Mail Photo Browser

The Photo Browser Window shows the images that can be found in the iPhoto-database. The window is limited to a Lists-pane (at the top) and an Items-pane (at the bottom). The size of the window can be changed to view more or les images in the Items-pane.

The Lists-pane shows all Lists, handpicked and smart, Events, etc that are also found and defined in iPhoto (no Albums though). The Events-list even changes the content of the Items-pane to mimic iPhoto’s behaviour. Thus moving the mouse over an events image will present the images pertaining to that event.

And finally there is a search facility (title, description, keywords and rating) for quickly finding images. The window also supports videos, but these have to be in the iPhoto supported format.

The only thing that I miss is access to the Pictures folder and the image scaling.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • mashing ,

mail

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Firefox 3 bookmark management

With the introduction of the lasted release of Firefox 3, a new approach to managing bookmarks has been introduced. In order to test this feature I imported my 3000 some bookmarks from WebNoteHappy. This did not make Firefox very happy, I had a crash, but in the end I could access these bookmarks. Unfortunately all this bookmarks were added to my Bookmarks Menu. This really brought Firefox to a temporary halt when I accessed the bookmarks menu item.  I missed the cross-application exchange of folders and tags from WebNoteHappy (a lack of standards?).

The Items-pane shows the bookmarks of a selected list in table format. The user can determine which fields must be shown. In addition to the bookmark fields, the user can also show the visit date, the visit count, the added date or the last visited date.

The most interesting part is the Lists-pane, as this is not totally compatible with other MicroContent Clients. The History-list is a folder with the recent browsing behaviour, so not really a bookmark thing. The Tags-List is really a group that contains preprogrammed smart folders for each tag. Each tag-folder contains the bookmarks that have been tagged as such. The All Bookmarks group is really the entire library of bookmarks. This group contains three other lists/groups: the Bookmarks Toolbar group, the Bookmarks Menu group and the Unsorted Bookmarks group. These three groups are fixed and one can not add other groups on this level.

When adding a bookmark one can chose on of these groups or any folder in these groups. One can also drag&drop bookmarks from one group to another. The Bookmarks Menu group has two predefined Smart Lists: Recently Bookmarked and Recent Tags. I assume that ‘recent’ means the last 10. These Lists can be d&d’d to other groups.

The Bookmarks Toolbar group has smart lists for Most Visited and Latest Headlines. It is again unclear what Most Visited means. Latest Headlines refer to Items in a RSS-feed. This seems to be part of the Live Bookmarks feature of Firefox.

All in all a pretty reasonable implementation of a MicroContent Client, but it is not match for WebNoteHappy. The tag-feature is nice, but the approach will break down with hundred of tags. I miss XBEL-support. And I can not create my own smart lists. And it is just to slow for many bookmarks.

On the other hand the integration with the browsers allows to create smart folders such as ‘most visited’. I do not like the split between Toolbar, Menu and the rest. In this way there is no entire library. I understand why it was done in this way, it seems simpler. The integration of the URI-bar with the bookmarks library is very nice. This allows to make very clever URL-suggestions and can indicate whether the URL has been bookmarked yet.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • type • bookmark ,

firefox

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Times application

The user can create multiple ‘newspaper pages’, add feeds and assign a feed to a pane. The location of the panes and the format for each pane is set and can not be changed.

At this stage of the application I have mixed feelings. I appreciate the possibility to see multiple headline in one glance, so I can quickly scan news. Depending on how interesting a feed is I can increase of decrease the amount I see. So it should be much quicker scanning and reading. If there is something interesting I can drag it to a shelf for later reading.

I however miss some control. How can I see whether I read an article or not? Why can I not edit my RSS-URLS? My RSS-feed did not show anything, I was not able to figure out what went wrong. The import feeds from NetNewsWire is nice, but with hundreds of feeds imported shows that tthe current feed management solution is not the right one.

However the application shows an interesting new visual apporach to MicroContent. And one that I do not yet have fully my head around.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • type • blog
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Data portability

I agree with Dave Winer, there way to much discussion on data portability. These discussions are just fights to defend their turf. By opening up a service already much is gained. One can solve interoperability later.

And take your data out, do not trust services, replicate your data as much as possible, do it yourself.

