The ability to run code in your web browser has given us many great things, such as Google Maps. But once in a while a tiny annoyance will make me long for the days when a browser was just a browser, and not a platform. Today’s annoyance is the trick to place the keyboard focus in a text box when the page loads. Here is a screen-cast of my unscripted rant and demonstration of the effect (1:43).
The main problem with these script tricks is that there’s not a good way to customize them across the board, apart from disabling Javascript entirely. Each web site has its own user interface, even if it’s ostensibly just a document. The example is Atlassian because I happened to be browsing their stuff today, but I’m not picking on them in particular. Actually I’m finding Confluence to be fairly impressive, and (dare I admit it) less clunky for non-technical users than the open source options (the best of which might be Twiki).
Common Craft has a fun and engaging style for presenting “Web 2.0” technologies with paper and white-boards. Found at Presentation Zen, but I chose a different video than the two that appear there. Enjoy “Wikis in Plain English”…
My talk at CCSC seemed to go okay. I took more inspiration this time from Garr’s Presentation Zen blog and book. I have always been relatively pleased with my visuals, I think because I received some good advice early on, and I’ve always had a reasonable sense of design. But this is the first time I let go of some long-cherished approaches (for one, titles on each slide that successively tell the story) and the first time I used ‘full-bleed’ stock photography. Some of the slides also contain videos. Here’s a slide-sorter view of most of the visuals (some redundant progressions elided). Click to embiggen.
I think Garr’s advice worked because this talk is more persuasive than technical. I’m not certain yet how I would adapt a talk about compilers or type theory. But in a sense, all conference talks are persuasive. You just don’t have time to convey the finer technical points in that format, so really the goal is to persuade the audience that your result is worth investigating after the talk is over.
This month, I became a published photographer. Some time ago, Mark Zachry happened across my Australia photos and contacted me about the possibility of using one of them for the cover of an academic book he was co-editing. Mark is a professor of technical communication at the University of Washington, and the book is Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions: Cultural Perspectives on the Regulation of Discourse and Organizations [Amazon] [B&N] [Baywood]. I received a gratis copy of the book at my office address today.
My original photograph.
This is not the first time my photographic work has been used by others; I’m aware of various event tickets, business cards, and presentations. But this is (as far as I know) the first time one of my photographs has been displayed on Amazon and B&N. If you do “search inside” at Amazon and click one page past the cover, you’ll find my photo credit at the bottom of the page. That’s somewhat exciting.
Incidentally, commercial use such as this is not permitted by the default license, so don’t start treating my site as istockphoto! To reproduce my photographic work commercially, you must seek specific permission (as Mark did). If the thrill of having my amateur work appear on Amazon wears off, I may start raising the fee.
Follow-up about BitTorrent: at some point, I read the FAQ and found that for BT to work correctly, one needs to forward ports to overcome the Network Address Translation done by the router. (Would have been easy except that I forgot my router config password and had to reset it.) But after doing that, the number of peers increased significantly, and with it both upload and download rates. That’s more like it!
In my email the other day, I received a message with an image claiming that:
Wow, sounds great, I thought. Where was this when I was doing my thesis research? So is it based on the lambda calculus? I read on:
Ah, that kind of ‘type system’. Come to think of it, the message was from myfonts.com…
I had to see what all the fuss was about. I have been visiting ‘productivity porn’ sites like 43folders and lifehacker (and their associated flickr groups) off and on for a year. And last weekend I finally swung by a Barnes & Noble and picked up a Moleskine grid-lined notebook.
When I first opened it up, the experience was a bit deflating. I caressed the cover. I sniffed the binding. I investigated the pocket in the back. I don’t know what I was expecting… a shining beacon? A choir of angels? I guess it’s impossible not to be a little underwhelmed after the way these things are hyped on the Internets.
So I tried it for a week, sitting aside my usual cheap black-marbled composition book, half full. I carried the Moleskine notebook to meetings and seminars. I did some course planning and sketched some project ideas. I’m just up to page 12, and I have to admit it has grown on me already.
Having grid-lined pages comes in handy. It allows you to write landscape or portrait equally well. It supports very neatly-drawn ad-hoc tables. (I’m tracking meeting-time preferences for members of my committee on one such table.)
