Its nice to see someone else call out Malcolm Gladwell on his pseudo-scientific writings. I aired my frustration on this blog a while back and whilst my post was intentionally amped up show-boating, Joel, who sometimes could be accused of the same thing, was pretty straight-up on this one.
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 is currently surplanted by a trial version of MarsEdit; Firefox has surprisingly been replaced by Safari – I don’t know how long this will last as I am a great fan of the rich set of plugins available for Firefox but for now its probably the lighter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.
Its hard to say whether Enso will go the way of my experimentation with browser gestures. Others I work with use the gestures fluently now making me envious of their reduced barriers to productivity. I do think I lose much time transitioning from pointer devices to the keyboard and back so I am inclined to think the people at Humanized have something.
For the uninitiated, what is it? I’d recommend watching the video they have placed on the frontpage of their site. The short rub is that Enso overloads your caps-lock – holding it down reveals the Enso dialog which hovers above your OS, transparently waiting for input. Its a command prompt for navigating your applications or for applying simple commands to your context; for instance some selected text.
It is clearly a polished product – I recognise a few elements from earlier memes they had successfully set loose into the sphere. Some elements such as their use of modal messages which appear in the user’s field of view are smart but maybe not as clever as they present them to be. But maybe they are – I am still training myself to look for the Enso interface in front of me rather than in the task bar.
I can’t help but wonder whether the task of testing this software out is somewhat of a catch-22. To test it properly requires one to learn a few keywords which drive the system and also to train themselves to use Enso rather than existing (slower?) ways of achieving goals. If you succeed at this then the system is probably working for you already and the ‘test’ is over before it has begun.
I guess it comes down to whether you believe this is a significant adjustment to the drag that ‘modern’ interfaces such as windows afford you. I personally think that windowing is working against you for most of the time. Fiddly dragging and resizing is time costly and doesn’t deliver much. If you need to fit two documents side by side then there should be a button or a command for it. Moving these things manually seems like pushing unnecessary work to the user.
Humanized present Enso as being grounded in the study of human computer interaction and they present a manifesto of how life using computers could be much easier. I don’t disagree, but is this product a step forward? Enso takes us back as much as it takes us forward. It reminds us of lessons many developers already know – of the effectiveness of the commandline. It consolidates what Google success has been teaching us – that typed text can lead to an infinite number of destinations and they have made even Googling a few clicks closer by having access always available from the keyboard alone.
Those with Google Desktop who have put up with its (in my experience) fairly regular crashes would be familiar with a similar capacity, in this case overloading the control key, a double-press brings up dialog Enso-esque but of course has in actuality beaten Enso to market to what appears Enso’s most interesting application thus far.
I do persist though as navigating many tabs and windows is my own personal goal and Enso may offer a path of lesser resistance to them. I will let you know how it goes.
I am a proponent of tackling tasks which represent the maximum reward for the minimum effort. Why spend months focusing on 11 different things when 2 of them could substantially improve your product or your business proposition or your team’s effectiveness.
A couple of recent releases which have just caught the attention of slashdot.org (and now me) in linux land have struck me as being not necessarily effortless developments but in the face of their potential impact on Linux adoption, releases that deserve applause.
First up (and currently slashdotted it seems) is a windows installer for Debian. The other is also a windows installer for the ubuntu linux distro.
What does this mean? It means that two key reasons you delayed installing linux on your laptop or desktop just evaporated.
Live cds were the first step in wider adoption however my experience of them was mixed. A live cd have saved us on a number of occasions when working with sick machines. For use as a trial OS however I have found them to be slow. This may have been due to an old dvd drive more than anything else.
I’ve run a few installs of debian and redhat for development machines at home but found the time administrating them became prohibitively expensive as I reduced the amount of time I spent developing (as I increased general administration and project management responsibilities). Linux desktops have been progressing impressively and I find that my frustrations with ineffeciencies on my windows machine demand I try something else.
I applaud those who have championed, evangelised, developed, tested these two projects. You may have just created an upward-shift in the Linux adoption. It is time now for the various window managers and applications on Linux to prove themselves with their new-found audiences. I do agree with recent posts that disparity between linux applications user experience is a challenge which continues to affect uptake however could unifying tools which change the way people use their OS minimise the impact of such disunity?
I will be trialling Enso over the next 30 days so more on this to come…
Update: I came across a similar project that has been around longer. I am surprised it has not caught my attention earlier? Maybe evangelism is truly what is needed?
There have been philanthropists in javascript development since the language was concieved by Brendan Eich. A few that I can point to as having provided tools and inspiration along my path in web development: Mike Foster and his excellent x library (and it predecessor) which just worked and added some bling to projects of a few years ago; Brent Ashley and the jsrs library code and examples which opened my eyes to a new form of optimisation I could use in the web applications I built; PPK for the never-ending resource that is quirksmode… I am sure you all could name others that facilitated your own web application careers – feel free to add to this article in the comments.
In more recent “web 2.0″ times it was the success of Sam Stephenson’s Prototype, defined by its syntactic sugar which reminded the web development community at large of the dual functional and OOP natures of Javascript (invigorating in the face of the millions of custom procedural functions that previously ran the web). This has driven the current increase in client-side scripting interest. Of course Prototype was also helped in part to the libraries which built on it such as Thomas Fuchs’ Scriptaculous and Open Rico and also those influenced by such as MooTools. I would argue that all this activity (and other developments) was itself fueled by the natural return to ascendancy of web development that was always imminent after the tech crash’s over-correction.
With exploration of Prototype (and Javascript in general) we also learned. We learned that messing with the Object.prototype is verboten and that there were better ways to include functionality than inlining everything. Ben Nolan’s Behaviour library demonstrated this best (well then, anyways, these days I now just include separate files which use the various selector functions in combination with the cross-browser Event Handler implementations found in each major library).
Mid-way through last year we were evaluating libraries, namely Prototype, Jquery, Dojo and YUI. YUI won out for a number of reasons. Jquery looked great but it wasn’t at version 1 yet and seemed to be changing on a weekly basis (for the better, but that was too much flux for a project destined for our end users). Prototype I had used in some of my demos but the documentation was sketchy and every example relied on inline script tags scattered through-out our templates. I trialled out Behaviour which was quite handy but some examples were not easily recreated when combined with Behaviour. We were also concerned that Prototype would not play well with others. We wanted to leave the door open to continue using other third-party libraries in the future.
Dojo looked awesome but again was low on useful documentation (They have much improved – in fact all libraries have, in this regard). The Dojo events package looked very cool with its AOP-style approach but I had reservations that it might add too much ramp-up time to our tight schedule.
YUI had a combination of API and example-driven documentation as well as coverage on all the key features we needed. Its namespace implementation was simple, allowing us to get in and comprehend their code quickly. Once undertaking the project we did find that the documentation could still have been much better, but such are the joys of open-source libraries and their documentation, right (php is an exception – the comments on the API pages was a stroke of genius)?
The last twelve months have seen Dean Edwards and John Resig and others team together to provide a cross-browser solution to detecting when the DOM content had completely loaded (at a time before assets such as images have completed downloading).
This month has seen Jack Slocum weigh in with faster DOM search functions, setting a new benchmark in the area that John Resig had previously thrown down the gauntlet. This sort of collective innovation is for the good of the community and is providing an accelerated environment of innovation. I don’t fully subscribe to information singularity as while I do think acceleration can be hyperbolic it will more likely form an ogilve, flattening at some point rather than continuing to approach infinite (there are, afterall, limits to our ability to process information and effeciently distribute it amongst the hive-mind that is the community that forms around any topic of learning).
Philosophic analysis of the phenomena aside I do think it is valuable to recognise the progress that has been made and the factors contributing it and encouraging everyone to continue providing and contributing to the environment that has allowed us all to flourish.
This post is not going to be the tipping point for this blog however it is interesting to think about which one might. The beauty of setting up a blog is that it is almost like writing a secret journal and then leaving it behind, open on a bus. You are really writing for yourself in the first few posts – or even worse – for no one, not even yourself (see my soccer posts for a case in point 
). But I did not start this blog for myself – I am familiar enough with my own ideas that it is redundant to write them down purely for my own edification.
I read most of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point last year. I didn’t finish it because I felt it was a fairly flawed work however I did rapidly finish all of (the not-un-flawed) Freakonomics. What was it that I felt unsatisfied about with Tipping Point? Afterall I believed in the concepts Gladwell was discussing – they led me to the book in the first place. Unfortunately Gladwell spends too much time trying to be compelling.
My first annoyance with this book came with the Paul Revere annectdote – something that Gladwell returned to so often that I eventually threw the book down the reference after the reference that caused me to utter “If he mentions Revere one more time…” (you can add fist waving to your mental image if you want to).
Excuse me, everyone else, for a sec… Malcolm, if you ever read this – the Revere annectdote was weak and unverifiable. You chose it because it was something close to the American psyche – a story parents told to kids. For chrissake – Revere is not just his name – it describes how the American public relates to the legend of this man. It worked from an illustrative standpoint however you drew it too close to the core of your argument by so regularly returning to it. With artifice at the core your book felt as compelling as the news they wrap fish and chips up with.
Freakonomics appealed to me more as it stands as more than just opinion supported by fairytales. It is not without its own transgressions from the objective to the subjective but only a fool would expect any work to be purely objective. This wouldn’t have mattered for Tipping Point if it was purely a documentation of the phenomena of social inflections. However part of its appeal was that it explored how ideas travelled and how small changes could lead to big ones. Of course that is appealing, it smacks of efficiency, of complexity theory and most of all it hinted at a magic well of infinite success if such phenomena could be harnessed.
But I didn’t believe the Paul Revere story the first time. I didn’t think I needed to – I saw it as a great illustrative story which could be supported by actual research. I didn’t expect it to be used to prop up the research! Most telling was the coincidental cross-over between Freakonomics and Tipping Point. Both discussed the extraordinary drops in crime in New York.
Gladwell posited that the Broken Windows policy of Mayor Giuliani was responsible. Freakonomics much more convincingly put forward the idea that changes in abortion laws twenty years earlier as a reason for the reduction in crime. Big changes versus small changes. It seems to make sense that the work put in should be closer to the magnitude of the resulting flow-on changes.
Broken Windows policy is not a small policy to implement however it is piecemeal. It doesn’t confront the root cause of a problem but rather addresses smaller outward manifestations of it. I liken it to the The Sorceror’s Apprentice. Or a knight trying to fight an infinite-headed hydra. The truth is you cannot expect to affect change by pushing around the edges. Changes in abortion laws meant less children growing up in broken homes. That meant less disadvantage and eventually less crime. It didn’t mean making small changes and relying on some magic flow of social change to catch on pay it forward.
All that makes sense to me and my experience thus far. Do I believe it? Not really. Not yet. Its a set of ideas to continue exploring. Just because Malcolm Gladwell can’t enlighten me to the mysteries of complexity doesn’t mean I don’t think knowledge of how things interact can lead to an advantage. I hope to explore some of these ideas (and many others) here. If the world can truly be manipulated (and my theorizing concludes that it can) then by rights, hard work should get these writings to an audience that is wider than my social sphere. The goal is to accelerate my learning and to feed that back.
Damn its good not to have written about Soccer. Bring on Italy.
