I just got inspired for this article here, where Aditya Mukherjee talks about how and why he blogs.I want to talk about that and about why I read blogs - as this is something many people here in germany don’t understand or just don’t want to do.

Aditya Mukherjee tries to get better, develop his way of writing and wants to present his ideas to the world. He tries to keep track of his personal progress. These also motivate me to blog. I’d also give people I know the possibility to read my ideas even when we don’t have real-life contact, as this makes people keep connected. And keeping connected is important to everyone of us. Its not the meaningless facebook-friendship, but the possibility to read, what the other person’s up to. Thats also why I’d love to see more people I know blogging or at least using Twitter. They might think I don’t care about them, but the point is that nobody likes to ask everyday “Hey, whats up in your life?” - and given that you have more than one or two persons you know, its better to have a push- instead of a pull-mechanism to get their updates. When something is important to a friend, I’d like to know it. If he put it on twitter, I get that update. If he even writes a longer blogpost, I still can decide if I’d like to read that thought of if its not important to me.

And writing blogposts isn’t a big deal wither. Okay, it takes some time, and at the moment I can’t find much time to do that either, as I just finished studying and will begin working in a software company tomorrow - and just bought a flat with my girlfriend (well and you have no idea how much time it takes to pick the tiles, the lamination, every bit of the kitchen and get all the bureaucracy done). But writing helps me to order my thoughts and to improve my english. And perhaps someone I happy to hear from me again. You never know.

Same with reading blogposts. I began subscribing to a small number of XML-feeds (from blogs of people I know), but learned some other great blog, that I like to read. Some of them are technical, some are philosophical, some are both. Lately, I posted a blog-link to someone who might have been interested in it, about a management technique that is used in his work and what often goes wrong with it. The response I got was “I don’t have time to read blogs - and this stuff in blogs is all pure theory and has nothing to do with the real world work. And by the way, everyone can read blogs.”

This somehow stroke me. Someone who doesn’t read blogs tells me that everyone can do it. Well, I agree that everyone can read, but reading blogs with content that is about your profession or about stuff you care about is important information for your life. And of course you can’t do that if you don’t take time for it. Some people read the newspaper to know what happens in the world - and they take their time to do that. Some read professional magazines - and also take their time to do that. So whats wrong about reading blogs?

Well, I guess the problem is, that its not really commonplace in Germany to do that. People here are always 4 years behind compared to the trends in the USA - and blogs in Germany are often thought of as homepages where people show off the newest funny stuff they found on youtube. If you’re really picking the good quality stuff, you get much more personalized information than you’d find in any newspaper or professional magazine. The writers are not professional all the time, but who cares? Iknow my posts are not too well thought-out too, but hell where’s the problem? You can skip every blog entry as you could flip a page in the newspaper.

Now back to “everyone can read blogs”: indeed. But not everyone can be patient enough to read blogs, to find blogs that delivers good content and to digest that information in a ways that helps you in your everyday life - or work. Its the same with books. Everyone can read them - but that doesn’t mean everyone takes time to do so. Hell, perhaps it would be better to read books, but if you’re into computers you’ll soon realize that the world changes too fast for books to be cutting-edge.

Well, nevermind. Just a lifesign from someone who doesn’t find much time to blog at this time.

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I just finished my final presentation as the finishing-line for my studies in computer science. I wrote about the inclusion of a RDFa-Editor in a blogsystem, where a user can include semantic annotations in their posts. The goal was to create a tool for editors that would enable them to enrich the posts they make with individual semantic markup. Its mainly focused on usability and is based on the WYMeditor and two servlets. It should be easily portable and perhaps this can be an inspiration for CMS-vendors, so normal people without domain-knowledge (in RDF and Ontologies) will be able to post semantic markup for their contents.

The presentation is made with the flash-tool of prezzi.com and is completely in GERMAN. You can find it shared here. Let it first load the media before you go on watching. If you experience lags, you can download the more smoothly runningoffline-exe-file.

If someone needs a translation, I might invest the hour of work doing so (just post a comment). This is the presentation … click on the forward button to move forwards, in the downloaded version you’ll find the forwards/backwards-butons in the lower right corner and can also use standard powerpoint-presentors:

I hope you like the idea - and I hope that the semantic web world gets more usable for “usual people”, otherwise it might not come to reality for many more years. If you’re interested in the thesis, let me know.

