Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, on user interface and user experience, and looking at desktop user interfaces holistically:

In the open source community, we celebrate having pieces that ‘do one thing well’, with lots of orthogonal tools compounding to give great flexibility. But that same philosophy leads to shortcomings on the GUI / UX front, where we want all the pieces to be aware of each other in a deeper way.

…

It’s only by looking at the whole, that we can design great experiences. And only by building a community of both system and application developers that care about the whole, that we can make those designs real. So, thank you to all of you who approach things this way, we’ve made huge progress, and hopefully there are some ideas here for low-hanging improvements too 🙂

This approach is why I find myself most aligned with where Ubuntu is taking the Linux desktop. The changes they have introduced to the UI over recent versions have been controversial — sometimes even breaking with revered Unix-y traditions — but I broadly think they are the right decisions to move the platform forward.

With mobile computing taking the lion’s share of industry attention, who is doing the thinking on innovating the traditional desktop? Ubuntu.

I will readily acknowledge that this kind of traditional desktop computing will probably be less important in the future than it has been in the last decade.

I don’t think that means no-one will want to use a desktop. I certainly don’t think it is a reason to stop innovating.

The recent creative industry pat-on-the-back event The Oscars^[1] has got me thinking about creativity, art and business.

We have mega-über-super-stars, and struggling artists. And that seems to be it.

There are some fantastic people and businesses that are exceptions, but there are still relatively few ‘little guys’ able to make a comfortable living from their art (in a way that respects their customers too). ^[2]

Where is the middle ground? Is it really the case that it must be this way, or is it the case that Hollywood and The Big Three and their policies are stifling the creative start-up?

» Read the rest of this post…

There has been quite a lot of recent press coverage of the Next Gen. report, by Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope. One of the key issues raised has been the way that computing is taught in British secondary schools.

At the moment, Information and Communication Technology, ICT, is essentially a crash course in how to use Microsoft Office. That is, for many secondary school pupils, almost the entirety of the coverage of computing in the curriculum.

[The curriculum] focuses in ICT on office skills rather than the more rigorous computer science and programming skills which high-tech industries… need

For someone passionate about technology and computers in many different ways, my experience of this manufactured ‘ICT’ subject in secondary school was utterly, utterly uninspiring. I don’t think this was a particular fault of the school, I think it was a systemic failure of the curriculum.

It is, of course, important that school-leavers are capable of the kind of basic office productivity tasks on computers. These are skills that many employers will need and I don’t question the educational value of that for a moment, even if it is a little dull.

For someone like me, however, this ‘ICT’ subject completely failed to recognise and encourage my talent and enthusiasm in computing. I therefore developed my skills outside of school. It is troubling, though, that there will be many other children who may have huge potential in this field who may not have opportunities to develop computing — computing beyond merely using a word processor — outside of school.

Research by e-skills UK has shown that young people find the existing ICT curriculum to be boring, poorly taught, too basic, and perhaps most importantly, too narrowly focused on office applications. This has a knock-on effect on their perceptions of computing- related careers as poor, dull, repetitive and low-paying.

It is again, very concerning that ‘ICT’ is creating a perception of computing as mundane, tedious and with little future potential. The job of the education system isn’t just to produce qualified people — it is to inspire people in subjects they might not have even considered before, and to develop and nurture the talents of the individual.

I am sure there are individual schools, and individual teachers, doing a better job than the curriculum mandates, and for that, they should be applauded.

The good news is that this report is being listened to by the UK government:

… the Government recognises that the current ICT programme is insufficiently rigorous and in need of reform.

I hope that this country can make progress in this area. The current state of affairs for computing in UK secondary schools is not just disappointing, there is a real danger of missing great opportunities — for individuals, and for the whole country.

Image is a modified version of Keyboard, by Flickr user john_a_ward. The image is licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

I’m a huge believer in having control over content that I purchase. I refused to use the iTunes Store, which otherwise provided the best online music experience, until the songs were available without the DRM restrictions hitherto demanded by the rights holders. I still prefer the humble DVD^[1] to other ways of getting video which are bound by the artificial (and ineffective^[2]) restrictions demanded by the rights holders.

