Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

You would never guess from this shot that the song I am crooning is New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Thanks to Kevin Bjorke for the photo.

Just a thought, while I’m on a blog posting roll: wouldn’t it be cool if someone implemented a sort of del.icio.us“trackback” feature for weblogs? That is, a WordPress plugin that could display the number of times a post has been bookmarked on del.icio.us. It could be almost like the distributed, weblog-ish equivalent of the way Flickr displays the number of people who have marked a photo as a favorite. I’d do it, except I already have way too many side projects as it is. Jonas, any interest?

(Update: Ask and ye shall receive: Andrew Skinner has done it! It’s now running on my weblog, and I couldn’t be happier with it! Thanks for your hard work Andrew!).

A little while ago, Brent Simmons asked his readers about their window management style: whether they manage clutter by closing, minimizing, or hiding. Lately, I’ve been interested in a similar “Beatles People vs. Elvis People” distinction: some people tend to prefer to locate things by browsing, while others prefer search.

I, for example, fall squarely into the search camp. I almost never use the “Browse” view in iTunes–if I want to listen to a specific album, I find it more expedient to simply type the name of the album into the search field. This is a bit messier, of course, since it usually turns up songs that are not part of the album, but that doesn’t really bother me. I do the same thing with Mail: rather than sorting my messages into a number of folders, I prefer to let it all go into one big inbox and find what I need later by searching. I suppose you could say I prefer ad-hoc, logical views of my data to concrete hierarchical organization (which could also be one reason I love the concept of tagging so much).

Obviously Tiger, with its focus on search and metadata at both the system level and app level, is a huge boon to people like me, and I think my experience demoing it at MacWorld this year really threw the search/browse dichotomy into sharp relief. I demonstrated Spotlight features like Smart Folders to nearly everyone I talked to, but while everyone seemed to understand them, only about half seemed to think of them as killer features the way I do.

So how about you–are you a searcher or a browser?

Observant users of Cocoalicious who have updated to Mac OS X 10.3.9 may notice a problem with the “New Post from Safari” feature: namely, the selected text on the page is no longer captured. This problem is caused by an unfortunate regression in both Safari 1.3 and Safari 2.0: the Javascript “getSelection()” call no longer works properly when invoked through Safari’s “do javascript” AppleScript command. Rest assured, there is a bug in Radar for it, and hopefully it will get fixed at some point.

(Update: Sent trackback to Hyatt’s Safari 1.3 regressions post.)

Matt Haughey posted a comment today chastising the “geeks” who have been resisting Adaptive Path’s “Ajax” label for new wave web applications that use XMLHttpRequest, Javascript, and the DOM together. He chalks their resistance up to the typical engineer’s distrust of marketeers, and urges them to jump on the bandwagon in order to more effectively extract money from non-programmer VCs, managers, and so forth.

I would argue that Haughey is missing the real source of their consternation, though: I think there’s a feeling, perhaps, that in publishing their white paper and coining their own name, the hipster consultants at Adaptive Path are laying claim to, or at least hitching themselves to, someone else’s revolution. If anyone deserves credit for legitimizing and popularizing the use of XMLHttpRequest, after all, it must be the hardcore coders at Google (and the team behind Gmail specifically), and yet by coining a marketing label, AP will probably become the go-to guys for journalists, executives, VCs, and other non-techies seeking to understand the technologies behind Web 2.0. The tendency in the geek world, where “cred” is very important, is to think of this behavior as something akin to the “sidler” on Seinfeld–the guy who does little of the work himself, but always seems to be standing conveniently next to Elaine whenever kudos are being handed out.

Haughey is right, though: we need a succinct way of referring to this architectural style, and Ajax is as good as any. And let’s face it, if we’re really concerned about who deserves the proper credit for Ajax (or at least the XMLHttpRequest part of it), we’d have to give Microsoft Internet Explorer mad props. Let’s see how the web geeks respond to that one!

(Update: Due to the potentially incendiary nature of this post, I wish to point out that I have no ill will toward Adaptive Path. I think they’re smart people, and Jeff Veen has been one of my heros since I read his books in college. I’m merely explaining what I think Matt Haughey is missing about geek psychology, and this probably would have merely been a comment on his weblog if he allowed them.)

If you’re a weblog reader who’s been waiting for me to post, or someone who has emailed me and is waiting for a response, or a Cocoalicious user who has been waiting for an update, or a Cocoalicious contributor who has been waiting for a patch to be integrated, or a PodWorks user who has been waiting really long for an update, or a PodWorks user who is waiting for support, or a WWDC Dinner attendee whose name I have yet to put on the page, please accept my apologies. I’m afraid recent stresses (both professional and personal) have made it difficult for me to maintain my customary level of overcommitment outside of my day job.

The good news is that I have a backlog of interesting things to write about, including SXSW Music, my spur of the moment trip to Death Valley, the future of Cocoalicious, an idea I have about how digital music players could implement more intelligent shuffle, a Google Maps hack I’ve been working on, my new Nikon D70, and possibly (depending on how things go) even an exciting new direction in my life.

Oh–and I promise to try to get back to answering email soon…

Last week, Fraser Speirs posted Apple’s “Meet the Engineers Behind Tiger” page to his del.icio.us links. In what has proven to be an interesting study of the social power of del.icio.us, I then posted the same page to my own del.icio.us links, not so much because I wanted to bookmark it, but rather so that I could add the comment “Someone should make trading cards!” to the URL’s del.icio.us history. Since then, I have had one person contact me with a proposal to actually print some, and Martin Pittenauer actually went to the trouble (using Interface Builder no less!) of mocking up a series of “Magic: The Gathering”-style cards.

Like any good game, MAP’s cards have some tricky surprises. For example, you might think that Bertrand Serlet, the dread lord of OS-related software development at Apple, would be darn near unbeatable. But you’d be wise not to underestimate the might of Spotlight czar Yan Arrouye, who packs a +100 “Find Stuff” punch (not to mention the ability to summon Dominic Giampaolo at will).

Who knows–perhaps some enterprising soul will organize a “Battle of the Tiger Engineers” tournament for WWDC this year? I’ll provide the 12-sided dice.