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This was meant to be a comment on the post touchscreens suck, but it became a bit long and therefore its own post here. The author basically talks about some main usability issues with touchscreens: having the fingers where you need to read (thus using up viewing space), missing or unnatural feedback (from virtual keyboards) and the missing ability to pick something up and put it somewhere else (that I’ll call “drag and drop“). Its also perfectly possible that some might think I sound like an Apple fanboy in this article, but I’m perfectly willing to use a better mobile phone when someone invents it. I’d love to see a Pre for example. Oh, and I use a PC.

Touchscreens are ALL about usability. The concept is called “direct manipulation“. Humans always try to use their hands to manipulate something they see. If you’d give a caveman a computer-monitor with some windows and items and a mouse and a keyboard and tell him to move one icon around, guess what the caveman would try to do to manipulate the objects on the screen? Touch them. Grab them. Squeeze them.

Direct manipulation feels more intuitive to humans - thats why the mouse was invented in the first place - as the next best replacement for a hand on the screen. Of course people could have gone on using keyboards and shells and being pretty effective with it. But Windows and the Mouse made computers usable for normal people for the first time.

Don’t forget mice and keyboards have been around for a really long time, so the concept is perfected now. As with all “new” technology, its not always nicely thought out well in the beginning. Apple is a bit ahead of the game as they already have Touchscreens on the market for over two years now and you could argue they were concepting on this long before - while other companies really began thinking about copying when the iPhone 3G became such a huge success one year ago.

The iPhone is therefore the touchscreen-device you need to look on when you try to talk about the usability of touchscreens. I held and tried to use A LOT of different other touchscreen smartphones and they plainly ALL SUCKED in some way. Most need too much pressing power to be usable (therefore if you pressed too lightly, the input may not have been recognized), are imprecise, have stupidly laid out virtual keyboards and have weird menus all over the place.

But now let me come to your main critisizm: using a touchscreen instead of a keyboard. Your view on touchscreens seems to be that they’ll replace keyboards. Touchscreens are SCREENS and nothing can stop you from using a keyboard anyways. They DO NOT take up more space. The keyboard is just not used in mobile phones sometimes, as it can be emulated by the touchscreens and you don’t type much on mobile phones anyways. And I must definitely say: yes, if you type a novel or some code, you’ll definitely not want to do that on a touchscreen.

Image via Wikipedia

Touchscreens are meant to be used with easy-to-use input elements like buttons and sliders. Press a button. Why grabbing a mouse, moving it to move the pointer on an icon and click the mouse if you can just touch the friggin’ icon itself? BUT virtual keyboards work better than expected - on the iPhone at least. If you and me type a 160-character message on our phones, I can guarantee you that I’ll be much faster - I can use my two thumbs on an accurate virtual keyboard with a well-working language-correction, zero response time and good feedback in landscape-mode. I never thought that it would work that well, but it does.

Ah here comes the feedback issue.

Apple also seems to think you’ll need keyboard-feedback, as everytime you type a key on the virtual keyboard you get a keyboard-like clicking sound (in fact I exchanged it via jailbreak because I didn’t like the clicking sound). The popping-up letter that tells you which button you just pressed is only there a millisecond - just long enough to be able to see it. It never interferes with your input. My girlfriend has vibrating feedback on her touchscreen-phone. And already asked me if I could turn that off. So much for haptic feedback. (Meanwhile haptic feedback for touchscreens is in development, the plastic screen can “bubble up” a bit, but I don’t think this will be a big breakthrough.)

Having the hand where you need to see the screen is bad. Therefore the visible area is made smaller, so you have room for the virtual keyboard. The keyboard is usually on the bottom for the screen, so your hands don’t interfere with the rest of the visible area that you need to see. This is a very good solution I think. If you argument that you can slide out your keyboard, I could say that this is not a touchscreen problem. The G1 showed that slideable keyboards can be combined well with touchscreens, an Apple-patent for a slideable touchscreen-device (say an iPhone with a slide-out touchscreen) shows that this is only a problem of miniaturization - not of touchscreens theirselves.

But all this was referring to mobile phones, where typing is not the main problem and novels don’t get written. What about touchscreens in computers? I also don’t think this is very usable. Think about how you sit in front of your PC doing work. Try (for 5 minutes) to click and drag-and-drop on your screen and then think about typing a text on your screen. This would clearly suck. The monitor is too lange to move everything around, go from here to there with your fingers 1:1, and usually a monitor is standing in front of you, so typing on it wouldn’t work well. In a usual computer, a touchscreen could only be an addition - and for an addition, I would be pretty expensive.

