From the desk of » Technology

Features for Twitter for Mac

konrad — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:55:37 +0000

Twitter’s native app for Mac OS has been my primary Twitter environment for some time now. I used it before it got that entirely new (nonstandard) user interface. I still like it better than the other Twitter app’s I’ve seen out there, but there are a few gripes with it that I have.

I like to be able to drag apps by taking their topmost element in the window. I don’t like to see that bit of UI convention out the door; I don’t like the fact that I have to pick up the Twitter window by it’s right-side margin.
I would like the default of presenting Twitter usernames to indicate whether I already follow them or not; this would be especially useful on fridays. Maybe give the names two distinct background colours, very light but noticable. That way, I could see the overlap with others, and not have to access each name seperately.
Sometimes, loading images from twitpic does not work reliably, and I have no idea as to why. I have to close the popup and reopen it for the image to load.
Handling blocking users is not consistent: When I am on the “Mentions” tab and block a user, the tweet I am on disappears right away. If I am doing the blocking in the user’s profile, the tweets of that user remain in my timeline and mentions. I’d much rather see them disappear everywhere.

But I’m sure they’ll all be addressed in later versions.

Zeitungs-Websites

konrad — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 20:36:45 +0000

Liebe Zeitungswebsite-CMS-Konfektionierer,
die Druckansichten auf Euren Websites sind ja durchaus sehr praktisch. Könnt Ihr es aber bitte so einrichten, dass die Druckansicht nicht ein neues Fenster oder ein neues Tab öffnet, sondern einfach in meinem aktuellen Browser geladen wird, so wie jede andere Seite auch? Und könnt ihr auch auf den JavaScript-Aufruf des Druck-Dialogs verzichten? Das fände ich sehr praktisch.

Danke!
Ein Instapaper-User.

Nokia/Microsoft vs. …

konrad — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 22:40:39 +0000

I get the very distinct impression that MicroNokia are not setting themselves up to compete against Apple, but much rather primarily against Google’s Android. Largely, this is because again we’re seeing a split between hardware and software companies. In splitting apart those kinds of development, they are at a disadvantage to bring about the same quality of user experience as Apple shows the world as attainable. That’s also why the PlayBook and the new HP TouchPad are, to me, more likely to work well – because they are enabling themselves to just focus on what the entire package delivers to the user and do not have to compromise for their technology partner that they have decided their fate to be linked with.

And, whilst we are at it, I’m idly curious as to whether the folding of the talks between Google and Nokia was in any way relevant to Eric Schmidt giving up the CEO role at Google. Of course, one can envision that the talks between Google and Nokia were much more one-sided: Google can negotiate from a position of strength in the smartphone market; they see no necessity to bring on board a vendor who has good device knowledge. After being publicly ridiculed for the Kin and never really being successful in the smartphone market, was probably more egalitarian in the relationship. Much as I can understand that position, it also shows the fate the two companies do share in the smartphone arena and it holds little promise to how they might move forward together. That Elop was a Microsoftie and knows the culture of the company well is also something not to be forgotten. And I think that after the lack of success in delivering a Linux deliverable even though they had been at it for a while (anybody remember the Nokia N700?) might also have been a factor. If you can’t trust your inhouse Linux people to get something reliable out the door, why should they be able to do based on somebody else’s Linux-based smartphone stack?

What I am curious about, now, will be the third-party developer strategy – and that’s the very point where the interests of the two technology partners are not well-aligned. Nokia will want the developers to have their products run exclusively on Nokia devices, and will probably work hard to have a competitive advantage over other WP7 products in User Interface and probably other APIs. (They need to – they’ve already sold out Search, Maps and other key components to be the same as with the other WP7 vendors.) Microsoft, on the other hand, should have in mind to not let the platform fragment too much, or else they will also draw bad blood from their development base. The people who have stuff in the Ovi store these days are burnt anyway, because they need to completely write off those investments and, in the worst case, get their eyes set on an entirely new ecosystem. (Of course, Nokia could be providing transitioning tools, or a HAL that allows for Symbian apps to run on WP7, but I’m not sure that the phones will be up to that kind of tasks.) And as Sun learned in the transition from SunOS 4 to Solaris: Developers having their apps broken do not respond kindly.

So these will be interesting times ahead indeed. But I’m sceptic that the new Nokia Windows phones will really get that kind of market traction that other platforms enjoy.

