Tag Archives: history

The web we lost »

December 14th, 2012

Anil Dash waxes poetic about the web of turn of the century before Facebook and Twitter. But then talks about what is happening now:

But we’re going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know.

Facebook is definitely the modern-day America Online. Twitter the modern-day SMS. But our blogs are still here. And Google does a decent job of indexing them. And maybe, just maybe we’ll see a resurgence of people “getting onto the web” as opposed to “getting on Facebook”. But the only way that will happen is if these tools of yesterday get as much attention and focus as the social web. And I think I see that coming.

 

Twitter needs to state their objective in much clearer terms »

July 10th, 2012

Jason Kottke, today:

 It’s funny that so many of the things that make Twitter compelling weren’t actually invented by Twitter but by the users and developers.

It is true. Linking, @replies, #hashtags, photo sharing, location sharing, and much much more all came from the community and the developers that built cool tools ontop of Twitter. Not from Twitter themselves. Twitter simply supported and fostered the growth of these features.

Michael Sippey of Twitter, a few weeks ago:

These efforts highlight the increasing importance of us providing the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools. Back in March of 2011, my colleague Ryan Sarver said that developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” That guidance continues to apply as much as ever today. Related to that, we’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.

The Developer Rules of the Road do not seem all that ominous but the tech press is certainly painting a picture of doom and gloom for developers. And, the developers that have read these rules, no doubt, stand back and wonder what exactly Twitter is getting at. I think Twitter needs to state their objective in much clearer terms.

Legalese is not my strong-suit but reading through Twitter’s Developer Rules of the Road document I came away with the following opinion. Twitter does not want developers to simply recreate Twitter.com, Twitter for iOS, Twitter for Android, Twitter for Windows Phone, etc. If someone is going to create a Twitter client, it should be markedly different than the way that Twitter’s own official apps work. For instance, someone could build a client that shows the main Twitter timeline, Lists, and trending topics in a whole new way (like Tweetbot, for example) but it should be easy to see that it isn’t the official Twitter client (which it is easy to see that) and it should exclusively use the Twitter API for these features (I don’t know enough about Tweetbot to know), and – in the near future – it may be asked or even forced to show Twitter Ads.

I could be way off. If I am, it may be even more apparent that Twitter needs to state their objective in clearer terms.

 

Historical video: The early days of Viddler

March 22nd, 2011

Yesterday Robert Scoble re-published a video from the days of PodTech, the video podcasting network, that took us down memory lane at Twitter HQ.

Robert quipped that he was happy that he stuck to his guns regarding longform videos of this type. He isn’t alone.

Not too long after the Twitter video was recorded, at Web 2 Expo in San Fransisco, I was fortunate enough to record an episode of LunchMeet with Eddie Codel.

Here is that episode (in the Viddler player because PodTech’s embed no longer works):

You may argue that Viddler hasn’t had the cultural impact that Twitter has had on the world – but you’re not sitting in this chair. Viddler has done amazing things since that day with a meager budget, only a small percentage of the man-power, and from locations that many think out-of-touch.

Many of these stories are about to be told on The Viddler Spotlight. Stay tuned.

“Just beginning to use wheels”

March 30th, 2009

Another fantastic entry in the journal of Henry David Thoreau (which I’ve mentioned a few times before) this time dealing with being able to use “cars”, or wheeled wagons, in late-March in Concord, Massachusetts.

Here is the snippet from Mr. Thoreau’s March 26, 1856 entry:

“They are just beginning to use wheels in Concord, but only in the middle of the town, where the snow is at length worn and melted down to bare ground in the middle of the road, from two to ten feet wide. Sleighs are far the most common, even here. In Cambridge there is no sleighing. For the most part, the middle of the road from Porter’s to the College is bare and even dusty for twenty to thirty feet in width. The College Yard is one half bare. So, if they have had more snow than we, as some say, it has melted much faster.”

He finished his entry with the fact that he couldn’t travel “in the cars” to Concord. There were no cars in his day so by this I can only imagine he means a horse-pulled wagon with wheels rather than sleigh runners.

If I was his neighbor in 1856 he could have borrowed my 4-wheel drive Jeep.

The Firefox 3 launch might be more important than you realize

June 18th, 2008

I don’t know how many applications you have installed on your computer but I have enough where there is an update to one of them at least once per week and often times more.

Due to this barrage of updates yesterday’s release of Firefox 3.0 may just seem like another run-of-the-mill update to one of the applications on your computer.  I assure you this just isn’t so.

Sometimes the beginning is the best place to start. Mozilla Firefox, an open source browser, started out as a project within the Mozilla corporation, then named Pheonix, to battle against the feature creep that was happening with the Mozilla Suite of applications.  Do you remember when Mozilla was a huge download with tons of “applications” within one application?  Well, that was why Firefox was originally branched off into its own application, to deal with that bloat.

