davextreme: June 2009

30 June 2009

Grant Morrison Interviews

I don’t want to link to every interview in del.icio.us, so I’ve started a blog on Tumblr to which I’ll post links to Morrison interviews I find. May still post some here, of course.

Mac OS X 10.4: How to prevent .DS_Store file creation over network connections

I’ve read this isn’t a problem for 10.5 (Leopard), but good to note for future reference.

29 June 2009

Twitter Favorites and Retweets

I think Twitter clients should adopt a new practice: show me tweets that people I follow mark as “favorites” in my timeline. Most clients already provide a view that shows me posts from my friends, replies to me, and my direct messages. Favorites are fairly underutilized by Twitter clients. Favrd collects tweets that have been starred by multiple people for some fairly entertaining reading, but mostly I don’t have easy access to posts that my friends mark as favorites, and it’d likely be interesting information.

In fact, I think it could eliminate the need for the practice of “retweeting”. Right now, if a friend of a friend posts something he thinks is worth sharing, my friend might repost that tweet so that his friends (me including) can see it. So if my friend’s friend has posted this:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

My friend’s retweet, using the most popular syntax, might read:

RT @username: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”

(I don’t particularly like that syntax. I don’t think it’s very intuitive. “RT” is an acronym that’s completely unique to Twitter, so it’s unlikely a new user will figure out that it means “retweet”. And even if they do, it’s not a term that very adequately describes what’s going on, that my friend is quoting one of his friend’s tweets. I’d prefer something like:

“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” — @username

…but I digress.)

Syntax issues aside, retweeting adds lot of clutter to Twitter. Imagine that I follow 20 friends, and many of those follow someone else who I don’t know. If that someone else posts something retweet-worthy, I end up seeing the same quote 15 times on my timeline. And likely not all 15 at once. Maybe 10 within a few minutes of the original, then 4 more an hour later, and maybe the last one three days later when that person gets back from vacation. So I get a quote from someone I don’t follow that keeps echoing across my timeline. Even worse, sometimes people retweet retweets. (None of this is a problem I’m personally having with my friends on Twitter, but it’s not hypothetical.)

It’s not that there isn’t value in retweeting. It’s good to point out that you like what someone else wrote. That’s what social networking is about. But I think there’s a better way to show your appreciation for someone, and I think using Twitter’s preexisting favorite feature is the way to do it. For one, it’s more persistent. You can go to twitter.com/username/favorites and see every public post that user’s ever starred. A retweeted post will disappear off the front page over time with nothing differentiating it from any other post authored by the retweeter, but there’s a record of a favorite.

How could Twitter clients present favorites more… favorably? I picture that Twitterrific would probably throw them inline with the rest of my friends’ posts, but in a different color. Tweetie would probably add a star icon to the left sidebar. Birdfeed would do something subtle, I’m sure. (It’s a playground!) Potentially the clients could scrape some metadata and come up with a clever way to show who marked that tweet as a favorite, or represent visually how many people had marked it. Maybe they’d bump it up top whenever a new friend starred it, or maybe it’d be better to keep it at the timestamp of the original post (something a retweet can’t represent).

So, summary: marking a post as a favorite shows that you like it. Twitter doesn’t support a good way to get that “this is good” message out to your friends. Twitter clients could easily represent this information. Doing this would obviate the need to share that you like a post by retweeting it, which adds noise, too much of which makes it hard to find the good stuff. Marking someting as a favorite also conveys more information than a retweet, because it can be aggregated and found later. Just an idea, but I think a good one.

Update: a short follow-up post, on the potential difficulties of implementing this idea.

26 June 2009

HD Movie comparisons

Side-by-side, you can see the difference between Apple TV, cable, and Blu-Ray videos, even though they’re all billed as “HD”.

25 June 2009

Insert Clever Title Here (Maybe "Too Much Meets the Eye"?)

