Con10uum

I’m not totally sold on this, but the idea seems to have legs. Couple the general idea of how windows are managed with an accelerometer, so that scrolling could happen vertically as well, and you may have sold me.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Rant about the Internet

So this post originally appeared on Twitter, in very small snippets, throughout a day last week.  These ideas started coming to me piece by piece.  I was at work, and wanted to have some way to get the thoughts out of my head and somewhere else.  Twitter is where they went.  Typically, Twitter is where I go to scream into the void and expel the random thoughts that have no other outlet or rational place.  Yet for a few hours, it helped me form a visible string of thoughts I might not have otherwise  been able to achieve.

It did get a little long, though.  A friend from college recommended that they would be much easier to read in a single post, and I am eager to see how it turns out.  I’m not editing anything.  I’m simply stringing together my tweets, so proofreading is minimal.  Curt sentences, abbreviations, or poor punctuation are all due to Twitter’s 140 character limit.  However, for the sake of readability, I’ll insert some paragraph breaks.  So here we go:

Powered up tweetdeck this morning. It interfered with listening to @ifanboy, hit pause. Clicked iPhone headphones, Man Man started up instd.

Griping abt technical glitches sounds so petty, but they can be so frustrating. It’s moments like these when I realize how much time I spend working with a computer or electronics in one fashion or another. All in all, it’s far too much time. And how ironic is it that I express this on Twitter?

Occasionally I’m struck by how engrossed our society has become in technology. It’s ubiquitous. I love being able to have a map of the whole world in my pocket. Or be an email away from anyone. 30 years ago, none of that was possible. But I grew up just as everything was changing. I knew a day before the internet, albeit briefly. And I also know that the existence of the Internet has changed the way I think. I expect immediate satisfaction of any question.

That can be highly rewarding, as well as highly distracting. I naturally don’t think in a straight line, so hyperlinks are dangerous. Spending a random 15-30 minutes is like going down the rabbit hole. 15-30 minutes online that is. I know I’m not the only person to believe that the Internet has the capacity to change the way we think as individuals & as a society@large.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the Internet. It’s a wonderful tool, and I advocate for it. It empowers everyone with a chance to be heard. The barrier to entry to become a netizen is minimal. Everyone may voice their opinions. The downside is, with so many voices screaming to be heard at once, the result is cacaphony. It’s still hard to separate the wheat&chaff

So although in theory the Internet allows equal footing (anyone can start a blog), old media archetypes seem almost inevitable. Big name websites like @gizmodo or @boingboing become trendsetters, tastemakers, and content finders, much like trad. publishers. Anyone who may have started a blog has learned how hard it is to get noticed. I’ve lost count of how many blogs I’ve started and stopped….Largely from what I perceived lack of interest. Perceived as a lack of interest. It’s still hard to get noticed, even with all the benefits of self-publishing that blogging allows.

But writing is just one aspect of the Internet. It goes far beyond writing, of course. The Internet frees access to information. And that is a wonderful thing. It is a great tool that encompasses anything that is susceptible to digitization. Which is a lot. I will end my rant soon. A couple more points to make.

As I may have already mentioned, the Internet is a tool. And as all tools, it is an extension and expression of our humanity. (Or at least an aspect of our humanity) However, because of how broad and deep the internet is, we must be wary of it at times. It reflects a large part of the human experience. Both good and bad. I believe that the Internet heightens aspects of our humanity, the good along with the bad. And b/c of that, we must be vigilant…In how we use it, and remember it exists to enhance our lives, not control it. Otherwise, the relationship between tool and user is reverted Should that day ever come where we exist to serve the Internet or any other tool, we should abandon it.

Ok. I’m done with that line of thought now. Back to random tweets.

Fin

So?  What do you think?  Does a post that started on Twitter, which is supposedly accelerating the death of the English language, still make reasonable sense?  Granted, it doesn’t have the polish that a normal piece would have.  But does it still convey the central train of thought?  Let me know.

Lala.com

I recently stumbled across lala.com, a music discovery site in the same vein of pandora, slacker, and last.fm. In much the same way, it allows you to search for artists and stream music like any number of sites do. However, there are a few features which set it apart.

