Tonight I came across an update from the IE team. This topic was also covered at A List Apart. Its best to read those articles first – its on a key Web Standards issue (short version: to trigger ‘standards mode’ in IE8 a new meta tag will be required on your pages) and I think a thorny one.

Sometimes you read something and instantly you feel that something is awry. I wasn’t alone either (although the author the esteemed Eric Meyer comes out with support for the solution):

As I read through Aaron Gustafson’sBeyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8, my immediate gut reaction was deeply negative. The version-targeting mechanism Aaron described was just wrong, completely backwards, the exact opposite of what we ought to be doing. Every one of my instincts, honed over a decade-plus of web development, was in opposition.

I should begin by saying – I am not one to bag all things Microsoft – I think too many people anthropomorphize companies like Microsoft and Google. In this situation however my gut reaction is to disagree with their proposed solution because it feels like yet another complication is to be added to publishing web content.

The burden of majority market share and a user-base of many millions is certainly something that will throw all sorts of confusing considerations into their pathway and thus I expect some missteps along the way (as I would from any organization).

The great thing about having the IE team blogging however is that there can be dialogue with the community and the best pathway can be illuminated through that dialogue.

The aspects that I feel are wrong about IE8 requiring a meta tag to enter standards mode are :

• The list of things developers need to do to accommodate for IE grows again.
• It feels like we are forced to trade an extra meta tag to get IE to behave.
• The article argues our mothers will have IE8. Maybe our Mums can wait for IE8 until the sites on the web incorrectly accommodating for IE7 are corrected? I implore you – ask your Mum about IE8 tonight – let me know what she says.
• I don’t like documents ‘knowing’ about what renders them.
• Something Mum once said about putting your best foot forward.
• IE9 will require a golden key embedded in your page to unlock its level 23 rendering engine.

The weird thing is I do like versioning things – we use versioning as a safety net – much as its being proposed for IE8. I guess it just doesn’t feel like the web I know. I like the idea of browser companies trying hard to render my site correctly rather than me trying to test and code for all the browsers out there.

I hate reading posts of dissent which don’t provide alternatives so here’s my hastily constructed one; Rename IE and no longer use any trace of that name to identify it.

The existing web with IE specific code only kicks in for IE. The new branded browser from Microsoft ditches the older rendering engines – drops its weight and runs like its a new entrant to the market.

Anyway, I note it here; I disagree.

I used Macs a lot at University and whilst I didn’t completely revile them they certainly weren’t compelling enough to convert me. Price-wise the divide was large and software support was niche at best. Apple has come a long way since then playing an excellent strategic game supporting the progression of the Mac hardware as the ‘every-platform’ through BootCamp and their support ofvirtualization software, Parallels.

For me however the seduction was not one of purely access to a large variety of software – I’d seen the Mac find leading software products in almost every category of software I cared about. For me the issue was the taxing burden that poorly realised user-interfaces on Windows Pcs that wore me down. As time becomes a more precious commodity I found time wasted battling interface which could have been spent doing frustrated me to despair.

A few weeks into owning my new Macbook and I am still amazed at how few battles I’ve had to fight to be productive on it. I am discovering new software to replace my Windows favorites – where it was FeedDemon its now NetNewsWire (I think Newsgator may be able to attribute a portion of sales to the growing numbers of Mac converts); Windows LiveWriter (which I commended the Windows Live team highly on – Mac version please?) is currently surplanted by a trial version of MarsEdit; Firefox has surprisingly been replaced by Safari – I don’t know how long this will last as I am a great fan of the rich set of plugins available for Firefox but for now its probably the lighter information load I am dealing with on the new machine that is making Safari such a pleasure.

On the bang for buck front – I went with the standard MacBook and am glad I did so. For the price of a low to mid-range laptop you get a faster, quieter more pleasant to use machine. For all the tasks I’ve thrown at it I’ve not yet hit anything that has made me need to think about the hardware. And that’s the way it should be.

