tecznotes

These are excerpts from an article sent to me by Sha after I made an offhand comment about projection speeds of old silent films, thinking of this old view of San Francisco in particular.

Normally I blog all dog-eared pages in books that I read, but now I'm a Kindle owner so I have to use the built-in clipping mechanism to get the same page-marking outcome. It's better to read on, but not as good to mark books with. Possibly this is a moot point, because I haven't actually purchased a book for the Kindle yet - most of all I read things from the web, via Instapaper's Kindle feature.

The most interesting new thing I learned from this was the existence of a tug-of-war between cameramen, projectionists, and theatre owners, all of whom had a variety of ideas about what looked good on screen, what constituted a correct speed, and what was economical to show. I recommend you read the whole thing, but here are a few good bits.

One transfer to media with invariate speeds:

We used a variable speed telecine machine called a Polygon. Because they are virtually obsolete, suitable Polygons in Britain exist only at the BBC- which has both 16mm and 35mm models. Fitted with a 28-sided prism- 'The Flying Ashtray'- the Polygon enables you to transfer film to videotape at any speed from 4 fps to 35 fps.

On differences in equipment:

An Edison film of 1900 will generally project satisfactorily at 24 fps. Edison's rival, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, used a camera which weighed 1700 lbs. This camera had a motor, and it turned at a speed of 40 fps. ... During the Nickelodeon period, films were projected at whatever speed suited the management. The standard was supposed to be 16 fps.

(Holy shit, what a name: The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company)

On competition between exhibitors and producers:

Projected at the 'correct' speed of 16 fps, a full 1,000 ft. reel of 35mm film would last 16 1/2 minutes. The Essanay Film Company of Chicago tried to beat wily exhibitors by printing the running time of the films on the posters. The exhibitors retaliated by pasting a strip of paper over the line. Some unscrupulous theatre managers could get through a full reel in six minutes! Ten minutes was acknowledged to be 'more usual'. Yet, even today, on standard 24 fps sound projectors, 1,000 feet takes eleven minutes.

On the active role of the projectionist:

A 1915 projectionist's handbook declared- in emphatic capitals- 'THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SET CAMERA SPEED!' The correct speed of projection, it added, is the speed at which each individual scene was taken- 'which may- and often does- vary wildly.' And it declared: 'One of the highest functions of projection is to watch the screen and regulate the speed of projection to synchronise with the speed of taking.'

On getting used to a higher speed:

While filming Annapolis in 1928, cameraman Arthur Miller received a wire from the studio to crank at 24 fps. He did so, and everyone complained that the speed slowed everything down too much- it was particularly noticeable in a dress parade scene of midshipmen.

On optimization for higher projection speeds:

Talking about comedies, Walter Kerr writes: 'Silent films chose, by control of the camera and through instructions to projectionists, to move at an unreal, stylised, in effect fantasised rate.' And he quotes as examples the last two silent Chaplins- both films designed to be shown at sound speed, but photographed at silent speed (whatever that was!). 'The least glance at Modern Times reveals instantly that all of Chaplin's work in the film... has been filmed at a rate that puts springs on his heels and makes unleashed jack-knives of his elbows. This is how the films looked when they were projected as their creators intended.'

The last excerpt in particular makes me think of tuning for low-end media, such as mixing Beatles songs with shitty AM radio speakers or testing hip hop through cell phones. Where will your work be encountered, and what will it feel like when seen or heard there?

In 1998, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) opened its doors with the rallying cry "to hell with bad browsers". Their goal was support for W3C web standards with the aim of preventing development costs from skyrocketing as the major browser makers of the time (Netscape and Microsoft) split the public with two diverging products.

One of the core arguments made by standards advocates focused on accessibility requirements, in particular the design of web pages that were available to blind users with screen reader software. Use semantic markup in place of layout tables, single-pixel image shims and GIF text, and what you write will be readable by everyone. I remember making this argument at the web design company I worked out fresh out of college, and it was always a bit of a hard sell even to myself. I didn't quite believe in the legions of blind users out in the world struggling to access my rave flyer portfolio through Jaws, and after a while it all took on a sense of righteousness-for-its-own sake, purity in the face of ugly real-world commercial requirements.

Fast-forward ten years, and I'm now using all those accessibility features on a daily basis. At some point during the dot-com bust it turned out that the written word was the payload, and regular people started using alternative browsing devices to access text from the web. Arguments about device-independent, semantic markup and graceful degradation suddenly have an additional halo of legitimacy because they affect everyone.

I recently bought a Kindle, and I'm again thankful for the past decade's vogue for separation of style and content. I'm pleasantly surprised by the dissolution of technology into behavior, with my "read later" Instapaper bookmarklet that time- and space-shifts all the usual tl;dr's into BART-compatible slugs of pure text on a reflective screen. Meanwhile Arc90 Lab has produced Readability, the browser bookmarklet designed to suss out usable signal from "all the insanity that surrounds the content we're trying to read". All those years of making half-hearted arguments for disabled visitors are paying off in usable content for everyone else. I read more now, and more effectively. Talented web designers are arguing for the abandonment of old technology that shackles content to form.

The web is the best thing that ever happened to reading.

There's one area that's lagging, and it's PDF. I love reading academic papers, but they're generally set in a two column skeuomorph form that's hell on Amazon's PDF-to-Kindle conversion feature. The text comes out interleaved, with a line from the left column followed by a line from the right column, repeat. Amazon does OCR on bitmapped PDF's, but they can't yet figure out this dinosaur format.

I'm looking forward to the day I can bundle everything off to Instapaper and the Kindle for later digestion. I'd love to see this last print-dependent content form liberated from uselessness.

I mentioned a few things last week I thought were interesting about Fever, Shaun Inman's new web-based feed reading tool. Feed readers as a technology have basically remained stationary for a number of years, so I'm excited by the idea that someone is rethinking them in some way. This is a set of hastily-written notes based on my experience with Fever.

I'm a little harsh on the application in places, so it's worth mentioning that I think Shaun Inman has made a beautiful thing, and apart from the gripes listed here, I'd probably recommend Fever to anyone who's looking for a basic feed reader and wants to avoid being tethered to a single desktop or remote service provider.

First, my bias: four years ago, Mike Frumin, Boris Anthony and I were working hard on Reblog, the Eyebeam-supported tool for reading and republishing RSS feeds. Eyebeam used it to curate feeds about art and technology, with weekly stints by guest Rebloggers using software initially created by Frumin. I'm told that Tumblr's Reblog feature was explicitly influenced by our Reblog. Even though ours is for all intents and purposes a dead project, I continue to use it every day as my primary reading and republishing mechanism.

I'm interested in Fever because I'd be happy to move away from Reblog if the right tool came along, and the core promise of Fever, to show you what's most highly attended-to in your collection of feeds, is a pretty exciting one, like a personal Memeorandum or Digg.

I went ahead and bought a copy of Fever to give it a test run. It's server side software, and there doesn't seem to be anything like a demo mode. You need to cough up $30 to see what it's like. Now that I've tried it out, I have some additional things to say about this software in particular and web interaction patterns in general.

Install

The installation process is a breeze, and extremely innovative to boot. There are three steps: you start with a small seed application on your own server, you make it world-writeable so that it can modify itself, and then you link it to a paid account on the Fever website. The complete application is pushed to your server without your intervention, and you're off to the races. I'm fairly certain I've never seen anything quite like this before: usually PHP/MySQL software is more like Reblog or Wordpress, where you unpack the thing as a complete unit, install the database and so on yourself, and do your own configuration. Fever seems to have some basic protections in-place to prevent malicious outsiders from scrambling your installation, but there's a completely fascinating power inversion at play. Where the entertainment and software industries have spent millions or more trying to develop bulletproof phone-home mechanisms to ensure that your local copies of their media refuse to play without remote authorization, Fever takes advantage of its naturally web-facing nature to establish a link back to its home base. Because Fever doesn't ask you to change the folder permissions back from world-writeable, I was curious whether Inman would use this as a vector for remote software upgrades.

I saw this just the other day:

Just now I saw a second one, for version 1.02. The messaging here is astonishing: while you were out, something you own transformed itself into something new.

Overall though, installation was a breeze: it took a few minutes (including some wrangling with the always-execrable PayPal) to get set up.

There are two aspects of Fever's design that I'm not altogether happy with.

Hover

The first is hover controls, described by Smashing Magazine:

When a user interface has many elements in which the user can perform actions, the page can become cluttered and hard to scan. This is especially common in the administration section of Web applications, where users can change table data. A good way to handle this is to hide each element and reveal it when the user hovers over that area.

Fever uses this technique to a frustrating degree, shown in this animation of me moving the mouse from the left side of the browser to the right:

Whole swaths of functionality hide and show themselves, including various management controls, an iPhone-style alphabetical navigation column, and highlighting of feed items on the right hand side. Personally, I think this is a particularly terrible form of mystery meat navigation. It's difficult to discover what actions are available to you in an application if you need to fly around the screen with your mouse to look for controls, and the particular design of Fever doesn't let the hover controls save any particular space or clutter. Commenter James Schend on the article linked above describes a second way in which this pattern is harmful: Beware, hover controls only work on devices that have a mouse. They're useless on iPhones. (And tablet PCs, and touchscreen kiosks, etc, etc.)

Overall, the high amount of mouse-reactive interface mutability in Fever makes it feel shaky, jittery and tentative. There are places where it doesn't even help, e.g. what the fuck is this?

This idea of subjective perception of physical stability in interactive software is something I think is particularly hard to get right, but enormously important - Apple's work in particular seems to absolutely nail this every time, through the acceleration models in their basic widgetry, particularly on the iPhone and trackpad.

My recommendation here would be to simply turn all this stuff off, and leave all the UI elements on-screen and unresponsive to simple mouse movements. 99% of desktop UI conventions simply don't make sense on the web (I'm looking at you, drag and drop).

Distance

The second aspect of Fever's design that I'm not altogether happy with is spooky action at a distance. By this I mean pieces of the page that influence other pieces of the page without apparent reason.

Fever uses the now-common AJAX technique to perform updates, allowing users to delete articles and modify feed subscriptions within list views. The frustrating thing about Fever's implementation of this technique is that it visually centralizes the wait indicator: you perform an action such as deleting an article on the right-hand side of the browser window, a wait spinner appears on the left-hand side of the window, time passes, and finally the visual result of your action modifies the appearance of the page. Your single action has effects in two places and two times, and your attention is split.

To be fair, Fever is not the only offender here. For a long time, Twitter used this same pattern when posting updates from inside the web interface, with a tiny spinner tucked up and away in the corner of the screen, far away from the text and button form elements you used to make your update. They've since mended this particular problem (while simultaneously introducing some really ill-advised link-breaking AJAX-based page replacement navigation).

When you perform "bigger" actions, Fever uses a modal dialog box to ask for confirmation, something I've always called The Ghetto Shield because it's so lame. Here's me trying to add an item to a blacklist:

This is another desktop UI convention that has no place on the web. Even Apple left this in the dustbin of history when it replaced system-blocking dialogs with per-window sheets with the introduction of OSX.

My recommendation here would be to take advantage of AJAX and HTML's ability to localize action and reaction: changes should take place where and when you made them, even if their confirmation takes time. This is something that I continue to believe we got absolutely right with Reblog back in 2005. As an example, here's the bit of interface Reblog provides for adding tags or comments to an article prior to republishing it:

The form replaces the content of the item (it's invoked by the small tabs to the right), so that you can have as many forms as you have items. No modal dialog, just an asynchronous modification in place. We also handle the split attention issue here by placing loading spinners near their associated actions. In this example, you'd publish the article by clicking the big letter "P" next to its title, which would be replaced by a spinner for a second or two until the action returns successfully. If you were to archive the article (mark it as read), the content immediately disappears leaving just a collapsed title bar area to indicate that you want it gone, the "A" is replaced by a spinner, and soon it's visually labeled "archived". Crucially, this allows you to immediately shift your attention to the next article in the list, knowing that there will be no further motion of on-screen elements to further distract you. Fever by contrast doesn't remove the article from the screen until after the server has confirmed that it's gone, making it necessary to hang around waiting for your action to have an effect before you can safely move to the next article.

Temperature

I've not said much about the core feature of Fever, its ability to dig through your articles and "take the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what's hot".

What Fever gets right is that that it looks at all the links in each article, not just the primary linked article. This means that if a lot of authors of various blogs are all pointing to the same story, it will have a higher-than-normal temperature and will bubble to the top of the Hot view.

It turns out that even in the nearly-200 feeds I'm subscribed to, the link overlap between feeds seems to congregate around some pretty mundane shit. Steve Jobs's liver transplant, that guy who got his iPhone back, etc. I'm interested in this stuff exactly once, then I would like to mark it read. Fever offers a "blacklist" feature in this view, but that's not quite what I want: it's not spam, it's just something I've read and am finished with.