But more important is the size: 13 x 21 cm, which is a lot narrower than my old composition books, and a more extreme aspect ratio than even ISO 216 A-series paper. A narrow page is useful for typographical reasons, of course, but even for note-taking it seems to work out well. It’s hard to use my composition books on my lap or otherwise in the absence of a desk… but I guess that’s also partly because of the soft cover.
Anyway, I’d like to write more on my quest (and misadventures) to find suitable tools for project planning and task tracking. LifeBalance was fun for a while, but it doesn’t run on Linux, and the interface is too ‘widgetized’ for my taste. I set myself up on Backpack a few weeks ago; I like its interface and concept but there are certainly drawbacks for realizing the cross-cutting concerns of GTD (project view vs. context view). This morning I’m checking out org-mode for Emacs, and for now I’m amazed, but I’m still reading the manual. I guess once I manage to settle into something truly workable, I’ll write about it here. I’m sure to David Allen it’s a travesty to spend so long chasing down the perfect system rather than just getting things done. But to me it feels like a legitimate (but, so far, unending) meta-project to sharpen my tools.
This TV show advert — plastered all around New York lately — is making me angry. Why?
That curly thing is not an apostrophe! And you don’t have to be a font freak or typography wonk to know the difference. In grade school — before I could distinguish Garamond from Gill Sans, before Adobe Systems was founded — I knew that an apostrophe curved down and to the left.
So how did this happen? Considering that computer keyboards have no ‘left curly single quote’ key — and that probably 98% of all computer users wouldn’t know how to type that character if their lives depended on it — how could this gaffe occur when the apostrophe key is right there on your keyboard?
Yes, you know where I’m going with this: SmartQuotes.™
This is the feature on many word processors and desktop publishers that automatically converts typewriter-style straight quotes into curly ones. Unfortunately, it does a poor job of it, and that’s often worse than not doing the job at all.
Now, I’m not one to ridicule or be offended by home-made garage sale fliers and grocery store signage with their superfluous quotation marks. Er, well, I don’t extensively ridicule them.
But here is a case of a major broadcasting firm with professional graphic artists plastering their large full-color ads across a major city in which you can’t swing a cat without hitting a designer. There’s just no excuse.
P.S., it’s even wrong in the HTML on the web site:
I was looking forward to reading a Slashdot interview with Håkon Wium Le, the inventor of Cascading Style Sheets. Unfortunately, the way the page was rendered, each question was in a monospaced typeface in a little pre-formatted window with a horizontal scroll bar. The horror! If this is what CSS buys us, I want nothing to do with it!
I remember when web sites first started adopting CSS. Browser support was exceptionally poor (it still is if one includes Microsoft IE — as Håkon writes, “standards don’t benefit monopolists”) and the web designers didn’t really know what they were doing with it either. The tell-tale sign of a CSS-based web site in those days was that text overlapped with other text. I presume this was because designers assumed certain fonts at certain sizes, and hard-coded positions of everything based on them. This did not fare well at all with my GNU/Linux/Mozilla setup. Eventually, browser support improved and designers learned better ways to deal with ‘liquid’ layouts and user-selectable font sizes.
Now, though, the capabilities of CSS are somewhat respectable. Sometimes I think it would be helpful to support a notion of ‘glue’ like in TeX. Glue is space that has a natural size, but can potentially shrink and expand as needed, within specified parameters. Or at least, I’d like to be able to specify a width as “3em + 5px,” since one of these measurements is relative to the current font size, and the other isn’t.
I haven’t really looked yet at what is in CSS3; maybe I should.
Some meandering trail of web surfing brought me back to Flickr today, and I wondered whether anyone else is bugged by the square thumbnails — see my post from 5 June — or whether a distaste for machine-cropped 1:1 aspect ratios is just my private obsession.
I found a much more poetic diatribe by Glenn McDonald. He says he prefers an extreme horizontal 3:1 ratio, although I found little evidence of that in his (quite beautiful and well-narrated) galleries. But his explanation of what is happening with Flickr is bang on:
Cropping 4:3s and 3:4s to 1:1 symmetrically is technically trivial, and although it’s aesthetically unreliable in the abstract, the vast majority of amateur photographs are center-weighted, so it usually turns out OK. Actually, the vast majority of amateur photographs are also probably framed too widely, so a little universal symmetrical cropping almost certainly improves more Flickr pictures than it damages.