While ripping apart the new movie, Roger Ebert very adroitly explains the problem with how the movie Transformers look:

From its origin as a children’s toy through its evolution in TV animation (1984) and the 2007 movie. It has grown steadily more complex, apparently feeding on larger and larger junk yards. [The movie Transformer] is now too much to comprehend, especially in Bay’s typical average shot length of not much over one second.

I don’t entirely hate how the new ones look. I get that Bay wanted to move away from the blocky look of the original series, but in doing so, all the bots look the same. They’re just a mess of tubing and metal. It’s hard to tell them apart during frantic action sequences, and they’ve gone so far from their original forms that it robs me of some of the fun recognition of a childhood toy brought to life by movie magic.

Peter Cullen’s voice still does it for me, though.

Links: Ebert’s review and essay, and io9’s must-read review.

(I don’t know that I’ll go see the new movie, by the way. For my $10 Moon would be an unquestionably better choice, but maybe I’ll be in the mood to kill a few brain cells this weekend.)

A Rooting Interest in the Bottom Line

The Nationals are seeing a great surge in attendance from visiting fans rooting against them. It’s easy to get to DC from Philly, New York, or Boston, and it’s cheaper to get good seats here.

The blue and the green

Wild optical illusion.

Sour Outlook – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

Sour Outlook

The next version of Outlook takes a major step back in Web compatibility.

24 June 2009

stevenf.com - My loving homage to every breathless unboxing...

stevenf.com - My loving homage to every breathless unboxing…

Hilarious. Worth watching all the way to the end to see every single thing that’s inside the box.

19 June 2009

Stanley Kubrick 1928 - 1999

Amazing archive of essays.

YouTube - Arrested Development Documentary: Final Trailer - Updated

Arrested Development Documentary: Final Trailer

Despite my love of the show, I think the number of episodes it ended up being is about perfect.

Why the newspaper still beats the Amazon Kindle

Sadly: “But both versions of the Kindle are missing what makes print newspapers such a perfect delivery vehicle for news: graphic design.” Hopefully they can improve on this in time.

Innovative Nintendo game help system to debut this year

I actually really like this idea. I hate giving up on a game I paid good money for, but no matter how hard they try, there will be frustrating levels that you just want to skip.

Tilting at Windmills on the Captain America 600 story

Long but interesting piece on how Marvel intentionally kept information from its retailers in the hopes a slow news day would sell comics, despite the retailers not knowing how many issues to order.

Glyphboard

Handy webpage you can add to your iPhone’s home screen that lets you copy special characters to the phone’s clipboard.

17 June 2009

Dinosaurs saying, "hey."

Dinosaurs saying, “hey.”

15 June 2009

Jeff Bezos: Kindle Books and Readers Are Separate Businesses - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Jeff Bezos: Kindle Books and Readers Are Separate Businesses

I’m glad to hear this. A standard of some sorts for ebooks would help people designing devices know what their users are going to see, so that eventually ebook designers know what constrains they’re dealing with.

13 June 2009

An Error Occurred Communicating With Netflix

I’ve been using Netflix’s Instant Queue feature on my TiVo for a few weeks. It works fairly well except for occasional stops to rebuffer, but last week I started getting this message: “An error occurred communicating with Netflix. Please try again.” I called Netflix support and they had me delete the Netflix connection from my TiVo’s “Video on Demand” menu and then connect it again, and now it works. I think what happened is that my TiVo’s IP address changed (which can happen occasionally when the device or the router restarts) and Netflix got confused.

10 June 2009

Easter Eggs in Pixar's Up

Easter Eggs in Pixar’s Up

09 June 2009

iTunes Script to Download Available Purchases

If you subscribe to a season pass of a show in iTunes, you can set Mail to run this script whenever you get an email that a new episode is available. It’ll have iTunes download the episode and then delete the message.

08 June 2009

Viewing a TV death in four acts

The stages that a TV show goes through during its life.

05 June 2009

Marie Mundaca on designing books for David Foster Wallace

Book design is likely one of the most underappreciated arts, but I find it fascinating.

iPhone Video Chatting

(Just doing some fanciful thinking about an iPhone with video.)

