I have been drawn to the idea of such devices for a long time. Perhaps it’s from watching/reading too much sci-fi. There was some British sci-fi show called Star Cops. I saw it in the late 80s. Some UK cop gets posted on the moon to help sort out local crime. It was an understated show with few fx, but the cop had a little box thing (called “Box”), about the size of a paperback book, that contained an AI that was his personal assistant. It would so research on his behalf and book flights (to the moon and back) for him. It would answer phone calls and take messages if he was busy. I loved the idea.

Daniel Keys Moran had Trent, the genetically engineered genius hacker who wrote his own agent (Ralf the Wise and Powerful) that could go out into the net and act on his behalf. Sometimes Trent was in the driving seat and the Ralf was his avatar, or sometimes Ralf could act autonomously. Ralf  lived in a small portable device when it wasn’t roaming the net.

About 6 years ago, I bought my first PDA. I took my tax return from my first full time lecturing job and bought me a little HP something or other. It was a piece of crap. Perhaps I had high expectations for computing in the palm of my hand. I wanted to believe these devices were useful, even paradigm shifting. But it was a gutless piece of crap. I struggled with it for a while, but the final nail in it’s coffin was when I became a Mac convert and found I could no longer even sync my calendars without jumping through hoops.

Now my mobile phone does everything the PDA ever did, but better. And it makes phone calls. And surfs the web. And takes decent pictures.

But my phone is still a pain to sync with my computer.

I have a netbook. My ASUS eeePC that I’m writing this on. I love it because it’s small and portable and does what I want it to. But it’s not the device I *want*. It is still just a cut down computer with a keyboard and all the old school modes of interaction.

I really believe that Apple radically changed the game with the iPod touch and iPhone. The interaction with those devices is magic. So many of us have seen movies like The Matrix and Minority Report that show amazing conceptualisations of how cool user interaction could be with touch or motion. So few devices even come close to realising this. Apple stands out from the pack as one who does come close. Microsoft has Surface, but I want it in my pocket!

And there are the many imitators. Lots of touch devices got rushed to market in the wake of the iPhones success. Bless them. To be fair, I have not tried many of these devices. But even the ads make them look bad. Pale imitations. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are finally heading in the right direction (for me). So many people are mind locked in the old paradigm of keyboards and business apps. Let those people have their 24″ laptops with twin graphics cards and a car battery to run them. I *don’t* want my portable device to be a full blown computer. I already have one of those.

But give me a portable device I can slip into my pocket. Don’t give me pissy little wana be full keyboards (the Nokia E72? Give me a break!). Give my touch screen. No. Give me smart *multi* touch with gestures

I don’t think we are there yet. We still have new user interaction patterns to work out. We have AI to develop (not *real* AI, but machines that are smart enough to help me get the job done with me wanting to kill it, AKA the paper clip). We still have hardware to refine. It’s early days, but I *so* looking forward to seeing what devices 2010 will bring.

I did. And it took me ages to work out why my page kept submitting until I realised I had to set the “type” attribute to “button”.

It seemed an easy enough job, so I started working on parsing the CFA RSS feed and then linking to Google maps to show where the fires are.

But the fires were over before I finished the job, and since then it’s languished in my pile of projects that would be nice to finish if I had the time. And now it’s fire season again and I was thinking I really do need to get that site done soon.

I just had a look at the CFA site to see if anything had changed, and now they have maps. Guess I was too slow

Time to archive the code and move on to the next little project.

One night I was using it. I shut it down and put it in my bag. At work the next day I turned it on and … nothing happened. Completely blank (black) screen. I angsted over it for a while, then called the shop I bought it from. It was still under warranty, so I couriered it  to them.

A week passed. I got a call that the machine was ready. Half an hour later they called back to say it wasn’t. The new parts they had put in (logic board and optical drive) failed some last minute test. They would have to order more parts. Best case was the laptop would be ready on Tuesday. I had tickets to fly to Sydney on Wednesday.

So I waited.

