Photo by ybboey

If you don’t have a good idea, no problem, he’ll give you one – as long as you’re awesome. Oh to be Paul Graham. To have teams of shit hot coders fighting to be accepted by you so that they can work on your idea all summer, for minimum wage. He has created the world’s first ultra-high-level compiler. I’m being disingenuous of course. This compiler has (at least two) minds of it’s own, and Paul doesn’t really mind if it doesn’t do what he asks just as long as there’s a fair chance it will make him some money.

Here’s his full pres:

Before watching that the phrase “global warming propaganda” would have smacked of blinkered Republican rhetoric. As is pointed out in the film, there is a great global warming juggernaut brimming with funding for scientists that is very hard to slow down now. Even Bush conceded! (Wouldn’t it be funny if his stance on man-made global warming redeemed him in the end.) I think this is a very important film to legitimize the other side of the debate. I wonder is it having much effect?

I don’t know about you, but having a previously certain belief shattered by what looks like good science gives me a really good feeling. This science stuff is pretty awesome.

After more reading around, it seems the documentary was a bit misleading, including theories which have been discussed in the literature and found to have problems, and not including some theories that have been put forward to explain the data presented. Check out this detailed response. Nevertheless it’s good to have some counterpoint to Al Gore. Now maybe we can meet in the middle?

Discoverability

Novice users are surprised when you tell them you can right click things to get extra options.

Added complexity

After discovering that their interface to the computer has another variable, they can become confused as to which button they should use in which situation.

Too many options

Because GUIs usually have a lot of containment metaphors, right-clicking on a point means you could be directing your attention to any of several nested entities. As a result, context menus don’t have enough context and tend to be very long and hence difficult to find things in.

Discoverable, Entity Specific, Left-Click Context Menus

There is an alternative

• When the user makes some gesture towards an object such as hovering over it, a discreet target is displayed close outside the border of the object.
• If the user makes a gesture towards the target, hovering or clicking, it expands to show possible contextual actions for that object.
• Otherwise, if the user moves in a different direction, the target disappears.

IMHO, this goes some way to solving the problems above. Newbies can discover contextual functinoality easily. They don’t need to worry about an extra mouse button. And the menus can be entity-specific, so the functionality can be simplified. Plus, this interface is an evolution: it can be complimentary to the standard right-click menus.

Issues

Small Entities

Sometimes the user may want to direct attention to a small part of the interface, for example a character in a text editor or a pixel in a graphics package. These are valid conceptual entities and as such should have associated actions and options. However, it seems impossible to display a context menu target for every mouse over of such entities – The smaller the entity, the harder it is to avoid the menu target.

Overlapping Entities

Sometimes different conceptual entities take up exactly the same screen real estate. This increases the complexity of the contextual menu, but no more than that of a right-click menu.

Microsoft Office 2007

This pattern has popped up as one of the changes in the new MS Office interface overhaul. Here’s what happens when you select a piece of text. Look closely, there’s a hint of a contextual toolbar there:

As you move your mouse towards the faint target it gets solid and you can directly change the properties of the text:

If you move your mouse in the opposite direction it disappears and never comes back.

It seems the Office team have only used this on text selections and only for text formatting properties so far. It works in Excel and Power point as well. If you want to try out the new interface for yourself, Microsoft have set up vanilla installs that you can interact with through a website without installing anything. You have to have Internet Explorer on Windows, and be willing to install some ActiveX remote desktop plugin.

Elsewhere

Here’s another example from Flickr. Right-click menus are even less discoverable on the web, since not even experienced users expect them. Hence, Flickr does this when you mouse over a person:

Seen any other examples?

If you’re wondering why I’m posting twice in the same month (how shocking!), it’s because things are changing around here. You are reading this via the RSS feed so you won’t be aware that I have redesigned the blog’s homepage. My intent was to make this medium more conducive to writing quick posts on more diverse subjects yet still keep it hanging together as a coherent whole. Because let’s face it: something has got to change around here if I’m going to write more and better.