I was interested to read Diane Coyle’s assessment on many of the shortcomings of e-books. I’m not a big reader myself, but books, electronic or otherwise, are an important part of society and of culture — and I too share some concerns that today’s e-books systems fail to offer important functionality that analogue books have had for generations.

Sharing, lending and borrowing of paper books is an important part of the whole book experience. Unfortunately, it’s something that is either obstructed entirely by today’s commercial e-book systems, or is an optional (and unavoidably platform-specific) feature that the publisher can refuse to offer on a whim.

Diane Coyle’s observation on this situation:

You can’t share books on a device. I can’t even get e-books I bought on one device onto another device I own, although no doubt one of my domestic IT support staff (sons) could do it for me. I certainly can’t read the e-books my husband downloaded because he’s onto his next e-book on his iPad. E-books torpedo domestic and friendly sharing.

Multiple, competing proprietary standards for reading books, where users have no ability to move their content from one format to another, is a really awful idea. We are inclined to accept this kind of incompatibility in newer media forms until one format wins — Betamax and VHS, HD-DVD and Blu-ray — but there’s never been incompatibility between owning hardback and paperback books, for example!

» Read the rest of this post…

And this is why whatever browser you use to access this site, you will always be given exactly the same page.

Comic is XKCD — Server Attention Span. The comic is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.5.

Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog 1 for iPhone (UK iTunes App Store link). Yep, that’s right — the original game from 1991 for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.

It’s a fun game, albeit one which I’m not really very good at, having only made it to Spring Yard Zone so far (even with the assistance of the Level Select ‘feature’).

One thing that struck me about this game, though, is the technical limitations of the original hardware this game was designed for. When you have a 7.61 MHz 68K processor, a total of 512 colours (only 64 of which can be on the same screen at the same time) and sound that has to be generated through a rather primitive Programmable Sound Generator chip, you have a lot of things to work around and a lot of restrictions to work within to create a fun, entertaining video game.

Despite all these technical limitations — in fact, even because of them, you end up with an artform that becomes uniquely beautiful, because it is so technically constrained. The fact that all the sound has to be generated by this one chip, all the colours used have to be painstakingly thought out ahead of time so that the palettes will work out and you have the colours you need, the fact that the whole game has to fit inside a few megabytes — it enforces simplicity.

It’s something that’s easy to forget about when we can carry around extraordinary processing power in our pockets and the computers we use at our desks have such technical capability.

Video game programming twenty years ago demanded a different mindset — efficiency, simplicity and a degree of pragmatism about making things fit around the limitations. This game for me sums up where the binary, definite nature of digital technology, with all of its 1990s limitations, can meet with the full expression of human creativity.

• All the iOS devices — iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, are built around Cocoa Touch.
• Snow Leopard brought 64-bit support to the Mac mainstream for Cocoa applications. Carbon applications are clearly on the way out and have been since the release of Leopard in 2007.
• The third major release of iTunes since Leopard came out is still Carbon and still only 32-bit. (Perhaps an even greater irony is that there is a 64-bit Windows version of iTunes.)

Is this a bit of a nitpick? Probably. Does it really matter what the framework underneath iTunes is if it is being improved? Possibly not. Is iTunes a huge, vital part of Apple’s iPod/iPhone/iTunes Store infrastructure that they are naturally unwilling to make huge changes to? Absolutely.

But I really, really wanted iTunes 10 to be ‘iTunes X’ — not just another major release with some new features, but a drastic rewrite of the application (for the Mac anyway) in Cocoa. The app’s performance has been improved with recent versions, but iTunes is still the one application that ships with Macs that feels out of place — the interface is jarring and not fluid, the app frequently hangs for several seconds for no reason and there is ancient UI debris hanging around. (Those first two might be better with this release, I don’t know, but the Mac OS 9-style context menu cursor lives on.)

Ah well, maybe iTunes 11? 🙁

Further to my post explaining why I don’t like centralised comments systems such as Disqus, this blog post by Jacob Barkdull echoes some of my opinions on the service — both from a technical point of view and from the ideological standpoint that for something as critical as comments, if it’s on your website, it should be under your control.

