Archive for the ‘Web’ category

Features for Twitter for Mac

March 10th, 2011

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. :-)

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Zeitungs-Websites

March 2nd, 2011

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.

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Posted in Technology, Web

Why IMAP is a good model for cloud services

February 10th, 2011

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.

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Posted in Technology, Web

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

September 16th, 2010

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, …)

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URL shortening, a new approach

June 14th, 2010

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.

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Posted in Web

Google Browser Sync — noch eine Firefox-Erweiterung

June 9th, 2006

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.

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Posted in Technology, Web