Tuesday come and still no call from the techs. When I called them they explained that the guy working on my laptop was sick. There was no way it would be ready before I went to Sydney

At lunch time on Tuesday, I jumped on a tram and rode down to MSY computing in North Melbourne and bought a eeePC (1000HA).

After my experience with the Asus netbook I bought for the kids, I was prepared for the worst. But the machine exceeded all my expectations. I quickly abused the work bandwidth and ran all the Windows updates, and installed a few apps.

The next day I flew to Sydney.

The eeePC did such a good job. Battery life is less than advertised, by it did survive a whole day of twittering and note taking at the conference (thanks also to the free wireless there). Didn’t have it running all the time of course, but it still impressed me.

Now that I’m back in Melbourne, my MacBook has finally been returned to me. I’ve decided that the Mac can be my home computer for now on. I suspect that being dragged to work and back every day had something to do with it’s break down. And the new eeePC does what I need it to do at work (browse the web )

I managed to keep that promise and I’m glad I did.

I want to summarise the event. I found some talks particularly though provoking and  they will probably be the subject of more detailed follow up posts.

I arrived in Sydney on Wednesday, a day early for the event, and enjoyed the Sydney hospitality, and beer, with some friends. It was a nice relaxing start to the Web Directions experience and reminded me how nice Sydney can be.

Thursday 8 Oct 09: Day 1 of Web Directions South.

Escalante

Day 1 keynote
Matt Webb

This guy was interesting and inspirational, but I just don’t know what to make of it.
The Here and There maps were cool. And I liked the way he drew inspiration from science fiction.
I suppose the take home message here is to look at things from a new perspective.

Font embedding and typography.

Mark Boulton

I liked this guys idea that the historical poor state of fonts on the web has forced us to have better typography. Making the most of what little we had.

I’ve often been frustrated with designers who come from a strong print background and think that the web is the same beast as print. This guy was a passionate designer, but he was realistic about the web and it’s limitations. At the same time, he was not afraid to challenge those limits.

His main call to arms was directed at the main browser vendors and font foundries: Make new cool fonts specifically designed for the web.

The state of developer tools

Ben Galbraith

This was a great technical overview of some of the great developer tools available now for writing code. Tools have evolved  far beyond  the old alert(); dialog for debuging JavaScript.

In general, he says, the tool available in Firefox (Firebug), Opera (Dragonfly), Webkit (Webkit is the render engine behind Safari, Chrome and Adobe Air), and IE8, are all on par with each other. The webkit developer tools got a special mention for looking the prettiest. While the IE8 tools got a special mention for having a heap explorer so you could see how you code was executing.

An interesting point here was that IE8 provides low level developer access right into the heap. FireFox abstracts this away to the point where the same kind of low level access is not available. IDEs could use an IE8 style API to run debuggers right in the IDE. FireFox cannot provide this until the open up an API to this kind of functionality, although they are working on this, he said (Check out the Web Debug Protocol working group).

Something else he said FireFox was working on is Web Workers. Web Workers are like threads (in a browser, FireFox) but are stateless to reduce problems with concurrency.

I think the take home message here was the JavaScript libraries are good and mature, and the tools have developed to the point where using JS libraries is a lot less painful than it once was.

Canvas

Dmitry Baranovskiy

Wow. What a great speaker. This guy was probably the most entertaining speaker of the whole conference. And I enjoyed what he had to say as well.

He was critical of the Canvas element while providing a good overview of it’s capabilities. He suggested the best example of development within Canvas is  Bespin

His main gripes with Canvas seemed to be that it had no DOM associated with it, and that it’s API is non standard.

Since Canvas just provides an API for painting pixels on the screen, there are no DOM objects that can be inspected and manipulated the same way everything else in the browser can. Seems to me that this means it suffers all the same problems Flash has, but without being a plugin. But since Canvas currently lacks wide spread browser support, I’m not sure the distinction means much.

