What's perhaps more disheartening is that we see such backward-looking thinking in the top-line offerings from the king of design software companies, Adobe.
Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Standard
The basic toolkit for web designers and developers, Adobe® Creative Suite® 3 Web Standard software features all-new versions of the fundamental tools for creating and maintaining interactive websites, applications, and mobile device content. Prototype your projects, design assets, and build and maintain professional web experiences. Work on your choice of Mac or Windows®.Combines Adobe Dreamweaver® CS3, Flash® CS3 Professional, Fireworks® CS3, Contribute® CS3, Bridge CS3, Version Cue® CS3, and Device Central CS3.
As a web designer, I look at this offering and shrug with frustration. Aside from Bridge and perhaps Fireworks, I have no use for any of these applications. It's just not relevant to the requirements of web design these days.
When it comes to theming for Drupal or any other content management system or even basic blog system, what you need are decent graphic design tools (such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks...) and a proper text editor (BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate...).
If you're a student or just starting out in web design, my recommendation is to order the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Standard. Unless you're a Flash artist, the "Web Design" packages are just a waste of disk space.
]]>It's one of the oldest requests. We asked it as children, and our children ask it of us, and we ask it of one another. "Tell me a story."
We marvel at "King Kong." We're enthralled at seeing the "Lord of the Rings." We're mesmerized at the sweep of "Star Wars." "Sky Captain," "Final Fantasy," and "Sin City" head into new realms. And who will forget, "Who Shot Roger Rabbit?"
Yet, at some point, all these projects were screenplays, or at least treatments. There was a story.
I was reminded of this as I listened to the commentaries of Jodie Foster and Robert Zemeckis each give their running account in the background as I watched "Contact" on DVD.
For Foster - the star - it was mainly about the story. For Zemeckis, it was more complicated, or as the top-level guy, Zemeckis had a wider range of responsibilities, but I could not help but notice how devoted he was to the technical aspects of the film. Perhaps he let Foster take care of the story and rather than be redundant, he gave his spin on what magic was done during the production.
And yet, as I look at the latest in a series of box office offerings, special effects are playing more of a role. To be sure, it is cost-effective to paint things out. For example, in "The Untouchables," a street scene required that all window air conditioners be removed from an exterior shot so that the scene would look like the late 1920s and not the late 1980s. No longer would a film company have to go door-to-door and incur the expense of removing and replacing the offending window units.
Special effects, like spice or salt, are best when they enhance rather than overwhelm the scene - in effect, upstaging the actors.
Is "Hamlet" a better play if the Ghost (of Hamlet's father) is made especially gruesome? At what point do we stop listening to the dialog, only to be swept along by a spook house or "Space Mountain" sort of experience?
Laura and I chatted about this a bit before Staff Meeting. I am "borrowing" her idea and putting it into entirely my words, but it goes like this: What if the last three Star Wars episodes had to be shot using the same special effects of the first three episodes?
Would the human drama come out better? Would there be more tension? How is it that some fantastic actors gave such wooden performances. Ian McDiarmid ("The Emperor") alone stands out.
The special effects don't have to be all that special. Let me conclude by turning back to the film "Contact," and the scene that did it for me. Our hero, Ellie Arroway, is listening to "the array," hoping to find intelligent life on other planets. She is alone, in the late evening, out in the field of dishes (dreams) listening to "outer space." Suddenly there is a crackling through the headphone. The camera zooms in on just her eyes.
Sentimental me, I am always moved to tears at this scene. The "girl scientist" has the "eureka!" moment. She has seen something that has escaped everyone else's notice.
The special effects show "the array" at night in the background, but the tension for me is over the top. And what's happening? She races off in a car to the center building. Her colleagues simply waken sleeping computers. No scene before, or after, compares with this moment.
This is the story - a scientist who is scoffed at makes the greatest discovery of the century. We are not alone, There is intelligent life on other planets.
Alas, that too many films, so enamored with special effects and not story, forget there is intelligent life on this one as well.
]]>But his calculations reportedly inspired some new ideas in his colleague, James Watt, who took Black's ideas of "latent heat" and used them in the development of a new steam engine.
