Sam Davyson

I am reading blogs through Vienna these days. I subscribe to:

• The Dreamhost Blog. – http://blog.dreamhost.com/
• Google Blogoscoped. – http://blog.outer-court.com/
• Mashable. – http://mashable.com/
• Nik Cubrilovic. – http://nik.com.au/
• Official Google Blog. – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
• Omnidrive. – http://omnidrive.com/blog
• Pandora. – http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/
• Rocketboom. – http://rocketboom.com/vlog/
• Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger. – http://scoble.wordpress.com/
• Signs of the times. – http://sillysigns.blogspot.com/
• The Jason Calacanis Weblog. – http://www.calacanis.com/
• theshow. – http://zefrank.com/theshow

Thanks to all of them for magnificent content. All day, every day.

The UI and user experience degrade by having applications running in the browser is not always worth the upgrade in being able to access your information from everywhere. Or put a bit more simply:

Web 2.0 is not worth it everytime.

I don’t want to upload my entire music collection to web2.0musicplayer.com to stream it back when I want to play it. It simply isn’t worth the bother. No one has suggested that as far as I am aware so far but that is an illustration of how it can be overdone. To me that example is clearly over the top, and I find some of the real Web 2.0 ideas to also be too much bother for not enough gain. You might be able to “get” it anywhere, but it is super fiddly to do so.

Take the idea of putting office applications online. For me this is very much on the border. For word processing I can just about see that it is a simple enough activity to mean the simpler interfaces are usable. You can word process with a glorified text area. The benefits of knowing that your documents are all safe, and not having to carry round a USB drive with them on mean for me they get the thumbs up. But spreadsheets is a whole other story. They are complicated things where you need to be able to enter formulae with confidence into the cells. I don’t really use many much, but when I do I need a complexity that is not matched online. I need to be able to drag formula to more cells, and for them to sensibly change to fit their new locations. I need to be able to write 1, 2, 3, in a column and drag them for a list of as many integers as I want. I don’t want to feel limited for space. And I need customisable charts and graphs. I havent seen an implementation that can give me this. So for a spreadsheet I would say no.

Since therefore you are going to have your spreadsheet files offline it makes sense to keep your documents with them. Which makes the word processing online option look less attractive. With your documents online you can also only get them when you are connected to the internet, unless you make a special arrangement to download them. This means that in that period of time when you lose connectivity not only can you not work on your document – but you can’t even read what you have done so far! I would say that all things considered “Web Office” is not ready yet for using. It is not worth it.

There is something similar with email. Email is now generally read in webmail services. They are hugely advantageous over using a non web based service as you can get your email from anywhere which is hugely important. The interface’s are never quite as good as what you get in a desktop client but this is overridden by the huge gain in accessibility. Most people though use 1 computer most of the time I think. Especially people with laptops. That is why I think it is best to use a desktop client hooked up to a decent webmail service for your email. You get the best interface there is for email in a very responsive desktop product, and you get access to your email from anywhere with a web connection too. That is an ideal solution.

Calendaring for me gets the same rating as the email issue. You need it everywhere, but the deaktop client’s are better. So you use standards to get a compromise. I broadcast my calendar up to a web service as well as having my web service’s calendar streaming into my desktop application. It isn’t a perfect sync situation. But I can add events and they will show up on both ends. And since most of the time I will be on my main computer I get the great experience that the web 2.0 version still can’t match.

So the ideals are: Office – No, Email & Calendaring – Half Way.

What about everything else Web 2.0? What about social networking? What about social bookmarking? They are both great uses of Web 2.0 technologies. They both get a big “yes”. They can’t and don’t exist without the internet. It doesn’t make sense to even ask this question about them.

My message is simple. Web 2.0 is cool, but not for everything. Not yet anyway.

Writing this post proved to be enormously tricky for some reason. I started out with this:

The trend set by Web 2.0 to move your applications into your browser is going at a hell of a rate. You can now do your email, your calendaring, your word processing, your spreadsheets, your slideshows, your project management, your IM, your photo organisation… all within your web browser.

The Benefits

The real reasons for using these services is that it means you can get your email, work, photos etc. (“your stuff”) from any computer with an internet connection. And as everything is hosted over on the service if your computer fails then your work is still safe. As it is continually backed up by the service you are using. So it is a pretty neat way to do things.

The other huge incentive comes with pricing. Online services tend to be powered by advertising or sponsorship and come generally free to the end user. This is a far cry from the big amounts you have to pay to just get a copy of Microsoft Office for instance.

The Problems

The main drawbrack is that the browser was not designed to host such a complex range of activities. The programs have to therefore be much simpler and tend to be much more fiddly than their desktop counterparts. The most basic task is ridiculously difficult to replicate in the browser in the same style. Not that this is a real problem to the end user they don’t have to code it! And luckily there are plenty of web programmers who seem more than willing to work flat out to produce near desktop style applications.