One final note: having used the Mac’s DVI out for connecting with my telly I think if you have a DVI enabled TV then a MacMini represents incredible value for you.

I used to get frustrated when someone beat me to a post, especially when my post had been delayed due to other committments. I’ve shrugged that off these days as I like being economical and afterall, linking to existing related work is sort of the point of hypertext, right?

One of the blogs I subscribe to, ‘Software As She’s Developed’ by Michael Mahemoff covered and extended upon some thoughts and frustrations I’d been having with ecommerce sites recently (or forever, I guess).

I’d recently decided that I should get over my disappointment with the I-Mate KJam and should get a new phone. Having been burnt before I wanted to research the phone well and feel like I had surveyed what is available. Being in the field I am I surmised that online would be the place to undertake this research. It would be a pinch. A saturday morning would do it, surely.

I have now decided, after days of research, that it is impossible to do thorough shopping research painlessly online. I can only assume that the expense of setting up a good online shopping experience is beyond but the biggest of players. And even the good examples I found are not yet frictionless from frontpage to checkout and are also rarely localised to Australia yet.

This post covers a few technical reasons why many sites are more costly from a time standpoint than they need to be. I’ll try not to restate too much of what is said there as the post already covers it nicely and is worth a read.

Instead i’ll raise some additional rationale for why commerce online is still in its infancy and why many likely abandon it for the bricks and mortar encased sales-people of the real world.

So firstly, lets explore the why of the activity.

Why shop online at all?

If its easier to just go to the shop, compare products side-by-side and to interact with the sales people to clarify facts you are unsure on then why bother with online shopping at all?

Well, I did, in frustration abandon an online purchase for an offline one but I felt a few basic drawbacks from the experience :

• Sales people’s incentives do not always align with yours. A quick way to test this (and I did) – ask them a question about the product you already know the answer to and you will notice the response usually was what they felt you wanted to hear rather than factually correct.
• Its a massive task to compare products within a store as well as across competing stores. It strikes me as being suited to an online activity where data processing is common activity

Shop front clutter
Many sites lose me on the front page. I dig around a bit but generally a front page brimming full of thousand of links and thumbnails doesn’t bode well. Only oddball bric-a-brac types appreciate clutter – and only because they know it means normal people wont have found their precious treasures yet. I don’t want to see all your products and specials and categories on your front page if it obscures the basic information I am after (like, do they even sell phones?). With the phone buying experiment I found it hard to locate a full list of phones sold by a particular telecommunications provider.

Shop fronts on the web are not equivalent to shop fronts in the real world. They are more like what a shopper sees as the enter a real shop – everything! It of course could be much more effective than a real shop because you should be able to search for exactly what items you are after and get straight to them. My supermarket still fails me in this regard because I often find myself scouring the isles trying to reverse-engineer the reasoning behind why they placed the milk next to the pet food and not near the bread.

No feature comparisons
If you are looking for a phone, a tv, a car (and these items seem quite popular among humans) then you usually find yourself in a ‘feature-off’ where feature-laden products vie for your approval. Of course, certain aspects about you will help determine which features are important to your purchase decision (your bank balance/credit, existing items you own like the Blueray enabled PS3 you just bought etc.)

Having a dozen or more tabs open is a terrible way to compare obscure details between each of products. At this point I must give some kudos to shopping engines like the one powering tech.yahoo.com which facilitate easier feature comparisons. Why are their still so few ecommerce sites that support this functionality (and, indeed, when can I see a version of tech.yahoo localised here in Australia)?

Can’t bookmark ready for easy comparison

Hopefully most sites support bookmarkability these days (those that don’t are definitely missing out on sales) however, as cool as modern bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us are, they do not cater specifically for shopping and can’t extract the attributes of the products you’ve shown interest in. I’ve a feeling that before long we will see an extensible product microformat become widely adopted which browsers or shopping spiders could read however for now we must rely on the site to provide this functionality.