He goes on to describe how ubiquitous square thumbnails in galleries will shape our own perceptions of what we want, leading ultimately to square-format cameras, and tools that make it even harder to process non-square scenes. One day, even 4:3 will seem ‘extreme’.
This self-reinforcing dependent vogue for square photography is, I think, a machine gain and a human loss. Worse, it’s a sparkly machine-gain that humans are lining up to lose.
He concludes with a rousing appeal to designers and developers to make our tools less sparkly — keep the flaws conspicuous, and we’ll be more likely to address them.
We make our tools in the easiest shapes, and then we accommodate their limitations, and then we hone them to perfect their limits, and then we forget that this is not how we wanted to live.
Flickr is pretty popular as a social photo management application. I end up visiting it at least weekly, although I’ve never put my own photos on it. One thing that bothered me about Flickr from the very beginning is that they use square thumbnails all over the place. That is, they ignore the natural aspect ratio of your photos, and cut a square segment out of it for use as the thumbnail.
Occasionally, the effect is somewhat disturbing. I guess it’s natural to see people’s heads cut off in amateur snaps, but what about the photo all the way to the right? Is it a tile plaque in the washroom of a deviant sex club? Or something altogether more innocent? Click through to find out!
The auto-cropped square thumbnails bug me because I happen to think the aspect ratio is an essential part of the photographer’s statement. I do actually take the time to crop and otherwise post-process (some of) my photos, which is one reason it can take so long for me to get them published. But still I think it’s worthwhile. Here are some before/after examples…
Before: a pretty scene, but my parents are so far away!
After: they are more recognizable, but without losing the feel of the surroundings.
Before: just some people milling around, but there is no clear subject.
After: I chose the subject in post-production.
Before: I kept the shutter open and successfully blurred a jogger across the center of the frame… but the wires overhead severely detract.
After: not only are the wires cleaned up, but the cinematic aspect ratio emphasizes the motion.
I wonder whether any of the Flickr enthusiasts are the same who complain about the aspect ratio of TV movies or pan-and-scan DVDs. Don’t get me wrong: as an amateur web designer myself, I fully understand the convenience of square thumbnails. You can stack them into very neat grids. You can design little user interface widgets around them without having to fret about a wide variety of image sizes. But in my opinion it’s really worthless if your thumbnail does not accurately represent the image itself.
8 June 2006 update: Serendipity! A useful article on cropping for impact (with good examples) just appeared at the Digital Photography School.
Designer Khoi Vinh posted an idea for a sort of word non-processor application, which he called BlockWriter. Though it doesn’t exist yet, he secured the domain name already… a nice touch. The motivation, as he describes it, is this:
I noticed a few years ago that some serious writers, at least in the early drafting stages of their work, were turning to manual typewriters as a method of sidestepping distractions… There’s no email to check on a typewriter, no beeps and pop-up reminders from other applications, and no access whatsoever to the Internet and its tantalizing abundance of productivity-killing diversions.
What’s more, a manual typewriter is a powerful antidote to authorial dawdling, that propensity to continually re-edit a sentence or a paragraph — thereby imparting the feeling of working without really working — instead of continuing to write new sentences or paragraphs instead. Unlike word processors or even the simplest text editors, manual typewriters don’t allow you to easily re-edit, insert and revise a sentence once it’s been committed to paper. This makes for an entirely different writing experience: the ideas come first, and the act of finessing them, of word-smithing, comes after all the ideas have been set to paper.
The application would have essentially two purposes (which could be served by separate apps). First, it would block out other distractions, perhaps going as far as to block the network. Second, it would pretty much act like a typewriter: the cursor moves forward only. You could use backspace to cross out previous words like this but otherwise you just keep typing and get the ideas out.
I can usually tune out distractions for long enough to come up with a few paragraphs at a time, assuming I’m actually interested in what they say. But I suffer much more from this latter problem: endlessly tweaking the words and the sentences. Writing in the small. Usually it’s more productive to get everything down, and then go back and tweak. The only way my dissertation got written was with me in a coffee shop with pen and paper (and, incidentally, no internet).
