascript to handle the licensing nuts and bolts (meh, big deal).
Conclusion
Typekit is likely the best thing to happen to web design since the re-emergence of browser competitiveness. It will be embraced quickly and fervently when it is released this summer, and its creators should be loudly applauded for doing it instead of just talking about it. There are too many talkers in the world and not enough doers. The team at Small Batch has done an excellent job of taking a problem that a lot of people like to talk about and solving it in a practical, equitable way. It’s a welcome solution to a real issue and a significant step towards a leaner, Veener web.
The Sorry State of WYSIWYG Web Editors
We got into a heated discussion in the office about WYSIWYG web editors today. While heated discussions are nothing new to us, neither side even being happy with their own argument was. When people are arguing over things they don’t even believe in, there can be no positive outcome.
My side was as follows: All web editors — including TinyMCE, YUI, and FCKEditor — are broken in different ways, and the only software I’ve seen which can satisfactorily desuckify one of them is WordPress. Because of that, we should deconstruct what WordPress has done to TinyMCE and apply the same duct tape to our own editor on Newsvine (we use TinyMCE currently, but are in the process of moving to YUI).
Our development staff’s side was as follows: All web editors — including TinyMCE, YUI, and FCKEditor — are broken in different ways, and because of the crazy amount of ridiculous cleaning, converting, regexing, transforming, and other shenanigans WordPress has to do to their editor just to get it to the state it’s in right now, it’s not worth spending the time to recreate such a mess, only to have it remain imperfect and possibly break in upcoming browser releases.
There are several things wrong with each editor but the particular problem we are trying to solve is that when you’re in HTML mode, you can’t create paragraphs just by putting double newlines between them. Some people say that because you’re in HTML mode, you shouldn’t expect an editor to do this for you, but I’ve been using blog software for six or seven years and that is the behavior I — and I believe most others — are accustomed to, so I couldn’t imagine releasing something without it. As mentioned above, the WordPress team has craftily hacked this functionality into their WYSIWYG system, but other platforms like Typepad have not.
I could go on and on for another hour about details, but after going through all of the WYSIWYG editor machinations we’ve gone through, I’m left wondering why the web development world still hasn’t figured this out yet. We can write an entire e-mail application, a replacement for Excel, and whatever the hell these things are, but we can’t replicate a toolset we’ve had in MacWrite since 1984?
Think of how much has happened in the last 25 years, and we haven’t been able to nail that.
TinyMCE circa 2009: Millions and millions crrrrrrrrazy features. Doesn’t work satisfactorily.
Microsoft Word circa 1991: Just enough features. Works plenty fine for most people.
I know hard-core coders like to hand-code html even when writing web comments (self included), but 90% of the world would rather not be bothered with that. What’s it going to take for this problem to go away? If you’re involved in WYSIWYG editor development, I’d love to know. Is it the disappearance of old browsers? Is it something that should be Flash-based? Is it just that no one’s really worked full-time on the problem yet? Why isn’t WordPress’s crazy hackery built into TinyMCE in the first place? So many questions…
So far, the one effort I’ve noticed that seems to take the cleanest possible approach is the WYSIWYM Editor. What-You-See-Is-What-You-Mean essentially translates to “the HTML code associated with what users type will semantically match what they intend”. Meaning, if I type two blocks of text separated by a double newline, I get two properly <p>d paragraphs out of that… not just a blob of text separated by <br> tags. Or if I bold some text, I get <strong> tags instead of other ridiculousness.
Sadly, the WYSIWYM Editor seems to have been in development since 2006 and is only at 0.5b, but happily, there appears to be a healthy flurry of activity around it lately. I really don’t mean to disparage the hard work that’s gone into all of these imperfect WYSIWYG editors in the past, and I do realize that browsers are the core culprits here, but it’s 2009 already and I’d prefer a solution to this longstanding real-world problem over almost anything promised in HTML 5, CSS 3, or any of the other specs we’ve been eagering awaiting for the last several years.
Last Rites
Last week was a sad week to be in the Newsvine offices. While we were toiling away, our friends upstairs at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer received their unemployment orientation in advance of being laid off two weeks from now. The conference room in which these talks occurred is right next to Newsvine headquarters, so during the course of entering and leaving the office throughout the week, I caught multiple glances of the scene and the people affected by it.