I’ve a feeling I could continue this list forever but I am interested in frustrations you’ve had with online commerce. What improvements can online stores make?

In an earlier post I posited that the folks behind Twitter were about building a short-messaging platform that went far beyond the prosaic visage they masquerade behind.

With the recent announcement of Twitter securing venture funding there was much discussion of Twitter being unfettered by a business plan. Apologies to anyone who actually knows this to be true however for now I will remain skeptical that this remotely true. I think it would too difficult to attract the engineering talent required to get something like Twitter off the ground if the sole stated aim was to attract users and see what happened next.

Business plans are over-rated?

The VCs involved quipped about investing in a company without a business plan had worked out previously for them and felt it would again. Andrew Parker believes that companies are busy working on traction because business plans are pointless until you get some. In a similar vein Umair Haque and Paul Kredosky also reinforce this meme and believe that companies might avoid a business plan to make themselves a small target when under the scrutiny of a VC. You can’t criticize what doesn’t exist is the thinking, I guess. This strategy seems a little too transparent to me, to be effective. Actually I think I will nickname this strategy ‘the Aardvark’ (in case it catches on!) – where companies roll up into a ball so VCs can only see the protective plate-armor; their millions of users who are waiting to spend their money as soon as the company thinks of something they can spend it on.

Alright, smart-alec, where’s the evidence that there is more to Twitter?

Twitter’s innocuous ‘What are you doing now?’ query, the broadcasting of which is the key function of the service currently, offers an activity which is novel enough to generate interest in the service but is also disarming enough for people to underestimate their strategy.

Dave Winer who loves thinking publicly about these things believes that Twitter’s democratic approach to its API is part of its strength. 

Twitter’s API is very simple. It covers the entire functionality, leaves nothing out. You could implement the Twitter user interface using the API.

The openness of the Twitter API differs from many other offerings which limit functionality available via API to keep users loyal to the main interface of the respective service.

Often people cite the simplicity of things as being their strength but what I think they mean is the level of abstraction and the constraints applied. A clean abstraction is economical in its language, avoiding permutative options – those can be achieved through combining with other abstractions.

The API has been kept abstract and open because Twitter are betting on people finding applications for a short-message nexus which can find you whilst mobile, working or at home. Designing the API like this may have been a natural tendency of the engineers in charge however when viewed alongside the extensive IM and SMS gateways they are maintaining worldwide there appears to be too much shape for a company supposedly looking purely for traction.

A point I covered in earlier posts about Twitter which I would like to revisit is that of Twitter’s usefulness being less about letting people know ‘What I’m doing now’ (which, as readers of this blog may remember, I don’t find that useful) and more about it as the nexus point between various gateways.

Reviewing what I said in one of the earlier posts :

Something I haven’t heard much in the current conversations about Twitter and that I think is important is that one of the key strategic strengths of the service is infrastructural – the link between IM and mobile network messaging and the web is a useful one which many applications will build upon. I think one of the players in the industry, whether Twitter or Jaiku or a new player to come (and regardless, likely to be acquired by one of the big companies) will benefit from owning a reliable set of gateways maintaining these links.

Being a platform is hard work

As anyone using the service would have noticed – its hard work maintaining gateways and services and in general ’being the platform’ or nexus point for a variety of different consumers.

Some proof of this; another company, IMified who are in a very similar business to Twitter, recently plugged Twitter into their own service whilst the Twitter IM bots were out of action to allow users of Twitter to keep on Twittering :

Over the weekend we added Twitter as a new IMified service. We definitely feel their pain trying to keep an IM bot up and running. We’ve had our own issues in case you haven’t noticed ; )

And this cheekiness :

It appears the Twitter IM bots are still down, but have no fear, we just added support for notification updates to go along with the release of status updating last week. What can I say, we’re opportunists!

But being a platform can also pay off…

One of the coolest bits of functionality that’s actually useful that Twitter has afforded another service I use, RememberTheMilk, is the ability to use the SMS and IM gateways to post tasks to my task lists. This saves me money and time when I am out and about and I think of something I need to do/remember.

