Archive: September, 2012

When I was writing about browser-developer relations yesterday, I took this little dig at Safari:

Apple, of course, dodges the issue entirely by having absolutely zero developer relations when it comes to their browser.

A friend of mine who works at Apple took me to task about this on Twitter (not in the public timeline, of course, but by direct message). I was told I was being unfair. After all, wasn’t I aware of Vicki Murley, Safari Technologies Evangelist? I had to admit that I wasn’t.

“What’s her URL?” I asked.

“URL?”

“Of her blog.”

“She doesn’t have one.”

That might explain why I hadn’t heard of her. Nor have I seen her at any conferences; not at the Browser Wars panels at South by Southwest, nor at the browser panels at Mobilsm.

The Safari Technologies Evangelist actually does speak at one conference: WWDC. And the videos from that conference are available online …if you sign on the dotted line.

Now, I’m not saying that being in developer relations for a browser vendor means that you must blog or must go to conferences. But some kind of public visibility is surely desirable, right? Not at Apple.

I remember a couple of years back, meeting the Safari evangelist for the UK. He came down to Brighton to have lunch with me and some of the other Clearlefties. I remember telling him that I could put him touch with the organisers of some mobile-focused conferences because he’d be the perfect speaker.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m not actually allowed to speak at conferences.”

An evangelist who isn’t allowed to evangelise. That seems kind of crazy to me …and I can only assume that it’s immensely frustrating for them. But in the case of Apple, we tend to just shrug our shoulders and say, “Oh, well. That’s Apple. That’s just the way it is.”

Back when I was soliciting questions for this year’s browser panel at Mobilism, Remy left a little rant that began:

When are we, as a web development community, going to stop giving Apple a free fucking pass? They’re consistently lacking in the open discussion in to improving the gateway to the web: the browser.

And he ended:

Even the mighty PPK who tells entire browser vendors “fuck you”, doesn’t call Apple out, allowing them to slither on. Why is it we continue to allow Apple to get away with it? And can this ever change?

When I next saw Remy, I chuckled and said something along the usual lines of “Hey, isn’t that just the way it is at Apple?” And then Remy told me something that made me rethink my defeatist accepting attitude.

He reminded me about the post on Daring Fireball where John describes the sneak peak he was given of Mountain Lion:

But this, I say, waving around at the room, this feels a little odd. I’m getting the presentation from an Apple announcement event without the event. I’ve already been told that I’ll be going home with an early developer preview release of Mountain Lion. I’ve never been at a meeting like this, and I’ve never heard of Apple seeding writers with an as-yet-unannounced major update to an operating system. Apple is not exactly known for sharing details of as-yet-unannounced products, even if only just one week in advance. Why not hold an event to announce Mountain Lion — or make the announcement on apple.com before talking to us?

That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.

And that, said Remy, is exactly why now is the time to start pushing back against Apple’s opaque developer relations strategy when it comes to Safari: they’re doing some things differently now.

He’s right.

Apple’s culture of secrecy has served them very, very well for some things—like hardware—but it’s completely at odds with the spirit of the web. That culture clash is most evident with Safari; not just a web browser, but a web browser built on the open-source Webkit platform.

I’m sure that Vicki Murley is great at her job. But her job will remain limited as long as she is hampered by the legacy of Apple’s culture.

That culture of secrecy is not written in stone. It can change. It should change. And the time for that change is now.

Paul Irish recently announced that the RoboHornet browser benchmarking tool is being open-sourced. This is great news!

RoboHornet is designed to avoid the selective dick-measuring that characterises so many benchmarking results touted by browser vendors in their marketing spiel. Instead, the criteria that RoboHornet tests against are decided by developers like you and me. It’s like Stack Overflow for browser performance.

Sadly, Roger Capriotti from Microsoft used the announcement as an opportunity to engage in even more swaggering selective dick-measuring. Bizarrely, he seems to have completely misunderstood how RoboHornet works. Repeatedly mischaracterising it as “micro-framework”, he takes it to task as a tool that “only focuses on specific aspects of browser performance” …completely glossing over the fact that those “specific aspects” are chosen by us, the developers who build the websites that the browsers are supposed to render.

Instead, he chooses “a real-world scenario” …imitating the scrolling text effect seen in the 1999 movie The Matrix, concluding:

This is a great example of why we have consistently said real-world performance matters when evaluating a browser.

WAT?

But, y’know, the risible example and complete misrepresentation of RoboHornet isn’t what bothers me about the post. It’s the tone. I’ve had it with this sort of sniping, mean-spirited, playground politics. This does not move the web forward. This does not make a more beautiful web.

On the plus side, crap like this makes you appreciate the professionalism of the people working on Firefox, Chrome and Opera (Apple, of course, dodges the issue entirely by having absolutely zero developer relations when it comes to their browser).

Don’t get me wrong: there are very, very good people working on Internet Explorer at Microsoft. But they’re not the ones writing petulant blog posts. I feel bad for them. If Roger Capriotti—whose job title is “Director, Internet Explorer Marketing”—is supposed to be speaking for them, he is letting them down badly.

It seems like there’s been a lot of activity lately around the idea of open device labs and I’ve been doing my best to keep track of it all.

There are communal device labs springing up all over the place: Berlin, Cape Town, Helsinki, Amsterdam and soon Washington DC. Here’s a list of most of them.

If you’re running an open device lab, or hoping to set one up, be sure to register at Lab Up, a site that aims to pool resources and hopefully get some device manufacturers to distribute their wares. There’s also a mailing list for open device labs. Sign up if you have or want a communal device lab. Sharing is caring.

Finally, there’s an article on Smashing Magazine that goes into great detail on every aspect of setting up and running a communal collection of devices. If you’ve been thinking about starting an open device lab in your area, now is the time. Do it.

It’s been two weeks since the mind-blowing awesomeness of dConstruct 2012 and I’ve still got a brain full of the amazing knowledge bombs dropped by each and every speaker.

I’ve been keeping track of other people’s write-ups of the event too:

Hypernaked published a report.

Andrew Johns wrote down his thoughts, going through each talk in turn. He also wrote a follow-up post pointing out that one of the emergent themes of the conference was education.

Sjors Timmer wrote a review that cites Italo Calvino.

Happy Famous Artists pulled out three strands from the event:

1. Digital is about beauty and about layers.
2. The power of play.
3. The interconnectedness of things through chance.

There’s a write-up over at info.nl called Playing with the future at the seams.

But I think my favourite write-up comes from Laura who did a report for Ubelly called Our Positions Of Power. It’s a thoughtful piece that pulls together multiple strands that emerged throughout the day. And you’ve gotta love the opening sentence:

After a weekend of reflection, I’ve decided that dConstruct 2012 had the best talks of any conference I’ve ever attended.

Some people took some great pictures at dConstruct. I like this set on Flickr.

Eva-Lotta drew some fantastic sketchnotes (as usual).

And Geri took a bunch of really nice pictures.

People said some very nice things on Twitter, Paul Swain wrote a very nice “thank you” post, and I even got a lovely postcard from an attendee.

If you want to re-live the magic, have a listen to the audio from dConstruct 2012.

I was in southern Germany this week to speak at the inaugural Smashing Conference. It was a really good event, packed with in-depth talks and workshops for web developers. Its practical nature contrasted nicely with the more inspirational value of dConstruct. I always say it’s good to have a balanced conference diet: too much code and I start itching for big-picture thinking; too much big-picture thinking and I start jonesing for some code.

That said, I have to admit that I missed out on quite a few of the talks. That’s because I was outside exploring Freiburg. Or should I say, I was outside rediscovering Freiburg.

I used to live there. I lived there for about six years, all told, during the ’90s. That’s where I met Jessica.

To start with, I was playing music on the streets of Freiburg. Later, I got a job in a bakery, selling bread, pretzels and all manner of excellent baked goods. Meanwhile, I was playing in a band (two bands actually: for a while I was the bassist in Leopold Kraus, the finest surf band in the Black Forest). At some point, the band decided we needed a website. I said I’d give it a go. That’s when this whole web thing started for me. I started freelancing on the side. Before too long, I was able to give up the bread-selling day job.

But after six years, Jessica and I decided that we were done with Freiburg. We moved to Brighton, where we’ve lived for twelve years now.

So it was with some excitement and a certain amount of nervous anticipation that we returned to Freiburg for the Smashing Conference. What would Freiburg be like now? Would it feel weird to be back there?

Well, Jessica has written all about what it was like to go back. I highly recommend that you read what she’s written because she puts it far better than I ever could.

Jessica has been publishing online at wordridden.com since we lived in Germany. Reading back through her posts from way back then about life in Freiburg makes me wish that I had started writing on adactio.com sooner. I don’t have much evidence of my time there: a box of cassettes (cassettes!) that the band recorded; a handful of photographs.

