How does one compete with Google’s home page?  It has a definite design center – absolutely minimal, fast loading, with ample white space.  Microsoft had quite a challenge, and I find the new live.com intriguing.  Keep the minimal aspects, but instead of white space integrate the search box into a gorgeous daily-changing image, from somewhere in the world.  Add a few hidden roll-over nuggets explaining the image and suggesting related searches to find out more.  Simple idea, executed smoothly in all the details (e.g. page is completely useful while the image downloads).

What do I find so great about this?  The daily images are really intriguing, reminding me daily that there’s a wider world out there. It marries the richness of art with the utility of the interface.  It competes with the increasingly-monopolistic Google, but not on Google’s terms. And the implication of exploration of the world reinforces the theme of exploration of the internet in a way that I find, dare I say, kind of uplifting.

I set this as my home page several weeks ago, breaking my longstanding preference for about:blank, and sometimes I even launch up the browser just to see what the image of the day is.  Refreshing job, Microsoft!

As I posted back in 2005:

The US automakers don’t seem tapped into [the fuel economy] trend at all.  They still seem to think circumventing mileage minimums by pumping out SUVs is the way to sustainable revenues.  Last week Ford and GM were put on notice that they were wrong.  At least the blue half of this country, and I suspect lots of export markets, are willing to invest their automobile acquisition budget in a choice that reduces pump costs, unsightly and unhealthy smog, and reduces our dependence on foreign oil, and maybe even get a bit of value appreciation while they’re at it.  They’re even more motivated to vote with their dollars since their election votes haven’t provided much of a visible return.  Yet despite plenty of urging by the environmental community, Ford and GM seem to have ignored the inevitabilities of the long-term.  More and more of those purchasing dollars will head straight to Japan.  I suspect the next 15 years could be pretty rough as our automobile designers adapt.

High fuel prices have accelerated the timeline beyond what I had imagined, and Prius sales have accordingly boomed. 

I’m proud to at last announce I’ve joined those voting with their wallets for fuel efficiency and low emissions (and unfortunately against our domestic automakers) with my new purchase!

Let’s hope American competitiveness is up to the challenge, and hope that they do a much better job of recognizing and capitalizing on long-term trends in the future.

I’ve been trying out the Windows Live Writer (beta) for a few days, to try and overcome some of the frustrating limitations of writing and editing blogs online.  I had some frustrations, especially in the realm of embedding photos, but the latest Update release seems to have solved those problems, so I’m ready to endorse the product wholeheartedly!

The first advantage of using a "rich" client application rather than a "reach" web site, is the availability of offline storage.  I’ve lost my work several times when "Save" falls prey to network issues.  I often write longer posts in an email message and paste them in so I have backup copy if something goes wrong.  Windows Live Writer has a Save Draft which saves it locally on the file system - much less likely to encounter problems.

Windows Live Writer integrates delightfully with Spaces.  One can create a post, publish it or post it as a draft with one click (minimal one-time configuration required), or open an existing post right of the blog for editing and reposting.  Sweet, an rich client experience no more complicated, and a lot more responsive without having to download all the fancy graphics, than the online experience.

You can view the content as you edit it in several ways: Web Layout, which shows you the content styled just as it will appear in the blog (it downloads the style of your blog and faithfully reproduces it in an editable fashion), or an HTML Code view in case you need to tweak the source (which I’m finding much less necessary now).  There also is a "Normal" view which isn’t styled like your blog, but I honestly don’t know why one would choose this option - maybe it makes more sense with non-Spaces blog editing.  There’s a Web Preview view as well, approximating the entire blog page with the content in place - not terribly necessary since Web Layout works so well.

You can also edit some properties unavailable in the online version - like the date and time of the blog.  The HTML generated is much nicer than the HTML editing control too, namely it actually uses <P> elements instead of forcing everything to a <DIV>, eliminating much of my manual work after completing a post.

