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I like Javascript enough to work with it, write in it, and meet up for coffee/tea to hear how its life is going. But I don't want to move in with it and have its babies.

I realize that in contemporary web development I am completely out of sync as everyone who is anyone claims that they want to move in with and have Javascript's babies, be they JS babies of the web variety, bouncing server side nodes, or cute little mobile frameworks.

But maybe, many of the everyone who is anyone are feigning their deep, abiding love of Javascript, and maybe like me they would rather catch up with JS over a drink and occasionally write in it, all the while they are actually thinking about Python, or HTML, or Ruby, or CSS, Photoshop vs. Lightroom, or ObjC/C#/C++ or maybe even some chocolate or a beer. Maybe.

It is not just Javascript that I am not that in to, I feel the same way about Illustrator and PHP. With the latter, it is much easy to be honest with one's technology peers and contemporary's and say, "I know I have to occasionally use them to get the task done, but, wow, I really don't like them.", as most folks have critiques of PHP and they probably don't really like Illustrator either. The the person will snicker and admit much the same or they will go into how if you just did it like this, you would like it better.

Javascript has gone through a curious arch of being cobbled together for the web, critiqued for being a toy scripting language, and then somewhere in the last few years it went to the gym, started doing supplements, got a bit of work done, and became the be all and end all amongst many contemporary developers right now. Javascript got its act together and even the previous critics are a bit entranced with it right now.

To admit that yes, I can write it, yes, I can tweak a framework, yes, I can... but no I am not using it in any advanced capacity because the truth is I would rather not, is quite a bit more risky right now.

Javascript, can we just meet up for tea or coffee?

How about you? Do you have a technology that is a common or currently trendy part of your design or development workflow that you cringe or have a big sign over every time you use it?

The lovely folk at Environments for Humans are hosting the 2nd Annual Responsive Web Design (online) Summit April 16-18, 2013.

The great thing about the E4H online summits is that one can attend and participate in the summit from anywhere were you have a data connection - home, office, coffee shop, car, mountain, desert, the ISS, wherever.

Yes, there is a the traditional presenter presents with slides, but the best part - speaking from experience as a presenter and as an attendee - there is a real time chat that the attendees can use to ask questions, comment on the presentation, and otherwise interact with the group, which then gives the presenter an opportunity to interact back.

I love this style, as it makes the presentation into a more of a meet up or workshop conversation amongst peers around the ideas in the presentation rather than Lone Speaker on Podium speaking Truth to Audience.

I will be presenting at 9am (CT) on Wed April 17, 2013 on "Mobile Development on a Shoestring Connection".

Please come join me, a whole slew of great speakers and topics, and fellow designers & developers, whether you are currently working in Responsive Web Design or Mobile or are RWD/Mobile curious, for the RWD Summit next week. It will be good, stimulating, and great way to get up to date on a wide range of ideas in the RWD and mobile spaces.

Use '20JEN' when registering to get 20% off an individual or meeting room ticket!

Look forward to next week at the RWD Summit!

Jenifer Hanen - A Minimalist's Guide to the Mobile Web - BDConf, April 2012 from Breaking Development on Vimeo.

Thurs 08.30.12 - The nice folks at Breaking Development have published the video with slides from my presentation at BDConf April 2012 in Orlando.

If you say to yourself "I must know more about designing and developing for the mobile web and beyond the desktop", then get yourself on down to the Breaking Development Dallas coming up in a few weeks - September 24-26, 2012!

Thurs 07.19.12 - Yesterday my Nokia N950 dev testing phone decided to lose all charge after only 4 hours and I knew that it was time for a new battery. With some Twitter advice from Attila and Thomas, I was able to unscrew the back case batteries, open the back of the N950 from the speaker end and then verify which battery was in my device and at what mAh.