He criticised the API for being non standard. Well, it has an API and it can be used, but it’s a very verbose API. He made a good point that it looked exactly like the Java AWT Graphics API. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a Java developer over at Apple who simply ported AWT to JavaScript and called it Canvas. Perhaps this will get better in the future, and the door is wide open for somebody to write a library to wrap all the calls in nicer JavaScript flavoured functions.

SVG would be a DOM oriented alternative to Canvas, and Dmitry has written the Raphael JS library for SVG.

The state of the web as a platform

(panel discussion)

As interesting as it was to hear the guys on this panel talk, I’m not sure if there really was a take home message, or if they ever actually agreed on anything.

Best line, spoken by Microsoft Guy after Adobe Guy complimented Microsoft on something: “Who are you? And what have you done with the Adobe Guy?”

Making Waves

Day 1, Closing address
Cameron Adams

This was all about the making of Google Wave, for a designers perspective. It was an entertaining presentation (is it a coincidence that the designers all had the best looking presentations?) and gave a great peek at the iterative development process around such an ambitious project.

After Camerons talk, at the end of day 1, they presented the winner of the McFarlane prize. I was pleasantly surprised to see my old employer Swinburne won the prize. I know a lot of people did a lot of work to get it to where it is (including Mark), but well done Caroline.

WorkFLOW

Day 2, opening address (9 Oct 09)
Kelly Goto

There were some big ideas in this presentation. I don’t think I can do them any kind of justice in a paragraph or two. I think this talk is certainly marked for further consideration in it’s own blog post.

In a nut shell, Kelly Goto spoke about flow. Not work flow as in the mechanical steps of getting a job done, but flow state. That state of mind where things just click and you get great things done. Kelly suggests flow state is achieved at a sweet spot between challenge and skill level. If the challenges of a job are too easy, you get bored and can’t achieve flow. If the challenges are to great, you achieve anxiety instead of flow. If you skill level is too high for the job, you also arrive at boredom. So you need to find challenges appropriate for your skill level.

RDFa

Mark Birbeck

This wasn’t the most exciting presentation of the conference, but it was interesting enough.
I’ve long preferred microformats because of their simplicity, but this guy has got me seriously thinking about RDFa.
First and foremost, he made it look easier that I thought it was. That’s good, since it’s complexity is one of the things that was scaring me off. Perhaps there are too many overly technical descriptions for what RDFa is, and not enough grass root “here’s a simple example” sites.

Microformats is growing beyond it’s means. It started simple, and as it grew, people were attracted to it’s simplicity, but then began to run into it’s limitations. So they wanted it to do more. The more they ask it to do, the further it moves away from it’s simplicity. Since it works by hijacking regular markup and applying a non standard semantic to them, it can only ever go so far without either running out of way to twist the normal markup language, or needing to introduce name spaces to define it’s own semantics. It it has to resort to new name spaces, then it’s crossed the line and you might as well be using RDFa.

The other thing that RDFa has going for it is that it’s part of the specifications now. Moving forward, this could be a great boon to RDFa. Assuming enough people take it up to give it momentum, being in teh spec will give it a huge advantage over microformats. Of course search engine support, with or without specifications, may also make or break RDFa. If google doesn’ get behind it, regardless of whether it also gets behind Microformats, then it’s idea in the water.

I wonder if it isn’t too early decide this one?
In the bigger picture, both RDFa and Microformats show that the future of the semantic web is bright.

progressive enhancement

Elliot Jay Stocks

This guy used the term “progressive enhancement” in a different context to what I’m familiar with. I always think about it as it relates to JavaScript. Eg: only introduce a new JavaScript feature in a site if that browser can support it. But he expanded the term to take in CSS features as well. It was more about visual design of a site.

Some quotes:

Progressive enhancement = reward
Graceful degradation = punishment

I think he meant that enhancing a site was giving a reward to those people who were using modern browsers. Degradation means building a site with all the bells and whistles, then punishing users with old browsers by taking those nice functions away.