Image insertion in the online version is a major, major pain.  Did I say major?  One would have to leave the page (or open another and get into edit mode), choose a photo album, edit it, add a photo, browse to the photo, upload it, view the photo album, right click and get the property sheet, copy the URL, go back to the blog and edit the HTML to insert and <IMG> tag.  In fact it’s such a pain that I mostly upload the photo to Flickr instead and copy and paste the suggested HTML fragment right from that page in.  Then you right click the image and go through a nested set of context menus to set alignment so the text wraps around the right way.  And then you edit the HTML to add hspace attributes

But image insertion is totally, totally awesome in Windows Live Writer.  You click "Insert Picture…" and choose your picture off the hard drive, and it appears.  Click on it, and you get a full set of image properties in the task bar - alignment, links, alt text, size (need little small/medium/large with a way to customize what those mean).  When you post or publish the entry, the photo gets uploaded to a photo album along with the post.  Trivial, as it should be.

There’s a spell checker (which I miss greatly in the online version, and you probably miss it even more when I mistype.)  There are some new features I haven’t really played with yet, such as a Flickr browser plugin and a tagging facility, I’ll have to explore those later but they sound pretty cool.

So after all those praises, I have a few very small nits with the program and it’s Spaces integration so far.  First, there is a neat facility for setting the margins around images - something I always have to do in HTML mode.  However, although it sets and shows the margins nicely, when posting the entry Spaces strips out the markup.  I have to go back and add in "hspace" attributes which are so obsolete they sneak past Spaces’ defenses.  I hope Spaces fixes this soon.

There is a nice feature that automatically applies a blurred drop shadow to your image before uploading too.  However, when you apply it it shrinks the photo area so the photo + drop shadow is the same size as the original photo was.  The photo body is shrunk and gets blurry as a result.  It would be much nicer to add the border without changing the size of the photo body.

There are some nice useful image controls too like rotating, adjusting brightness and applying a watermark, but along with it comes some features I can’t believe anyone would find useful like Gaussian Blur and Emboss effects.  Seems wasted to me.

All in all, Windows Live Writer rocks.  It is fast and lightweight just like the content one would use it on, and beautifully simple for simple things while having a smooth transition to more advanced features, and very little that you’d never find appealing.  Well done!

Well, I haven’t been blogging much lately, instead spending my evening hours designing and building a web site for my wife Deanna’s metal and fused glass sculpture.  And last Friday we finally launched the Central Park Studio website!

The site only contains a few of her many works, some of those which I had easy access to or already had workable photographs of.  We plan to photograph more and put up new pages every couple of days.

I haven’t built a website in a few years, and learned a few things:

• Now I understand better why people have been clamoring for transparent png support in IE.  IE7 supports it, but I had to sniff browsers and do tricky tricks to get it working in IE6.
• IE is much more forgiving than Firefox.  A small error (in one case a missing quote) affected IE not at all, but set Firefox on a serious tailspin.
• Up front investment pays off.  I generate the site from a small number of XML files using XSLT.  This allows me to quickly add new artwork, as I don’t even have to create a page for a new piece, just add a bit of metadata about the piece and the images associated with it.  Once I got this working well, adding new images was an almost exclusively Photoshop task.
• Photoshop drives me crazy.  And rocks!  For doing lots of image adjustment, color matching between images, sizing and so forth it does a great job.  I really wish however that the adjustment controls weren’t all buried in a submenu.  Have I overlooked a handy image adjustment palette for one-click access to all the adjustment tools?
• Buying a domain name and hosting space is easier and cheaper than I would have believed.  I set aside a day for it, and the site was up and running, including email, within a couple of hours.

Anyway, check out the site, link to it ;-), and send me comments.  I’ve only tried it on IE7, IE6, and Firefox.  I’m sure there are many improvements that can be made (I’ve already got a list going).  Enjoy!

Another reason to own a Mac is to avoid the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.  When your laptop takes a moment for intense self-reflection, visible to us as total frozen meltdown (as Paul’s Mac recently did), wouldn’t you rather be soothed by a calming collage of semi-transparent textures and colors?  Gorgeous!  Almost makes you look forward to the next complete system failure!

You know, I’m reconsidering my feeling towards Macs.  Perhaps they really are the coolest things ever!  There’s just a few problems to overcome to make them really attractive.