Where It Works

Some things work much better in the browser than others and these have been adopted much commonly. In these applications the ability to be able to access the information from any location is paramount. Tools like email clients are being replaced with webmail. Why? Because it is worth the loss in user experience to be able to get your emails from anywhere. And …

Then I thought “What is this a manual?”. Come on! I can do better than that. So I went for a completely different beginning:

What do you use most on your computer? If you are saying Notepad then you really aren’t the subject here. You may however be the target. I’m looking for those people that when they go and buy a computer from the physical computer shop they answer this question with: the internet, email, word oh yeah and messenger. They are then assured that their computer will be perfectly sufficient to do all those tasks. “It is a basic computer. It can handle the basic tasks that everyday users preform, and do so with ease” says the sales assistant. If you’ve heard those words and immediately written out the cheque then you are what I mean by “people” in this post. The normal people. They don’t have blogs, they don’t listen to podcasts, they don’t read digg. The Internet for them is the blue E. You probably know the type. It is the majority of people.

These are the people that I don’t think Web 2.0 is getting through to…

But then I realised that wasn’t what I wanted to write about at all. I still wasn’t really clear about what the title should be for the post. All I knew is I wanted to write something that generally said that the UI and user experience degrade is not always worth the upgrade in being able to access your information from everywhere. That was really the central statement I wanted to hit. But I didn’t want to go crazily detailed about everything everwhere like the first attempt. Or go way out of my way like I for some reason did in my second try. I need to get to the point, and get there fast. So this is how I eventually decided to start.

Stand back for the actual post. It is here.

The conversion of prices from dollars to the British pound has always been a bit of a mystrey. But nothing is more baffling than the new prices given to the iPods. The top of the range iPod Nano (Black) costs $249 or £169. The bottom of the range traditional iPod also costs $249. But wait for it… it costs £189.

There is clearly something funny going on here. An extra £20 has come from somewhere. Either Britain is being ripped off for the traditional iPod or Britain is getting a bargin on the iPod Nano. I know that the price conversions to pounds are quite complicated. First they have to be converted to pounds, then VAT is added and then they have to made into a sexy price… probably by some rounding up. I decided to investigate this process.Lets first take an example outside of this conflict. Say the iPod Nano 4GB. There it is $199 or £129. A direct conversion of dollars to pounds says that $199 should be £105.75. Now take VAT at 17.5% it comes to £124.25 which they round to the £129 price tag. So this method of conversion seems to work well.

Lets now try it on the iPod Nano 8GB (Black). So we take the $249 and we get £132.57. Plus the 17.5% VAT gives £155.77 which is quite a bit less than the £169 that the British are made to pay. But if you think that is bad then look at the £189 that is charged for the full iPod (30GB) that is a full £33 above the price worked out through considering tax.

So lets take a little closer look at this price conversion process. Below I list the price differences between what the British prices should be (including tax) and what they are.

iPod Shuffle: £5.53 – $10.38
iPod Nano 2 GB: £5.69 – $10.68
iPod Nano 4 GB: £4.75 – $8.92
iPod Nano 8 GB: £13.23 – $24.83
iPod 30 GB: £33.23 – $62.35
iPod 60 GB: £40.47 – $75.93

Quite a premium on the highest range iPod too. It is just it was much more noticable for the 30 GB iPod given the same price was used for it and the iPod Nano 8 GB.

I can’t do such an indepth analysis for other country stores as I am not aware of taxes that may be applicable. One thing I can see without any knowledge of customs and taxes is see if the price of the 8 GB Nano is the same as the 30 GB iPod in each store.

And it is in:

Australia, Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the USA.

But it isn’t in:

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Suomi, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Republic of Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.

The pattern is pretty clear. Europe and Hong Kong (where the price increment for the iPod 30 GB is very slight) have the different prices. That is the majority of the courtries that are offered by the store so the question should perhaps not be why the prices are different in all of these places but why they are the same in Australia, Canaga, Japan, Singapore and the USA. It seems completely crazy. Perhaps some EU wide tariff only on things with more than 8 GB of storage? It just doesn’t make sense.