The Scotch distillers were "scratching their own itch," and a major technological invention developed as an almost-direct result. This in turn revolutionized power generation, which allowed for major improvements in factories and industrial plants and led to a burst in what we call the Industrial Revolution.
Each of these steps involved new development, new inventing, new improvements in that which was. But how many of these things happened only because Scotch distillers wanted to use coal instead of wood to fire their boilers? If invention were left to inventors inventing only what they themselves might want to have around, would we be where we are today, beyond the industrial, transportation, atomic and information revolutions into this explosion of interactive communications?
The Drupal itch
There's been quite a bit of discussion going on in the Drupal developer community about, well, how to cultivate community. For the most part, there's a recognition that something needs to be done. For example, Dries Buytaert, who launched his idea of an open source CMS a few years ago, noted that in 2005 the user base on Drupal.org grew threefold, but the number of contributors remained essentially constant.
What to do about this has been the subject of debate for the past several days now.
On the one hand, you have folks who believe that if you're not coding for Drupal, you're essentially a parasite -- a "hitchhiker."
Users who don't contribute to Drupal are hitchhikers. Nobody needs them onboard, Drupal will get from A to B fine with or without them, and if they want Drupal to go out of its way on their behalf they should ask nicely, if there isn't time to take them exactly where they want to go hitchhikers should be thankful for the free ride they have had.
Thankfully this attitude isn't a majority opinion -- at least I don't believe so. And the man who wrote the above paragraph has expressed a desire to have it rewritten because he readily admits that the wording is rather inflammatory and off-putting. (Reader: The linked page very well could have changed by the time you look. The documentation pages on Drupal.org are living documents, always subject to revision.)
However, I question the entire concept of users as "hitchhikers." A CMS does not grow in a vacuum. And I don't think it's simply the result of "scratching your own itch," either. Because the fact of the matter is that Drupal is not simply a result of development, it's also a tool for community-building, personal communications, business facilitation and so on.
A product or a tool?
Think of Drupal as the text. The developing community is the writer. And the users, site admins and designers are the audience. One cannot exist without the other. Just as a book's audience gives the book significance and meaning, Drupal's users give Drupal meaning. The text would not exist without the creator; the text would have no meaning without the user.
But Drupal is not simply a text -- a static body -- but is a dynamic object. It's both a product of development by the Drupal developer community, and a tool used by the users to achieve things that perhaps the developers never imagined. Drupal's development gives Drupal existence, but Drupal's use gives Drupal meaning. Drupal is the result of community development. But it's also the result of how it's been applied in the real world.
For example, CivicSpace would not exist if it weren't for the developers who made that Drupal distribution happen. They are doing a lot of hard work to integrate powerful community-building features and modules into a seamless, effective community CMS. But would CivicSpace exist if it weren't for the demand for something like it in the Dean campaign? Would the changes in CivicSpace since then have happened if people weren't actively using CivicSpace, challenging its limits and discovering new ways to make it useful and effective?
For example, would Drupal have a trackback module if the trackback concept never was embraced by bloggers in the first place?
Whose itch is it?
How many developers discovered they had an itch to scratch only when a site admin tried to do XYZ or simply asked if something were possible? How much of what has been developed for Drupal and CivicSpace happened in a vacuum far removed from reality?
How many itches that got scratched never would have appeared if the scratcher were not exposed to this or that idea, notion, approach or feature somewhere along the line?
I cannot say for certain, but my guess is that there are very few itches that start tickling in a vacuum. We're all a part of the world. In the Drupal context, we're all a part of the interactive web universe -- at least to some degree. And Drupal's evolution is not just a matter of DNA -- the programming ideas and talents of the developers -- but also a result of the habitat in which it exists.
I think the hitchhiker metaphor is a bad one because it suggests a monolithic construct of an automobile, in which developers are in the driver's seat and everyone else is just looking for a "free ride." The Drupal community is much more amorphous and diverse than a singular automobile, and there are far more drivers than can fit behind one wheel.