While the Nokia N950 specs as listed on the Maemo.org wiki state that the battery is the BL-4D 1320mAh, @achipa wrote that the Nokia 808 PureView's BV-4D battery would work as well, which I tested and it worked. As of today on Amazon.com, the BL-4D is for sale but is only 1200mAh and the PureView's BV-4D with 1400mAh is not yet available in the US or for sale on Amazon. When the BV-4D does come available I will get one for my N950 as the extra 200mAh will help in the battery lasting longer department.

Big Thanks to Attila and Thomas for their Twitter advice, esp. on how to do the Quick Charge (carry an extra battery and swap it out).

Video taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia 808 PureView.

Today's good news came at 1:16pm PDT when Marissa Mayer announced that she was leaving Google to join Yahoo as their new CEO.

I am greatly heartened by this.

I don't think all cars should be designed and made in Detroit. I don't think all movies should be written and filmed in Mumbai. I really don't think all software and/or hardware should only be designed by Apple and Google (or in another era Microsoft & Apple, or IBM & ...).

The more strong international and big national software, hardware, web, and mobile companies that there are, is for the better for everyone who uses said technologies.

The tech press loves to have a duopoly that they can pit against each other to the exclusion of all other companies, but as a user of technology I don't want a binary either or choice. Life is richer when there is more than two choices, and it is much richer when there are more choices.

Yahoo, while it has been floundering in recent years, has been a company that still has great potential and many of non-tech folk I know use it every day. I look forward to seeing what Ms. Mayer will do, as her work and accomplishments preceed her, hopefully she will be able to refine Yahoo and help lead the company to focus on a place(s) of strength for the enrichment of all who use the web.

Tues 04.17.12 - Yesterday I was quite wrapped up in the nerves of presenting, today I took notes during the Breaking Development Orlando sessions and I have added in the presentations slide embeds as the various speakers have shared them.

My two favorite BDConf presentations from Monday the 16th was Guy Podjarny's "Performance Implications of Mobile Design" and Stephen Hay's "Responsive Design Workflow":

Per my usual, my notes are a paraphrase of what is being said during the presentation and what is on the slides, anything is quotes is a quote from the speaker rather than a paraphrase. The notes plus presentation slides can be found after the jump.

Mon 04.16.12 - Here are the slides from my presentation on "A Minimalist's Guide to the Mobile Web" from Breaking Development Orlando.

Here is the official description of the talk for the BDConf website: "Designing and developing for mobile devices can be overwhelming in the sheer amount of factors to consider. Questions of where get started or how to retool for fast and lovely mobile sites can send one screaming for the supposed safety of Webkit before running and hiding under an iOS rock. But such fear and trembling is unnecessary and we can go forth in confidence with the minimalist's guide on data sipping as a legitimate lifestyle, serving responsive images, how to strip that code, and do I really need all this Javascript?"

A video the presentation will be available soon on the BDConf Vimeo channel.

If you are a mobile or web design and/or developer who really would love to attend a great one track, intimate conference on the mobile web, Breaking Development Dallas will held in September 2012.

Fri 04.13.12 - I deleted my Facebook account today. I have wanted to delete it since the first 15 minutes on Facebook book back in 2007. Today I did it with no regrets only a feeling of true relief.

I will let my Tweets tell the story, click on the links for each Tweet to see the conversations that followed:

8:28 AM - 13 Apr 12 Facebook only comments does not build community, it excludes. Looking at you @nokiaconnects. Give more commenting authentication options.

8:51 AM - 13 Apr 12 @nokiaconnects @texrat @ktneely Give the reader choice, don't force them to up your boss' stats for his/her ROI discussion with his/her boss

9:12 AM - 13 Apr 12 Is re-reading the instructions on how to Really and Truly Delete my Facebook account. Deleting will be my early birthday present to myself.

9:16 AM - 13 Apr 12 Done. Goodbye Facebook. I never loved you. Not even a little. 14 days my data will be gone too, not that there was much of it. #ExtraHappy

G+ Announcement on Breaking up with Facebook:

I pulled the Trigger or in this case a few clicks and a captcha and Deleted my Facebook account! I would specifically like to thank the +Nokia Connects folks for pushing me over the edge this morning with their switch to Facebook Comments only.