Apple again is leading the market here (they already build accelerators into macs so you can bump the screen from sidewards to close a window, but I consider this meaningless - just a funny fact). They’ll present a “Touchpad” soon, a tablet-mac with a touchscreen-only input - and this thing will be used to type on with a virtual keyboard. And this is the whole solution to the problem! A tablet PC. Small screen size. The monitor is on the table if you type a longer text, so its where the keyboard usually is. The screen is large enough so you could type conveniently. But will you be able to type fast on a screen with no haptics? Well, I don’t think so. Or at least, I can’t imagine it working as good as a traditional keyboard.

Conclusion: The smaller the device, the more a touchscreen makes sense and the more the touchscreen will work. Just try out an iPhone or iPod Touch for a day or two, and you’ll see that touchscreens work really good when the device and the system behind it are well laid out for this means of input. But the keyboard will not be replaced in the near future - as command-line-shells won’t be replaced too.

P. S.: Reviewing this post, I just realized that I didn’t talk about drag-and-drop. I must say that I also think that drag-and-drop still works best on a mouse, but I also saw some iPhone-games that really do a great job in this resort. Apple doesn’t use any drag-and-drop in the iPhone, aside from rearranging the icons. Touching an icon for one second makes all the icons wiggle so you know you’re in drag-and-drop-mode, but I don’t think this is the best solution. But they’ll have to make it work on their touchpad I think. Maybe they’ll use multitouch - I’d use two fingers moving from outwards towards the item, which would highlight the item (or make it bigger) and then drag it to its destination, releasing it with a click. We’ll see soon.

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Image via CrunchBase

Robert Scoble (who’s on Twitter about 24 hours a day) did an interesting post about how he uses Twitter today - after he unfollowing a whole lot of people and shutting down his autofollow-bot he still follows about 2k people (about 1300+ that he met and 600+ that he’s interested in). This is one of his accounts that he uses for the “filtered information flood” as I’d call it. All people he follows are from a certain area of expertise that he’s interested in most or people that he’s met and therefore might be interested in their tweets. These people he met are also followed by Scoble on another account.

Scoble tells us that he switches Twitter clients pretty often, and therefore can better filter information by following a certain target group with different accounts. And he also tells us that its pretty impossible to read the tweets of 90000 people anyways.

I must say that I think the same way. But I don’t have time to be on twitter everyminute of the day (as Scoble and some other “Social Media Guru Expert Evangelists”), so I even have to filter some more. First, I took my ithoughts_de account and only followed people I like to read and who tweet interesting stuff. As I don’t have too much time and don’t want to clutter my timeline with people who tweet way too often (like Scoble) or only tweet a lot of completely pointless stuff (like Ashton Kutcher or Tila Tequila), those get removed rapidly. Following 250+ people is pretty easy to keep up with, if you look for the filtered information of the day. This is the source of knowledge, that will always instantly tell you important stuff - much earlier than official magazines or websites. No matter what, I still get a lot of information in there, so I can’t always be on that account when I want to use my time effectively.

Therefore I set up a protected account for myself, where I only follow people I know personally (one exception). Here in germany Twitter STILL didn’t break through to the usual webuser, so these are only six people (if you leave out doubleaccounts). That I’m pretty sure that only friends can read it lets me also dump my own pointless stuff without much information value there AND I can use it for communication. I also use this account with my iPhone, so if I make a pointless TwitPic I won’t scare away my ithoughts_de followers (that I believe are there for the good links I find and share).

After all, I also set up a follower-bot thats nicely working in the background to build up followers slowly with 3.4k followers atm. You never know when you wanna have that audience around (that might mainly be bots, but who cares - sometimes also numbers count).

New Idea for Twitter.com

I think if you know about Twitter you could also drive this to the extreme and make different accounts even for different topics of interest. Every account could follow some special breed of people and you could tweet your links to the group of people who follow your account dedicated to that single topic. In facts, this is one of the features that twitter should integrate into (premium?) accounts: using their REST approach they could let you divide your stream into topics and also let you assign your friends (the people you follow are called ‘friends’ on twitter) to that topic. This topic-centered URL would look like http://twitter.com/ithoughts_de/topicjava/ instead of just http://twitter.com/ithoughts_de and you also wouldn’t have to set up 100 accounts then. A nice drag-and-drop webinterface could let you customize your topics and sort your friends in there and you could decide if you follow a person or only one (or more) of his or her topics. Some microsyntax like “§topicjava I found a nice Java-related article that I want to share” could work for older twitterclients while Twitter expands their API by one more parameter called ‘topic’, so updated clients could directly post messages into topics.