If a new iPhone comes out that has a built-in video camera, it’s not a leap to imagine they’d introduce an iChat app with it that lets you transmit video while you talk. Problem is, the camera’s on the opposite side of the phone from the screen, so if you point it at yourself, you can’t see the other person’s video. They could put two cameras on it, with one facing toward you, but I don’t see that happening. Maybe instead it’d more one-way in design. The idea that you would be talking to someone and want them to be able to see something cute your cat’s doing or whatever. You take the phone away from your ear (Maybe it automatically switches to speaker even), hit “send video”, and then point the camera at it. Your friend gets the video in realtime, and then you go back to talking. It’s not video chat, but honestly, how useful is video chat? Seeing someone’s face adds a little to the conversation, but not a whole lot, and it means you’re devoting your eyes to the task and not doing the stuff many people do when they talk on the phone like fold laundry, play video games, etc.

I guess Belkin or someone could sell a little video iPhone conference call stand. You’d put your iPhone in it and it would have a few mirrors to get your face into the phone’s camera while still letting you face the front toward you. Or of course a snap-on front-facing camera accessory for $50.

Of course every Mac has video chat built in already, and I don’t know that people use that often. Partly just because my phone can ring at any point, but I need to have my computer awake and be signed into iChat to receive a video chat invitation. Maybe a video iPhone could let me receive a call on my phone and then transfer it to my Mac? The conversation could keep going through Bluetooth but I’d get the video on my Mac with its iSight camera in a better position to have a face-to-face conversation.

Never Use Real Names in the Field

I love this Frank Quitely panel from Batman & Robin 1. Look at the body language, how Robin has his arms crossed like the indignant little snot he is. And the dialogue, how obnoxious he sounds. Then Dick/Batman’s response, trying to teach Robin a few things. He’s been there before, sitting in the Robin chair as Bruce Wayne taught him the same lessons. And then the mini punchline, “I’d have killed for a flying Batmobile when I was Robin.” There’s a levity there that writers didn’t seem to be able to give Bruce Wayne after the 80s.

That, and I do like the actual topic they’re discussing. I hate when comics depict characters with super secret identities yelling each other’s real names to each other in the middle of crowded cities. Batman takes this stuff seriously, like special ops military do. He knows to use codenames in the field so that people can’t overhear their identities. I enjoyed parts of Brad Meltzer’s Justice League of America story, but all the characters calling each other “Clark” and “Bruce” and “Diana” bothered me. It’s one thing for them to know who each other are, but I don’t want to see them signing birthday cards for each other.

How many balloons would it take to lift a house like the one in Pixar's Up? - By Nina Shen Rastogi - Slate Magazine

How many balloons would it take to lift a house like the one in Pixar’s Up?

I can just see Mythbusters trying to get the budget to buy all those balloons.

04 June 2009

Green Day on The Tonight Show

http://www.hulu.com/watch/75652/the-tonight-show-with-conan-obrien-tue-jun-2-2009?c=2233

Green Day appeared on Tuesday night’s Tonight Show, and it was an amazing performance. This is why they’ve been my favorite band since I was 14.

Mix an Exploding Drink - Wired How-To Wiki

Freeze Mentos into ice cubes and serve them in Diet Coke. Preferably at an outdoor event, I’d think.

The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien - Twitter Tracker (06/02/09)

The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien - Twitter Tracker (06/02/09)

Loved this bit from Tuesday night.

03 June 2009

Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions

Cool Guys Don’t Look at Explosions

02 June 2009

Movies In Frames does 2001

Great way to pick out a motif.

Kindle Content Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Kindle Content Design

As I’ve argued before, I think newspapers could go far on the Kindle (and other such devices). There are some good guidelines here for design, but I wonder how they’d change between the Kindle and the DX? With the DX you can more closely copy the print layout. Would that be better?

The Personal Journal Of Doogie Howser, M. D.

Terrorism, Domestic and Foreign

I dislike using “terrorist” as a boogeyman label, but there are some interesting questions here.