A ‘QuickAdd via SMS’ option to Google Calendar should be a straight-forward (and bloody useful!) addition  if utilizing the Twitter platform. I am sure a variety of other services leveraging SMS/IM will appear (Google/Yahoo/MSN Search?) benefiting from the effort the Twitter people have undertaken to ensure the infrastructure they provide stays accessible (and I am not saying they are there yet…).

If I make bold (and possibly long) assertion; assuming people continue to find use for these short message/short instruction services and the Twitter team can keep it all hanging together, ironing out the kinks and interruptions, we will see them become the platform of choice for short-message-in/short-message-out type services and in the acquisition path of a multi-national telco!

I have long found Outlook a pain-in-the-butt to use and a few years ago switched back to Thunderbird (I had been a user of the Netscape Mail client in a former life…).

I find Thunderbird is much lighter and quicker at filtering mail than Outlook. There are better clients but all seem to have their own quirks which have kept me from adopting them.

The main difficulty with replacing Outlook with Thunderbird is that it lacked a good calendaring option. Incompatibility with the other Outlook stalwarts in my office meant I was forever having to ‘View Source’ on email bodies to see when a meeting was to be held so I could go and manually enter it into Google Calendar (my primary calendar which I share with my team). Fortunately I found the Lightning plugin to add a calendar to Thunderbird but I was still manually updating meetings in Google Calendar.

Now I have just come across this excellent tutorial on setting up what might be the holy-grail of calendar setups and want to share it with all Thunderbird users and frustrated Outlook users. Here is the short version of the tutorial for experienced Thunderbird users :

1. Install Thunderbird 2, RC1
2. Install the Lightning plugin so Thunderbird can read Outlook meeting requests and place a calendar in the Thunderbird interface.
3. Install the Google Calendar provider to allow Lightning to add two-way synching with Google Calendar.
4. Add the XML address for your primary Google Calendar (Found under “Calendar Settings >> Calendar Address”).

And you are done – test it by setting a meeting in the calendar within Thunderbird. You should see the meeting appear in your Google Calendar shortly (I had to manually refresh). More information at each the sites I have linked to.

Catchy title maybe; but hopefully anyone who is or will be experimenting with Twitter might consider this post and draw some value out of it.

The Steve Rubels and Robert Scobles of this blogoworld (notice its hard to refer to virtual domains, I keep choosing different ways to refer to the world of online information, I will continue to until I find one I like) are heralding Twitter’s importance via their virtual pulpits. After about a month of my own experimentation with the service I suggest tread with some caution when signing up for Twitter alerts to your phone or workplace IM.

For a basic description on Twitter see my previous post  ‘Tweets are the Ultimate in Disposable Content’.

Few of us have jobs which benefit from that much interuption and very little of the content available through Twitter currently could concievabley be relevant to our minute-to-minute activities at work. We cannot draw the same value out of the content as those whose jobs it is to evangelize web usage and cannot benefit from the immediacy of republishing new technologies the minute they hit blogland. I am not saying the hype around Twitter is necessarily wrong – there is useful or entertaining information on it but , like blogs it will be more useful to you at a time when you choose, for a task you determine.

As I covered in my earlier post, the value the author places on their own words is linked to the audience’s percieved value of the content. Lets put it this way there will never be twittershelves built for storing your favourite tweets from the Shakespeare’s and Dylan Thomas’s of our times. You will wait for them to publish a book and then you will buy that for your bookshelf because you know that a book will be the fruits of their considered thought and effort.

I think acknowledging that this will be how people value individual content items on Twitter will also will drive how people value Twitter overall. One of the key variables in the Twitter value equation is in the timeliness of the information – only timely information that truly provides value in being timely will serve the audience. This is not to say there wont continue to be a constant streams of banal chatter… it just means that this content will have an erosive impact on the audience – taking more from them than it gives.