My G+ comment expanding on the whys:

+Valerie Lynn Yes, I jumped ship after threatening to do so for years.

+Abhinav Natarajan From the time I started on FB in 2007 or so, I really didn't like it but felt forced to be on it. The way I managed my dislike was to only log in once every two weeks or once a month and stay on just about 15 mins to check in with folks I otherwise would never see online. I made sure that I didn't have photos or any real content up as I don't like their TOS and copyright. So, I never really used it to start with.

As FB has gotten more invasive, I have gotten more frustrated.

Per the usual, my true social media love is Twitter [http://twitter.com/msjen]. I remain on Flickr [http://www.flickr.com/photos/msjen] and Google Plus. ;o)

+Hector Hurtado I had my account deactivated for the 1st 18 months, I only activated it when I had to for a work event in 2008. And then it just snowballed into a place where many of my friends who don't like being online but do like a nice closed sandbox (MySpace or FB) started posting. But in the 4 years since, having access to an occasional conversation with a person who is only on Facebook does not outweigh all the yuck/sh*t about FB.

For those of you who are now wondering where I will go online, I am not changing any of my ways, I am just taking out my once every month 15 min login to IrritationLand. And if you only have Facebook Comments on your blog or website, then sorry, no comment.

Per the usual, I can be found here on this blog, on Twitter, on Flickr, and on G+.

And a little humor.... The Oatmeal on "How to get more likes on Facebook"

On April 16, 2012, I will be speaking at the Breaking Development conference in Orlando, Florida on:

A Minimalist's Guide to the Mobile Web
Designing and developing for mobile devices can be overwhelming in the sheer amount of factors to consider. Questions of where get started or how to retool for fast and lovely mobile sites can send one screaming for the supposed safety of webkit before running and hiding under an iOS rock. But such fear and trembling is unnecessary and we can go forth in confidence with the minimalist's guide on data sipping as a legitimate lifestyle, serving responsive images, how to strip that code, and do I really need all this javascript?

Come join us for a mobile spring break in Orlando at BDconf! Register here with the following discount code, ORHAN12, will give you a $100 off the registration.

Wed 01.18.12 - Today was the day that many websites, large & small, blacked out and linked folks to information on protesting the current bills before the US Senate on SOPA/PIPA.

The most cohesive messages today were from Google, Wikipedia, and the EFF. If you haven't been following the debate, go read those links.

The best cartoons of the day were from The Oatmeal and Ed Stein.

It is the 52nd Week of the Year, the 452nd Week of this Blog, and 540th Week of my Freelance Web Business (minus the 53 weeks at Grad School).

It is time for something new.

All photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Thurs 12.01.11 - As the Qt Dev Days 2011 wrap up and are over, I present to you a summary of the photos I took over the course of the three days of the training and conference.

I really enjoyed and learned a good deal over the course of the Qt Dev Days. One of the best parts is the high ratio of nice and smart folks I met and the conversations were good. I attend at least 3-4 conferences a year and this one rates up there with Mobilism for my fave conference of the last 2 or so years in terms of content and inspirational conversation with other attendees.

Big thanks to Qt, Nokia, Digia, Futurice and all the other sponsors for putting on a great conference.

Even bigger thanks to all the lovely folk I met, the good conversations on mobile & development that were had, and letting me take your photos. Y'all rock.

See everyone next year, if not sooner.

******
My Qt Dev Days conference notes:

Qt Dev Days 2011, Day 1: Training
Qt Dev Days 2011, Day 2: Conference Sessions
Qt Dev Days 2011, Day 3: The Last Day

Thurs 12.01.11 - Today was the third and final day of Qt Developer Days in San Francisco (Airport area), being the last day it was a bit more relaxed and the sessions where more give and take. I have really enjoyed this conference, not only for all of the new information learned but for the high caliber of people I have met. I will definitely go again next year.