Don’t underestimate the importance of beauty

the nicer your site looks,
the longer your visitors will look at it
the longer they look at it, the longer they stay on it.
the longer they stay on it, the better your chance of selling them something

“forward thinking code is future proofing your web site”

Pervasive Computing

Rob Manson

I should have taken note of the fact that this session was listed in the Business track.

If we are talking philosophically, I like the idea of pervasive computing. IT is one of those things that nobody notices when it’s working. But when it’s not working, all hell breaks loose. I personally think that technology will one day fade into the background and become wallpaper, stuff that’s all around us, but which we rarely take any notice of. And that’s a good thing. Who thinks about the gas and electricity supply in our homes? Clean running water? It’s just there and we take it for granted and that’s okay.

I think products being promoted on the strength of this or that technology (802.11 abcdefg? Can I buy a vowel?) show that we are still hung up on the whizz bang cool factors. But that will fade in time and people will just take technology for granted.

That’s what *I* think. That’s what I was hoping for when I went to this session.

After listening about all the metrics used to measure the “distance” of technology, we reached this statement: “it’s all about the value proposition”.

That’s when I took a walk. Kevin Yanks talk on CSS Frameworks was standing room only, with people bulging out the doors. I’d clearly gone to the wrong session, so I took a quick walk around Darling Harbour.

Test Your JavaScript

Rob Mitchell and Mike Williams

Maybe it was because it was the second day and all the talking was starting to get to me. But this session disappointed me a bit.

He took way too long trying to sell me on the idea that testing your code was good. I know that. Just show me the latest and greatest ways to test my JavaScript. Show me the code!

There was some code demo’s, but it was just enough to whet my appetite, not satisfy it.

Rather than repeat everything, here is the presenters list of links to available tools.

Closing Address

Dan Hill

Wow. This guy was deep. What a mind.

At first I did wonder if they had picked the wrong speaker and he might have been at the wrong conference. But he seemed interesting enough, if a little off topic. But the more I listened to him, the more impressed I was with his work. And the more I started to see why he’d been asked to speak.

This guy is looking at a seriously big picture.

I should also note that this guy provided a wonderfully rounded compliment to the opening speaker. Nicely done.

Now it happens that I was sent two vouchers for free credit on Google AdWords. AdWords works by me submitting ads to Google which they run wherever it is that Google runs ads (which is just about everywhere). The ads are free to place, but whenever somebody clicks on an ad, it costs me money.

So I tried setting up an account with the credit I’d been sent. In the end, it added up to about $180 worth of ads. You can set a limit on how much to send per day, so I set the limit at $4 a day, so I got a bit over a months worth of advertising.

Once I started running the ads, there was a 1:1 increase in traffic compared to clicks on my ads. AdWords was working! I was getting traffic. Unfortunately once the credit ran out, the ads stopped, and my traffic went back to it’s normal level, which is to say no traffic at all

The yellow line in the graph represents new visitors and as you can see, nearly all of my traffic is new, which means that nobody is coming back

Oh well. Nibble some humble pie. It really is me-ware after all. It’s curious how running the ads can make it look so good, yet none of it mattered since nobody came back. $180 dollars worth of credit spent on worthless traffic. I’m glad I didn’t spend $180 of my own hard earned.

Parrallel to the AdWords experiment, I was playing around with AdSense. AdSense is where you can let Google run its ads on your own site and get paid whenever somebody else clicks on those ads. I was curious to see if traffic flow through my site translated into income through advertising.

During the month of August, while the AdWords ads were running, I made a grand total of $1.37 at an average of 12 cents per click. So it was costing me $4 a day to run ads directing traffic to my site. There was about 10 visits per day as a result of those ads. So it was costing me ~40 cents per click to bring traffic to my site, from which I made 12 cents per click on ads when they were on my site. Or to look at cost over time, AdWords was costing me $4 a day, while I was making 4 and a half cents per day from AdSense. It was costing me 100 times more than I was making.

The economics of this are sadly clear to me. AdWords just isn’t worth it (for my site). The only way for this to justify itself would be for word of mouth growth in traffic, and for return visits to increase. But based on figures I was seeing through Google Analytics, I’d need in excess of 1000 visitors a day just to break even from ad revenue (if I continued to pay $4 a day on AdWords).