1. The first is processor power and battery life.  Even Apple has recognized that Intel has the industry beat here, and is moving Macs to Intel processors by 2007.  In my dream Mac I’d have a Pentium M (Centrino) chip to give me great performance and a healthy battery life.
2. The second is a large number of applications that will run on Macs.  I’d like it if any program available for Windows ran on my Mac.
3. The third is the most advanced improvement in user interface design since mice and graphical user interfaces - a truly usable tablet interface.  This capability can fundamentally change the way you interact with your computer.  I’d like the best in class operating system with this capability, which is Microsoft Windows XP Tablet Edition.  (I’m not the only one who thinks this might be possible.  Apple has even joined a Windows Benchmarking program.)
4. And last of all, I’d like the neat apple logo to show off how cool I am.

Well, why wait for Apple to get all this together?  For the last year I’ve been working with all these pieces, and just needed to tie them all together into the whole package.  Here’s my recipe:

• Step 1: Take a Toshiba Techra M4 with 15" display and 1.9GHz Pentium M, with all the bells and whistles, throw on your favorite windows applications including Microsoft Office and Adobe CS2.
• Step 2: Apply an Apple sticker to it (they cost about $150 but come with a free iPod ;-).

Then bask in the envy of any Macficionado friends you have left.

[Update 4/15/06: Charlton asks some good questions about the future of Macs.]

An interesting tidbit came across my desktop with the words "design by committee" in it.  Well written.  Gotta share it!

Apparently a small team desired some UI changes to the GNOME open source project, so they went ahead and did them and are now presenting them back to the community.  The community is a bit shocked to be presented with something with a fairly complete design rather than a set of requirements.  (Web Service folks - this sound rather familiar?)  The designers defend their decision quite eloquently:

…

Although the changes aren’t nearly as radical as the original mockups, they are a big change from the current GNOME panel menu. If we had proposed the changes on the mailing lists, it would have started a huge discussion about what people hated about the design ("you can’t make the panel menu depend on beagle!!!") and how it should be different. And then we could have either (a) completely ignored everyone and done it ourselves anyway, or (b) had a long conversation about the merits of the design and then not actually finished the code in time for NLD10. So we did it ourselves, and now either GNOME will like what we did, in which case, yay, free code for GNOME, or GNOME won’t like what we did, in which case, no harm no foul for GNOME, and yay, brand differentiation for Novell. (And anyone who yells "fork" deserves to get one stuck in them.) An equivalent answer to the question is "because you can’t do design by committee". Everything good in GNOME is good because one person or a small number of people working closely together made it good. Much of what is bad in GNOME is bad because lots of people have contributed without having a single vision of what the end result is supposed to be. …

This is just another aspect of the UI "simplicity" thing. We like UIs that try to do the right thing (metacity, epiphany/firefox, evince) rather than UIs that try to make every possible user happy (enlightenment, mozilla, gpdf/acroread). If you try to design something by committee, you either have to end up with the latter sort of messy does-everything UI, or you ignore and hence piss off a large chunk of the committee.

And that’s where we are with NLD. There is no way that everyone in the GNOME community is going to like the changes we wanted to make. But we did the user testing, and we believe in it, and we want to make the changes anyway. So we’re doing it. Maybe it will turn out good, and maybe it will turn out bad. Either way, the GNOME community learns from it. Think of it like this: wouldn’t it have been cool if we could have tried out spatialus on our users, found out that they hated it, and then reverted back to browserlus, without ever having to actually piss off our users? This is essentially what is going to happen with NLD10. If Novell’s customers like the NLD changes, then GNOME can adopt them. If Novell’s customers don’t like the changes, then GNOME can stand off to the side and say "yeah well, we never liked that UI anyway. Not at all like how we would have done it."

But some people will still say "But couldn’t you have discussed it with the community before doing it?" No, we couldn’t. If we had, it would either not have happened, or it would have sucked. It’s inevitable. It’s not a problem with the GNOME community, it’s a problem with communities in general. The wisdom of crowds [4] only works in situations where there are clear right and wrong answers. If you try to apply it to a design problem, where there are many entirely different right answers, then you end up with a wrong answer. Always [5].