Why IMAP is a good model for cloud services

konrad — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 23:36:31 +0000

I do admit it: I like the IMAP protocol. I regularly use multiple computers and my iPhone, and I read and write email on all of them. IMAP makes that convenient: I have the same view of my folders and my inbox on every computer. We also use a Webmail client that uses IMAP as its underlying technology, so even via webmail, everything looks the same. And apart from the fact that I quite enjoy the way that I can look for all stuff that was sent my way, I much more like the fact that I have just one folder of email that I sent out. It doesn’t matter where I am when I send something off: it all ends up in my sent box on our mail server.

IMAP is a well-specified protocol. One can argue whether it’s a well-desgined protocol, or whether parts of it are a total nightmare to understand and implement. But is is that, well-documented. Given enough programming talent, you can sit down and write either a client or a server for it. (And given the track record of various IMAP clients in the wild, it does take a certain kind of dedication and a good load of skill to really get it right.) But it’s not a technology that lets you guess what a certain field on all requests might mean or why the answers look so different on every second friday of a month starting with J.

The fact that it’s documented means multiple implementations exist. That means if you want, you can set up an IMAP server and just use that; or pay somebody to do just that. Personally, I’m not so fond of the idea of giving all of my email away to somebody who I don’t really know all so well, so my IMAP store is on a server that we run ourselves. But if your preferences are different, there are plenty of services that allow you to use their IMAP server, and be happy with that.

This is where I believe cloud services should be heading. Like so many, I’m a fan of Evernote (I’ve written about that). I’m impressed by what Google Documents can do inside the browser. But for either company: do I know who else has access to my data? What laws are even applicable for stuff that I put up? I’m sure that both Google and Evernote are subject to US subpoenas, but what about german legal demands to hand over data? Or, say, those originating in India? What happens to all the data should Evernote or Google fold? I’d love Evernote even more if there were a way to run a server of my own – because then I know for sure who has access to my data. Or the protocol they use were well-specified so that others could also contribute to a public server my Evernote client connects to.

Ah, if it only were so easy as with IMAP.

Data Roaming?

konrad — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:45:41 +0000

Coming home from two weeks abroad and some idle time to think, I have a few more topics to blog about.
One of them is one of the things I consider one of the most obscene forms of ripoff the mobile phone carriers do is „data roaming.“ If you want to bring your smartphone online, what they do is they do not let you easily use their own data network, but rather insist on transporting your IP traffic over their own networks to your home provider where it then is allowed to hit the public internet.
What is this?
Let me just use the local network, I don’t care where the transit into IP world happens. This would be so much cheaper, and any decent phone can handle the configuration. Heck, I did this years ago with my Treo!

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

konrad — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:21:30 +0000

It is a widely held belief that Steve Jobs is a man to transform industries. He’s done it before, and I think he (with his company Apple) has set his eyes to do it yet again. This time, it’s telephony. And I can’t blame him, it is a god-awful industry we (as a species, globally) are putting up with.
Take the epitome of modern phone technology: the mobile phone network. We’re still using phone numbers (a technology that is a century old and was optimized for the rotary phones and their electromechanical counterparts in the switching system), we’re basically using a network designed to deliver billable events and we’re communicating with voice quality that is actually more than awful.
Enter FaceTime.
FaceTime takes the telephone conversation out of the old phone network and puts it onto an IP network. It makes communication easy and fun. And it’s no longer just tied to the iPhone (which the carriers probably would have liked), but also going to IP-only devices: iPod touch and all iPads. Apple usually is known for delivering good user experience, so phone calls are good for the user.
But now, Apple is setting out to be not just the media centre of the world (with music and video already going their way), but the new phone system, too. Between the new Apple TV and FaceTime, I do have some ideas why Apple needs a new data center …
[EDITED] I do not think that the video telephony is what makes FaceTime so particularly important or game-changing. I think it is the seamlessness in which the phone and IP network interact. Ultimately, reducing the phone carriers just to another form of data carriers. I do know that Skype also works suitably well and has a good installed base. But what is different here is that FaceTime is automatically installed on every iOS device, and integrated well with the entire Apple experience (think: Address book, MobileMe, …)

Lessons in customer support

konrad — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 20:24:08 +0000

I — probably along with many, many others of the iPhone Twitter App — discovered something that I consider a bug. As soon as you rotate the phone, your position in your timeline is utterly garbled. Where you are after turning has no resemblance whatsoever to where you were before. That means: Take the phone, rotate it, rotate it back and you’re at a completely different place than before.