But, we can go back even farther than that.  Instead of reiterating what is already out there I recommend reading the Wikipedia entry on Mozilla Firefox (which leads to many, many pages of information) as well as watching a video that Andy Baio recently shared called Code Rush.  Code Rush is a documentary that aired on PBS about Netscape opening the source of their browser, calling it Mozilla.

After reading through, and watching the documentary on, the information and history of Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Mosaic you just can’t help but feel that a little bit of history was written over the last few days while millions upon millions of copies of the Firefox 3.0 browser has been downloaded from the Mozilla Web site.

So while you download your copy ((The Mozilla Web site is nearly unreachable because of the attention that Firefox 3.0 is getting.  I recommend waiting a day or two before giving it a try.)), install the software, and use it to view Web pages – realize that thousands of people and years worth of history are behind the application you are using.

Update: Also worth watching is a Google Talk by Mike Pinkerton who was on the original Netscape team and now manages the Camino project at Mozilla.  Found via Andy Baio’s comment thread on Code Rush.

Unrealized architectural projects of Moscow from the 1930s to the early 1950s

April 2nd, 2008

Hot on the heels of my unrealized designs for this site comes something I saw, starred, and never got back to a few months ago: Unrealized architectural projects of Moscow from the 1930s and the early 1950s.

Some of the project, like the Palace of Soviets, are monumental in scale. Gorgeous stuff throughout.

Source: The Architecture of Moscow from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Unrealised [sic] projects..

Past designs of this site; some made the cut, some didn’t

April 2nd, 2008

As I work on the next version of my site’s design, which is coming along quite nicely I might add, I figured now would be a good time to take a stroll through the hallways of Colin Devroe Design, Inc. and look at some of the designs of my site that had never made it out into the wild.

Let me preface these screenshots by saying I am not a designer. You have been warned.

From past to present

Here are some of the designs that I created for this site, some of them made it, some of them didn’t, over the last few years. If, for some reason you are crazy, you want the Photoshop document for any of these you may have them free of charge.

cdevroe.com - March 2006

Circa March 2006

This one never made it, at least in the way we see it here, to the public site. But a version of it did end up making it to the live site and ran here for at least a few months.

cdevroe.com - April 2006

Circa April 2006

Nothing of this design ended up here on the site. The thing I notice the most about this was that it wasn’t a particularly wide design, so I was obviously still on my iBook. It is funny how, unless you are a professional designer, you tend to design for yourself before others. Professional designers are put to the task of doing just the opposite.

cdevroe.com - May 2006

Circa May 2006

Thank heavens this never made it live! Oh, and I’m beginning to notice how the diet had an affect on each of these designs. This design was from only one month after I started my diet, so I was still using photos of myself from when I was 35-40 pounds overweight.

The only redeeming quality, I think, about the direction I started to go with this design was that I starting to get away from the solid white background. But, alas, I never published this version.

cdevroe.com - June 2006

Circa June 2006

I can’t believe I was pumping out crappy unfinished designs every single month in 2006. This was obviously a variation of April’s attempt, and included both the Rebel Alliance logo and the numbers from LOST. Nice.

cdevroe.com - July 2006

Circa July 2006

This design was the beginning of a design that I ended up using in October 2006, which you’ll see below. This was when I began to really think about how blogs, by their very nature, didn’t do a very good job at “advertising” older content. It seemed like older blog posts became stale, Google bait, and so were a lot less valuable long term. So I created this quick and simple way, by using some photography, to link to older posts.

cdevroe.com - September 2006

Circa September 2006

This is where I began to combine my ideas for featuring content and also using “natural language navigation” in addition to the normal navigation menus in the header. The next version of this site will actually incorporate the navigation ideals from this design, in some form, and I’m looking forward to finally bringing this out.

Something else I’m noticing is that in September 2006 I was still using my middle initial on the Internet. I’ll have to do some serious digging to see when it was that I finally realized I wanted to drop the D. and just use my first and last name online.

cdevroe.com - October 2006

Circa October 2006

As we saw back in April 2006 I had created the foundation for what became this theme. This was actually a pretty good version of the site, in my opinion, as it had many of the things I really wanted to pull off. It may not be as aesthetically pleasing as I would like, but I’m not very talented in that area. But this version definitely made it easy to publish content the way that I wanted to. Something I’m slowly working my way back to now.

cdevroe.com - October 2006

Circa October 2006

I have no idea what I was trying to accomplish with this design. Though looking back I do like the direction I was going with the footer here using natural language navigation. Everything else is pretty horrible, which is probably why I never even completed the mock up, let alone put it live on the site.

cdevroe.com - May 2007

Circa May 2007

Pushing out in the the simple and artistic side of myself, I began to try to put together a header that would better show that I wasn’t tied to only a two-color, boring design. This mock up only shows the simple header but, where this layout began to excel was how it handled navigation. I think I ended up scrapping it because completing all of the JavaScript needed to pull it off became pretty daunting at the time.

cdevroe.com - November 2007

Circa November 2007

In November of last year I began to scramble. I was desperate to get something different up here on my site and so I began to experiment in Photoshop a lot. This was one version where I just went crazy and tried to do something completely different than what I have ever tried here.