So to sum up: design by committee is bad, endless debates that result in code not actually being written are bad, design by very small teams is good, software with a unified vision is good, trying out cool new UI ideas is good, free code at least doesn’t suck, and of course, for Novell, not shipping NLD10 is bad. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to get more of the good without also getting more of the bad.

[4] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385721706/102-7630748-5396113
[5] http://www.diacenter.org/km/usa/most.html

Especially check out the last link ;-).

I took this quiet Saturday afternoon to finish up a project that has been in progress for months - organizing my spice collection.  I found a set of nice little tins at Ikea a while back that fit nicely into my spice drawer, replacing the hodgepodge of spice bottles, tins, and baggies.  Now I have a "standard" spice container for all my most commonly used spices.

But as I know from my day job, with standards comes homogeneity.  That diversity made it easy to quickly find a particular spice based on the shape and color of the container, and often of the color of the contents.  My tins aren’t transparent, so there is no visual clue as to their contents.  Naturally, I printed out some labels, so I wouldn’t have to open each tin every time I was looking for a particular spice, but each label varied only in the text.  You’d still have to read through a lot of labels to find what you are looking for.  I found myself relying more on the patterns of stains and peeling corners than the text on the label itself!

I thought this was an interesting design concept:  Each tin has all the right design points for it’s appointed task: the size and volume are just right, the wide mouth is works for scooping, pinching, or sprinkling, the surface matches the stainless elsewhere in the kitchen, and the surface is easy to clean.  But when that good design is repeated over and over, something happens. The repetition of an appropriate form might exhibit some qualities that aren’t that appropriate.  Amount is a design quantity that needs to be considered.

That reminds me of a statement by Robert Irwin about the components of color.  Desktop publishers are used to Hue, Saturation, and Brightness as sufficient to define all the possible colors.  Irwin added a surprising forth component - Amount.  While HSV is sufficient to determine an individual color, the amount of each color in relation to others has a profound effect on how one perceives those colors.

The traditional solution to the Amount problem in a set of spice containers is transparency.  Each container automatically takes on some of the diversity of it’s contents.  Not having this "automatic" option, I had to craft an artificial mechanism for diversity.  I based the solution on the diversity of spices by making new color labels which include a photograph of each spice.  At a glance you can differentiate the various spices by color, upon closer inspection you can differentiate shapes, and if that fails for similar spices (like ground thyme and ground oregano), you can fall back to the text label.

Taking all those pictures, cleaning them up in Adobe Photoshop, adding the circular text in Microsoft Publisher, printing, cutting, and affixing each label, was a rather time-consuming effort, multiplied by 50 tins.  Perfect for a lazy afternoon.  But now it’s time to go cook Christmas Eve dinner, spices standing ready, each with its own character despite the regimented rows.

Some people just aren’t satisfied with going weeks between fill-ups in their Priuses. Some want to go months!  In the Christian Science Montior article Plug-in hybrids: a here-and-now alternative, Mark Clayton reports on homebrew efforts, to add batteries and a charger to your Prius and get a 50-60 mile charge each night:

One auto critic who tested a plug-in Prius recently reported that in normal driving, not trying to go easy on the throttle, he would still have to fill up the tank just once in 5-1/2 months.

This doesn’t seem like low-hanging environmental fruit to me, but clearly it appeals to some!  Where there’s a market, a vendor will emerge:

Edrive Systems, a private Los Angeles company, plans to offer by early next year an aftermarket kit that converts a Toyota Prius into a PHEV. Target price for the under-the-hood makeover: About $12,000.

But this seems to represent the extreme of a more broadly-based level of interest that is leading other manufacturers (such as Volkswagen), to follow suit.  ‘Bout time!

Ordered a new Dell UltraSharp 2005FP Wide Flat Panel display at near midnight on Wed (that’s when the sales promotion ended), and it arrived today (I didn’t order even overnight!)  It’s pretty amazing what’s happened in monitors since we made our last big investments back in the early nineties (20 in Apple monitors).  This new monitor takes a small fraction of the space the old one did, and has a greater visible area.  At last we can fully open the cabinets above the computer desk!