Disqus is one central controlling entity, if Disqus decides to do “maintenance” or they begin to have server problems, everyone using Disqus comments now has not only no way visitors may leave comments, but also no way to display previously posted comments. And if worst comes to worst and Disqus disappears (as is possible with companies) everyone is left without comments, unlike if the comments are controlled by each “webmaster”.

…

I find issue with the added near 4 second pause on every page just to display Disqus comments, Disqus handles this well, but not well enough in my opinion. Because when pages load with Disqus comments there appears a little “Loading…” message, that eventually gets replaced by the comments and the form to post comments, the problem with the way they do this is when you refresh the page it jolts, kicking the scroll down the length of the comments until Disqus has loaded where it then kicks the scroll back up the length of the comments.

UPDATE, 2011-08-29: Ben Vinegar, a Front-end Engineer at Disqus, has responded to this post. It is apparently possible for users to export their comments to a local database, display them for users without JavaScript and it is mentioned that the “scary red error box isn’t sending the right message”. These are welcome steps forward to addressing my dislike of the service.

I don᾿t like centralised commenting systems like Disqus and IntenseDebate. I am disappointed whenever I see a site using them; I want to use this post to explain why.

The Attraction to Centralised Commenting

Services like Disqus and IntenseDebate are marketed as being ‘better’ platforms for enabling commenting on blogs and articles. You essentially outsource the comments on your blog or website and have them handled by the service.

It is an attractive idea because you can outsource the more difficult things like handling spam comments and so on, and because it allows users to have a single identity with the commenting service and then use that single identity on many sites.

Making Commenting on the Web Proprietary

The primary reason that I do not like such services is because they seek to make commenting on the web proprietary. The web should be open. The web is open, for the most part, and I think it should remain that way.

Centralising commenting on your site is taking the control over the discussion over your content and handing that control to a third-party.

I think comments on blogs and so on should be as open and as simple as possible — enter a name and email address and just write a comment. Yes, that way of doing things is more open to absue such as the misuse of identity and spam and it doesn’t have the advantages of being able to connect comments from a single person together.

» Read the rest of this post…

Facebook is one of the most important social platforms on the internet today. I joined it probably several years ago now, not long after Facebook Applications were introduced.

Those of you that follow me on my personal Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible account, @strategyoracle will probably know that I keep that account protected — i.e. only those that request to follow me and I allow can read my tweets. I do that because that is the way that I feel most comfortable using the service and it is how Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible is most useful to me. I have tried using that account both publicly and privately, and ultimately it was more useful and more comfortable to keep it protected.

On Facebook, I have also used the privacy options to make Facebook a tool that is useful to me and that I feel comfortable with. I was able to keep most of my information inside a small group of trusted friends and in doing so, I felt comfortable using it and sharing with it.

In recent years, though, the degree of control that Facebook gives you has eroded. This EFF post demonstrates how the service and its privacy policy has changed in this respect since 2005. I have found it more and more difficult to feel comfortable using Facebook in the context of these changes.

The final straw came today.

Now, it seems that any ‘connection’ that you make — whether it be with a friend, or a page that you ‘like’, has to be public.

Facebook came up with a screen asking me to make many ‘page’ connections public, based on my interests and activities that I had previously entered. Even leaving aside the fact that it showed me interests I had previously deleted from my profile, I was horrified to learn that unchecking all of the boxes to share the information actually removed all that information from my profile! There is now apparently no way to restrict information such as my activities and interests and only show that to trusted people. It’s share all, or have nothing, when it comes to this information.

It is quite clear to me that this is now the choice:

You either use Facebook as publicly as they want you to (even as that changes in the future), or you don’t use it at all.

I choose the latter. Assuming I don’t get convinced otherwise in the next few hours, I consider it pretty likely that I will delete my Facebook account. After all, I can always create one again later.

I am hugely disappointed that it seems Facebook doesn᾿t seem to respect people who are more private by nature. I am sorry to all those who may prefer Facebook as a medium for communication and will not be able to contact me there.

UPDATE: I went ahead with the delete. I can always create an account again later and remember you can always send me an email or request to follow me on Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible (or follow my public Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible account too).