Category Archives: Technology

Online Apps Turn Me Offline

In my search for some kind of memory-enhancing, panacean note-keeping application, I’ve had to confront again what is becoming an increasingly common conundrum: do I want a solution that lives on the desktop or on the network?

Despite the significant leaps forward seen in online applications in recent years — Google Docs and the 37signals suite of apps, to name just a few — I still find most of this stuff slower, less efficient and less integrated with the way I prefer to maintain my own personal information ‘cloud’ than desktop software.

Given the choice, I’ll almost always opt for the native speed of an application written in Cocoa, the ability to call it up with suddenness and satisfaction via Quicksilver or from the Mac OS X Dock, and seamless, peer-level cohabitation with the data stored inside my Mac OS X Address Book, iCal other local data resources.

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Revving Up ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngineNot long after I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I had that feeling familiar to most everyone who similarly relocates: “This is great. Why didn’t I do this sooner?” Once you’ve given up today’s Manhattan and its generally not-worth-it hassles, you understand how much more livable life is across the East River.

Well, I’ve got something like that feeling again right now, as I take the very first steps towards porting this site from Movable Type over to ExpressionEngine. (This is part of my recently stated desire to resolve the general slowness on this site.) It’s a daunting transition — especially for me, someone with more ambition than free time or technical facility.

To my surprise however, given a few short hours, I’ve gotten much further in getting ExpressionEngine to replicate my existing functionality than I thought I could. I literally started with zero knowledge of the software at the beginning of the week, and with less than six hours’ worth of labor, I’ve hobbled together a rough but serviceable, EE-powered re-creation of Subtraction.com.

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High-Fidelity Stereoscope

U2 3DYou could describe me as a somewhat reluctant fan of the Irish rock band U2. I was a big fan as a kid, but these days I only sporadically enjoy their music, and as they get older the band members’ penchant for dressing like dads just escaped from a Hot Topic store makes me cringe more and more. Still, I buy every new album they put out. I don’t really listen to them all that much, but I buy them. It’s something I do mostly out of habit and some vague idea that I may as well own all of their albums; I bought my first U2 record (cassette tape, actually) when I was fifteen or sixteen, I think. Oof. That’s twenty years of forking money over to these clowns.

Last night I threw another sixteen dollars on that pile when I went to see “U2 3D” at the IMAX theater at Lincoln Plaza. As an entertainment product, this movie is exactly as advertised: the Irish rockers filmed in concert, projected in three dimensions hugely against IMAX’s signature concave screen.

It’s not an unentertaining film, I’ll admit, though there was certainly more than enough of Bono’s hammy gestural histrionics to make me glad it only ran about ninety minutes long. I guess it helped that I knew all of the songs, too, but the real attraction — the only reason I was tempted enough to travel all the way uptown on a Monday for it — was the buzz I’d heard about this movie being a visual breakthrough.

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The Host with the Most

Among the problems in my life that I’d like to do something about sooner or later is server performance for Subtraction.com and the various domains that I host along with it, including A Brief Message. These are all hosted over at DreamHost which, as I and many people have mentioned before, is less than ideal; it’s slow, slow and slow.

I’m told, though, that the performance I get from DreamHost is unfortunately about the level of performance I should realistically expect from any shared hosting plan. It’s consumer hosting, after all, and even if I move up-market a bit and pony up more money, consumer-grade hosting is never going to be as responsive as my fondest daydreams hope it can be.

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Bought and Paid For

Um, did no one notice that, in my post about Adobe Creative Suite 3 that I mentioned that I had purchased that software package? Like, I bought it for myself, with my own hard-earned money. I didn’t “borrow” the installation discs from a friend or a business, which I’ve done in the past, ahem. (Not that using installation discs owned by some other party is particularly easy these days given Adobe’s anti-piracy measures.) But neither did I go looking for so-called cracked copies of the software on the Web, though they’re readily available, I’m sure.

It’s no doubt a function of the respectable, grown-up’s salary that I’m now lucky enough to bring home, but looking over the software on my hard drive, fully ninety-eight percent of it is legitimately mine (there are a couple of unpaid-for shareware utilities in there — I may be on the straight and narrow, but I’m a procrastinator, too). Meaning, I paid for it, and if you launch the software and invoke its registration screen, it will say “Registered to Khoi Vinh,” or something to that effect.