On this trip, I took quite a few photographs. In three days, I recorded an order of magnitude more data than I had done in six years of living in Freiburg.

Brighton SF really was a wonderful event: Brian Aldiss, Jeff Noon, and Lauren Beukes all gathered together for an evening of chat and readings, hosted by yours truly.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Thanks to Drew’s tireless efforts, the audio is now available for your listening pleasure on Huffduffer. I’ve also published a transcript.

I highly recommend giving it a listen: readings from Jeff and Lauren, together with wonderful tales from the life of Brian Aldiss …superb stuff!

If that whets your appetite, there’s more audio goodness from each of the authors to be found on Huffduffer:

• Brian Aldiss,
• Jeff Noon,
• Lauren Beukes, or
• everything all together.

In the meantime, enjoy Brighton SF with Brian Aldiss, Lauren Beukes, and Jeff Noon.

There was an attempted break-in at the Clearleft office this week. Don’t worry—nothing was taken.

I mentioned the attempted break-in on Twitter (and Instagram). While most people offered sympathy and support, one person took me to task for talking about the incident at all. Not good for client confidence, apparently. And it gives us a bad reputation to boot.

This little dose of victim blaming reminded me of the incident in Douglas Rushkoff’s life that spurred him to write Life Inc.:

I had gotten mugged in front of my rental apartment—on Christmas Eve, no less—and had posted the time and location of my mugging to the Park Slope Parents list, a generally helpful, crunchy, and supportive message board for people raising kids in that section of Brooklyn and beyond. Within an hour, my email inbox was filling with messages from concerned neighbors. Scratch that: angry neighbors.

They wanted to know exactly why I had posted the exact location where the mugging had taken place. Didn’t I realize what this could do to their property values? No, these folks had no immediate plans to sell their homes—yet they were still more considered with the short-term asset value of their real estate than they were the long-term experiential value of their neighborhood!

Also: 137.

Quite quickly after I wrote my email to Findings about their email notification anti-pattern, I got a response back from Lauren Leto:

Give it to us. I applaud you shouting at us from a rooftop. I also hate defaulting to all notifications and agree that it was a douchebag startup move but can assure it was one made accidentally - a horrible oversight that the entire team feels bad about and will work to amend for you and the rest of our users.

We try to be a site for the common user - nothing like Facebook taking cheap shots wherever they can. I hope we haven’t forever turned you off from our site. Relaunches are hard and mistakes were made but nothing like this will happen again.

Apart from the use of the passive voice (“mistakes were made” rather than “we made mistakes”), that’s a pretty damn good response. She didn’t try to defend or justify the behaviour. That’s good.

She also asked if there was anything they could do to make it up to me. I asked if I could publish their response here. “Yeah, feel free to post”, she said.

I think it’s important that situations like this get documented. It could be especially useful for new start-ups who might be thinking about indulging in a bit of “growth hacking” (spit!) under the impression that this kind of behaviour is acceptable just because other start-ups—like Findings—implemented the email notification anti-pattern.

As Lauren said:

I think every startup manages to mess up one of these at some point in their life, either willingly or unwillingly. A clear listing of all offenses could be useful to everyone.

That’s where Harry’s Dark Patterns wiki comes in:

The purpose of this pattern library is to “name and shame” Dark Patterns and the companies that use them.

• For consumers, forewarned is fore-armed.
• For brand-owners, the bad-press associated with being named as an offender should discourage usage.
• For designers, this site provides ammunition to refuse unethical requests by our clients / bosses. (e.g. “I won’t implement opt-out defaults for the insurance upsells because that practice is considered unethical and it will get you unwanted bad press.”)

The email notification anti-pattern isn’t yet listed on the wiki. I’ll see if I can get Harry to add it.

Dear Findings,

I see you have introduced some new email notifications. I have also noticed (via my newly-overstuffed inbox) that by default, these new email notifications are checked.

WHAT THE FSCK WERE YOU THINKING‽

Sorry. Sorry. I lost my temper for a moment there. And the question is rhetorical because I think I know exactly what you were thinking …“traction”, “retention”, “engagement”, yadda yadda.

I realise that many other sites also do this. That does not make it right. In fact, given the sites that already do this include such pillars of empathy as Facebook, I would say that this kind of behaviour probably has a one-to-one correlation with the douchebaggery of the site in question.

You’re better than this.

Stop. Think. Spare a thought for those of us who don’t suddenly—from one day to the next—want our inboxes spammed by emails we never opted into.