One of my favorite toys as a kid—before we had a home computer—was a basic IBM typewriter. It was electric, but didn’t do much more with the power than make the hammers move. I’d use it to write stories and plays, type up recipes, etc. Yes, I’m that much of a nerd. It has been so many years, that I never really thought about how a typewriter forces you to work.
Word processors (even their 1980s incarnations) encouraged endless tweaking of the words, and their WYSIWYG successors similarly encouraged tweaking of the format. It’s great that the software we have now lets us go back to insert, delete, and rearrange our text without retyping everything or sacrificing whole forests. But perhaps that flexibility has costs as well…?
Anyway, it will be interesting to see if anything comes of the idea. A hacker with more Emacs skills than I have could probably whip up a blockwriter-mode in under an hour. The first step would be to delete all keys bound to anything other than self-insert-command.
No, not proof of a theorem… a pre-print from Elsevier, the publisher of my MetaOCaml paper. It arrived by email this morning. So far, practically all of my publications are with ACM or Springer. This is the first that will appear in ScienceDirect. I almost feel like a real scientist.
Without digressing too much on the role of scientific publishers in the Internet age, one thing I do enjoy is getting back a proof that looks like a proper article. Whether it’s due to the banner, or little widgets they add in the header and footer, or just a typeface other than Computer Modern or Times, at least it looks like it was touched by a publishing house since I submitted it.
I’m reminded of visiting technical and academic bookstores when I was still an undergrad, or the first years of grad school. I would pick up a slim $90, 180-page treatise by some professor, and be disappointed when it looked exactly like what I could have printed out myself if only I had access to the .tex file: the Computer Modern typeface and LaTeX book class, with all the default settings. Not that these are necessarily ugly, they’re just not special. For $90 a copy, is it too much to ask that the publisher hire a designer?
The strange thing with this paper is that I used the LaTeX document class provided by Elsevier for my manuscript, and it looked like garbage. It was full of widows and orphans and huge irregular spaces between paragraphs. One of the reviewers even commented, “this can’t possibly be done by TeX.” I was indeed embarrassed by the typography, and I could have fixed it, but I chose not to stray from the publisher’s settings.
Maybe their public document class is intentionally crummy. That way, when you get back the real proofs, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. It will look like they actually did something in exchange for you relinquishing your copyright…
Here is one reason of many that PowerPoint makes you look like a total amateur: it cannot kern fonts. Just look at the distance between the initial capital letters and the rest of the words below. ‘Yale’ is the most egregious example, and utterly embarrassing if you’re representing Yale and this horrid bit of text appears on your title slide. No, there is not a space character between the ‘Y’ and the ‘a’… PPT just renders it that way.
The default way to lay out letters digitally is to use the bounding box of each letter. Just imagine the smallest rectangle that encloses the whole letter. And then stack those rectangles together like books on a shelf. This works for most pairs of letters, but sometimes they look terrible that way.
To fix this, all digital fonts contain information about pairs of letters that should be moved slightly closer together than they would otherwise appear. This is called kerning. Digital fonts have been designed with kerning pairs, and computers have set type with them, since at least the 1970s. And here it is 30 years later… I guess Microsoft didn’t get the memo.
The strange thing is, Microsoft Word can kern the fonts, but inexplicably it is turned off by default. You have to go into the menus and ask for it. If I ask PowerPoint about kerning, it draws a total blank:
Now, you may argue that people who have not studied typography or design won’t notice this. So, using PowerPoint would only make you look like an amateur designer to other designers, not an amateur computer scientist or chemist or management consultant.
But I believe this is dead wrong. People who haven’t studied design can’t identify problems like this, but I’m pretty sure they notice them at some level. An audience member will come away thinking my visual aids are very professional looking and yours are crappy. He doesn’t necessarily know whether it was the layout, the color scheme, the choice of font, or the software itself. But the impression left by your visual aids will certainly impact your message. Here is the same text, set in the same size, in Apple’s Keynote software. Notice that the ‘e’ is tucked slightly under the ‘T’ in ‘Team’.
I rant about this problem to myself whenever I see it on someone else’s slides, which is basically whenever I attend a talk. I was prompted to post this today because we had an awards ceremony for students last night, and I had to stare at the word “V aledictorian” in PowerPoint for a while.
Say no to PowerPoint, or at least start bugging Microsoft to fix this!
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