This quite goes against the law of least surprise for the user. So I tried to inform Twitter of that bug. I searched for a place for such feedback, did indeed file the report and included what I take to be a start on how to resolve the issue. I received an answer from Twitter a few days later, but with something that I consider to be completely beside the point. The answer, basically was, „If this is a problem for you, you can rotation-lock your phone.“ Come on, Twitter. You can do better than that. If the mail back had at least included something like „Thank you for reporting your concern, we will look at this internally“ or „Thank you, we will consider how to best deal with the issue for a future release,“ all would have been well. But to be told that this is a non-issue is, to be honest, most disappointing. And yes, I do indeed consider this to be a problem. And no, I do not consider rotation-lockng the phone an appropriate solution. (I do tend to type on the landscape keyboard, but read on the portrait orientation, so I do in fact quite like to change the direction of the phone.

And it would have been easy to not make me frustrated about this, too.

eBooks

konrad — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:37:16 +0000

So there’s a new Kindle that looks quite attractive. Many things on the Kindle plattform appear quite nice: You can read the Kindle books on multiple devices (the Kindle app for iPhone and iPad just as well as your desktop and laptop computer) and have your library available on all devices equally. The way I understand it, you even see your own notes and progress on your books on all platforms; this is how storage should be done (local copies for offline, but basically be accessible from anywhere).
And yet, as with many other of the new media consumption gadgets, you get a big bag of concerns that at least still give me second thoughts on all of this.
For one, I don’t want to leave such a well-documented trail of what I read, when and for how long. I know that by shopping at Amazon, I already leave quite the trail about my reading habits, and buying stuff on the Kindle does not change that all too drastically. And still, I feel that the more data Kindle transfers to Amazon, the less comfortable I am with reading stuff on such an electronic gadget.
Also, we’ve seen that Amazon is able to change the library on the Kindle without your approval or interaction. This gives an entirely new meaning to the concept of „purchasing a book.“ It’s actually much more like a public library: You pay for the privilege of being allowed to read a book, but only little of the experience is under your control.
And that brings us around to the next point: I want to be able to pass on books. Once I’ve read them, I want to have somebody else have them. Or I want to be able to loan them; either just for an afternoon of leisure or for others to completely read those books. That’s just not possible on the Kindle. But then, I also think that it’s not possible on iBooks, so that levels the playing field.
For the time being, I just might be stuck with paper books.

Home media integration and other televisory matters

konrad — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:50:30 +0000

Following up on my last posting, there are a few more things that come to mind when thinking about the future of TV sets. With all those video streaming services that I want, I also would like integration with my lapop (or iPhone or iPad, or whatever other media consumption devices there are in the household). If I see a video on one of my devices, I’d like to be able to easily transfer that running stream onto my TV set. So, for instance, I am browsing TED and find a presentation that I’d like to continue watching while I do something else on an iPad (which I currently don’t own, but that is another topic). So then, I’d like to bounce the stream off to the TV set in the room I’m currently in and continue to use the iPad for other things.
And on the subject of transfers: I more often than not carry my iPhone on me. I can easily have my earphones plugged in there, and the cable not tangle with anything. So then, my laptop should link up with the audio output of the iPhone and transfer it’s sound out via the iPhone. That way, I could walk around and continue to listen to what I have on the computer — or just not be tied to the computer by means of headphone cable.
I’d like to be able to watch HD content, record and playback it at my leisure. And get HD content in such a way so that I can watch different HD channels on different TV sets concurrently, and without paying a monthly sum for every single device. We can do that now, with the plain analog cable service that we have. By means of cabling, we can distribute the signal to multiple TV sets. Anything but that would be a step backward, to my mind. It would be a great plus if the HD content could also be watched on laptops (and we have both Windows and Macintosh devices in the household, of which one Windows laptop regularly gets used for watching TV with a USB TV tuner), but that is even a secondary goal. I’d be happy if we could just get two TV sets. Of course, if we just had one media storage solution so that recordings of TV shows could be shown on any screen around, that would be a plus — but that seems to currently not be easily available.
It seems there’s still a great many challenges out there to get media stuff working conveniently and easily …

TV sets and online experience

konrad — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:39:10 +0000

It seems that TV sets that offer some form of web connectivity are the latest craze, right next with the 3D stuff that is not yet ready for consumption, at least to my mind. I say web connectivity because it’s about the web more than it is about internet connectivity — the TV sets are even a far cry from fully giving you a decent browser experience, let alone thinking about other protocols or applications. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing—but one still should be honest about what kind of experience a device is delivering.
What this is about, though, is that youtube is not enough. Of course it’s fun to look at various video clips and that one site is very rich in all the content it offers. Maybe, if the manufacturer is kind, they’ll also include other online video systems (vimeo, ustream.tv, or sevenload and myvideo.de in Germany) But as we all know, the web is filled with so many more opportunities. Being in the german TV market, I also want to be able to look at the online video offerings of the local TV stations; incidentally that also requires a Flash player on the device. I presume that other markets will have other offerings that the consumer might be interested in—a constant, steady battle for the manufacturer if the want to follow this all. And then, there’s video podcasts, there’s streaming stuff coming up that we don’t yet even dream about. A nightmare to keep current, even more of a nightmare if you have to keep pushing updates to the sets at the consumers constantly.
So we have established that the requirements for the TV online experience are high: Flash player, a decent full browser to support all the various offerings, a good update path to get new versions released (just imagine if IE6 had been distributed with every TV set that a certain manufacturer shipped five years ago, with no clear way for the customer to update). I think we’re getting dangerously close to having a full operating system on the TV set. And then we haven’t even touched integrating the normal TV services, video on demand, time-lapse watching, new ideas about pay per view.
Watching a home entertainment system for the living room certainly won’t be getting easier!

