After graduation I had an odd compulsion to keep in touch with those friends I knew I wouldn’t be seeing around. An odd compulsion to take back my farewell and replace it with a “guess what I’ve been up to?” I wanted to stay connected somehow, to keep touching base when the base had disintegrated, so I started an SMS bulletin. 160 characters sent once a month: The Clarko Newsletter. The title alone ate up an eighth of my character budget. And somehow the number of recipients grew, rather than dwindling. People wanted to know why they weren’t on the list, even if I wasn’t reporting anything groundbreaking. So I kept going.

A few years later, with the blogging phenomenon gaining steam, I threw off the shackles of the SMS message and began this: decaffeinated dot org. Of course I didn’t call it a blog… ‘blog’ was an ugly word, a distasteful abbreviation used by the proles on hosted services. Mine was a weblog. It was my new connection. Styled text, hyperlinks, infinite length and infinite frequency at no added cost. How could you not love something that liberating?

The audience didn’t translate, of course. People are content to receive something stupid and sentimental on their phone once a month, but sitting down at a computer to catch the rambling daily updates of a former classmate is a bit much for normal humans. There was a farewell SMS, but from those few that made the jump the audience grew again. I don’t know how, but it did. And with strangers this time. I was getting email from strangers. Strangers who weren’t trying to sell me viagra. It was weird, but it worked for me. I was still touching base.

In the years that followed, the blog saw me through a dozen countries, three funerals, a university degree in Computer Science and Linguistics, and the news that I’ll soon be an uncle. It also outlasted two jobs, four houses, and two long-term relationships. It was the only constant, even if the updates were anything but. And despite a lousy track record for the finality of these ‘farewell’ things, that time has come again.

The high school and university base-touching has shuffled off to MySpace and Facebook, the photos to Flickr, the gripes and the discussions to a handful of forums and mailing lists, public and private. You might say I’m decentralizing. As for the daily updates, suffice to say I’ve regressed to the cramped reality of the SMS message. Plain text and short as hell, but not without its charm. So I’ll say farewell from here, and see you around.

There hasn’t been any official word from Apple that this is the case, far as I know, but my speculation hat says Duh! Why wouldn’t they keep embedding your credentials into every purchase? Nobody said ‘unprotected’ meant ‘anonymous,’ and it’s a pretty clever way of keeping people honest, but my concern is that people won’t be told up front or it’ll be buried in pages and pages of unread legalese.

If your Aunt Ethel downloads a song and sends it to her friend Mildred thinking there’s no harm done (it’s like loaning her a book, right?). What happens the next day, when Mildred’s son Howard is sharing it with the whole world on LimeWire and the RIAA’s death squad arrives on Ethel’s doorstep?

A passive protection scheme means infringers be found and punished later, not sooner (if at all), and anybody who’s ever trained a puppy will tell you that don’t work.

Markdown

Plaintext SMS, meet hypertext. Markdown offers the best of both worlds. Prettying up Twitter’s web/IM/RSS/JSON output with a tiny subset of Markdown’s span elements would make a world of difference. *Emphasis*, **strong emphasis**, and even [better looking links](http://example.com) would be worth the measly couple of characters spent using them. Images are obviously verboten, and block-level elements a waste of time in messages with a 140 character limit, but the inline elements fit the bill nicely. Heck, Twitter itself doesn’t even need to do this… Twitterrific & Co could already be doing this.

Reply Targeting

A recent Twitter addition has been the official embrace of the ‘reply’ message. That is, a message beginning with @Username is thought to address a particular user, albeit publicly viewable where a ‘direct’ (private) message would break the flow of conversation.

This has been happening a long time. It predates the web! But Twitter’s adoption of the convention as an official feature was as simple as adding a link to announce that Message X was in reply to User Y’s latest message. Sometimes this screws up, and the mile-a-minute action-packed adventure that is Twitter means you end up ‘replying’ to a message that isn’t relevant. Your link is stale and out of context. Something needs fixing.

A technologically-feasible solution would be to extend the @Reply convention to allow status IDs as well as user IDs, so @#16950751 would reply specifically to that ‘tweet’, and could be made minutes, hours, days from now. The reply would never be stale.

Unfortunately it’s not a workable solution without further tweaking. The numbers are ugly, and in places where the in-reply-to links aren’t visible (SMS, IM, Twitterrific) the whole scheme would be incomprehensible. Translate the @StatusID to an @Username in the message text, though, and the process is invisible.

It’s a power-nerd feature, true. But I don’t hesitate to say a lot of Twitter users are nerds already, and client apps like Twitterrific could easily make it accessible to Joe Blow. People who didn’t plan to exploit it would never have to work around it.

But I’ve just damned the feature by suggesting it isn’t worth the effort of implementing, since so few would use it. Maybe something lower-impact…

Permalinks in Context

Addressing the same problem in a way that doesn’t impact user input at all, permalink pages (like the one I linked above) could contain more of the conversation leading up to the moment of postage. A time-slice of a user’s friends list rather than a lonely, out-of-context tweet permalink. Not even the entire friends list need be sampled, just the last half-dozen tweets from any @Replied usernames, and suddenly just-missed-it link staleness goes out the door.

@Reply SMS Forwarding

I’ve disabled almost all of Twitter’s mobile features on my account. Sure, I still post from my phone when I’m on the go, but I got sick of receiving 200 SMSes per day pretty quickly and set it to forward only Direct messages to my mobile.

Direct messages are pretty rare, though. People tend only to use them for things that are actually private, in my experience, so the vast majority of inter-twitter communication is carried out with @Replies. It’d be nice if these were sent to my mobile, so I can participate in my own conversations when I’ve left my computer behind.

They’re a funny beast, these @Replies, which is maybe why the majority of this feature-tweaking wish list has focused on them. Half direct message, half public update, they straddle the line uncomfortably. Right now they lean more to the public update side of the fence… I’d like to see them behave more like direct messages that happen to be world-readable.

Still, I’m kind of backward when it comes to buying music. I like vinyl and CDs; I’m a hoarder. I trialed eMusic for a month, downloading two perfectly good, DRM-free albums with all the legal consent the artist had to offer, and I still felt like I had to buy the CDs. Physical media, I’m stuck on you.

But the world is full of people more reasonable than I, and this is good news for all of them.

What is a weblog if not a digital platform for the overly-opinionated? I need to get back to my roots and cut the ‘detached’ crap.

Part the first: Apple needs to rein that shit in.

There’s a TV commercial airing over here at the moment for Rexona that makes use of a particularly-recognizable pianny sample for its soundtrack. Recognizable not because I know anything about jazz pianists, but because I have my greasy, computer-nerd finger on the pulse of youth culture and own a Lily Allen CD: the ad uses a Professor Longhair lick (pianists have licks, right?) that Allen sampled a year ago.

Anyone with the mental faculties of a third-grader can tell you Rexona’s marketing team doesn’t give two hoots about Professor Longhair, they’re just trying to sell their deodorant to people like you and me (y’know: finger, pulse, etc) and want to give us something to relate to. What better way to relate than with a top-forty single from a MySpace superstar? And what cheaper way to have a hit song in your ad than to mix your own from the same sources?

The problem is it doesn’t work, or at least not on everyone I know who has seen the commercial. People say “Is that that Lily Allen song? Wait, no, it’s not the real thing. It’s a muzak version or something. Lame.”

This is about where Apple walks into the picture. Somebody at TBWA\Chiat\Day had undoubtedly seen Christian Marclay’s Telephones and thought it was appropriate. Who wouldn’t? And while the rest of the details are murky (they approached him? for permission? to buy it? wha?) Marclay was reportedly unenthusiastic and Apple ended up with a Telephones clone. A more up-to-date, better-cut Telephones perhaps, but a clone nonetheless.

And everyone thought it was cool. It is cool! It’s a cool ad.

But later, when people found out it’s not “the real thing,” just like with Rexona and Lily Allen, their reaction is the same. “Apple couldn’t come up with something cool on their own? Aren’t they, like, all creative and shit? Lame.”

Part the second: LogoMaid aren’t criminals, they’re just sad

I don’t care much for LogoMaid. The whole SimpleBits thing notwithstanding, their entire business is founded on the premise that you don’t care enough about your corporate identity to do any more than buy an off-the-shelf logo for $29. Or $199 if you don’t want to share that logo with a dozen other LogoMaid customers. And when their home page says this, it just gets tragic:

Your logo is not just a fancy graphic adorning your website or stationary - it's a representation of your business philosophy, your overall direction, and your attitude towards your clients and your business. Your logo is the sum total of your corporate existence. It basically tells who you are.

I don’t have enough sics for that paragraph, but if “your attitude towards your clients and your business” is to go grab something cheap that looks moderately professional because you’re cheap and moderately professional, I'm bewildered by your lack of respect for your clients and your business.

Looking cheap is one thing. Punk rock has coasted for decades on looking cheap. But being cheap, and generic to boot… where’s your sense of pride? There are plenty of people in the world who just turn up to work and grind through the week, hoping it’ll magically get better some day. Evidently, some of the designers at LogoMaid have that exact attitude. But how do you ‘just turn up’ to your own business?

I guess I’m chastizing LogoMaid’s customers more than LogoMaid itself. They deserve it, even if they’ve already demonstrated by their actions that they just don’t care. And I suppose I feel the same way about prostitutes and their clientele. I can’t help but look at the hooker and think “Wow, you really know how to spot a business opportunity,” simultaneously shaking my head at the client, thinking “Damn, dude, there are plenty of easy women out there, and sleeping with them won’t make you look like a total sleazebag. Try harder!”

The wrap

We’re living in a post-Godin world. And when Apple’s story is that they don’t do what’s easy, or what’s cheap, but they do what’s good, they can’t get away with something that looks like plagiarism. Big corporations can’t get away with anything.

Smaller businesses, I guess, can and do get away with things that look like plagiarism. Routinely. But when a small group of nerdy vigilantes with weblogs decide to prove them wrong, such a shitstorm can be conjured up that they’ll probably be more careful in future. I’m happy to be part of such a shitstorm.

It’s not a blatant pixel-for-pixel copy, but clearly it’s a shameless knock-off. They took his logo and added a fake mustache, as it were.

Evaluating that visually:

And today, concerning the charge that Apple’s “Hello” Oscars commercial is a rip-off of a sequence in a 1995 film by artist Christian Marclay, he says:

I don’t consider this a rip-off … Using the same basic idea is not the same thing as copying an original piece of work.

And breaking that down visually:

So, uh… yeah. Using the idea of four curly braces in an icon? Rip-off. Using the idea of a dozen clips of film stars answering telephones with a variety of salutations? Not.

I like John Gruber and Daring Fireball —I’m a member, fer chrissakes— but this takes “Apple apologist” a bit far.

How long? You mean you weren’t already?

It all started with Nobby. Nobby isn’t his real name, I don’t know his real name, but he’s a regular on the Perth public transport system. He’s tall and extremely thin, he walks with a limp, and I met him on a bus at Stirling train station.

It was a 99 — the bus that took me from Stirling to the University of Western Australia for three years — and I was seated, reading a textbook. As Nobby boarded, I looked up and my eyes met his. Accidental, yeah, but I’m not so impolite as to pretend he didn’t exist. If he were a pretty girl I might’ve been inclined to hastily avert my gaze (I’m only a proficient flirt when I’m loaded) but instead I smiled — a friendly, polite smile — and went back to my reading. Nobby figured this was an invitation to sit down next to me and sell me on Jesus.

I listened for as long as could be considered polite, listened to his story of how the lord visited him, flying through his bedroom window on a rainbow, and healed his legs. But in the end I had to give him my best “thanks anyway” and stick my nose firmly back into my book. That day I decided it was in my best interest to avoid smiling at strangers on public transport.

After that came the motley assortment of surveyors, environmentalists, panhandlers, buskers, beggars, and spruikers. They’d always been there, but I realized the reason I was plagued by them was that I was being too friendly. Just making eye contact was enough to have them shuffle over and speak to me at length about their exclusive offer.

I ignore billboards, I toss junk mail. Intrusive marketing has taught me to disregard even the most basic of human psychological responses. I probably should pay attention to the big yellow-and-black striped sign, but it’s just the new ‘Dangerously Spicy’ Tex Mex Burger. I probably should talk to the guy on the corner who wants my attention, but he just wants my money and my time, and doesn’t really plan to enrich my life any.

Ignoring the Nissan Altima keys I see on the park bench can’t be too far a step from here.

The news (or speculation turned rumor, rather — it’s all completely imaginary) turned up on Steven Berlin Johnson’s blog a couple days ago, crying “multitouch everywhere!” and musing that a new lineup of touch-sensitive Apple Cinema Displays, coupled with OS X 10.5, could usher in a new era of computing.

Think about the common denominator behind:

• The missing killer features in the Leopard preview
• The lack of iLife updates in Jan 07
• The rollout of the iPhone multitouch interface
• The abnormally long delay in releasing new Apple displays
• A rumor about a ProTools killer that relies on touch displays

I look at all those developments, and say with absolute scientific precision: Apple is going to roll out the multitouch interface across almost its entire product line this spring, integrated into Leopard, new displays, iPhone, iLife, and the successor to Logic.