People losing their jobs is always a sad thing but I feel like this is the true beginning of the end for almost everyone who works at a newspaper. If you work at one and you aren’t intimately tied to the web operation, you should start making future plans as soon as possible. And honestly, even if you are intimately tied to the web operation, I wouldn’t feel too safe either.
The death of the newspaper is a depressing thing to absorb, but what’s much more disappointing to me is that I feel like news itself has been devalued. There’s an oversupply of news-“ish” information on the web, and people have decided — usually without realizing it — that free “news snacking” is a better value proposition than paying for in-depth reporting. As one who is surrounded by news snacks everyday in the form of Newsvine, RSS feeds, instant messages, and other inputs, I’m as guilty as anyone of this mentality. At the end of the day, I just feel like through my various short-attention-span news inputs, I will absorb most of the news zeitgeist without any cost to me.
Cost is a funny word though. It is generally used as it was used in the paragraph above: to denote the expending of money. Lately though, I’ve noticed there are many non-obvious costs associated with us becoming a society of news snackers:
- Our attention spans are shrinking below even the levels caused by the television explosion of the ’80s and ’90s
- We are consuming more and producing less (no, sharing or reblogging does not count as producing)
- We value timeliness of information more than depth of coverage, or even truth in some cases
- We are driving most kids completely away from journalism as a profession
- We’re uncovering more of the whos, whats, whens, and wheres, but less of the hows and whys
I suppose we’re saving some trees and removing some friction from the publishing flow in the process, but all of the above are very bad things; things that will probably take us awhile to fully realize the effects of.
A lot of people have been asking me lately how the P-I (and newspapers in general) could be saved and even whether I’d like to be a part of it. In fact, if you want to see a live session about it and you live in Seattle, I’ll be doing an event at the UW Business School on the subject next month.
I have several modest ideas but none of them involve saving the actual paper. I’m a lot more interested in saving the future of long-form and local reporting than I am in saving the newspapers themselves.
Rarely are one’s ideas completely original so I’m sure these are no exception, but here are the three most promising in my opinion:
Getting smaller and staying local
Many privately held businesses and all publicly held ones require growth. It isn’t enough to turn a healthy profit every year. If your business isn’t growing, your management is questioned and your stock declines. The first step in keeping local news viable is realizing that it may not be much of a growth business, and it may be quite a bit smaller of a business than it has been in the past. These two factors do not bode well for the prospects of publicly held local news companies in the future. Imagine the P-I as something more along the lines of what Cory Bergman has built with his network of neighborhood blogs like My Ballard. I would argue a fully built-out neighborhood blog network like this is more valuable than what the P-I currently has. Nothing against the P-I’s website… it’s great… but it doesn’t pull me in as a citizen of my neighborhood. It’s a conventional mix of local stories that usually aren’t that local to me along with national stories I prefer to read on sites like msnbc.com instead.
Local news companies need to concentrate on creating communities of people who talk to each other, not just people who read the news and leave. Where you can connect people, you can make money.
Make something that’s worth paying for again
I may not pay for every author I happen to read on a daily basis, but there exists a collection of more than a few people on my blogroll who I would pay $5 a month to read, if it were exclusive. I’ve always been bearish on paid content as a model, mainly because you could usually do better with advertising, but with CPMs dropping through the floor, I’m not convinced that is necessarily the case anymore. What I’d like to see attempted is positioning a publication as more of a “discussion club”. Heck, maybe you even can read the content for free, but in order to join the discussion, you need to be a paid club member. With membership also comes social events around town, swanky garb, and other niceties to help you rationalize your modest membership fee. I always thought the New York Times should have done this with Times Select.
Bear in mind, I’m not suggesting just throwing up a pay wall. That would not work. The idea is creating bits of value — in addition to content — that people would gladly pay several bucks a month for.
Partner with your people
As a great business, your customers should be your best partners. In the case of news agencies, this doesn’t need to stop at readers evangelizing your publication for you. In many cases, they are actually willing to help you run it. Why have a staff of 150 when you can have a staff of 15 and engage your community to help produce a lot of the content? People like doing things that benefit their community. Make sure your business is seen as a way to do that.
The future of journalism may be in pro-am publishing.
Anyway…
Overall, I’m not super optimistic about the future of a lot of these newspaper companies, but I really would love to see them at least replaced with something better. I still have a hard time believing that a 146-year-old company like the Seattle P-I is moving out of their own building before we are. I don’t see that as any sort of victory for Newsvine since we are much more of a news platform than a news agency, but rather an indication of what happens when you have everything to gain and nothing to lose versus everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Presto Chango
After almost five years of running Mike Industries, it’s time for a change! The fact that I made it this long without redesigning is either a testament to the majestic timelessness of the original design or my general uncomfortableness in doing “self identity” work. Since we know there is no such thing as timelessness on the web, we can therefore assume it’s the latter.
This redesign had five objectives, in order of importance:
- Make shared items such as found links, video, and photography more a part of the overall content presentation. I still write original posts 1-3 times a month, but it’s nice to keep things fresh in-between as well.
- Refresh things visually with a wider layout, new typography, and a fuller footer, among other elements.
- Modernize and completely rewrite the code that was brought over when I switched from Movable Type to WordPress a year ago.
- Offer more feed customization, including full-text RSS.
- Don’t break old pages with the new design.
… and away we go:
Bringing multi-source aggregation into the fold
It’s easy to take posts from other places like Delicious, Tumblr, and Twitter and display them in various places around your blog. It’s a bit harder to ingest those same posts into your blog’s publishing system and then output them as actual native blog posts that people can comment on. And finally, it’s incredibly hard to do the second thing in a way that’s flexible enough to display many different types of content in many different contexts.
Getting to the first stage would have been easy via a few lines of javascript, and in fact, I already got there with the previous design, embedding my Delicious links in the Mike Industries sidebar.
In trying to make it to the second stage, I tried several different “aggregation” plug-ins for WordPress, but eventually settled on a wonderful little creation called FeedWordPress, by the one they call “Rad Geek”. After installing the FeedWordPress plug-in, you simply give it some feeds to suck in, tell it how to categorize and tag items from each feed, and then let WordPress templates do the rest.
I was originally going to move over all of my link-saving from Delicious to Tumblr because I love Tumblr’s posting interface, but since my Tumblr account got hacked within a couple weeks of opening it, I decided to only use the Tumblr account to post fun stuff like videos. My initial reflex was to move all “collecting” to one platform, but since everything is getting pulled directly into the main blog anyway, I’ve convinced myself that the use of multiple platforms is actually a strength. I’m essentially pulling my Tumblr and Delicious feeds into the “Shared” column and my Twitter feed into the “Overshared” column.
I am unconvinced that Twitter will be a permanent part of this blog, since I still don’t enjoy either publishing or reading many tweets, but I’m giving it a try to see if it sticks. Twitter’s rising popularity continues to amaze me to the point where I’m almost ready to officially consider myself “too old”. On the one hand, I totally understand it because it’s so easy. But on the other hand, I totally despise it because it enables such laziness and extravagance of expression. Anyway, that’s a conversation for another blog post.
The single hardest part of the entire redesign was writing a script that ensured no items in the Shared column would render wider than the column itself. Since there will be plenty of YouTube video tags in there, it was essential to resize them all as the column renders, but not permanently in the database, so that they can render at full size when viewed from the permalink pages. I am no Wolf with regular expressions, but after hours and hours of hackerations, I came up with this:
I cribbed part of the short scale_image_240 function, but the rest was from scratch. Beforehand, I searched for quite some time on Google for a function to do exactly this and couldn’t find it, so hopefully this post will help some future searchers in their own quests to resize content.
Even though running these computations when the sidebars render isn’t too computationally ferocious, I went ahead and “widgetized” my sidebar in WordPress as well, so I could make use of the excellent WP Widget Cache plug-in. WP Widget Cache writes your entire sidebar out to disk so that it can be served up quickly and statically.
Ok, now that the geekiest part of the redesign has been explained, on to hopefully more interesting matters…
Separation of different content types
As much as I love what Doug and Dave have done with their superb redesigns, I just don’t like displaying original posts and peripheral content in the same column. I may not be the most prolific original post writer, but when I write an article, I want it front and center, and not pushed down by links or other distractions. With this redesign, the flow is simple: the most important stuff is on the left, the semi-interesting stuff is to the right of that, and the barely-interesting stuff is to the right of that. Size also flows according. The wide column is important, the medium column is semi-interesting, and the narrow column is barely-interesting.
