Russell Beattie

In the immortal words of Bill Cosby, "I told you that story to tell you this one." Over the past six months or so, I've been heads down on a couple different web projects which make heavy use of HTML5, and more specifically dynamic, Javascript-templated designs. At first, I have to say I was quite hesitant. It was only a few years ago that I was completely uninterested in Javascript because it wasn't supported by most mobile devices at the time.

Back in 1995, I was working as a junior programmer/consultant for a company called (I kid you not) The Future Now consulting. Having no background in computer programming, I got the job by accident of having previously temped at IBM as a copy writer (befitting my college education in Journalism). Before I left Big Blue, I grabbed some extra Lotus Notes manuals - which were pretty hard to find at the time - and rote-memorized them enough to to find a job as a junior developer.

Apple launched their new iBooks Author and iBooks 2 apps today. After I watched the keynote video, I downloaded everything, and some sample books, to try out and see what they came up with. The new book format is pretty nice and has some interesting features, but honestly, it's nothing that a decent web developer couldn't do with HTML5. That's the point of course - that you don't *need* web developers to create great looking interactive books, and that's great.

To say I'm excited about the rise in popularity of eBooks is probably an understatement. Not that I'm an overly avid reader, I've just been waiting for eBooks to become mainstream for a good decade now. Back in the early 2000s, I was trying to read what eBooks were available on my Palm Pilot and testing out my Mobdex stuff which displayed 800 or so boring old Gutenberg Project text files on a mobile phone.

This post actually started out as a long email to some researchers I work with who study user experience, especially with families (they're the folks that did the fun Nokia/Sesame Street stuff). I thought about the email today and realized there was no reason I couldn't share it here as well, since I think it's truly fascinating.

I just saw this interesting article about Google's new Windows Phone 7 homepage on wpcentral.com where it showed how you can add a custom tile to your home page for their website. I thought that's pretty cool, but wondered how they did it. First, I logged into my server and tailed the web server log, loaded up my website on my WP7 phone, pinned the page to the home screen using the bottom menu and checked the logs to see if it was re-requesting an iPhone like apple-touch-icon. Nope.

I saw this article earlier called "jsdom + jQuery in 5 lines with node.js" and thought it was pretty cool. I tried it out, and it worked like a charm to parse a webpage. I didn't realize how easy it was to use jsdom with an external library like that, and I was pretty impressed with how fast it processed and returned the results.

Years ago while living in Spain I had what I like to call my great epiphany. I was using the first true smartphone - the Nokia 7650 - to chat with a bunch of pals via IRC while shopping for a new laptop. The people I was chatting with (the original Mobitopians) were located literally around the world - in the UK, the US, New Zealand - even Madagascar if I remember correctly.

When the iPad was first announced, back in January of last year, I wrote up some thoughts about it titledWhat we really wanted was a MacPad not an iPad which pretty much explains the post completely. There's not much in that post which was off. I did end up getting an iPad, enjoying it immensely over the past year. Also, the competition was not even a year behind in launching competing tablets based on Android and WebOS (as opposed to the almost three year lead Apple enjoyed with the iPhone).

I'm pretty excited about this - for years now I've been wanting to extract a program I wrote back around 1982 from an old computer cassette tape it was stored on. My son is now getting old enough to take an interest in programming, and it spurred me to take another stab at loading up my first "big" program from when I was about his age. The game is called Letter Defender, and I wrote it in 5th grade (I think) for the TRS-80 Color Computer.

Years ago I had comments on this blog. They're long gone now. When I first added them (and we're talking nearly 8 years ago), the people and the comments they left were great, but that didn't last long. As anyone who's ever used the Internet has seen, the comments quickly started to fill up with idiots and trolls and the quality went to hell.

There's lots of articles out there now reviewing the TouchPad, so I won't cover that stuff. I'll just rant and rave about the things that pissed me off or impressed me. Hardware * The case is chunky, clunky and plasticky. * The volume button isn't set in the slot perfectly, so it rattles. * The case itself isn't sealed perfectly, so it creaks as you hold it and let go of it. * The screen is generally ok, but in the dark you can see 'stage lighting' effects from the side.

