Global Nerdy

If you had to reduce the New York Times article on Friendster, Wallflower at the Web Party, down to a set of bullet points on how to destroy a promising social software application, it would look something like this:

• Inflate your ego to Ellisonian proportions; emulate Larry's social graces at parties.
• Make sure that all the decision makers don't understand the concept of your application, don't use it and are well outside your target demographic.
• Focus on adding new features and reaching new markets instead of fixing basic problems such as glacial response times. There's no money in user experience.
• Obsess over what Google and Yahoo! will do rather than what you're going to do
• Micromanage your users: rigidly control what they can post on their pages (Pictures of the actual user only! No joke pics, no pet pics!) and whose profiles they can see (only friends and friends of friends).
• Leave users with nothing to do once they've entered their profile and amassed a collection of friends.

The article misses a small but significant point that turned off a lot of early adopters: Friendster's infamous firing of programmer Joyce “Troutgirl” Park, simply for blogging that they had switched back-ends from J2EE to PHP, something that could easily be discerned from the filename extensions of its web pages.

The first thing that you should keep in mind when watching this video of Steve Jobs demonstrating the features of NeXTSTEP 3 [YouTube — 35 minutes, 8 seconds] is that it was shot in 1992. Back then, the competing mainstream operating systems were System 7 on the Mac (George ran it on his IIvx, I ran it on my 660AV), and Wintel users could choose from Windows 3.1, OS/2 2.0 and the most popular one, the sad but ubiquitous MS-DOS 5.0.

If you want to see how far ahead of its time NeXTSTEP was, watch the video over your lunch break. In the first two-thirds of the video, Steve demonstrates the dock, the Mail app, dragging and dropping attachments directly into email messages, smooth window dragging, voice annotations, WYSIWYG word processing, index-based file search, seamless browsing of other directories on machines on the network and object linking. The machine appears to respond snappily, even though its processor ran around 33MHz and it had a only a few megabytes of RAM.

Being a developer, the bit that gets me the most starts at the 23:10 mark, when Steve uses Interface Builder (which lives on in the Mac OS X developer toolkit) to cobble together an client app that connects to NeXT's Sybase-based employee database and provides a master/detail view of employees, displaying both text and photo data. Windows developers wouldn't have this sort of toll available to them until 1995 when Borland released Delphi 1 and Microsoft pushed out version 4 of Visual Basic (I didn't think VB really got useful until version 5 in 1997). Mac users would have to wait even longer for REALBasic to give them the same capability.

In addition to the tech time travel aspect, the video also gives us a look at Steve's years “in the wilderness”: a skinnier, clean-shaven, IBM-ish shirt-and-tie guy honing that “presentation Zen” for which he is known today. We expect him to take shots at Microsoft's offering, but seeing him make jabs at Apple is priceless.

The video's inspired a fair bit of commentary: see these Reddit comments as well as these blog entries on programming musings and Rixstep.

Flash drives — think of them as the SD cards in your digital camera, but faster and with more capacity — have several advantages over hard drives. Speed-wise, access times for flash drives are somewhere between your computer's onboard RAM and the fastest hard drive; data can be read 3 times faster from a flash drive than a hard drive, and you can write to a flash drive in two-thirds the time. A flash drive assembly weighs slightly less than a hard drive and it consumes slightly less power, which translates into less lugging and more battery life, which is good news for those of us who do a lot of business travel. Finally, for those who like to treat their equipment roughly — Cory Doctorow, I'm lookin' at you — their solid-state nature means that they're more resistant to impact. The current downsides are price and capacity — the premium for being an early adopter is slightly over US$1,000, which gets you the present maximum of 32 gigabytes of storage.

Digital World Tokyo reports that flash drives are an option for their B- and Q-series computers, available later this month and in November, respectively. The article points to their early reports on Samsung's and Sony's flash drive-equipped oferrings. None of these firms have made any announcements about making them available here in North America, so for the time being, if you want a flash drive-equipped laptop, you'll either need to fly to Japan or Korea or buy it from Dynamism.

Rentometer
is a Google Maps mashup that could come in handy if you're apartment-hunting. Give it a U.S. address and a few particulars about a
place for rent at that address (monthly rent, number of bedrooms,
number of units in the rental property) and it displays a “rentometer”
showing where it falls in the range of rents in the neighborhood and a
Google Map with markers showing how the rents at nearby rental
properties compare:

Rentometer represents not only a useful service, but also some good UI choices:

• Great visualization: Rentometer's display gives you a very clear picture of the range of neighbourhood rents at a glance, with the “dial” showing you where the given address falls in that range and the Google Map showing you where the cheaper, equivalent and more expensive places are. The old way to present this data would've been with a table; this shows that mashups can be used to deliver information in a more meaningful way.
• Use of appropriate technologies: The Rentometer developers did a good job of playing tools to their strengths: the “rentometer” dial is rendered using Flash while the Google Map is DHTML and JavaScript.

PC Magazine is reporting that Apple's going to poke the hornets' nest in Redmond again:

Apple will step on yet another of Microsoft's toes early next year when the Mac maker unveils the next version of its iWork productivity suite, complete with a new spreadsheet application.

Sources report that iWork '07 will gain this new third component, code-named Lasso, which will go to bat against Microsoft Excel in the consumer and small-office space. The new application will arrive in addition to the upgraded Pages 3 and Keynote 4 programs, Apple's current answers to Word and PowerPoint.

The iWork bundle  is one more example of the good money to be made in simplicity—in this case, fewer features. Microsoft's ubiquitous suite has become so complex and powerful, most users tap only a small fraction of its features. By reducing the feature set, Apple makes it simpler for users to use those features, offering more direct access to functionality.

It's much the same advantage offered by online Office "competitors" like Zoho and Writely Google Docs & Spreadsheets. In all these cases, their developers have seen how less can mean much more for most users of Microsoft Office.

Link

Tags: Apple, Microsoft, iWork, Microsoft Office, simplicity, spreadsheets

Think ROKR missed the mark on mashing up mobile phone with the iPod? BlueEye may be a better way to get the best of both worlds (at least until Apple releases their own sooper seekrit iPhone).

BluEye syncs up with your mobile phone via Bluetooth. When you get a call, it alerts you through your earphones with your ringtone and gives you the option of answering or ignoring the call. If you answer, the hands-free microphone handles all talking duties, while the BluEye pauses the iPod and displays caller ID information on the screen. Missed a call? Scroll through a list of your 9 most recent calls on the iPod, choose a number and BluEye will make the call for you.

No need to haul that mobile out of your pocket for the mundane task of calling someone now.

Link

Tags: iPod, Bluetooth, mobile phone

Well, those iPod nanos look pretty red to me, and that isn't a shade in Apple's current nano color palette, so I guess it's safe to say that Apple has added their iPod to the brands enlisted in the (RED) cause.

Kudos to Apple; Oprah makes a nano look even smaller than it really is, and the money goes to a good cause. A win-win. [via Engadget]

Update: Get the official word from Cupertino here.

Tags: iPod, Apple, Bono, Oprah, (RED)