First of all, it allows you to stream entire albums. I find that extremely helpful, because whenever you listen to music on pandora and find a song you like, you can’t really control when you’ll hear something else from that album or artist again.  I appreciate hearing music in the album format, which is most often the way the artist intended for the music to be heard.  Digital music is often credited with diminishing the importance of the album in favor of individual tracks, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  

Second, Lala.com lets you to upload your entire music library to the cloud for free, allowing you to access your entire music collection from anywhere you have an internet connection.  If they have your music on their servers, a copy is made available for unlimited streaming; if they don’t have your music, it is uploaded to their servers for free.  They’re also working on an iPhone app, so eventually you won’t need to worry about hard drive capacity on your media player–you’ll simply launch the app and you have all your music at your fingertips wherever you go.

There are, of course, some catches.  You can only stream a song or album once for free.  After that, you must purchase the song.  Individual songs are 10 cents for web versions; around 80 cents for an mp3.  You can also purchase web albums for 80 cents, and the album become a part of your online music collection.  

Uploading your entire music collection will also likely open you up to targeted advertising, so if you’re a privacy hawk, that might be a concern for you.  But keep in mind that the same targeted advertising is happening whenever you allow iTunes to collect information for your Genius playlists or whenever you upload your library to last.fm for more accurate ‘scrobbling.’  

Personally, I think the benefits are worth the costs.  Since the cost of a song is so minimal, I’ll be more likely to purchase new music.  And I look forward to when the iPhone app is available so I can listen to any of my music at work or anywhere else.  

Lala.com.  Check it out.

Dark Room

Since I’m working on a paper, I thought I’d share a program that I’m very hopeful will help me be able to focus more intently on the task at hand.  It’s called Dark Room.  Put it on at full-screen and it leaves you alone with the text, blocking out all other programs that may lead to distraction.  Granted, you can’t use any footnotes or anything like that.  But that’s okay.

The link to Dark Room is here.

The link to the Mac version (Dark Room is a clone of the original OS X program made for PC) is called Write Room, and is here.

Tech Changes

So I recently purchased a new laptop. My PowerBook was on its last legs probably about a year ago and it was time for an upgrade after five years of use.  Thankfully, Emily and I were able to afford such an upgrade earlier this year.

At first, I was drawn to the new MacBooks that are currently offered by Apple.  Emily got one a while back and it is a solid machine.  It does what it’s supposed to, consistently, without any hassle.  OS X is very easy to use, and after having a Mac for so long I’ve grown used to it.  I really liked the aluminum one, mainly because of its purported environmental design as well as the multi-touch trackpad.  I am very drawn to multi-touch technology, and enjoy using my iPhone for that reason.

Long story short, I didn’t get the MacBook.  Instead, I got a PC.  Those that know me realize that is kind of a big deal, given how ga-ga I’ve been over Apple products for the past few years.  I got an HP Touchsmart TX2.  It has multi-touch as well as tablet functionality.  Now, before I was even into Apple products I wanted a tablet. With this PC, I found integrated support for two alternate inputs that I love to use in a single machine. The pen is great to use in certain situations, and I enjoy absent-mindedly writing with it or trying to doodle.  With the multi-touch, I have found it works great for panning in and out of Google Earth.  Manipulating a digital map by using your fingertips is a much more satisfying experience than doing the same action with a regular mouse or trackpad.  However, the multi-touch support is not built throughout the OS, so much of its use is currently limited to the programs that HP has installed to demonstrate the hardware’s capabilities.

Granted, there are trade-offs for purchasing this PC over a Mac.  With a Mac, I know exactly what I’m getting.  With this PC, in some ways I’m betting on future software developments by Microsoft, N-Trig (the company that makes the digitizer for the pen and multi-touch screen), and other third party developers  that will utilize the hardware in the PC.  However, for the time being I think I’ve made the right bet: Windows 7 will natively support multi-touch gestures, and Microsoft has invested money in N-Trig for further development.  Furthermore, Windows 7 is supposed to be leaps and bounds better than Vista, which in my short experience with the OS has been hit and miss.

The bottom line is that I wanted these features in a PC now, and that meant going back to PCs instead waiting a few more years for Apple to offer a similar product.  Once Apple does offer something like this, I’m sure it will be well-polished and highly functional from the start.  That’s their design philosophy.  But for the time being, the PC market is going to be the place where incremental improvement will occur and companies will take risks to see what works. That’s exciting, and something I want to be a part of.

Here’s a video of some of the features that should be offered in Windows 7: