Hello Jon

I've been reading stuff penned by Jon Udell for a long time - I can remember some of his articles in BYTE magazine as I commuted from London to Manchester on what was then still British Rail. BYTE was a great magazine back then - with Jerry Pournelle's rambling experiences in Chaos Manor and the weird international section in the middle which just illustrated the gap between north America and elsewhere. But I always enjoyed reading Jon's columns - he was less technical but more practical, explaining how he'd leveraged some new technology to solve some interesting problem. More recently, I've been reading Jon's stuff online in his column and blog for InfoWorld, and it's still good stuff. He's spent a load of time looking at different ways of enabling, in his words, 'shared information spaces'. Everything from blogging and social tagging, through to deep linking into media content on the web and enabling structured search. I especially liked the way he brought screencasting out into the main stream and showed how powerful it could be as an education and sharing technique. I think my favourite was his walking tour of keene which demonstrated one of the earlier mash-ups of Google maps.

So, today is rather a sad day: Jon has announced he's no longer writing for InfoWorld and so another high quality feed in my Atom Reader is about to go dark.

On the plus side, he's decided to join a small company based just outside Seattle:

Bottom line: This isn't your father's -- or maybe your older brother's or sister's -- Microsoft. Initiatives like these matter, they're solidly in line with my own agenda, they're being pursued in very open ways, and I want to help move them forward.

Working for Microsoft? He must be crazy ;-)

 

tags: jon udell | microsoft | byte

Random Paper

A few paper thoughts, triggered by a couple of recent reports...

While ePaper products, that's electronic paper-like displays, have been threatening to go mainstream for some time, Xerox went ahead and approached things from another angle with the announcement of real paper that's erasable. This experimental project aims to enable printing on paper that can be reused by being printed again - presumably with something different - and again, and again. Interesting environmental implications, and if this gets to be a shipping product be very careful about what pieces of paper you sign in the future.

An interesting example of how the new world of social interaction on the web and the old world of printing something tangible onto paper is JPG Magazine. JPG is a real magazine - as Michael Arrington put's it: "It took me a couple of weeks to get over the fact that they are actually printing a magazine, on paper, just like people used to do in the last century." - but the interesting twist is that the content is submitted by users to the JPG site and the photo's that are included in the magazine are the ones that get voted for by the community. The pay back for getting a picture published? You get a years subscription to the magazine. The fact that this approach can have a viable business model demonstrates that there's still a high perception of value in the features that Paper version 1.0 can provide.

Talking of the social web, something I hadn't expected. Publishing pictures on crossoak has led to friends and family printing them (okay, no surprise there really) and incorporating into presents for us (thank you!). That's something that wouldn't have happened in the old days of 6x4 inch prints stuck in albums in the back of dark cupboards. Yet another example of the change in where people spend money, or not, on printing photographs. There's a number of people trying to figure out the business model for online photos, sharing and printing. But so far none make it as easy as it should be or turn it into a pleasurable experience of creating something unique from the raw assets.

Circling back around to electronic alternatives for paper, the BBCs Digital Planet had a recent update on the $100 laptop/One Laptop per child project. What I hadn't realised from earlier reports is that they've managed to get a daylight viewable 200dpi greyscale display into the thing. As display technology keeps pushing the resolution and contrast ratio boundaries, the reading and general viewing experience is going to keep getting better. In many ways that's just as well, because with rights management increasingly being applied to documents we'll increasingly be reading from screens and not paper. (Aside: my dim lighting preference is already gaining ground in the office as a nicer environment to read long documents from displays).

Of course, once someone figures out how to combine rights management with Xerox's experimental erasable paper we'll have a solution for protected real paper... now that would be fun ;-)

 

tags: paper | print | epaper | | printing | rightsmanagement

james expresses himself

Three posts from James on the expression announcements from earlier today, under the heading opening the kimono on Microsoft Expression:

• Part 1: Blend, Design, Web
• Part 2: WPF/e
• Part 3: Media & Encoder

I've been waiting for a CTP of WFP/e for quiet a while - ever since seeing an early demo at PDC in 2005 - while having the tools that enable rich and efficient collaboration between designers and developers is going to be a big part of improving software development productivity, another reason why WPF is so important.

As Somasegar put it in his blog:

Our goal is to unite the various roles that are part of the software development process and in the case of user experience we are very focused on bringing creative professionals into the fold.

I've seen the frustration of user interface (eek, should that be user experience?) designers not being able to get their concepts and designs reflected in the final code, and seen what a time sink the current state-of-the-art can be. All this in a world when increasingly the competition can match your features that really matter to customers and it's becoming how those features are implemented and how users can interact with application functionality that really matters. You can see this trend all over the place - from the increasing use of AJAX, through the new ribbon in Microsoft Office System 2007, to the (re)emerging area of connected rich clients or rich internet applications.

That said, the most important bit of the announcement? Why it's the encoder of course ;-)

A while back we moved to the pacific north west from the channel south east. At one point before the move we thought we were being mighty adventurous, then we started hearing rumors of another family with children at the same school who were also moving to the US. Over time, more and more people asked us if we knew the Clarke's, nope we would say. So it turns out that James & Co. moved from just about 3 miles from us in the UK to around 8 miles from us here in the US and while I'm working in building 2, James is in the philosophically much more interesting building 42.

Anyway, I digress, I was just going to point out that I've been a little frustrated with our current home-brew method of sending video clips back to family in blightly, so it's just as well James moved over too, since he's contributing to the solution, announced today :-) 

Although, I'm not sure where my little clips of video would rank on his usecase prioritisation... 

 

tags: expression | wpf/e | design | web | video | wpf | development | productivity