Didn’t anybody stop to think about just how intrusive this would be?

Also, doesn’t this flood of new emails directly contradict this section of your privacy policy?:

As part of the Services, you may occasionally receive email and other communications from us, such as communications relating to your Account. Communications relating to your Account will only be sent for purposes important to the Services, such as password recovery.

Contrary to appearances, I don’t want to be completely negative, so I’ve got a constructive suggestion.

How about this:

If you’re about to introduce new email notifications, and all my existing notification settings are set to “off”, perhaps you could set the new notifications to “off” as well?

Sound good?

All the best,

Jeremy

Where do I start?

I could start by saying that dConstruct 2012 was one of the best days of my life. But let me back up a bit…

Here’s what I did last week:

• Sunday, September 2nd: The amazing PixelPyros at Jubilee Square with Seb, followed by The Geekest Link pub quiz at The Caroline of Brunswick.
• Monday, September 3rd to Wednesday, September 5th: non-stop Reasons To Be Creative.
• Thursday, September 6th: Improving Reality with the brilliant Warren Ellis followed by Brighton SF, which exceeded my wildest expectations.
• Friday, September 7th: dConstruct. Indescribably brilliant.
• Saturday, September 8th: Mini Maker Faire, a fantastic collection of hackers and hardware in one place.
• Sunday, September 9th: IndieWebCamp UK round at The Skiff with some of the smartest people I know.

That was just one week in the Brighton Digital Festival! And the weather was perfect the whole time—glorious sunshine.

I was really nervous on the day of Brighton SF. Like I said, I had no idea what I was doing. But I began to calm down right before the event.

I was sitting outside with Christopher Priest (I told him how much I liked Inverted World) and Joanne McNeil when the Brighton SF authors showed up, met one another, and started chatting. That’s when I knew everything was going to be fine.

Jeff Noon. Lauren Beukes. Brian Aldiss. Three giants of science fiction. Three warm, friendly, and charming people.

The event was so good. Each of the authors were magnificently charismatic and captivating, the readings were absolutely enthralling, and I end up thoroughly enjoying myself.

Thank you for sending in questions for the authors. On the night, things were going so smoothly and time was flying by so fast, I actually didn’t get a chance to ask them …sorry.

It was a wonderful event and Drew very graciously agreed to record the audio so there’s going to be a podcast and a transcript available very soon. Watch this space.

When the day of dConstruct dawned, I was already in a good mood from Brighton SF. But nothing could have prepared me for what was to come.

I had the great honour and pleasure of introducing an amazing line-up of speakers. Seriously, every single speaker was absolutely superb. It was all killer, no filler.

Ben’s keynote set the scene perfectly. And boy, what a trooper! He really wasn’t a well chap, but with classic English stoicism and moustachioed stiff upper lip, he delivered the perfect opening for a day of playing with the future.

From there, it was just a non-stop delivery of brilliance from each speaker. After each talk, I kept using the words “awesome” and “mind-blowing”, but y’know what? They were awesome and mind-blowing!

And at the end …James Burke.

(this is the point at which I really needed to study the dreams/reality diagram because I was beginning to lose my grip on what was real)

What can I say? I was really hoping it would be as good as an episode of Connections but what I got was like an entire season of Connections condensed into 45 minutes of brain-bending rapid-fire brilliance. It was mind-blowing. It was awesome. It broke my brain in the best possible way.

When James finished and the day was done, I was quite overcome. I was just so …happy! I had the privilege of hosting the smartest, most entertaining people I know. And I’m not just talking about the speakers.

At the after-party—and on Twitter—attendees told me just how much they enjoyed dConstruct 2012. I felt very happy, very proud, and kind of vindicated—it was something of a risky line-up and tickets were selling slower than in previous years, but boy, oh boy, that line-up really delivered the goods on the day.

Here’s one write-up of dConstruct. If you were there, I’d really appreciate it if you wrote down what you thought of the event. Drop me a line and point me to your blog post.

If you weren’t there …my commiserations. But here’s something that might serve as some consolation:

Thanks to Drew’s tireless work through the weekend, the audio from Friday’s conference is already online! Browse through the talks on the dConstruct archive or subscribe to a podcast of the talks on Huffduffer.

But you really had to be there.

The Brighton Digital Festival is in full swing, Reasons To Be Creative is underway, and Brighton is chock-a-block with all manner of smart geeks enjoying the seaside sunshine. It’s pretty damn great.