If you like this idea, please share it on Twitter … lets hope someone at Twitter sees it. They could also do this thingy for their premium accounts. *cough cough … I didn’t say that you must be mistaken*

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Image by The Pug Father via Flickr

As a 3G (without S for speed) - iPhone-User I was pretty cautious when 3.0 came out. My jailbreaked 2.2 was running pretty slow, and as 3.0 brought new features I thought it might be even slower when I jailbreaked it. But luckily, Apple provides updates that increase performance instead of making things slower. So my jailbreaked 3.0 run faster than my jailbreaked 2.2 - in fact, I don’t even feel it running slower anymore.

“Why Jailbreak anyways?” you ask? Because:

• Its easy. Just download the jailbreaking software, google for a how-to-tutorial and just do it.
• You get the lockscreen calendar. Always seeing which calendar-events come next is a uber-feature. Look for the lockscreen-screenshot in the gallery in this post to see how it looks like. Just shows all calender-items on the lockscreen, so you don’t have to look in the calendar-app all the time. The working lockscreen-calendar I found in Cydia is called “Lock Calendar”.
• Another nice thing is the “20 second lock screen” that lets to lockscreen stay activated for 20 seconds instead of the usual two or three seconds - very useful with that calendar lockscreen.
• You get a design you like. Using Winterboard and one of thousands of design choices in complete themes. Look in the gallery to see the design I use. Download “Winterboard” in Cydia and any of the masses of Themes.
• You get a videocamera-function on 3G (not included in 3.0 if you don’t have a 3GS). Search for Cycorder in Cydia to download it.

[Show as slideshow]

• You get qTweeter, a superb update-client for iPhone that updates you Twitter and/or Facebook status. qTweeter is just there to SEND messages, not to read them, but you can use it inside any application by sliding your finger from the top of the screen down. You can include pictures (frsh or from the camera-roll), videos (from Cycorder), songs (with a weblink to a prehearing) or links (while in safari) in your tweets. Maybe more that I didn’t see so far. Costs a small amount of money to use with all features. Look into the gallery to see three pics where qTweeter gets drawn with a finger from the top of the screen.
• You get BiteSMS, a superb SMS-client where you can send cheaper text messages (in Germany 0,06€ per SMS).
• You get these features: Google Voice (if you’re in the US, free SMS and cheap worldwide calling) and Tethering without needing to pay extra money to your provider (Cydia-search for Tether; costs a little amount of money).
• You can install AdBlock, an AdBlocker for Safari. There was also a little fee included, but I don’t need to tell you that downloading ads is pure waste of time and transfer volume - so its worth it. Sadly the newest version of AdBlock has an error which crashes Safari - I hope they fix it soon.

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If the question is, what JavaScript-Framework you should use, finding an answer is usually all about finding out what you already use and what seems to be the feature-richest, fastest and best supported frameworks. If you already use a Framework, just take that one if you’re not only using it for some easy simple stuff like a popup or something. Otherwise, think about what you’ll need the JS-library to do and consult the web. What I have done:

Some Quotes:

“You can save a tremendous amount of time and effort by using the browser-independent framework that JQuery has spent untold man-hours testing, debugging, and proving in the field. While there’s nothing wrong with writing JavaScript, why not speed your development time by writing to the library instead? As I’ve always said, don’t reinvent the wheel, unless you plan on learning more about wheels.” - Jeff Atwood

“A JavaScript framework may not make you a better programmer, but it will make you more efficient. That alone should be reason enough to choose a JavaScript framework, or library if you prefer. Unless you decide to build your own, there are plenty of options available to developers. However, choosing the right framework can be tricky, and weeding through a mess of opinionated fanboys (myself included) is intimidating.” - Brian Reindel

Features-comparison:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript_frameworks

(pretty much tells us that Dojo and jQuery rule)

Speed-comparison:

http://www.domassistant.com/slickspeed/

My test resulted in: jQuery fastest, Dojo was close … Protoype and Moo were pretty slow (used Firefox 3.5)

Research and advise:

http://www.dannydouglass.com/post/2008/04/Comparing-Popular-JavaScript-Frameworks.aspx

Conclusion

Think for yourself. I’d always recommend jQuery, as every single developer that has ever used it has fallen in love with it, and it just always ranks best - everywhere. You got all features, high speed, short syntax, small filesize, very good documentation, unnumerable amounts of plugins, tutorials - and a low learning curve. If you can’t trust EVERYONE ELSE, you’ve got to have good reasons to.

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