I did a bit of research, and still ordered with a bit of worry, and though everything has worked out wonderfully I thought I’d pass along some of my learning.

The widescreen was appealing because of the low height (trying to avoid those cabinets was a main motivator for the purchase), but the monitor works in a rather odd native resolution: 1680×1050.  The Dell site has a very useful warning that some video cards can’t drive this resolution, and points to lots of updates.  Well, my computer is the Gateway 901X Media Center, with a RADEON 9800 series video adapter, and I went to "List All Modes…" in the adapter to see if that was a supported option.  It wasn’t listed!  I was unable to find a driver update that would support that resolution.  Would I end up using only part of the screen?  Or would it be stretched and have pixel alias marks across it?

I played with a Dell 2005FP non-widescreen I had access to to see what the effect of a non-optimal resolution would be.  I found that you generally will set the resolution well below the max resolution of the screen anyway, and the aliasing effects are generally pretty subtle.  So I went ahead and ordered it, with the prompt delivery mentioned above.

It turns out I am able to drive the monitor at 1680×1050 after all.  Either luser error in "List All Modes…" or it adjusts based on the type of display it’s attached to.  The screen is amazingly clear! But the lower resolutions weren’t unacceptable either.

I didn’t have as much luck hooking up the DVI cable instead of the VGA.  DVI is supposed to be better for high resolutions like this, but for some reason there is about 1/2 inch of black all around the screen.  I couldn’t really see any different in clarity - so I went back to VGA.

Biggest problem is that with the update in my ability to view photos, some of my recent postings need some significant readjustment - especially in the yellow/greens.  I’ve updated a couple already. And I updated my firmware in my Casio to tone down the saturation at the source. 

I really like the widescreen format - if you’re used to working full screen at 1024×768, all of a sudden you have extra real estate where you don’t expect it (off the side), and there are always good ways to fill screen real estate!

I wonder if these guys would have gotten even better than 110 miles a gallon without (I assume) ethanol in their mix.  After all, ethanol lowers the amount of heat stored in the fuel:

[Ethanol] contains only about two-thirds as much energy as gasoline. Thus, when it gets blended with regular gasoline, it lowers the heat content of the fuel. So, while a gallon of ethanol-blended gas may cost the same as regular gasoline, it won’t take you as far.  [Robert Bryce, Slate]

As I’ve blogged before, I’m glad to see more evidence of Prius fanaticism, even when it’s taken to rather ludicrous extremes (driving 1400 miles in circles is hard to justify as "efficient" ;-).

I finally finished trolling through all the winners of the Industrial Design Excellence Awards for 2005 (which seems to go down quite a bit). There’s the usual collection of sleeker Sharper Image designs on the same old products, thinner cell phones, tougher laptops, every product made by A-P-P-L-E and its parasites.  Whoopee.

But there are a few gems that really have a unique approach on the subject material.  Here’s a mini-tour of my top ten:

1. ASUS Vento 3600 Desktop PC has the styling of race car fused with a storm trooper.  The front comes off and apparently twists to provide access to the DVD drive.  Nothing but styling, but still, hard to say it’s not unique!  (Alternate view.)
2. The bUNIT is a credit-card size authentication device with fingerprint reading built in.  The design was intended to convey the idea "exclusive", which is not the loftiest or most humane quality to strive for, but the design certainly expresses it in spades!  It certainly makes me want to be part of the club! (Alternate view.)
3. The BenQ LCD Monitor Crazy Arm provides a menacing array of devices to hook your USB devices into.  It seems to want to reach out and jack into your brain directly.  Is that how we are starting to think about our cameras, music players, USB keys, and so forth?  I don’t think this product would give me warm fuzzies, but I confess it’s refreshing to see someone design product that communicates "menacing" so well.  Looks like it’s right out of the Matrix.
4. I enjoy when someone solves a problem that seems obvious in hindsight, but simply was beneath the notice of most of us.  The Rubbermaid Paint Buddy is such a device.  Irresistible!
5. The Barrel Grill really takes a fresh look at the barbeques cluttering up America’s patios.  I keep my unsightly old Weber hidden in the garage, which makes me even less likely to use it.  This design addresses the unsightliness of the traditional grill, with it’s underside of unsightly and grimy struts, and addresses that issue in an elegant way.  Double use as a side table is a bonus!
6. The Hullavator Vehicle Roof Rack System.  What can you say?  It’s about time!  I’ve spent decades hefting kayaks and windsurfers onto car roofs, sometimes in adverse conditions. It’s great to see a solution engineered to address this, especially as I spend more time blogging than exercising and lifting that blasted kayak just seems to get harder and harder…
7. There is nothing revolutionary about the use of the Full Contact Spice Grinder.  I use a dedicated coffee grinder myself.  But what a great shape!
8. The Lenovo Smartphone ET960 isn’t all that revolutionary, but it is the coolest styling in a PocketPC phone I’ve seen yet!  If I ditch my laptop as my personal assistant, this might take its place
9. The SHIFT Concept Bicycle tackles the problem of discontinuities in the progression from trike, to bike with training wheels, to bicycle, by making this progression occur not only in a single device, but in a single usage of that device, based on the speed of the rider!  Having just been working with my daughter on the last of these stages, this idea really appeals to me!  If the mechanism is mechanical and based on momentum as I suspect, it’s brilliant!
10. The technology required for the Snap Bracelet Concept sounds a bit futuristic to me, but the idea of a device with a sophisticated user interface and no buttons (rather than a minimal set like the iPod) is pretty intriguing!

Well, not too many days after I wished for better editing tools on this service, they have quietly appeared!  The editing features not only allow font and size adjustments (which would have served to correct some of my copy-and-paste problems) but there is a direct HTML editing mode as well, so I can remove any copied attributes that are messing up the consistentent style.

Having access to the HTML also allows me to embed images in the text.  So I immediately went back and updated some of my previous entries, with some pretty good success I think!  Some of the entries relied heavily on the image to communicate the complete idea - now I’m in control of the relative size of text and images.

With these new tools at my disposal, I did have to make some design adjustments to the page.  As you can see, I’ve increased the size of the text relative to the photo album so that I can have wider pictures, and still wrap text around the photo.  I also went with a simpler template, one without transparency, in order to make the inlined pictures display better.  It was hard to see before, but the little thumbnails were 20% transparent in the old "Megan’s water" design.  It became much more obvious as the photo size grew.  I tried hacking some styles to restore just the images to full opacity, but gave up after only a few minutes…

I took Chris Pratley’s suggestion and played with OneNote’s Publish features, using as a sample last Thursday evening’s fern discovery expedition.  Publish worked great, saving the page in MHTML (a multi-part HTML package with embedded images).  OneNote preserved the layout nicely, which is pretty impressive given HTML’s limitations as a document layout format.

However, MSN Groups serves up the resulting .mht poorly - IE doesn’t seem to recognize the format and display the results correctly.  (I have no idea if other browsers even support this format.)  You can right-click and download the file to your local machine and browse it just fine, but that’s rather inconvenient and raises security suspicions.

The MTHML can be converted to plain old HTML fairly easily in IE by selecting File/Save As…/Web Page Complete.  The resulting multiple files require a bit more work to upload to MSN Groups, but the results actually work (always a good thing.)  Would be nice to have a direct Save As…/Web Page Complete or equivalent in the next version of OneNote.

[Update 14 June: Well, that didn't work as well as I thought.  The simplest "My Documents" option on MSN Groups isn't publicly viewable.  Creating a new group with public permissions still required an MSN account to view - unacceptable for my purposes.  When I moved the files back to my own ISP account, and updated the links in my blogs, I found the Save as/Web Page Complete didn't preserve relative locations, and mangled the names to make direct access through a browser impossible.  Had to do some hand-editing.  Looks like I have to up the priority of my request that OneNote export clean HTML directly.]