And let's face it, the "end users" -- bloggers, site admins, business people, campaign managers, community leaders, artists, etc. -- have a lot more influence on development than a hitchhiker does on an 18-wheeler trundling down the Interstate.
A community defined by Drupal
In the end, I guess I'm saying that Drupal is not only defined by its community, but the community is also defined by what is Drupal. And because of that symbiotic relationship, it's only healthy to cultivate communication and camaraderie across all niches within that community. We may each be able to survive without each other, but we won't thrive.
And just as Drupal does not benefit from users demanding free work from "ubergeeks," developers' looking at the user side of the community as hitchhikers yields no gains, either.
Divided we can survive. But working collectively we can thrive.
]]>Cyberduck -- A freeware ftp program for Mac that stands right up there with shareware Fetch. My only complaint is that it has one or two quirks in how it interfaces with Textwrangler (below). But nothing I can't live with. In fact, I find the interface a bit more intuitive than Fetch, so even though the dog has my 50 bucks ($25 each for two seats), I think I'll be working with the duck.
Textwrangler -- My favorite coding toy. It's easy to navigate, what with its document drawer, can open and save files directly via sftp/ftp, color codes program code, and does nice diff work. And best of all it's free. (But I may take advantage of a short-term sale to upgrade to BBEdit, which has all of these features plus the CVS capabilities I've been needing.)
OfficeTime -- You can download this for a 60-day trial, but it only took me a few hours to get hooked on this program. You can set up projects and tasks, with preconfigured rates. You track time by clicking on icons in the toolbar. Billing amounts are automatically calculated. It's also a handy way to keep track of your non-billable hours. (For example, how much time do you really spend reading blogs every day?) You can also have each project's and task's hours posted to your iCal, in the appropriate category you designate. There seem to be quite a few shortcuts and non-obvious features as well. This is $24.95 (special rate for a short time) that I will have no qualms spending.
OmniGraffle -- I was first introduced to this program when it was bundled with my PowerBook. I used it until the PowerBook's hard drive went through that agonizing click of death. I ended up picking up OmniGraffle for my iMac because I love how easy it makes to draw flow charts and menu diagrams for DVDs. (You'll see some of these charts here in the future.) A couple of days ago the iMac's power unit suddenly quit on me, so I'm back on the rehabilitated PowerBook ... and missing OmniGraffle a lot.
ecto -- This is what I use to post most of my blog posts. It's affordable, works on Mac and Windows, and is under active development, so it's always getting better. I hardly ever see the create-a-new-post form on this site any more.
And my latest fun with Drupal....
tagadelic -- Ber Kessels' module creates a tag cloud out of one's folksonomy-enhanced taxonomy. With Drupal 4.7 tagging is going to expand in Drupal, but it's nice to have this navigation tool now (and visible in the left sidebar here).
I'm also very intrigued by the new iMac. It has a lot of nice new features and a streamlined design, but they managed to keep it at the same price level. Let's just hope they managed to fix the problems with the midplane assembly that have been haunting the iMac G5s sold early this year ... including mine (which has gone through 4 midplane assemblies so far). I love my Macs, but I do recommend getting the AppleCare extended warranty coverage.
For the record: I have no business or personal affiliation with any of these products or their developers. I'm just liking them a lot.
]]>Our most recent delight: Jeremy of Kerneltrap has released a completely rewritten spam module, "Spam 2.0." Among its features:
We'll be trying this out right away and comparing the experience with the existing spam modules (also developed by Jeremy). Hopefully, with some pre-emptive sniffing of spamalicious content, we can open up our comments to non-registered users on our various sites.
]]>The troll pestered me via email for a few days, and the default account started getting flooded with spam. I was safe, but still felt quite violated. Since then, aside from a brief attempt to join a "trusted" chatroom using a client for my newly acquired Mac, which resulted in crashy failure, I've not ventured into IRC.
So when Lisa Stone asked me if we could host some sort of online chat for BlogHer, I did not make the impulsive leap to IRC.
We've taken some heat for that decision:
Fact is:
IRC can be accessed by many clients without a problem and has proven to be an overall workable system.Flashinterfaces on the other hand are usually a usability nightmare for experienced users.