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Conscientiously Objecting to the Living Room War

Apple TVTime was, you’d buy a TV, bring it home and plant it in your living room. Then you’d watch it. For like a decade. And when the picture started failing, you’d go and buy another and do it all over again.

Nowadays, television is more than a piece of furniture, it’s an experience. It’s multi-sourced, time-shifted, narrow-casted, and/or delivered on-demand. Digital, in short. Like all experiences in the digital age, television now requires the support of a full complement of systems — a peripheral army of boxes, wires and software — to make it happen. You can’t experience digital television, really, with just one of anything.

This is why, I think, I’m an unlikely customer for Apple TV, Steve Jobs’ set-top contender in the living room war. To be honest, the couch potato in me is intrigued by its ability to access Internet video, which I’m sure I’d watch more of were it made as convenient as Apple TV promises. And last week’s announcement that Apple will rent movies on demand through the device, too, is intriguing.

But I just can’t imagine myself buying one anytime soon. It’s not only that I would be adding another box to my living room (though I’m certainly not eager to take on that added complexity), it’s also how much the digital television experience demands of us.

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Expanding on Syncing

TextExpanderIf I’m going to be such a persistent critic of .Mac’s anemic state, it’s only fair that I give Apple’s service its due when it does something right. Well, it’s not so much that .Mac has done so much right lately as it’s being used by third parties for the right thing.

Specifically, I’m talking about the latest version of Smile on My Mac’s TextExpander, the keyboard shortcut utility that, in the past nine months or so, I’ve become incredibly enamored of. I’ve created dozens of shortcuts for the snippets of text that I type repeatedly — fragments as small as “<a href=""></a>” or as long as the instructions for getting to my house — and I’ve become almost addicted to the highly satisfying bonk! sound that TextExpander plays each time I successfully invoke one of them.

That’s why I was pretty happy to see that, in its latest version, TextExpander now provides support for synchronization through the .Mac service. It makes sense. TextExpander is the kind of utility that works best when it’s nearly invisible, and .Mac synchronization makes it even more transparent. Before this update, I had to manually back up copies of my shortcuts, which I’d then shuttle from computer to computer, laboriously importing them into each instance of TextExpander and weeding through duplicates by hand. Now, I can happily create shortcuts on any one of the three Macs on which I have the utility installed and almost instantly have them available on the other two.

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If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software

Enterprise software, it can hardly be debated, is pretty bad stuff. The high-dollar applications that businesses use to run their internal operations (everything that falls under human resources, typically, but also accounting, communications and, at one time or another, just about everything else) are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code. If you work at a big company and you’ve ever had to do something that should be simple, like file an expense report, make changes to your salary withholdings — or, heck, if you’ve ever tried to apply for a job at a big company — then you’ve probably encountered these confounding user experiences. And you probably cursed out loud.

This is partly because enterprise software rarely gets critiqued the way even a US$30 piece of shareware will. It doesn’t benefit from the rigor of a wide and varied base of users, many of whom will freely offer merciless feedback, goading and demanding it to be better with each new release. Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users. Given that hothouse environment, it’s only natural that the result is often very strange.

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Preserving Preferences

One of the more popular posts that I wrote in July was “Designed Deterioration,” in which I observed that digital hardware is rarely intended to get more beautiful as it gets older.

Governed mostly by the modern business principle of planned obsolescence, today’s hardware products are meant to get scrapped and replaced when they age beyond the near future. By contrast, older hardware goods — like the cast iron skillet I mentioned in my original post — often seem to have been designed with their eventual deterioration in mind. As they get older and become more heavily used, they get better.

That post might have led many to believe that what I’m advocating is that digital products should all be developed with designed deterioration in mind. While I wouldn’t object to that, I wouldn’t expect it to happen any time soon. By now, planned obsolescence is too strongly rooted a concept to allow for that.

I also happen to think there’s a lot to be said for designing for the current moment, designing something that addresses today’s values without feeling the pressure to create something that will last for all time. Which is to say that I have a bias towards what I consider to be ‘timeless’ design, for sure, but I also believe that our craft and our culture don’t progress when everything tries to appear timeless.

There’s one more part of this discussion I want to bring to light. So far, I’ve been harping on hardware and industrial design. But my original thought, when I sat down to write that post, was that designed deterioration seems like an idea that software could benefit from, too.

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