To avoid being owned by your inflow of everyone’s presence information I’d suggest for now, switch it off. Then, have a think about what you will get out of it and how you might distill this information source down to an information flow that is there when you need it at a rate that will truly benefit you.

Steve Rubel has good suggestions about how to filter and utilize content (see his Gmail nerve center articles) however remember, he takes this stuff to the extreme. I don’t know enough about the particulars of his job to comment but for own jobs, I suggest thinking about what your job entails and determine how much of a need there really is to be up to the minute with all the comings and going of the internet.

Is this actually something you could catch up on once a week (or even a month!) and instead spend those valuable minutes or hours lost to Twitteruptions and use them to being productive in the actual tasks pertininent to you being a valuable employee (or betting on the dogs, whichever suits you best)?

I am interested in other people’s experiences with Twitter – let me know if you are using it, wont use it or stopped using it.

Following on from my previous post on the fast-food like properties of web-content I thought I would look at the service which embodies the latest acceleration in content consumption, Twitter.

For the uninitiated, a ‘tweet’ (as referred to in this post’s title) is a single message sent via the Twitter service. Twitter is a short-message system which can be accessed by numerous applications and devices; primarily, but not restricted to, web, IM and mobile. Messages are by default public and therefore you could think of it as ‘mini-blogging’ where messages can be posted as easily as sending an SMS or IM.

The rise of Twitter in the early adopting set (lets face it, it hasn’t hit mass market yet) has seen the introduction of a new, even more throw-away type of content. The plethora of states, moods and emotions punctuated by links to sometimes vaguely interesting content really leaves a faint impression. The experience lacks cohesion and any real filter determining significance or relevance of a particular content item. This gives it a sort of fun lightness and I guess the beauty of it is in the aggregate of the impressions you get from someone’s Tweets you follow.

There has been plenty of discussion on blogs about Twitter – all discussing what amounts to the same thing – does this medium have future? Not to be silent on the subject I do think it is a service which will be a place alongside other internet-mediums like blogs and IM. I think it will be in a form evolved from the one we know today – one of the reasons being that many currently heavy users of Twitter in this experimental adoption phase will stop or at least severely par back their usage of the service as they realise its capacity to cause constant distraction, fragmenting their thinking and to generally get in the way of Getting Things Done. I’ll touch more on this in a subsequent post.

Something I haven’t heard much in the current conversations about Twitter and that I think is important is that one of the key strategic strengths of the service is infrastructural – the link between IM and mobile network messaging and the web is a useful one which many applications will build upon. I think one of the players in the industry, whether Twitter or Jaiku or a new player to come (and regardless, likely to be acquired by one of the big companies) will benefit from owning a reliable set of gateways maintaining these links.

The direction the presence products will expand will be in their ability to filter and summarize the content they deliver – experimentation with Twitter and Pipes will be interesting as the service will need to overcome its procrastinatory qualities. With the internet already being the procrastinators achilies heel the last thing we need (and I am assuming I might be representative of at least some of us in this) is a stream of random information flashing on GTalk or our mobile phones constantly to distract us from what we are actually doing.

Where Twitter-like applications could come into their own is if they can combine the users current geo-location, mood or other information to tailor very relevant alerts to them. Currently however its like trying to work with firehose to the side of your face.

In the realm of written content there has always been a relationship between how much work went into the piece and the depth to which consumers engage with it. Now I know this may sound like a gelatinous concept but bear with me as I explain.

Books generally render deeper, more memorable experiences than magazines; magazines more than newspapers; newspapers more than pamphlets etc. But even these pulpier written forms will yield more attention (and retention) from the reader than content on the web.

The rise of the blog has introduced an even faster medium which is more catered to scanning and bulk consumption – sort of like reading’s equivalent of fast food.