Categories/tags: MicroContent
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YouTube numbers

TechCrunch republishes some interesting numbers on YouTube. YouTube us the dominant player in the online video publishing and viewing world. It really shows that brands are ever important in the online world. And that means not only aggregators and search services, such as Google, but also hosters (video in this case) such as YouTube. If you want to be found, you just have to go through YouTube. Unfortunately this also means that the distributed world, the mesh, is still not here.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • video , youtube
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Desktop Web Apps

I have very mixed feelings after reading this post on ReadWriteWeb. I agree with the conclusions, but not with the reasons.

Web Apps do not yet have the required trust in order to become mainstream. You only trust what you have in your hands, on your computer. A good point. There is a lack of transparency. With a browser based web app, you know your data is in the cloud. With a desktop based web app it is much unclearer where your data is stored. There is no need to know, location is transparent.

One of the reason mentioned is that Web Apps are not ubiquitous yet. We do not have access everywhere yet. a very good argument. I loven reading blog-posts, listening to music, looking at vidcasts, creating blog-posts, when I am forced to be offline.

I agree with the comment that ‘the browser is no place for multitasking’. Josh Catone wants to replace it with multiple browser applications, each application for a single web app, as is the intention with Mozilla Prism. As indicated in the post: ‘a browser is not for hosting applications’. Adobe AIR is already a much better approach, but it is not good enough. Real desktop apps are just much better. Just have a look at MarsEdit, WebNoteHappy, etc. Unfortunately there are now also bad MacOSX examples, such as net4mac, which is just a dedicated browser. Real Desktop Web Apps are based on API’s and not on parroting the corresponding web-pages.

For me it is all about the integrated experience between all the applications.

[Inspiration ReadWriteWeb]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • web 2.0
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Understanding mystrands

I created an account for the MyStrands service. They have an associated application that goes with it.

The service works around music. The application allows you start and stop music from the iTunes library. If the track is recognised the app shows recommended tracks. When the application starts it upload the iTunes library. I guess this is for the recommendations, however these only come after one has played something.

On the site a list of recently played tracks are shown. Also a list of recommended artists and tracks are shown. strangely it asks me whether I know artists that are already in my iTunes library. It should have known that. You can indicate whether you know tracks and artists.

As an aggregating service you can also view top tracks, artists, etc. And there are the standard community features. And finally there are Parties, which I have not chequed out.

Drawbacks are that I can not listen to recommended music, just teasers. And why RealMedia?

I am afraid that I stick with Last.fm, I do not see any advantages and see more drawbacks.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • audio
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ODP Viewpoints and Maps

I have been pondering the comments of @Downes on one of my previous posts. In the comments he says that any map is one-dimensional. I am not sure what he means by that, but I take it that he says that any maps lacks aspects. This reminded me of the viewpoints of the ODP Reference Model. These viewpoints are interesting as they intend to separate (separation of concerns) things and offer various abstractions.

Now back to my map. My map shows the relation between the Information Viewpoint (the MicroContent Types/Objects) and the Computational Viewpoint (Applications/Services). The Enterprise Viewpoint is not relevant here, as the intentions and goals of the user are unknown. The Computational Viewpoint covers the actions a user wants perform on the MicroContent Objects (create, read, get, publish, etc.).

In these two viewpoints we should not talk about protocols, API’s, systems, software, distribution of components, etc. In several of the PLE diagrams, I see all the Viewpoints mixed, resulting (at least for me) in an unclearer picture. Unfortunately this is also often reallife reality, users a confronted with all kinds of technological and engineering aspects and they shouldn’t be. Things should be more transparant.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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MicroContent map and PLE’s

@Downes saw my Microcontent Map and sees a parallel with Personal learning Environments. He points to one of his presentations. So I had a look.

I must say that I find the drawings a bit hard to grasp. What I take out of these drawings is that many components (systems, services, software, etc.) are involved, many type of contents (user generated, professional), content is distrbuted over multiple places, API’s, etc.

For me the problem with such diagrams is that they try to describe the world in a single image, on multiple abstraction levels. These diagrams are nice show the complexity, but I miss some internal logic. And that logic is what I am always looking for.