Today at the much hyped Apple Event “It’s Showtime”, Apple announced significant changes to the iTunes logo. Here are the images:

	Months of design work. Thousands of ideas.
V6. Before		V7. After

The Musical Note

The thing that immediately hits you is the colour change. They have taken the plunge and gone straight from green to blue for the musical note. But that isn’t the only change. Not by a long shot. Just look at the shape of the note. The bar between the notes has got thicker (or “taller”) and has a new style of sheen which makes it look less 3D. The angle of the top of the note has slightly changed too and it has been lowered with respect to the disc behind it. Whilst the left corner of the note used to coincide with the edge of the CD behind it the CD is now higher at that intersection. The effect of this is seen throughout the image. No longer can the white background be seen between the two sticks of the note at the right hand side. This triangle of white is completely lost. The balls at the bottom of the note seem more rounded. Their angling has changed too and they are less elongated and more spherical. The shadow effect of these on the bottom disc beneath has totally changed. The old logo shows a clear shadow to the lower right of both balls whereas the new design has much lighter shading for the shadow and whilst it is to the lower right for the leftmost ball it is not seen at all for the righthand one.

The CD

The disc itself has also been changed. Again the most dramatic change comes with the colouring. The spectrum has been completely reversed in a rather bold move with the red in the lefthand spectrum now starting at the bottom. It’s center has changed to now be a lighter shade than the rest of the disc and due to shape changes in the disc (as well as repositioning decisions) you can no longer see through the disc’s central hole to the left of the left stick. The only viewpoint via which the hole in the disc can be seen is actually between the sticks themselves. Back with the spectrum, we see the colours have been really focused or “deblurred” for this new release. The spectrum is much more split up compared to the very smudged approach seen in the original design. The disc seems to have been raised vertically too. By this I mean that it is standing more upright than previously. The main indication of this is seen in the shadowing behind the disc of which more can be seen.

This is clearly a hugely significant change. And to unveil it on the same day as new iPods, iPod Games, iPod Movies, iTV to come, and a revamped iTunes program is incredible. Needless to say, the logo is shipping today.

Update: I think we were all kind of wondering if Apple would go full out and update front row to match the blue. And we shouldn’t really have wondered. Of course they did. They aren’t however so pedantic to update the information about front row on say the Mac Book page. Good for them.

Picasa Web Albums seems to be smart at preventing image hotlinking. They have this embed feature that provides a link back to Picasa Web Albums and that works fine. But if you just try and take the image URL and embed it I find it breaks pretty soon.

For instance here is an image embedded using the Picasa Web Albums code that is available from the left hand bar in Picasa Web Albums:

The above code snippet straight from Picasa Web Albums uses this URL for the image: http://lh6.google.com/samdavyson/ROm95iJ2ABI/AAAAAAAAAFM
/ZpTxZPsUuIA/flower.jpg?imgmax=288. If you just use this URL and not the link back to Picasa it still seems to work. Here is one just using the URL:

But when you remove the thing limiting the image’s size (?imgmax=288) it breaks.

As you don’t see the image above it has clearly broken. The clever bastards. So lets see if it will work with another value of imagemax. So lets try 576 (2 x 288):

No. That doesn’t work either. So at the moment you can only hotlink in the 288 size. I hope Flickr doesn’t start using similar technology soon.

Today I launch a US spelling version of my aluminium aluminum resource. This sees a little flag widget added to the sidebar of the site to flick between the different spellings of the versions.

Why make this change? Well research suggests that this spelling is more popular than the IUPAC standard. And the more people the resource can help… the better. You can check out the classic version here, and the US version here.

I posted an analysis of Live.com’s search interface not so long ago. And today on the official “beta-tag-removal” day I see many of the criticisms I made corrected in ways I suggested.
Lets first compare the looks. Here is the old:

And the new:

There are a few striking differences I think you will agree. Lets review what I criticised.

1. Live.com is styled not to underline the links. This is not really a problem for identifying the links, they are still pretty clear since they are marked in blue. But I think it may add some extra whitespace between the title of the webpage in the results and the description associated with the page.

>> Now the links are underlined just as they are on Google. The extra whitespace still seems to be there though.

2. The clarity of the tabbing system they have used at the top there could also be improved. At the moment it is not only not clear what they are, but also that you are on one of them (Web).

>> It is now much clearer that you are on Web which has a lighter shade for its background.

3. They have a footer at the bottom of the page that is visible since the search uses the infinite scroll bar so you feel like you are looking at a results viewer rather than just viewing the results.

>> They have dropped the infinite scroll bar! At least for the Web tab by default they have. It seems to be enabled for the image search. So with this of course the footer can be lost from “above the fold”.

One bug they seem to have picked up rather than corrected is they now have a space before the name of the file the page is from. E.g. “www.google.com/support/talk/bin/ answer.py?answer=24075″. I am not sure what the point of that is, but it certainly doesn’t make anything clearer for me.
I finished by concluding that the whole thing had a pretty gormless look, which with the changes they have made seems to have gone. I am liking this search facility now, competition is of course always good for the consumer.