More basement finds …

konrad — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:40:38 +0000

So if you thought that the last post dates me, see here. This is from the mid eighties, magnetic stripes to save stuff on. One stripe held all of 1.2 kb. What fun to remember!

URL shortening, a new approach

konrad — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:27:32 +0000

There is an approach in URL shorteners that I have not yet seen, but think that has some merit: Store all the information for the URLs in a DNS zone. Store the URLs you point to as TXT records. The zone can then be pulled and perused at will. That way, data is never stored in just one companies database, you can just go in an pull those links that interest you. If the shortening engine then allows for user specific zones, you can just get to all the data you are interested in.

The prototype should not be so hard to get in shape.

Look what I found!

konrad — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:01:01 +0000

Cleaning up the basement (because we had some water leaking in, but that is a different matter entirely), I found stuff that practically makes me feel ancient …

An iPhone API I’d like to see

konrad — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:03:41 +0000

Just talking about the iPhone, there is an API that I’d like to see and I’m sure many applications would benefit from: A download manager. I imagine that an app could register to pull the content of a specific URL or the answer from a Web Service at a specified time or at specified intervals, and then the answers or most recent answer is ready for consumption when the app is started by the user.

Ideally, this would integrate with iTunes so that when syncing the phone, all the data-hungry apps get their mouths fed and are provided with the last version of the data they’re interested in. What I have in mind are news-plucking applications like All Things Digital or Bloomberg, or the TV schedule apps — or many of the other apps that you start, then wait to have their content pulled, and only then continue to use. The basic thing they do is simple: They all get their data in first. And I presume many, many of them in one or the other kind of XML application.

Man, would that improve my user experience of the iPhone.

NeXT.

konrad — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:23:51 +0000

Steve Jobs demos NeXTstep.

[tags]Steve Jobs, NeXTstep, video[/tags]

Thunderbird Extensions

konrad — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:36:15 +0000

Wo ich schon dabei bin, schreibe ich auch gleich noch auf, was ich derzeit an Extensions so in meinem Thunderbird sitzen habe:

[Tags] Thunderbird extensions software [/tags]

Firefox-Extensions

konrad — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:21:38 +0000

Auch, ums für mich selbst zu dokumentieren, hier die Liste an Firefox-Extensions, die ich derzeit verwende:

[Tags]Firefox extensions[/tags]

Google Browser Sync — noch eine Firefox-Erweiterung

konrad — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 07:53:11 +0000

Mit Google Browser Sync kann man über verschiedene Firefox-Installationen diverse Dinge gleich beibehalten. History, Bookmarks, Cookies, gespeicherte Passwörter und die offenen Tabs werden bei Google (auf Wunsch verschlüsselt) gespeichert und können dann von anderen Rechnern direkt verwendet werden. Auf den ersten Blick sehr praktisch. Ich berichte in ein paar Tagen davon, wie erfolgreich das klappt.

Apple and TV

konrad — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 12:43:07 +0000

Listening to Engadged Podcast 47.5 and the discussion about the strategy Apple is following with video on both the iPod and the iMac, I am slightly surprised about some of the theories not articulated.

If you are a company that is highly identified with digital media, that – even with a certain understatement – is constantly on the technical edge, would you really want to integrate a dying technology like analog TV into where you develop your media hub? I see Apple as a company that rather takes its time and invests effort into doing things both right and in style. Analog TV wouldn’t make the new iMacs display look good.

To me, Front Row has HDTV written all over it. With Video in the iTunes Store, Apple even already is laying the groundwork to have HDTV transport in their hands and put some pressure on cable operators and broadcasters. They have a display more suited to 16:9 material than 4:3 TV. And of course, they can do all the wonderful things with the digital media that the iTools and Front Row allow.

I’m not at all surprised that there’s no TV in the mix … yet.

Podcasting …

konrad — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 09:30:49 +0000

Replacing writers block with total silence.