I'm not sure what my recommendation here would be. This is the difficult part. Recommendation engines are hard, and the task of building one that operates just on your personal stuff with minimal input is even harder. I hope that this is an aspect of Fever that Shaun puts additional future effort into, because it shows the most promise of any part of this interesting application. If he manages to really nail this down, I will changes RSS readers and even do the plug-in plumbing work to drag my republishing activities over. Happily, Fever will continue to update itself with fresh version while I'm out.

Right, so two weeks ago I pushed Walking Papers out of the nest, and it seems to have avoided the ground so far. This is a progress report.

The reason I chose June 4th to make it live was the OpenStreetMap mapping party on June 6th, up in the Presidio Sports Basement store "big room". The event was the first public use of Walking Papers, and we presented it as a basic alternative to the usual GPS method of collecting map data. Several attendees jumped in, and we got a few excellent submissions including a survey of the marshy land east of Crissy Field and absurdly high detail of businesses along Chestnut St. These two scans were such a thrill: the technology worked and we got legitimately street-level data from enthusiastic participants!

The most common piece of feedback I saw from users was to allow for landscape orientation in scans, so I added that feature this weekend. It's now possible to print maps in either landscape or portrait orientation, and the image recognition code distinguishes between the two based on aspect ratio. Users immediately started using the new orientation, including one German collecting house numbers:

Generally speaking, we are seeing loads of prints and not very many scans. It's incredibly easy to hit the "make" button on the front page, less so to actually collect some useful information, so I'm not surprised by the disparity. I am looking forward to seeing more activity though, starting with a scheduled mapping party on June 27th and 28th at RPS.

We've seen some very welcome feedback as well.

Austria's ORF Futurezone published an article devoted solely to Walking Papers on the 10th, which explains the disproportionate presence of many Austrian prints and resulted in a huge traffic bump.

Stefan Knecht of Germany's United Maps said the project was "just lovely", which was very nice to hear from someone whose work is so vital and excellent for online mapping:

Despite or even because of this "post-digital, medieval technology"- it's simply lovely. The reduce-to-the-max, crispy clear website is why I deeply adore Stamen for.

OpenStreetMap superhero Andy Allan pointed out that "even if you don't want to scan back in, it's actually a good interface for just printing maps for annotation."

Jason Kottke also sent some link love our way, in a post also highlighting The Incidental, the post-digital newspaper project Schulze and Webb (and Jones and Davies) at Milan's Salone di Mobile.

So that, in a nutshell, is what is happening with the project. It's nicely steaming along with regular prints, we're starting to see scans from users, we're playing with some ideas on how to more effectively foreground the idea of annotations and scanning on the site, the code continues to be freely available on Github, and I'm actively trying to boost real on-the-ground use of the system for actual mapping.

Shaun Inman just launched Fever, a web-based feed reading tool that you buy and install on your own server.

A few interesting things:

• Fever implements SnarkMarket's "compress into diamonds" idea: When I click that button, spin your little algorithmic wheels and turn my reader into a personalized Memeorandum. Show me the most linked-to items in the bunch, and show me which of my feeds are linking to them.
• I always wanted to turn Reblog into something like Fever, but never did.
• It's written in PHP, which makes me happy. All this blibber-blabber about web-based MVC development frameworks, and PHP is still the works-everywhere-including-shared-hosting common denominator. It's truly the Bourne shell of the internet.
• The installation procedure, esp. the way it ties in with the main Fever website, seems to be a way for Shaun to watch his user base, verify that installations are paid-for, and smooth the process all in one shot. Is it also a way to push updates, and is the chmod -r a+rwX step a possible point of exploitation? Too early to tell. Watch the video on the site, the installation bit is at the end.
• It's being marketed and sold like shrinkwrap software but you need an account on the website to install and license it.
• The division of feeds into must-read and might-read is pretty reflective of how most people think about their feeds in my experience.
• Drag-and-drop on the web is stupid.
• The grouping of entries based on linking is, to me, more of a way to mass-delete things that everyone's gabbing about rather than a pointer to what's actually interesting. When I imagined doing this kind of cross-item-similarity for Reblog, I imagined it as a way to quickly identify pockets of groupthink or P.R. clusters and rapidly/easily eliminate them. Just think, I could have handily avoided last week's internet-wide Google Wave boner!
• I'd totally install and use Fever if I didn't use Reblog for publishing as well as consuming - all of my snippets and most of my Delicious links are tagged and published directly from my feed reader. It'd be cool if Fever could do this, maybe as a plug-in.