Prior to today I had only listened to Free Music once, and it didn’t do much for me. Today it’s a completely different story. Now I’ve realised that 50 Foot Wave have stepped back from the direction they were going in on Golden Ocean and worked in more obvious melodies whilst bringing in aspects of Throwing Muses that made that band unique.
Too busy concentrating to write something sensible about the following tracks of the day. One’s melancholy and the other’s ravey. Guess which is which..
Apparently Vista will have a feature which “searches over a Wi-Fi connection for other Vista users nearby and then sets up a peer-to-peer network with them. The tool is meant mostly to enable laptop users to share applications and files, among other things.”
Gosh. Bonjour for Windows. Which you can get already, and which has been around on the Mac since 2002.
The same article states that virtual folders (i.e. Smart Folders) will be in the background because it “was a bit too much for some of its beta testers”.
There will also be a “protected Administrator” mode where “people will have to change it to full administrator level to perform certain tasks, such as installing an application. The operating system will warn the person when full privileges are needed.” Which implies that if you’re a full Administrator you won’t need to confirm your access privileges. Although “In the upcoming Vista preview, any action that requires full privileges will be displayed with a shield around it.”
A List Apart has published an article on Web 3.0. You read right. In it, Jeffrey Zeldman expresses his hatred of the hype surrounding Web 2.0. Correctly, he implicates that Web 2.0 seems to apply to any first-to-market web application developed using AJAX and (often) Ruby on Rails, seemingly developed to get quick bucks. I couldn’t care less about Web 2.0. It’s just a daft term which means nothing. Everything on the web that is an application is just that: an application. The implementation technology is irrelevant, because fundamentally the interactivity is driven by deciding how much of the application is to be delivered at the client-end. The implication being that the more that is provided at the client-end, the better it is.
AJAX has come in for some criticism. The biggest outcry is that it is nothing new, which is correct. Asynchronous Javascript has been available since the XMLHttpRequest popped-up. But when Jesse James Garrett called it AJAX, everyone started nodding their heads, realising that there was this tranche of technology that no-one was taking advantage of. Hence the hype.
It’s not about XML either. As far as AJAX is concerned that’s just a way of delivering information between server and client. The real benefit of AJAX comes from the asynchronous delivery of content into an existing web page, using the Javascript DOM and CSS.
You don’t need Ruby on Rails – any server-side language will do – but you do need a brain… Jeffrey Zeldman has two more problems with AJAX:
Wireframing is a design technique used to show, and/or prototype, every click through on a website. If you’re trying to wireframe an AJAX-based application, you’re using the wrong tool. 37 Signals think the best way is to write notes on your designs to convey all of the possibilities to your engineers. But this is rubbish. If you have designers and engineers that work like this, then you shouldn’t let either team anywhere near application development. Instead use traditional software design tools and techniques. After all, that’s what you’re producing: an application, a piece of software. Not a website. It’s just delivered using web technology.
Jeffrey writes that he keeps discovering new features in Flickr, some by clicking on white space. In ma.gnolia, the problem of representing additional features has been resolved by using icons. Wow! What a breakthrough. Funny how all those GUI design books from the 90s got thrown away in the rush to develop. In any case, if you want conventions and signifiers, why not look at applications that run on computers? It’s not magic.
Some of those that have commented on Web 3.0 seem to have a few problems in understanding all of this. Here are some choice points and my thoughts:
I’ll never understand the way some people treat their music collection. Someone has recently complained in Apple Discussions that the iTunes play count doesn’t work because it only counts a play if you’ve played the whole track. This person has many favourite tracks with low play counts because they skip the final seconds which have ‘white noise’ or ‘feedback’.
How can you regard a track as a favourite if you don’t listen to it in its entirety?
Take Galaxie 500. Many of the songs they wrote later in their career were more instrumentally oriented, which meant that some of the songs had lengthy instrumental conclusions. I’ve never been too keen on these, except Listen.., but I would never dream of fast-forwarding through them, or stopping any of them prematurely.
You know, I was right. And oh so early on in the year.
This is taken from her 1995 debut album Dear Sir. It’s minimal in a Sonic Youth style. The guitars desperately try to break free but can’t, and Chan Marshall veers between singing and wailing.
Everyone knows about spam in blogs, right? Comments that come in from anonymous sources trying to sell things, promote web sites etc.
Today, whilst idly clicking ‘next blog’ on Blogger I discovered a spam blog. A blog created and update solely by a spambot. Trouble is, although it has links in it, those links just take you to other spam blogs. So there doesn’t seem to be any point to them.
Here’s a question: Which of the following websites provides the more comprehensive review of the Disney takeover of Pixar?
Kathleen Edwards:
All the words you had
Planted seeds inside your head
Just waiting on a rainy day
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