These (personal) MicroContent Maps are an attempt to attain some logic. Let me explain these levels:

1. Me - at the top-level is the user that consumes (toMe) or publishes content. The user also needs other functions to manage his content;
2. MicroContent Type - on the second level are the MicroContent Types, the various forms of MicroContent. One could add other file formats (documents, spreadsheets, presentations), etc, to this level, but I chose to limit myself to MicroContent;
3. MicroContent Applications - on the third level are the applications that are used to consume/publish individual MicroContent Items. I limited myself here to applications. One could add here services that one uses through a browser;
4. MicroContent Services - and on the third level one has the MicroContent Services that communicate with MicroContent Clients through either API’s or feeds (Atom/RSS);

Naturally there are things missing from these maps. They are limited to what I actually use for instance. I would like to add the distinction between API, RSS-based and embedded MicroContent for instance. I think I should add Browser-based services, such as Gliffy in some way.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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MicroContent Map

Inspired by Loic LeMeur post on his Social Map, I decided to create something similar for me. But I take a different twist, the MicroContent twist. I want to map for each MicroContent Type that i uses the corresponding clients and services. This comes in 3 variants: toMe, aroundMe and fromMe, i.e. MicroContent that comes to me, exists around me (local) and that goes away from me. It is tempting to describe what is possible, but I want to focus on what I actually use.

My toMe map:

The toMe-map describes the clients I use to get MicroContent Items from the Internet. This can be through a feed, embedded in a web-page / HTML-fragment or as free Items with corresponding permalinks. Some clients are closely related to a corresponding web-service.

The other clients are basically generic ones and not tied to a specific service. I guess the message is here that I do not like to be locked in into any service.

The fromMe map looks a bit different:

What it basically says, is that I use a private solution for publishing. Only for images and video I started using public services in order to lower the burden of my file storage. And I have no practical experience with events and audio publishing.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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Quotably can be interesting

Quotably creates threads from Twitter-posts. The idea is that by detecting and displaying the relation between tweets, one can follow conversations. And this is a very good idea as that is not yet possible at the moment.

This idea of uncovering threads has also been tried with blog-posts. With breaking comment-systems another solutions are required. One solution could be that instead of putting a comment in the comments part of a blog, one puts the comments in one’s own blog with a reference to the blog-item one comments to. So just add the link. There was a party that did this (don’t remember who). Problem is that there should be an unambiguous way to encode these referral permalinks.

Quotable tries to do something similar. There solution is a bit more easier, as they only have to worry about Twitter. I am not sure how one create good threads. By adding ‘@username’ one refers to another Twitter-user, which is a good begin. However it seems that one can not refer to a specific post of that user. It seems that one can only refer to the latest post. When I add the tinyURL of the post, it does not help.

So for the moment Quotably is a limited solution.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • blog
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MicroPulse thoughts

I had several thoughts when reading Martin’s MicroPulse proposal. It was not easy to get my head around it. I am not sure whether it is appropriate to respond on my blog, but here I go. The thoughts are a bit unstructured and low-level at this stage and are created while reading.

I am a bit reluctant in creating systems. There are already so many things around. But then I am not familiar enough with KnowledgePulse.

The concept of ‘Continuous Partial Attention’ is interesting. With all the information flowing towards our devices (thanks to RSS), we live in an information sea that is very close to us. The question is whether we will pay attention to that sea. If I look at Twitter or Jaiku, then there is a peripheral component. But there are also other examples reminding of radio.

On my platform I created such a sea. Thanks to Growl a small windowlet pops up in the right-top corner of my screen, with the latest tweet. This windowlet stays there for 1 second and dissolves into the background. I have a choice to look at it and read the message, or just let it pass. Information in this windowlet can come from a variety of sources, such as Twitter, Jaiku, last.fm and all kinds of other status messages from local applications. Think also of instant messaging clients, where you notice your friends login and -out. This kind of information flow is like being ‘next to the sea’.

Fortunately there is no attention grabbing. When I do not look at this local sea, then it will be lost, but nothing will be lost.

This is a bit different from beeps from the mail application to indicate that there is new mail, or indicators to show how much new mail, rss-item, etc you have waiting for you.

The idea of an application taking over when there is no foreground activity (afk), reminds me of a screensaver. This screensaver would then sequentially present new Items from the subscribed RSS feeds.

The Growl-messages could be ‘calls for attention’. It however depends how intrusive these calls are. At the moment it is relatively hard for me to react to these calls: I can not click on them, I have to see the associated application and put that application to the front.

As soon as you are going to react to impulses from the sea, you are going in. You are opeining your Twitter client, RSS-client, etc, and are going to read the information for real.