All manner of commentators have lambasted the idea along the lines of “who the hell wants to spend their day with their arms in the air?” (they’re right, who does?) and superpundit John Gruber agrees:

I think a touch-based UI only makes sense for a tablet-like computer (like the iPhone). I’m not sure it would be generally useful with traditional displays or MacBooks. The angles seem wrong to me.

Me, I think the spirit of the excitement is right, but the trajectory is off.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a wall-mounted, multitouch-enabled, thirty-inch display would be the balls, I just don’t think anyone would buy them. There’s the muscle-strain complaint, the generally-agreed impracticality, the tremendous expense of the new displays (which you could bet would have built-in iSight cameras, too), and the massive number of people who would just plain miss out on the experience because they have current-generation displays, iMacs, and notebooks. What kind of super-sekrit special feature is a multitouch UI when nobody would be able to use it?

I think we’re just thinking too big.

What inexpensive computer peripheral could be hooked up to any old Mac, replacing the traditional mouse, to bring the revolution home? What has been built into Apple notebooks for several years already, enabling such amusements as two-finger scrolling and the two-finger right click?

Did you say trackpads?

We don’t need new displays, and we don’t need to hit the gym before Leopard’s release for tricep endurance training. With a multitouch-sensitive external trackpad on the desk, we could all be flicking and pinching and throwing our windows around in no time. It’s just speculation, as are most things you hear on the ‘net about Mac OS X 10.5, but I say it with absolute scientific precision.

• The June ship date isn’t just waiting for FCC approval, it’s also waiting for OS X 10.5 to go gold (remember: OS X ≠ Mac OS X, though Mac OS X 10.5 should ship around the same time). iPhone uses enough 10.5 base technologies that I’d hazard a guess they’re still working on some of the software.
• Looking at the iPhone UI (the graphical appearance, I mean. Not the interaction), and looking at iTunes 7, I’ll hazard a guess that they’re both rough indicators of what Mac OS X 10.5 will look like. There’s a common theme.
• I really hope Australia is included in the 2008 Asian launch. AT&T doesn’t operate there, but I’m sure one of the local carriers would be more than willing to bend to Apple’s demands and retool their voicemail system.
• Touchscreen interaction means no more one-handed operation, or at least very uncomfortable one-handed operation. Fingers are more versatile than thumbs, sure, but we’ve all grown very accustomed to using our phones (and our iPods) one-handed.
• I really hope they’ve honed the “chuck scrolling” algorithm such that there’s adequate friction on short scrolls. It looks great when Steve flicks his finger and zooms through a dozen screens before he stops it dead with his finger, but I dread a gentle nudge (aiming for a mere half a screen of scrolling, say) having massive repercussions.
• Word on the street is that Apple is worried third party apps could destabilize the OS—disastrous for a phone—but they could (at the very least) open up for pure web widgets.
• I wonder if major iPhone OS updates will be available, free or otherwise, or whether they plan to hawk us a new phone every year like they do with the iPod. Two year contracts, and all that.
• Speed dial, it has been said, needs to be speedier. OK, it's only a slide-unlock and three taps. On my Sony Ericsson, it’s a slide-open and one button. Who’s the tap counter on this project?
• No flash on the camera means I still have to carry a camera. And here I was excited about retiring my (old, but trusty) Sony Cybershot. It’s not a big ask; the Cybershot is 2MP (same as the iPhone), lacks zoom (same again), but it has a flash. And that’s basically mandatory these days. No, LEDs don’t cut it either.

Don’t take these as negative commentary, I’m extremely excited about every part of this thing. Finally, somebody brought the pinch-zoom UI to market! A real browser! Et cetera! But the wooting and hollering has been going for a fortnight now, and though I’m far from a detractor I’ve had these little niggles at me since I watched the keynote. Let’s hope most of them are unfounded.

Dave Hyatt today announced a CSS property named text-stroke (implemented as the vendor-specific -webkit-text-stroke) in WebKit nightlies, something similar to what I was craving only six months ago. That is, a text-outline.

What’s peculiar about all this is that, from what I can gather, this feature is not part of any official W3C spec. Why spend all this time inventing CSS properties when there are hundreds yet to be implemented (or perfected) in formal specs? Well… consider the new release of OS X (10.5: Leopard) coming down the pipe.

If you remember, the last time Apple’s WebKit team got really creative with HTML and CSS was just before the release of Mac OS X 10.4 when they announced the <canvas> element, <input type="range"> (that is, the slider control), <input type="search">, and support for CSS text-shadow properties. All invented (or implemented, in the latter case) specifically for use in HTML-based Tiger technologies like Safari RSS and the Dashboard. Text shadows also found their way into the Tiger font panel.