With IRC clients, I do have an out of the box log in my defined format. I will not have anything similar in that flash chat.
In a response there, I wrote
Yes, it would be great if everyone had good, stable IRC clients installed, knew how to use them, and knew how to protect themselves and their personally identifiable information. But we felt it was fair to assume that most people interested interested in Blogher are not computer geekettes and have no IRC experience.
Maybe we're wrong, but our guess was (and is) that most of the women and men wanting to connect about Blogher specifically would not be interested in researching, finding, installing, configuring and learning how to use new software just to participate in an online chat.... For most participants, we guessed that their "chat" experiences were more of the YahooIM variety. In this regard, we hope that this Flash chat solution works out.
And that pretty much says it all.
I'm the first to admit that non-IRC chat is something of a challenge. Even corporate-owned systems like MSN or Yahoo, or distributed relay systems like Skype, can face challenges in maintaining a chat with more than a handful of users.
We're trying to offer a simple interface that does not require any software installation, and does not subject the user to constant screen refreshes. I confess that this is something of an experiment. We'll see how it goes. (I'll post more specifics about the service once the chatroom is officially up, later today.)
It's not ideal. But then, no matter what we do, someone would be disappointed. My experience as site admin on a dozen or so sites is that most online users these days are not geeks. (The simple fact that Internet Explorer is still the most-used browser out there, despite the superior Firefox's being available for free, speaks volumes as to how reluctant people are to go installing new software on their computers.)
And so we'll muddle through this year, and learn from the experience. Next year we'll have time to do something more elegant.
]]>I was ready to register some snark on the Apple website, when I saw this link on the Support page:
The QuickTime 6.5.2 reinstaller will remove QuickTime 7.0.1 from a Mac OS X 10.3.9 system and restore QuickTime 6.5.2.
Either Apple anticipated this problem (which somehow I doubt) or the collective demands of other users prompted their response.
These kinds of things I find to be rather underhanded -- offering an automatic "update" which actually degrades your software from a "pro" package to something lesser. Is this the way to build consumer loyalty? Or do they figure it's their mission to screw their customers as much as they can get away with?
It just doesn't seem like a very friendly way to do business. You'd think that at least they'd offer some preferred pricing for an upgrade path, and do it before the hapless user clicks that "update" button.
You'd think.
]]>Now the question is how long until the modules bundled in CivicSpace are upgraded for the CivicSpace 0.8.1 release. While for most purposes we find the a la carte approach of building a Drupal-powered site, many times the CivicSpace combination seems to fit the bill, especially with community-driven and campaign sites.
]]>Sometimes you want to search the future. Jonathan Dube tells us about PubSub, a new site that doesn't search what's been posted already, but monitors topics you specify for posts yet to come.
Here are 10 ways a journalist can make use of PubSub (as suggested by Anne Green of CooperKatz & Company, which represents PubSub, in an e-mail to me):
- Know the moment a topic of interest is mentioned anywhere across more than 9 million blogs.
- Determine quickly whether a story you are working on is being talked about in the blogosphere a sign that it may be about to break into the broader mainstream media.
- Connect with potential story sources by monitoring which bloggers are posting on a particular hot topic.
- Track how an article you've written is being discussed in the blogosphere, to better understand its impact.
- Pick up emerging trends by using broad keyword subscriptions to "listen in""on conversations happening across the blogosphere (e.g., "teens and wireless" or "Homeland security and ports").
- Use PubSub's SEC/Edgar filing alert to monitor companies poised to file an S1 or to go public, and be instantly notified when the paperwork is submitted.
- Receive instant notification on press releases issued by companies falling within your beat.
- Better track how a particular story moves from the blogosphere to mainstream media, or vice versa.
- Track any mentions of your name or your news outlet's in blogs, newsgroups, etc.
- Pull updated stats on the size of the searchable blogosphere (for example, 9,083,318 blogs as of 3/23/05) to cite within an article involving bloggers.
Again, the world of interactivity grows just a bit more.
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