Here is another one.

cdevroe.com - November 2007

Circa November 2007

This mock up, which took me about 5 minutes to throw together, needs no other explanation than to say: I probably drank a lot that night. I had began to think that maybe I should come out with something totally “weird” and in that way it’d be original and thought provoking. Well, the only thought this design provokes is of crap.

cdevroe.com - November 2007

Circa November 2007

And now we get to what is now the current design of the site. It has had a few iterations since I installed this theme in October/November of 2007, but for the most part this theme has served me really well.

I really should have kept a gallery of screenshots of this site up-to-date every time I made a little change. Oh well, I think I will from now on.

cdevroe.com - December 2007

Circa December 2007

Another reach, here I decided to return to something close to October 2006′s design, one that I thought that worked pretty well – while changing around the colors and adding a few new elements into the mix. This “remix” never sat well and so I didn’t complete the mock up.

Are you still here? Wow. We’re almost done, I promise.

cdevroe.com - December 2007

Circa December 2007

This was another “few minutes in Photoshop” wasted. Sometimes I feel inspired and so I quickly open Photoshop to see if I can mock up the thought in my head. I remember, pretty clearly, having a great idea on this day on how best to pull off something – and then I completely lost it when I was getting everything setup in Photoshop – and so out came something completely horrible.

cdevroe.com - March 2008

Circa March 2008

So here is my first redesign attempt last month that I ended up scrapping. After mocking this up, I decided to go a completely different direction rather suddenly and so I simple dropped this design. This design is actually pretty “ok”. It is simple, does that it needs to, and not much that it doesn’t. But I decided that it was a little “too much” for what I want to accomplish with the next version of my site.

That was fun, wasn’t it? A look back in time to hopefully learn from and do better in the future. I think the idea of “it isn’t always what we do, but what we choose not to do, that makes us great” definitely applies here. Although my site’s design hasn’t always been very nice, I can say that I’m happy that I never put up some of these designs.

So what’s next?

Well, you’ll just have to wait and see, but I will say that I’m going to be going much more simple with the next design. Sort of like a Tumblr type design, with some added flare for the various portions of this site that are highly customized.

Essentially over the last few months I’ve been building a personal content publishing platform with WordPress, now at version 2.5, as the foundation. I’m really excited to see what the future of this site looks like, and hope that everyone enjoys it.

Note: Skitch, which is one of my most favorite applications/services of all time, made this post not only possible but really easy and affordable to pull off. Thanks to the plasq team for such a great product.

I wish I could spend one month…

May 16th, 2007

You’re probably thinking I’m a bit off but I doubt I’m alone. I’d love to travel back in time, to the beginning – you know – Genesis 1:1, and spend an entire month in various “time periods” throughout the existence of man up until our day.

Sure I could just get a Library card but how much more fun would it be to actually live, survive, suffer, or thrive in a time period rather than just read about it?

I used to say to people, on occasion, that I wished I lived before the technological boom. Before all of these distractions. And that may sound odd coming from someone who makes a living using these technological distractions, and perhaps I’m overstating my desires a little because, all-in-all, I don’t mind living in this little slice of the human effort – it is just that I’d love to experience the times that have already past.

What times would you choose? If you could only choose one, what would it be? I’ll try to answer these, but maybe you could too in the comments.

There are so many time periods that interest me and probably an incalculable number of time periods that I know absolutely nothing about. My first choice in time periods would probably be to see ancient Israel in all of its glory. Perhaps Babylon before it was overthrown. Or visit parts of China before it was covered in cement and footprints. To live in times before electricity. To make camp outside the city walls of Jericho before they fell. To watch how people reacted when the first horseless carriage drove through the streets of New York City, making the over one million horses shake in their shoes. To buy a plot of land in the Nevada desert sometime in the 1800s for two quarter-horses and a new gun. Or listen to Aristotle become one of the most respected philosophers that ever walked the earth before his theories began to be picked apart in modern-times. Or visit the Colosseum in its hay-day.

I’m rambling but there are many more that I can think of without any hesitation. The fact is, there is such a rich history in mankind that it would make it very difficult to choose just one.