That said, the smart money (or my money, at least) says stroke and fill follow the same trajectory.

He’s running a funding drive —a micropatronage with a $7777 target— to put food on his table for four months while he gives up his day job and goes a’beating on important government-type doors to demand the real moolah… seven million dollars to fund Open & Closed, his seven-year accessibility research project.

The Open & Closed Project is a new research project headquartered in Toronto. Our main goal is to improve quality by setting standards for the four fields of accessible media – captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. We’ll develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering. Where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, we’ll carry it out ourselves.

We’ll test the finished standards for a year in the real world, then publish them. (You’ll be able to download them for free or buy them in several formats.) Then we’ll develop training and certification programs for practitioners. It will finally be possible to become a certified captioner (or audio describer or subtitler or dubbing artist).

We’ll also develop and test improved fonts for captioning and subtitling (already underway). We’ll develop a universal file format.

Joe’s style is often combative, and it draws as much criticism as it does praise, but you can’t fault his passion and his dedication to universal accessibility. If you’re a human being and you give a damn—and especially if you’re a web developer, media creator, or software developer and you give a damn— go and donate today.

The peculiarity is largely so (as far as I’m concerned) because my copy of Myriad Pro doesn’t exhibit the same behavior: the stock-standard Adobe Myriad Pro ‘ffl’ ligature, as well as its ‘ff’ ligature, only join double-f at the bar. In Apple’s case, the ascender of the first ‘f’ meets up with the second in much the same way that the second ‘f’ meets with the ‘l’. It’s a nice touch.

Too, the weights seem a little off even at the same x-height, but I’m willing to chalk that up to scaling, anti-aliasing, and the like. I don’t have a copy of the shuffle logotype any larger than the one you see above. So I’m not going to pretend the renderings should be identical.

Whether this ligaturial (ahuh) oddity is due to some creative fudging in Illustrator to make the logotype pop a little more, or whether Apple commissioned its own proprietary variant of Myriad, remains to be seen. Anybody with insider info is more than welcome to email me and put me out of my misery.

There was one problem [with the Macintosh trash metaphor]. After a few releases, the Mac designers went a little too far and decided that a trash can with something in it should look “stuffed,” so when you drag something in there, you get a full trash can instead of an empty trash can. The trouble is that neat freaks were distracted by the full trash can. It looks messy. When they wanted to clean up, they would empty the trash. Over time, many people got in the habit of dragging things to the trash can and then mechanically emptying the trash so that the trash can wouldn’t look messy, thus defeating its original purpose: to provide a way to get things back!

Yes, I’m one of those neat freaks and I hate looking at a full trash can. Even if it has 30KB of files in it, it just looks so damn full! Maybe it’s time the trash became a little more dynamic: give it a few dozen levels of fullness, each representing some percentage of the disk’s capacity occupied by trashed files, but I digress.

A spam filter that announces the arrival of new spam is only marginally better than no spam filter at all. Spam is something I don’t want to deal with: period. But now instead of hitting Delete once for every incoming spam email, I’m made to switch to the spam folder, scroll through the list for potential false positives, and hit Erase Junk Mail to get the visible spam count back to zero. Every time I get new mail. The Junk folder, by highlighting its contents so proudly, sets off the neat freak alarm. And it’s a loud alarm. If you ever meet my mother, you’ll understand. And god help you.

So I’m neurotic, it’s an annoyance. In an effort to curb this Junk anxiety, I’ve opted for stealthy spam filtering by configuring Mail to mark all junk as read on arrival. Now the spam can pile up for days, weeks, I pay it no mind. Whenever the fancy takes me (not often), I’ll take a peek to make absolutely sure there are no false positives. But otherwise, who cares? If it’s not telling me about all the spam it trapped I can just go back to living the life I had before spam became an issue: a simple, carefree existence of full-fat milk, high-carb beer, and leaping before I look.

Now, to be perfectly fair, it’s only natural that the Junk folder should display its unread count by default; I’m not arguing that spam filters should be black holes. A lot of people would be worse off without some indicator of trapped spam, since they’d never be reminded to look for false positives and may (on mission-critical mail accounts) be completely screwed by a lost email. Likewise, some people would never empty their trash if it didn’t look full, and bad things would happen. Disks would get over-full with the bloat of a thousand deleted podcasts. But me, I just don’t wanna know. I’ll look eventually, but constant reminders just make me look more often than I need to. I found my happy medium with a simple rule. You can too.