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January 18, 2007
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GPS Chimes
GPS Chimes are wind chimes that are triggered by my proximity to home -- built with Mologogo and a Phidget Servo. Think of it as mile-wide radius around the wind chimes, where my networked presence and GPS location send a virtual breeze to announce my travel home.
More photos, instructions, background info, and source code available here.
Posted by juechi at 9:13 AM
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January 12, 2007
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Of the browser road ahead
Read/WriteWeb has an interesting post about the road ahead for both Firefox and Internet Explorer:
Mozilla recognizes that its strengths for normal users are its extensions and customization....So Firefox is aiming to be the best general Web browser - e.g. it wants to be faster for AJAX apps.
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Among the mandatory requirements listed for FF3 are improving the add-on experience, providing "an extensible bookmarks back-end platform", adding more support for web services "to act as content handlers" - all of which show that Firefox wants to be an independent information broker rather than a simple HTML renderer in its next version.
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Looking ahead, it's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers.
It's certainly no surprise to anticipate that IE will deepen it's hooks into the OS, making advanced features of Vista available. As long as that doesn't make it a giant security liability, then it seems like the obvious choice. Firefox, meanwhile, opening more directly up to web services could face similar security issues.
Either way, there is too much of an install base for the countless javascript/AJAX apps out there to have either new browser break what works now....in the depths of the browser wars years ago, sites were forced to adapt -- in todays environment, if a new browser release doesn't work with core online applictions, such as gmail, yahoo, or hotmail, expect that users won't upgrade.
Read the rest at: Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation - Browsers Heading Apart Again
Posted by juechi at 12:10 PM
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January 3, 2007
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Dropping the Ball in 2007
In a discussion with my son last night, way-too-late-youshouldstopaskingquestionsnow-late, he asked what "dropping the ball" meant (in relation to New Year's at Times Square). Of course, we also talked about winter in Antarctica and the governing system of Finland (constitutional republic, if you wanted to know).
Dropping the ball means more than that -- it means leaving things, goals, responsibilities behind that you didn't mean to abandon. So, equally in the spirit of the New Year, I share the great MEX manifesto for mobile user experience. Let's hope this is the year that there's at least some semblance of motion towards these goals -- my favorites are #2 and #9, and I offer my humble tweak to #8:
#2) Tearing down the walled garden will enhance the mobile content experience and release value for the industry. The objective should be a free market for content and applications, based on open standards and accessible to all. We think the current fragmentation of formats and channels to market is holding back growth.
#9) The mobile experience is limited to voice and text by in-efficient search and discovery mechanisms. We think any service should be accessible from the standby screen and it should be as simple as dialling a number.
#8)
Mobile devices are the natural choice for interacting with communities. Sharing experiences through your mobile device should be as simple as making a voice call. Wegravitymonkey thinks the success of user-generated content, social networking and community interaction through mobile devices will depend on enhancing developing innovative, mobile-specific paradigms of communication rather than replicating the desktop experience.
Go read it all, and don't drop the ball in 2007 (unless you're this guy, in which case, drop it!).
photo by c0nd0r2
Posted by juechi at 9:57 AM
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