The active nature of computer screens mean reading from them is tiring and the sheer amount of content available without the physical restrictions of the real universe mean content can be shifted and consumed much quicker. We write content so it can be easily scanned – we try to remove anything that might cause friction with the user getting our core messages. The messages themselves can be delivered in many ways, in bite-size chunks. You do not interact the same way with this information as you would a book or magazine.

To help picture what I mean – imagine working your way through the same amount of individual texts as you have in your most recent blog reading session and then imagine doing that using a paper-based media. You are in a bookstore, tearing through page after page, jumping from book to book like a maniac, leaving a wake of cast-aside material trailing behind you. You move through content like pacman through pellets.

The atomicised web-based content accelerates our desire to move through content quickly looking for small morsels of cerebral nourishment, each nugget of which can excite a brief sensation of satisfaction. These small rewards encourage a desire for more as well as an impatience with content that doesn’t instantly satisfy.

This is not to say that there is not great content on the web, there is plenty, but the best content knows what it is, it knows how much attention the user has to give – for similar reasons, McDonalds never tried to sell you McCaviar.

My prefered editor for Javascript is Aptana. I put up with the occasional slow performance of the Eclipse Platform which underlies it (it seems to hate dealing with windows network shares and vpns) because the IDE is very well thought out and works with me rather than against me.

That Javascript has an IDE at all shows that it has matured much since the early days of its inception where it primarily validated web forms, generally badly. With maturity in a programming language comes other things such as documentation. The preferred method of documenting API information these days is the *doc family of specifications and Javascript, through the efforts of the people behind Aptana I believe, has ScriptDoc.

ScriptDoc support is integrated into Aptana and helps the IDE make more sense of the very flexible syntax that Javascript supports – I certainly don’t envy the Aptana teams’ task of programmatically wading through the sea of anonymous functions, literals, prototypes in order to facilitate their IDE’s syntax highlighting, autodocumentation and outline capabilities.

Reading through the forums on the ScriptDoc site and through the specification I can see there is room for a lot more growth and development of this specification.

Something that we have found in our own Javascript development at Hitwise that we feel would be a valuable addition to the specification would be the ability to explicitly declare what the value of ‘this’ would be for a given function (or more specifically, method where a function is part of an object prototype). I will explain my rationale.

One of the ‘quirks’ (from an OOP perspective, anyway) of JS which is exploited to (sometimes) good effect by many of the key libraries about these days is the mutable nature of the keyword ‘this’.

For example, events (depending on whether they are native or ones augmented by a framework such as YUI) will define ‘this’ to be something other than the object prototype that you may have attached your handler function to. This means that ‘this’ can have different properties within callbacks to every other function you have defined for an object and can be therefore confusing (particular to those with OOP experience in other languages).

Indeed YUI and likely each other major library even allows you to explicitly define what the scope will be – they do this using some tricky closure syntax – I will often use this functionality to redefine ‘this’ back to the instance of the object where my event handler is housed to give ready access to the objects properties.

Of course sometimes, if there aren’t many properties you need to access it can be more convenient to access the element where the event occured through ‘this’ or in other circumstances even access some other arbitrary object and it is this reason that you are likely to see variation in what ‘this’ actually is!

When looking at a function and its documentation, you want to readily know what the available variables in the function scope are set to. The parameters can be easily documented and documentation for this across languages is almost universal. You also know that certain globals may be available and of course ‘this’. And most times you even know what ‘this”s properties will be.

But if you are writing a callback for an XHR call or an event handler then you can’t be sure what it will be. If you are calling an existing callback which may have dependancies it would be great to avoid looking at the code and go to the API documentation to see what the callback would like ‘this’ set to. You could achieve this by defining an additional parameter or a custom ‘@this’ comment definition for your function could save you or your colleagues time in the future and make your Javascript API docs easier to grok. Standardisation of such a property would allow IDE’s such as Aptana to use this information in its code insight functionality to inform you of this requirement as you write your call.

With the general level event-driven programming required in most web development these days this would be a welcome time-saver and reduce the mental switching required to determine what ‘this’ will be.