My first goal was to deemphasize the “latest post”, so everything got shrunk a bit until it was only readable by expanding with a click. (It has a nice flowy animation too. You know me, dear reader, I’m all about the javascrizzle.) Still, you can get a taster with a quick glance, and not just for one post but for the whole site, stretching back months at the moment. Please let me know if you disagree, dear reader. I value your opinion greatly.

There’s also a very simple greedy algorithm for sorting posts into streams by category/tag, so that the casual reader (not you, no no) can follow my stream of thought on a subject that interests them. And possibly ignore others. Most blogs don’t do much with the categories except list them in the sidebar. I think it’s time we made use of them. I guess it’s related to this unsubscribing thing that James Corbett is always going on about. Many people don’t want to commit the same way you have. They just want to dip in now and then to see if anything interesting has been going on. Call it grazing if you will. I noticed myself doing this recently for some blogs.

So, I understand that RSS is making the “homepage” increasingly irrelevent. Being an RSS subscriber yourself, you care little for homepages. In fact this change might even effect you negatively if I start spewing out any old rubbish that only looks good on the homepage because you can’t quite read it. NO, don’t unsubscribe!! I need you loyal reader. Without you I’m just sitting here sadly typing to myself. I haven’t forgotten you. I’m also thinking about the RSS angle. And, hopefully, RSS aggregators will pick up on the idea and start doing something useful with tags too.

Until then, let the others fly by, grazing me as they pass. You and I have a special, enduring relationship, dearest subscriber.

Yours always,

Eureka Man

PS: If you want to use the theme for your own wordpress blog (I loved that last post by the way, you put things so much more eloquently than I ever could), just leave a comment and I’ll work out how to package it up nicely.

An outlet for spare ideas and coding time? I’ll be very interested to see what projects come out of it, and what the project collaborators have to say about the service afterwards.

We’re just one of several money-making projects that will progress from idea to deployment in the course of this weekend at DHX. It’s got to be simple. It’s got to be popular. And it’s got to make us more cash than any other competitor in the next month. And we need you! How would you like to take a chance this Saturday and Sunday? Imagine that you could work like hell for two days, and then never again have to work on something you didn’t enjoy. Ever. It’s a gamble. But then, that’s exactly what our project idea is about!

I’m talking to you, Irish web 2.0 community. We need someone to focus on the backend of this thing, someone who’s comfortable working out data storage schemes, working out how to parse emails and things, working with APIs. You can work in any framework that the competition rules allow. There’s no problem with you working remotely. We’ll be on California time but that might work out for the best. We can take shifts at sleeping.

Cue big lottery finger. IT COULD BE YOU! Send me an email: eurekaman at gmail.

Update: We flaked out. Sleeping under a desk is not good for morale. Release will be delayed a couple of weeks. Full marks to Matthias, though, for his MacGyver-style office camping creativity.

So Canter’s answer to this was to set up broker servers which would act as a translating intermediary between client apps and web APIs (and he says his company is going to do this for certain API flavours). But then all API trafic gets routed through a centralized server. Anybody can see that’s not so smart. When I want to talk to a new API, I don’t want to talk through Canter’s server. I want Canter’s server to tell me how to talk to the new API. Then I can go off and do just that, all decentralized and pretty-like.

Now, web APIs very often talk fluent XML. So it seems possible that the hypothetical translation server could serve me an XSL transform that would tell me all I needed to talk directly to any API it supports. The idea is that these API normalizing transforms get written once, and reused in as many client apps as possible. They can be provided by the developer of the API, one of the client app developers, or anyone really. Client developers can simply target the normalized API and know that, without any effort on their part, their app will be able to talk to services which don’t even exist when they . Check out my MS Paint skillz:

Comments? Would you like this? Think it’s unnecessary? Think it wouldn’t work? Is it out there already? If not, maybe I’ll start a standard-defining session at BarCamp or Mashpit.

This is very important for the web as a platform.