In the MicroPulse description also more intrusive examples of Micropulses are mentioned. I have to ‘click-away’ these pulses, the come back until I did something with it. It reminds me of annoying pop-up, pop-under windows, of bouncing dock-items, etc. All requiring me to change my focus from my current task to something else. I do not want to be overwhelmed by waves from the sea.

The micro-information loop tries to establish the relation between this sea and the user. This relation is determined by the interaction the user has with that information, i.e. the amount of attention the user awards to that information. As described, there can be many levels of (’moe’ tweets whether I like to play Mario Kart with him on the DS) attention.

A question is, whether this attention recording process must be something explicit, as described with the Flash cards.

The idea of a context dependent sea/radio is an interesting one. It might lower the information overload burden, it is no longer necessary to switch contexts. But then these tweets ‘out of context’ are also nice and offer the coffe machine environment.

I have mixed feelings on the recorder thing. I am all in favor, in fact I tried to set up something for my self with, blogs, bookmarks, etc. In reality I do not seem to benefit from it. I guess that this is just the state of art. Recommendation is still extremely lousy. But here seems to main challenge.

For the moment no comments on the system part, it all depends what you want to accomplish.

[Inspiration MicroPulse]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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TimeLine application

The TimeLine application by Bee Docs is an interesting application. It reminded me of the role of time in MicroContent, but hat should be a future post.

In TimeLine one can either import MicroContent Items or create one’s own. A TimeLine Item consists of a title, a date (or a date range), notes (optional), an image (optional) and a link (optional).

On creating a new TimeLine it is possible to import Items from the AddressBook (birthdays), iCal (a selected calendar), iPhoto (creation dates), iTunes (recently playes songs/albums), RSS/Atom feeds, System Profiler (recent Apple updates), Skitch and NetNewsWire (publish dates). And when Images are available they are shown on the timeline.

The timeline is one of the presentation modes for MicroContent. The other are the table, the grid and location.

All in all very interestying. Unfortunately I did not have a need yet for such visualisation. The application si a bit rough at times. I had a few stalls that required me to force quit the app. I would like to see the possibility to import events at a later stage and on the secondary timeline. And I guess there other Items that could be imported as well, a Framework to do this would be in place, although the generic RSS/Atom helps a lot. And I woulk like to see a zoom possibility, so that I can see the entire timeline in a single screen.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • type • event
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Micro-blogging with MoodBlast

With MoodBlast I am rethinking micro-blogs. This application allows the user to post to four micro-blogging services and can change the status in 3 IM-networks (and Facebook). I was already able to this partly with my Applescript.

MoodBlast also has some support for creating the message as well. Thus one can add information on music that is playing in iTunes, the weather, the latest favorite video on YouTube. It also supports some specifics of individual services, such as the location in Jaiku, video-links in Tumblr.

The app can also grab url’s from browsers and add them to a message. And this also results in a structured post in Pownce, very neat.

All in all this can very well be my main application. I only miss the possibility to upload to my own micro-blog. This is however solved with the introduction of applescript support. So now I can use MoodBlast in conjunction with Quicksilver.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client
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A look at Pownce

Thanks to some other services, I happened upon Pownce again. I already signed up, but I never had a deeper look at it.

At first it just looks like another micro-blog. The structure of an Item consist of just one field: the title. And I use Pownce in this way, as I post to 4 micro-blog services simultaneously. An Item (called a note) has a corresponding permalink, where one can also see the comment thread.

However Pownce is not limited to a micro-blog structure, it is possible to add more fields to a pst/item. The ‘link’ structure adds a field for a URL.

The ‘file’ structure allows you to add any file. If I add an image it will be shown in the note. A file can only be posted to friends.

And finally one can create an event. This structure consists of a title, a place, date/time and a real note. There is a corresponding ics-file for easy importing. Interestingly you can reply to such a post to indicate you will attend.

I get the impression that I can not edit a note. I already needed that feature a few times. I am also annoyed that I can not edit the recipients. I already made several errors due to that. I miss a RSS-feed, at least I do not see it.

Pownce is a bit more a communication service, as one can send a note to just a single friend, all friends or the public. I like the approach of Pownce to struture.: if you want more, just add a field. It is much more like wild MicroContent.

I do not think that I will use Pownce though. I only view MicroContent through feeds in NetNewsWire. Although I will continue publishing to Pownce. My usage will depend on the feeds and integration with my desktop;

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • type • blog • bookmark ,

pownce

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