Typography
sIFR lives on in the new Mike Industries — of course — in the form of Trade Gothic Condensed. While I don’t think sIFR should be used in every project (we don’t use it on Newsvine), I still find it an invaluable method to really shine up blog design. The first version of Mike Industries used Agency Condensed rendered with sIFR 2, while the new version uses the aforementioned Trade Gothic (a Stan favorite) and sIFR 3.
By the way, I don’t usually like to call fellow developers out, but I will say this about sIFR 3: it’s beautiful and it’s been ready for at least a year, in my opinion, and yet it’s not officially “released” yet. I find this highly unfortunate. When you’re developing software for the web, it’s never going to be perfect. As long as your software generally works and isn’t causing any damage, release it. The entire web is a beta. The entire web is a hack. It always will be. Don’t fight it. If you’re on Release Candidate 436, that’s a sign you may need to let go a little.
Aside from the Trade Gothic, Mike Industries now uses Helvetica Neue for body copy and downwind headers. I am certainly no devotee of Helvetica, like 90% of the people in the film are, but with anti-aliasing so much improved in the last decade, it does make for some good readability these days. Plus, I just needed to get off the Lucida Grande/Verdana bandwagon for awhile at least.
Grids, shmids
I feel like grids are the new web standards. What I mean is that they are a potentially useful tool to achieve a noble means, but they aren’t the second coming of the messiah. If grids help you do great work, then by all means learn them, love them, and live them. But if you’re perfectly happy eyeing layouts as a drunken painter eyes a canvas, then eye away. I’m no painter, but I’m plenty happy creating layouts without the use of grids or any sort of sizing heuristics. I don’t make sure my main column is sized according to a golden-ratio and I don’t make sure every line of type lines up vertically with every other.
I just do what feels right… and that’s plenty good enough for me. You should do the same, whether or not that involves the use of grids.
Feeds revisited and reloaded
Due to popular demand, I am now pushing out full text RSS feeds. I would still rather not publish these because of content theft and other reasons, but in the end, my reticence should not trump the will of my subscribers. I’ll try it out and unless I notice widespread plagiarism on spam blogs, full-text feeds will probably continue.
Also, after running this poll about a month ago, I’ve decided to include original and shared items in the default RSS feed (the one you’re probably already subscribed to). According to the poll results, most people want to see interesting links and other stuff in the main feed, so that was the justification. If, however, you find the shared items superfluous, please switch over to the Articles Only feed. I hate the idea of anyone unsubscribing entirely because the main feed is now updated too often.
One thing I can’t seem to figure out is how to correctly enable the “all” feed in WordPress. For all of you WordPress gurus out there, I basically applied a filter to my existing “/blog/feed” feed to remove the Overshared/Twitter categories. It is as follows:
function exclude_category($query) {
if ( $query->is_feed ) {
$query->set('cat', '-473,-281');
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');
That correctly takes the stuff out of the “main” feed, but I need to provide another feed with everything in it. Something like maybe “/blog/feed?all”. I figured I should be able to just modify the line above to:
if ( $query->is_feed &! $query->query_vars['all'] ) {
… and it should work. It doesn’t. If anyone has any ideas, I’d love some help on that one (or another way to do it entirely).
Big footers are in
My footer now contains a lot of what was previously in my sidebar and more. I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. On the one hand, I like big, informative footers. But on the other hand, I don’t like burying such potentially important stuff so low on the page. If I end up getting rid of the Overshared column, some of the footer content may end up replacing it.
Backwards compatibility
Originally, I wanted to find a way to keep old blog posts in the old theme and style new blog posts with the new theme. I like this idea because it preserves the context in which posts were originally written and it also doesn’t break heavily designed posts like this one. In the end though, I was able to keep my main content area the same size as my old one, so the new theme really didn’t break any entries, so I have — for now — decided to move everything to the new theme. This decision is definitely subject to change though as I really don’t want to be tied to a 450 pixel wide white column for the rest of my life.
So anyway…
So anyway, that’s it. I’m pretty excited to get this rolled out, but at the same time there are still details that need some shining and bugs that need squashing. If you see any, give me a holler in the comments. Thanks!