Lessons learned:

• AdWords isn’t worth it for me.
• AdSense needs a lot of work tweaking it so it delivers relevent ads. I think this is one area that let me down. The ads Google was serving were rediculous for my content. They seemed to be getting more clues from my domain name (bluestoneIT) and were serving ads for paving stones rather that ads related to my content (table top gaming). Better SEO on my part would probably help this

I’ll continue to develop that site since it remains useful to me as long as I’m running the game, but the AdWords experiment is clearly a failure.

Did I mention that I was nervous that night? I seriously wonder if I managed to make my point at all. But this post is here to clear that up.

I won’t post my actual slides. In keeping with Andrews beautifully minimalist approach to presentations, the slides don’t contain any actual information. But here is the text from the presenters notes. It’s pretty much a script, timed to fit in the limitations of the format.

• I propose that the internet is immature.
  We are currently in the second expansion phase of the web, the first being the dot com bubble that so famously burst in 2001, and we have come a long way.
  But we still have a long way to go.
• I used to have a VW Kombi. It was baby poo yellow and was kitted out for camping, with a sink and a bed and a fridge. That model had twin carburettors and the control rod that synced them used to come loose while I was driving. The accelerator pedal would flop to the floor and I’d have to coast to the side of the road to fix it.
• The windscreen wipers would come loose too. I kept a shifter in the glove box so I could fix them when it started raining. That old car had plenty of quirks, and I got to know that car, and it’s quirks, pretty well.
  I got so familiar with it that I took the quirks for granted
• I think the web we use today is just as full of quirks as my old rust bucket (which I bought for $1000 and finally sold for $100). But like that car, we are so close to, and familiar with, the quirks that we take them for granted. We don’t question them.
• jQuery, Dojo, Yahoo UI, Prototype. These are just a few of the JavaScript tool kits that many of us probably use on a daily basis. They help ease the pain of browser detection, feature detection, plug-in detection, progressive enhancement, graceful degradation.
• As with JS, we all know some CSS hacks, and probably have our favourites. The box model Hack. The Holly Hack. Clearfix. IE conditional styles.
  The thing that all these JavaScript and CSS hacks have in common is that they are workarounds for problems.
  Not solutions.
• AJAX, a fancy new term for some old technologies, is another work around for the stateless nature of the web itself.
  By design, the web is stateless and that it opposite to the state-full nature in which most desktop apps work, and the way users expect them to work.
• In the original browser wars, fought between Netscape and MSIE, we wrestled with proprietary tags, and inconsistent implementations of JavaScript in a day when nobody had heard of a DOM and HTML was regularly badly formed. The world became a better place with the rise of a standards body like the W3C who imposed a sense of order and direction on HTML.
• It’s not over, and the browser wars are upon us again. Firefox slowly erodes IEs massive market share, with Safari nibbling at the heels too. And there are other browsers out there.
• The working group in charge of HTML5 started work in 2004 and is stacked with industry reps pushing their own agendas. The WHATWG was born out of frustration with the W3Cs lack of progress, but in 2007, the WHATWG recommendations were folded back into the W3Cs work on HTML5.
• But as with any committee, there are private agendas, and Microsoft who still commands the lions share of the browser market, no matter what we may think of them, has chosen to go it alone and stay out of the process, leaving Opera, Google, Apple and Mozilla (who between them account for about 20% of the browser market) to argue about the future of the web.
  It is interesting to note that the original HTML specification was not written by a committee.
• In the mean time, everyday developers are pushing ahead with actually building the web of tomorrow.
  Rich Internet Application, which is just a fancy term for a useful web site, push the boundaries both in terms of what people are learning to expect from the a web app, and the technology used to deliver those apps
• The bar keeps getting raised in terms of our expectations of the web, yet the pace of development of the underlying foundations of the web move at a glacial pace. When will our expectations of the web exceed its ability to deliver? And I’m not pointing the finger at developers, but at the constraints being placed on us.
• Like some street magician, we have all been distracted by the focus on which browser is best, how fast JavaScript engines are getting. We miss the fact that the protocols the web is built on were never intended for the kind of uses we put it to.
• Like my old Kombie, I didn’t need to keep throwing time and money at fixing things that broke. What I needed was a new car that worked the way I wanted it to.
• I say we need to rise up and say “we aren’t going to take it anymore!” We deserve a robust application framework on which to write our code without fear of session hijacking, backwards compatibility problems, or session time-outs.
• We need to acknowledge all the cleaver people that brought us as far as we have come. (There are probably a few of them here in this room)
  To their credit, I think they brought us to where we are today *in spite* of what the web has to offer, not because of it.
• Every day I am amazed at what a cleaver bunch of humans we are, and how we manage to wring new and creative uses out of the web, far beyond anything that Tim Berners Lee could ever have imagined when he first invented HTTP/HTML.
• I have no idea what’s coming next, but I suspect we are soon going to start expecting more from the web than it can deliver. And when that day comes, we will start using something else. The buzzword “Web 2.0″ has grown tired, but I think there will be a new web at some point, and that perhaps it will be radically different from what we are use to, possibly even down to the protocol level.