If I had to choose one, though, my spiritual side immediately thinks of the privilege of those in attendance for Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount or his baptism by John. Talk about wishful thinking. But then my intellectual side calls to mind the day man walked on the moon (or did they? *chuckle*), or the day Columbus felt sand between his toes for the first time in months (not because he discovered the country in which I live, kinda, but because this proved false the theory that the world was flat even though the Bible had stated it for thousands of years prior), or (recalling Bible stories again) the day Moses walked on dry ground between walls of water that stood nearly 3-miles high with millions of Hebrews while fleeing Pharaoh and his army.

Ok, I could go on forever. Suffice to say – this will never happen. But I enjoy thinking about it once in a while. Have you ever thought about going back in time? Where would you go?

Leopard wish list – Part one: Safari

November 10th, 2006

I fully realize that my “wish list” that I will be publishing is coming a little late to be included in the Spring-time update to the Mac OS – however it is good to note that much of what I am documenting has already been sent to Apple months ago.

The first thing I’m going to tackle is Safari (though I believe that Safari should be updated as a separate application and not part of the OS). I’ll try to focus my thoughts from fixes, to actual bugs, to feature requests.

Fixes

The following are not “bugs” in the traditional sense. I believe that most of the following was done intentionally, I just do not think they should have been done.

Setting your default browser is currently held within Safari’s preference panel. This “feature” definitely gets on the nerves of many and really I can’t figure out why this resides in here. In order to switch from Safari to Firefox you’d need to first open Safari and tell it you want Firefox to be the default browser.

This isn’t to say that Firefox (and other browsers) do not ask if you’d like to use them as the default browser on your system – but this does not mean that this is the proper location for this preference. What if I uninstalled Safari?

The blue RSS button at the top of the browser is fairly misleading. Apple is attempting to “brand” a doc-spec. In other words, they are saying that all “feeds” are RSS. Obviously this is not true. I do not want that icon to change from RSS to ATOM to “WHATEVER” when it applies, I’d much rather see Apple use the unified feed icons to go along with the unified feed theory (another post I have to bring over to my local site soon).

Multiple feeds detection kinda goes along with the above. I suppose this could be filed under a new feature request – but I feel like they might have kept it simple on purpose. I wouldn’t mind seeing a short list pop up with the available feeds for that site. Obviously this would only be useful if web masters actually listed these feeds in their documents.

Feature requests

Safari is definitely a browser for the average user, but I’d like to see a few of the “not so elementary” features from other browsers find their way into the Leopard release of Safari. Why? Because I’d much rather use Safari than Firefox if it only had the following.

Photo description

Bookmark keywords (click to zoom)

Bookmark keywords is something I use heavily in Firefox. I am not sure how widely used this feature actually is, since even browsers like Flock do not currently have this feature built in (and Flock is built off of the same engine and core as Firefox). Side note: I’ve been told that Flock 1.0 (due out sooner than later) will have these features as it will be built off of the Firefox 2.0 release.

To explain really quick, for those that are not familiar with this feature – Bookmark keywords allow you to setup shortcuts for your bookmarks. Let’s say that you had a rather long URL that you visited often, and you didn’t want to traverse your long list of bookmarks in order to get to that page without typing in the name manually, you can setup a shorter keyword for that. (see screenshot) You type in that keyword, and poof, you’re there.

Searchable history is not something I use every day, but when you need it – you find it very handy. I suppose I could liken a searchable history to Spotlight. Before Spotlight was introduced we never knew how much of a pain it was to find things on our local system. But, after having Spotlight for awhile now, I find it indispensable. Such is the case with searchable history. Safari’s history menu is crude – and needs a significant update.

Update: As Nathan pointed out the history in Safari is indeed searchable. But I would have never found it if he hadn’t told me where it was. So the UI needs to be adjusted to make this much more accessible.

Final thoughts

Really my requests for Safari are very light and don’t hold a ton of water when it comes to my decision to use Firefox instead of Safari. There are other, underlying, reasons why I use Firefox that are much more “under the hood” type of reasons. For instance, many WYSIWYG editors inside of various web applications do not function properly within Safari. Hopefully, with the very latest version of Web kit no doubt being included in the upcoming release of Safari, we’ll see some of this functionality made available.

I remember the first day I wanted to jump ship from Safari to Firefox. I wanted to use Google Calendar and couldn’t because Safari was not a supported browser. But now that I rarely use any online web applications – I may switch back and deal with my little niggles mentioned above until they become available (hopefully) in the next release.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

  1. Part one: Safari
  2. Part two: Mail
  3. Part three: iChat
  4. Part three: Finder

[tags]leopard, mac os x, osx, macintosh, apple, safari, wish list, browsers, flock, firefox, bookmarks, history, rss, feeds, atom[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt1-safari[/slug]