So I bought an HP TouchPad. I can't really afford it, but I couldn't resist - WebOS just seems so cool, and I wanted to really get a feel for how it worked in real life. Also, I wanted to see for myself if HP had what it takes to create a viable entry in the Tablet platform wars. It took me a week after launch, but I couldn't deal with the urge any more, so yesterday I took the plunge, dented my credit card even more and got yet another tablet.

I've been learning about the funky new stuff you can do using HTML5 lately, including doing a lot of Javascripting, and messing with Canvas and CSS3 transitions and thought I'd share some interesting things you can do that work on the iPad. Well before the iPad and it's newer drop-down-with-arrow menu came out, I actually thought that dialog boxes with arrows were a great way to present options to a mobile/touch user. Check out my post from Sept. 2009 to see my mock-ups.

W000t! A massive Yak-shaving effort caused by playing with Solr a couple days ago has lead, step by step backwards, until I finally just replaced my hosted web server with a shiny new one (for the same money no less), running on modern hardware with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS rather than a five year old Debian. I had forgotten how long it's been since I had upgraded my server - it was running on a P4 with 256MB of RAM.

The other day I was reading something on Twitter and I saw someone use a two-letter .io domain as a url shortener and was pretty surprised. I can't remember what domain it was, but I immediately thought "Wow, they're letting people register two letter domains. Interesting..." I finally just remembered about it now, and after throwing a quick script to check two letter combos, I found hundreds that were available.

When I first read about OnLive, the streaming video game system, I was more than skeptical. It just seemed impossible - playing videogames online without downloading any software!? No way. I was sure that what I saw was just a technology demonstration, and that it'd never see the light of day. "Yeah, that's interesting," I thought, "but it's not like it'll ever work." Wow, was I wrong.

Let's say I download some plugins for my web browser - say AdBlock, or Readability - and then visit your website, ignoring your ads and simply grabbing the content. This, to my knowledge, is not specifically illegal. It may be against your site's terms and conditions, but that's between us as individual parties, not against the law in general. Especially since I'm not redistributing the copyrighted content.

So I got the XBox 360 Kinect on launch day, and assumed it would come with some sort of mount to put it on top of the TV, but it didn't. Supposedly, it works just sitting on the base in front of your TV as well, but my experience using it for a couple days says that it definitely doesn't work well sitting below the TV. At home I have barely the 7-8 feet of clearance needed between my couch and monitor - setting the camera below the TV just didn't work.

A few years ago, I had an idea that was essentially a reaction to the introduction of "microformats" - embedding useful data into web pages by using "semantically correct" tags around information like address info or calendar stuff, and then using CSS to make that content blend into the page. The problem (to me) is that microformats were really stretching some of the tag definitions, and there was no real organizing scheme - all the different specs seemed like one-offs.

So cool - Amazon now lets you embed book sample chapters on the web. Awesomeness... I totally want to play with this more... I grabbed the ASIN number from the Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide and embedded it here to test: //<![CDATA[ KindleReader.LoadSample({containerID: "kindleReaderDiv", asin: "B0043M4ZH0", width: "750", height: "600"}); //]]> Very cool. -Russ

So I find it very amusing that a few weeks after I write about the death of RSS feeds, Twitter goes and disables Basic Authentication on their site, and doesn't have any immediate work-around for a user's authenticated timeline feed. And apparently, no one really cares, either. I'm talking about the feed that's *still* linked to from the orange feed icon at the bottom of your home page when you're logged in.

Let's think back a few years ago to what I think we can all consider the heyday of news feeds - a time when blogs were a still relatively new concept, companies like Feedburner were acquisition targets, Atom was an upstart format taking on the hegemony of RSS, and things like Twitter and Facebook were only just gaining traction. For a while there, there was a lot of buzz around news feeds as consumers got more used to the idea.

Last year I whipped up a quick little mobile widget called QLauncher, which could be used on the home screen of S60 phones like the N97 or 5800 to quickly launch a web search box with various services as options. It used S60's Web Runtime Toolkit - or WRT - which is essentially a wrapper around the internal Webkit based browser the phone uses. When I switched away to my N900 based on Maemo (now MeeGo), the one thing (besides Google Maps) that I really missed was my little QLauncher app.