Not long now ‘till Brighton SF on Thursday evening with Brian Aldiss, Lauren Beukes, and Jeff Noon. I’ll be the host for the evening so I should make sure that I’ve got lots of incisive questions for the three authors…

What the hell am I thinking‽ I have no idea what I’m doing. Damn it, Jim, I’m a sci-fi fan, not an interviewer!

I could do with your help. If you have anything—anything at all—that you’d like to ask one or all of these luminaries, please share it with me. We’ll be taking questions from the floor on the night too, but I’d feel a lot better if I had a nice stack of good questions to get the ball rolling.

So please, leave a comment and let me know what I should be asking these three masters of sci-fi.

If you’re coming to Brighton for dConstruct, there are two Map Tales I’d like to draw your attention to.

The first is a map of all the places where you can discounts with your dConstruct badge—very handy for lunch and dinner on the day of the conference.

The second is one I put together a while back of recommended Brighton coffee establishments.

And of course, while you’re in town, be sure to check out all the events that are going on as part of the Brighton Digital Festival; at the very least, make sure you check out the Maker Faire that’s on the day after dConstruct—it’s going to be fantastic!

Oh, and I almost forgot: the Big Sussex Market will also be going on the day after dConstruct, all along New Road and Jubilee Square.

With quality, local produce firmly at its heart, the Big Sussex Market features over 80 stalls of growers, producers and restaurants.

I was in the States last week for An Event Apart Chicago. I had a most excellent time. Partly, that’s because An Event Apart is always excellent, and partly because Chicago is such a great city.

I took pictures.

I did the Architecture Foundation’s river cruise (again), which I would highly recommend to anyone with the vaguest interest in either architecture or just cruising down rivers in boats.

I also went to my the second bases-ball game of my life. The first one was at Fenway Park, so going to Wrigley Field feels like the logical next step—maybe I should work my way through all the bases-ball field diamond pitches in chronological order.

To balance out such sportsness, I made sure to spend plenty of time in the Art Institute Of Chicago, taking full advantage of the Lichtenstein exhibition that’s currently running there.

I had the opportunity to meet some of the hard-working web geeks of Chicago. I had a look around the Obama campaign HQ, thanks to Daniel Ryan. I also got a tour of the whacky Tribune Tower, thanks to Chris Courtney, and I got to see first-hand how the web team at The Chicago Tribune are doing some very cool stuff with data.

Now I’m back in Brighton, which is turning into geek central with the Brighton Digital Festival. It kicked off last night with Seb’s fantastic PixelPyros digital fireworks.

Reasons To Be Creative starts today. I’ll be popping in out to hear some of the talks, but things are getting pretty busy here at Clearleft Towers, what with this being dConstruct week.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve started having dConstruct dreams this week. I have to remind myself to actually enjoy myself and not spend the whole time stressing out. I think it should be fairly easy to enjoy myself, what with that kick-ass lineup.

That’ll be on Friday. Before that, there’s Brighton SF on Thursday. That’s going to be a lot of fun too, and a total geekfest with Jeff Noon, Lauren Beukes, and Brian Aldiss.

Grab a ticket if you haven’t already. See you there.

Heather Champ just announced that the Mirror Project is being revived and it has brought back a flood of memories for me. Heather evocatively describes the origins of the Mirror Project from a time “when the web was younger, when home pages were what we made.”

The premise was simple: Take a picture of yourself in some reflective surface. That’s it. It seems so very straightforward in today’s age of ubiquitous photography and instant updates but there was a thoughtfulness that went into every picture posted. Keep hitting the “surprise me” link to see what I mean.

My first Mirror Project shot was taken eleven years ago. I have a few more in there. I used to blog about The Mirror Project every time one of my pictures was posted. I even used to have a little widget on this site to show a random Mirror Project shot.

Here’s a shot that Jeffrey took at the start of the millennium. That picture went on to have a life of its own as a book cover. It even spawned a meme.

Back then, I never could’ve imagined in my wildest dreams that I would get to know Jeffrey Zeldman, much less call him my friend. Here I am, eleven years later, writing and speaking about web design with my hero from way back when. Crazy!

Within a year, the Mirror Project reached its 10000th picture (just look at those fresh-faced kids).

My last Mirror Project shot was taken at South by Southwest in 2005.

My first pictures on Flickr date from the same time—when the worst-kept secret at that South by Southwest was that Flickr was being bought by Yahoo. Online digital photography was changing.

The Mirror Project has been gone for six years. It warms my heart to see it return, its URLs restored, its images reflecting back.