Univillage is the new social networking site on the scene standing as the only competitor for Facebook specifically for the college and university niche. A source has informed me that they received an email from Univillage when they hadn’t signed up, which gave them a password. Upon signing in with the details this student found a full account complete with someone else’s details.

This is clear incompetance on the part of Univillage. This is what must have happened:

• Andrea [the owner of the account whose details were exposed] signs up for a Univillage account.
• Univillage request a secondary email address on one of their forms.
• Andrea makes a mistake on the form and mistypes her address.
• Then Andrea forgets her password and triggers a lost password email to be sent to her email address (why it didn’t go to the primary I don’t know… perhaps it was sent to both).
• The result is that an Elsie [the real owner of the email address] gets an email from a company that she has never dealt with before revealing a password.

And when suspicious Elsie logs in with her email address and this password she finds all the details of Andrea. That is all the details… she is actually logged in as Andrea. I have contacted Andrea for comment on this story (at this time she is unaware of the issue) which will be published here when it is received.

Maybe Facebook wasn’t so bad after all?

For obvious reasons all names have been changed. This article is published with the permission of Elsie, and under the premise that it will help avoid more privacy exploits by the service in the future.

Updates – See bottom.

Everyone has seen Google Maps. That lovely AJAX interface that reinvented online mapping. Dragging maps… it is unbeatable. I had never actually used the maps for directions until last week when I used them for a trip to France. Somethings in the system were great and very Googly. But there were major flaws. Lets just say I got lost a few times.

What’s Good

The layout of the maps for printing is very neat. They offer the option of having little maps by the side of the instructions, and the small images that it uses for left and right are very clear. Overall it just looks nice. It is plain and simple. Unfortunately that is where the positives end.

What’s Bad

The instructions are not nearly sophisticated enough for actually using. Or at least for long distance travel I thought. As you drive in your car they just can’t be used to get you to your destination. The phrase “Turn left at such-and-such a road” is very common. Well the positioning of road names, at least in Europe, is almost exclusively such that you can’t see the name of the road until you are on it. And even then it is difficult to see it if you are trying to drive at the same time. You definately need a few observant assitants to be looking for the typically small signs that indicate road names. It is clearly not practical to park at each turning or junction to survey each of the road names that can be chosen from at the junction. Instead it needs to say “Take the 6th left” or “Take the left signposted as towards such-and-such“. Then you could use the instructions to get to where you wanted to go.

There is no cumulative column for milage provided by the service. So you can’t glance down to see that you have done 100 miles or whatever. You would have to manually add up all the previous components to get that figure. So working out how far you have progressed in relation to the total distance you have got to travel is not easy. The distances seem to be in the units standard to the country that you start in. Moving from England to France you move from miles to km, but it stays as miles throughout the journey. I’d really like a choice of being able to display one of the other throughout or display both in seperate columns. When you are in a country where all the mileage (or kilometreage) information on signs is in a different unit to those on your instructions it doesn’t make things easy. It would be nice if Google could offer choice in this area.

The printout gives time values for significant steps (more than 1 minute) but it doesn’t say how this is calibrated. I don’t know if it takes into account the grade of the road, and the speed limit on it when it works this out. It certainly should do. There should be some information about this conversion clearly on the instructions. When it says “289 mi (about 6 hours 28 mins)” I would like it to say what speeds it has assumed for that.

The lack of sophistication is really important when it comes to things like vias, avoiding toll roads, taking the shortest route over the “quickest” etc. Google Maps doesn’t offer any of these things. For vias you have to just input the locations in seperate sittings, which is really not what I want to have to do. If you dont want to go on non toll roads getting a map out and plotting your own route is the only way.

And finally it is unpolished. I have never heard anyone call a roundabout a traffic circle before, but that is what the instructions insist on saying. Sometimes it will choke on the instruction and have an instruction that just says “Continue” which just splits up the distance for one step so you have to add up the bits yourself to find out how far you need to go on a particular road.

Solution: Maps 1.0

There is only one way round this right now. It is to use one of those old mapping 1.0 services to get your routes. Say Multimap or the AA. They have all the sophistication that you need to actually get from A to B. Although they aren’t fast loading, and they don’t have maps that you can drag or maps that seamlessly zoom they have much better services for directions than Google Maps at present. Trust me when you are lost in a foreign country the last thing you care about is if when you were printing out the route the map available was draggable. Ironically functionality over looks is what Google is famous for with their “ugly” homepage that is so so useful. But with their maps they have gone the other way.

Updates

A German language blog, GoogleWatchBlog, discusses the issue. Some commenters point out other problems with the maps, whilst others disagree with the points made here.

Gary Price of Ask.com points me to their mapping service. Whilst not available in Europe it’s US version offers some of the sophistication I wanted. It can do vias but its printed version, units options, toll/non-toll options, and actual nature of the directions is lacking.