The last Twitter Code Challenge was a bust. I didn’t promote it very well, and going on holiday in the middle of it didn’t help. In the end, nobody submitted anything before the deadline. I didn’t even get to write my own code for the challenge. Not that I was going to compete against myself, but I don’t like releasing a challenge without at least showing that it’s doable by myself. I had an idea about injecting a canvas element into the page and using some kind of fractal algorithm to draw a Mandelbrot set in it. So the loose end is this: There was no winner. I still have the books, but for now, the challenge is not on.

In my Highs and Lows post from the 2nd of April. I did talk to Zazz about the SSD and they pointed out that there was in fact a little asterisk next to the “16 GB SSD” which lead to an explanation that 16 was in fact an actual 8GB solid state drive, and 8GB SD card.. Wikipaedia explains SSD as “a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data.” It also implies that flash memory can be considered “solid state”. So their 8+8 could be called 16GB SSD, if you squint at it. I feel ripped off, and I firmly believe that Zazz was being deceptive in their marketing of this product, but it’s a hard case to argue, and in the end probably not worth it. Lesson learnt: read the fine print.

The Acer Aspire is still kicking, but it struggles to do anything in a timely manner. It’s such an old model that I doubt it’s still available anywhere, but just in  case anyone is thinking about buying one, I’d seriously suggest they look at other models from other manufacturers first. The kids still like it.

And I’ve also made a slightly more formal TwitCode home page that explains the basic rules which apply.

This challenge is much like the first one, but this time I have made jQuery available. I’ve also changed the structure of the target page a little. It’s not as sparse as last time.

And this time I have two Sitepoint books up for grabs: Modern Web Design Using Javascript and Dom”, and “Designing Without Tables”. These books are second hand, having been much read by me. But I haven’t looked at them in a while, so perhaps it’s time for somebody else to get their chance. And in case you were wondering, the winner takes all. There’s no second place. I’ll pay the postage to send both books to the winner.

So the deal is you must submit the most fun / interesting self contained JavaScript code that fits inside 140 characters, so that it can be posted via Twitter. The 140 character limit must include addressing. It can be sent directly to me via Twitter by addressing it to @nedlud (my Twitter handle), or by including the more generic hash tag #JS

I’ll watch the #JS tag on Twitter and assume that any posts that look like pure JavaScript are entries.

The only change to the basic rules for this challenge is that the jQuery library is available.

All entries will be tested on this page, using Firefox 3.5 and jQuery 1.3.2. (not IE)

I’ll leave the challenge open for 1 week, starting today (12 July 2009), so next Sunday (19 July 2009) will be the cut off.

Start your interpreters..

You can see his winning entry, and the other entries, at http://js.bluestoneit.com/first.php