This Is Locomotion - Design, Code, and News

I just finished reading an article by Paul Graham (founder of  Viaweb aka. Yahoo! Store) on the downfall of Yahoo, and how it went from being one of the brightest lights on the Internet to a company that has now been declining in power and influence for years.

When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.

What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn’t: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.

Read the full article on What happened to Yahoo.

Perhaps his biggest pointer for technology startups is that they can’t afford not to have a hacker centric culture, which in his opinion is one of the many factors that had an important part to play in the downfall of Yahoo. For anyone interested in technology (or the tech business in general), his article is definitely a must-read.

Today I came across an interesting translation app for Ruby on Rails called Tolk. Tolk is a Rails engine designed to facilitate the translators doing the dirty work of translating your application to other languages. It gives translators a slick little web interface for translating words and phrases into whatever language you are needing help translating.

I think we’ll be implementing a Tolk instance to translate MediaCore, which is our open source video cms project. We’ll provide a little review of Tolk once we get it setup and running.

Recently Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs wrote an open letter discussing Apple’s stance on Flash. As you may know, Flash is not permitted to play on the iPhone, iPod, or the new iPad. Here are a few choice words on the matter from Mr. Jobs:

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind. Source: Apple

A representative of the browser software company Opera also chimed in with a few thoughts:

“But at Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology. Flash does have its purposes and will have its purposes, the same as [Microsoft's] Silverlight and others, especially for dynamic content. But flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage etcetera – you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there’s a reason for that.” Source: TechRadar

Even Microsoft’s General Manager for the Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, had nothing positive to say about the future of Flash:

“The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.” Source: Microsoft Developers Network

Apple has thwarted Adobe’s efforts at every step of the game in bringing Flash to the iPhone platform, and Adobe is now responding by requesting an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple’s programming tools.

Adobe really ought to take Jobs’ advice, see the writing on the walls, and start building HTML5 tools instead of wasting it’s time complaining.

At Simple Station we couldn’t be happier to see Flash slowly going the way of the dodo. We stand behind open standards, fast loading interfaces, and interactions that make good common sense; we will continue to recommend open-source solutions over Flash to all of our clientele.

One of my favourite applications a the moment is fluid.app, which essentially can turn any website you regularly visit into a Mac OS X application. I used to use NetNewsWire for all my RSS needs, but after spending some time with Google Reader I decided to convert.

The main selling point was the combination of using Google Reader with Byline, which is a Google Reader app for the iPhone. Since now I have a laptop, a desktop, and an iPhone one of the main issues I was having was that I wanted to be able to synchronize what I was reading. NetNewsWire didn’t cut it. The only thing that really irked me with using Google Reader was the fact I was tied to using a browser, there wasn’t an app for it (that functioned the way the web app does), and I found the default Google theme to be incredibly dull. After some quick research I discovered Fluid.app and Helvetireader.

Before (Google Reader default):

After (Helvetireader applied):

In this quick tutorial I will show you how I changed Google Reader to use John Hicks’ Helvetireader and build the whole thing inside a Fluid app.

Steps:

1. Download and install Fluid.app
2. Open up fluid.app and fill out the information like in the photo below. Where it asks for the icon you wish to use, you can download a ultra-high-res image of the Google Reader icon. Store the image on your computer, and then add through the file dialogue.
   
3. Press “create” – this will create an application for Google Reader and place it in your applications folder.
4. Startup your new shiny Google Reader Fluid application.
5. Now we will add the Helvetireader theme. Go up to the scripts icon in the menu bar. From the menu choose “open userscripts folder”.
6. Download the following two files: HelvetiReader.user.js and config.xml. Or you can download the zip. Note: Helvetireader 2 is now out!
7. Extract them to the userscript folder. If you have to overwrite the existing config.xml do so.
8. Go to the scripts menu in your new Google Reader Fluid app and click “Manage User Scripts” and check off the option for HelvetiReader.
   
9. Go to the scripts menu and hit the “Reload all User Scripts” option and then close and restart your Google Reader Fluid app
10. Everything should now work perfectly and you will have successfully integrated Helvetireader into Google Reader

On a side note with Helvetireader the sharing menu disappears. If you scroll to the bottom of a post and mouse over where the gear is, the menu appears. I now love the minimalism, but it did take some getting used to.

Thank-you John Hicks!

Today I discovered some fascinating statics from Focus Magazine on the state of the internet today. It is interesting to see that only 7% of bloggers are aged 18-24. When I saw this statistic I began to wonder if the medium is losing popularity with the younger crowd as Facebook and Twitter have gained momentum. It would be interesting to see this infographic plotted over the last 10 years to see how these statistics have changed. Were people aged 18-24 in 2004 blogging more than they are now?

Posting to Locomotion has slowed down over the past week as my team has focused exclusively on the release of our first big Open Source web application codenamed “MediaCore.”

MediaCore is a free open source video, audio, and podcast publishing platform. It is built for organizations who wish to distribute media in a variety of formats on their website while maintaining the ability to control the user experience.

