disobey.com

There's a decent series over at the SAP Design Guild on Screen Layout and usability: PART I: GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS sets up the series, PART II covers "Layout Hierarchy", and recently released PART III shows some examples of what they're talking about. Good read.

THE PROGRAMMING SOVIET:

What the command-line zealots cannot seem to grasp is that there are people who use computers who are not programmers! Teachers, lawyers, accountants, and secretaries get no benefit whatsoever from being able to tweak the source code or contact a user's group.

SELF-ANNIHILATING SENTENCES AND RARELY USED CLICHES.

Man, I'm so far behind. MRMLMoz: Mind Reading ML in Mozilla. Reminds me of HumanML (which wasn't an April's Fool, but has stagnated).

I simply must take odds with Dave Winer's WHAT IS A NEWS AGGREGATOR? - not just because I code an aggregator myself (like Winer produces RADIO USERLAND), but because there's a number of idiocies that are typical Winerisms. Yeah, I'm insanely late reporting my thoughts on this, but hell, I've been busy.

For one, his opening salvo of what a news aggregator entails ("reads a set of news sources, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse chronological order on a single page") is pretty damned limiting. If aggregators never evolved from this point, they're not much useful past 50 points of aggregation. Not allowing the aggregation to be sorted by user desire (as opposed to "reverse chronological order") is a pretty egregious sin (one that will be fixed in the next version of AMPHETADESK).

Winer continues: "early in 2001 we released Radio UserLand 7.0 which was the first software to bring XML-based aggregation to the desktop." This is plainly incorrect. Carmen's Headline Viewer was available on the desktop since APRIL 25, 1999, and debut'd a few scant months after "UserLand built its first news aggregator, My.UserLand.Com, in 1999". Naysayers complain that CHV wasn't crossplatform, but more than likely, it's "well, hey, CHV didn't sort reverse chronologically", blah blah blah. In a world of semanticism, we're still fighting on the meaning of aggregation (hell, in that case, AMPHETADESK heralded a world of truly crossplatform, open source, aggregation compatible with a well established programming language! Whee, press releases are fun!).

Typical Winer makes the world his oyster with "in January 2002, Radio UserLand 8.0 shipped, and news aggregation became a mainstream application." "Mainstream"? What about portals and push technology, like Pointcast (dead), My Yahoo (useless), or Onepage (dead)? What about NewsIsFree.com? Where has HISTORY gone?

Dave's right, though - it's been very exciting "to watch many of the smart people in weblog-land discover the convenience and power of news aggregators". It's also been very heartening to see people embrace the RSS syndication format with open arms, as well as the community opening up it's time to evangelizing and helping those with questions.

I shouldn't be surprised that the answer to the innocent question of "What Is?" is a giant press release for Radio Userland - it's typical marketing, and typical Winer. Ah well.

The massive amounts of goodness that are overtaking my AMPHETADESK project are very heartening. ANOTHER INTERVIEW WAS POSTED, I'm receiving patches via email to add new features and fix obscure bugs, people are GIVING THANKS and more big news on the way. It... it just plain old rocks, I tell ya. Thank you!

Want to know more about the new release of AmphetaDesk? Read THE #SWHACK EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, conducted by Aaron Swartz and Sean Palmer.

It's finally here! AMPHETADESK v0.93.

Yes, the new version of AMPHETADESK looms ever closer. Some of my non-crucial TODO items won't make it (like full revisions of the developer documentation) and I'm still a little worried about the Classic MacOS version, but things are coming around. It's good. Sniff.

ON DESPISING GENRES is a decent reading of why I hate forced categorization, where your "Hard Rock" may be my "Classical":

Tolkien is famous, so Tolkien gets shelved with Realism. But almost no sf gets deghettoised this way, because few librarians read enough sf or fantasy or know enough about it to pick out the books of "genuine literary value" from the commercial schlock.

Commercial schlock is not limited to genre fiction, and so fiction of absolutely no literary merit at all, commercial junk realism, gets shelved with Austen and Bronte and Woolf, while sf and fantasy of real merit and real interest gets treated as junk by definition. No wonder writers like Kurt Vonnegut deny strenuously that their sf is sf