• Check out the project, features and docs at http://getmediacore.com
• View the demo at: http://getmediacore.com/demo
• Watch the screencast on how the product works
• Give us feedback over at Concept Feedback

Over the past year we have built the entire platform from the ground-up to create one of the most cutting-edge podcasting and media platforms available anywhere on the net. In coming months we will be documenting the process of how we created MediaCore, the stumbling blocks we hit along the way, and the lessons we have learned in designing and marketing an Open Source project. It has been an exciting road and we are looking forward to the next few months as the project unfolds.

A huge round of applause should go to Nathan Wright, Anthony Theocharis, and Melanie Wright for all their hard work in making this dream a reality for Simple Station. I couldn’t have done it without them! I would also like to thank the TurboGears development community for the valuable feedback they have provided us with throughout the development process.

We have already enjoyed some early success including a glowing email from Leo Laporte of TWIT.TV, and a whole slew of feedback from various web design agencies. As the project continues to evolve we will be leaning heavily on the community for guidance on design feedback and feature requests.

If you are a fan of MediaCore you might want to consider following us on Twitter or becoming a fan of MediaCore on Facebook

One of the problems in developing large feature-rich AJAX web applications is that page load times can really suffer once you start using the larger JavaScript libraries such as JQuery, MooTools, Prototype, or SWFObject. Most of these libraries are larger than 50Kb in size and once you start combining libraries you can easily add 100Kb+ to your page loads.

At Simple Station we are adding the finishing touches to optimizing our first big open source application and we have been looking for every possible way to optimize the JavaScript we use. Today I came across google.load(), which promises to significantly decrease JavaScript load times.

The benefits of using Google to provide these libraries instead of your own server include:

• Google’s huge CDN (content delivery network) can deliver the file much faster than your own server(s). Since Google has large data centers all over the world, these files will be served from data centers geographically closer to your users. This helps to reduce network latency and works to increase reliability, scalability, and website speed.
• The more sites that include Google’s google.load() API the greater the chance that a user has already has the file cached, thus enabling your site to load faster as the script will not need to be downloaded.
• You save bandwidth as you no longer have to serve the file(s).
• The versioning system that Google has created makes it easy to include specific versions of these libraries.

All you need to utilize Google’s google.load() technology is this JavaScript snippet:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>
google.load('mootools', '1.2.1');
google.load('jquery', '1.3.1');
google.load('jqueryui', '1.5.3');
google.load('prototype', '1.6.0.3');
google.load('scriptaculous', '1.8.2');
google.load('dojo', '1.2.3');
google.load('swfobject', '2.1');
google.load('yui', '2.6.0');

View the complete list of ajax libraries hosted by Google.

The latest version of iTunes may sport a few new improvements but one thing that is certainly not improved is the user interface. Perhaps with Steve Jobs reportedly working solely on the new Apple netbook nobody has applied a critical eye to the latest iTunes release. After getting the upgrade via software update I opened iTunes up and immediately felt a few things were off. Firstly they increased the opacity of the white drop shadows underneath the play, forward, and rewind buttons; while this is a little detail the problem is that it makes the buttons no longer feel like they are inset into the interface. They did the same thing to the volume bar, the coverflow icons, the search box and every other button in the whole interface. Compare the new screenshot above to the old iTunes 8 screenshot and it’s pretty easy to see how they have ruined the subtlety of the buttons. Design is in the details.

Taking a deeper look you can also see how they have ruined the album art preview page by looking at the old album art page and then look at the new album art page. The whole interface is now set on white instead of a solid gray, a hideous black box now outlines each album, the drop shadows are a little too strong and they lost the tabs and the ability to control how big or small the artwork displays.

Oh Apple what are you doing? Did you just hire UI designers from Microsoft?

The latest version of Firefox (version 3.5) has been released this week and features a few substantial new features. Head on over to Mozilla and download the latest and greatest version of my favorite browser. Among other important things such as support for HTML 5 there are new tools for protecting your private data and also several improvements to the underlying engine that increase the performance of web based applications such as Gmail and Google Docs. A worthy update to be sure.

What happens to your website when you type in www.yourwebsite.com? Does it automatically redirect to http://yourwebsite.com or does it keep the www? If it keeps this prefix you are essentially telling Google and other search engines that you are running two websites. Google treats www.yourdomain.com as a seperate website from yourwebsite.com (More information on this issue known as canonicalization).

What should happen is this:
http://www.simplestation.com/

Which automatically reroutes all requests to:
http://simplestation.com/

We’ve had some debate at our office over whether it is better to redirect all http:// traffic to  http://www. or take it out and we’ve decided to go without the www. because if you start using sub domains it starts confusing people when you switch from www.simplestation.com to www.subdomain.simplestation.com.

Additionally www. by the definition of the acronym (world wide web) is redundant since obviously you’re browsing the web when you visit a domain with this prefix. Lastly it just adds unnecessary lines to marketing text. Since yourdomain.com is shorter and simpler than www.yourdomain.com why would you still want to add this unnecessary complexity? More information on this is below. (more…)