I have one more post of the photos from the event to come but the photo essay will need to wait until the weekend.

My notes are mostly a transcription but sometimes a paraphrase of what the speaker said and what their slides said, if exact quote then I will put it in "". The use of () is my notes or asides or thoughts.

Wed 11.30.11 - Here are my notes from the Qt Developer Days 2011 Day 2, the Conference Sessions of which there was many good & meaty sessions on Qt, Qt Quick, and mobile. The big dinner and party was also this evening, but that will merit a separate photo essay post.

My notes are mostly a transcription but sometimes a paraphrase of what the speaker said and what their slides said, if exact quote then I will put it in "". The use of () is my notes or asides or thoughts.

Qt Dev Days 2011 - Training Day

Tues 11.29.11 - I am at the Qt Dev Days 2011 in San Francisco(-ish) for the next three days and per my usual, I will be taking notes during the sessions and posting them here.

Today was the Training Day where one could choose one of five training tracks and I chose the Qt Apps with Nokia track and I am glad I did as the Digia trainer, Tuukka Ahoniemi, was funny, thorough, and informative on Qt Quick/QML matters big picture and small details.

The day started with Nokia's Kenny Mathers talking about the best way to make money from mobile apps and the Nokia app store. He talked about 'Next Billion' a favorite unspecified key phrase of Nokia presenters of the last year and I had an opportunity to ask him to clarify. And he did.

The day ended with Gordon Thornton walking us through how one submits one's app to the Nokia Store and demystified the process.

Now to go off to the Welcome Reception.

My notes are mostly a transcription but sometimes a paraphrase of what the speaker said and what their slides said, if exact quote then I will put it in "". The use of () is my notes or asides or thoughts.

On Friday in the way of any good internet bunny trail, I found myself at the PySide website wondering what progress had been made with the Python port/binding for Qt since I last looked, downloaded, built and inspected to see if it was fit for my mobile application development purposes back in April/May (or more like was my skillset I ready for building the most recent stable version of PySide).

In the first 20 minutes of traipsing down Python and Qt based bunny trails on Friday afternoon, I found myself in raptures of happiness, as it appeared to my eyes and reading comprehension that Nokia had taken on the PySide project and was moving forward with it as a legitimate wing of Qt. I was so excited that I called a non-technology-working friend and gushed about it to her (sorry).

I tweeted asking if any of the PySide folk would be at Qt Developer Days 2011 in San Francisco next week. I was ecstatic about the prospects of using Python for the logic in my Qt Quick apps rather than C++ or Javascript.

The major reason that I love both Python and Qt Quick/QML is that the code is by and large minimal and declarative but gets the job done powerfully without excessive grammar, wordiness, and very little punctuation, which makes my minimalist loving self happy happy happy. The very idea of Python + Qt Quick sounded too deliciously good to be true.

And it appears that after some months of Nokia dedicating employees to making PySide a robust binding for Qt and Qt Quick, that Nokia is now un-dedicating said employees and will be decommissioning their involvement in PySide to an add-on for Qt.

My hopes were crushed in less than two hours. Up in happiness of the possible perfect pairing of my favorite programming/scripting language with my favorite mobile framework, only to fall down the rocks of despair and sadness that so much potential was so fast dissipated.

Matti Airas the Nokia python guru on the PySide project does write in this email that he does see a future for PySide and mobile as an add-on for Qt in the community separate from Nokia. Here's to hoping that he is right.

Further hopes go to Python catching on as a good option to the various C languages and Java for mobile app development. And here's to hoping that PySide folks will be at Qt Dev Days next week.

****
Update from Wed 11.23.11 - Just to clarify, this post is for NaBloPoMo and is my joke on / to myself about moderating my enthusiasms in a world where the funding of technology projects is driven by management stratagems & quarterly profits, as I get so excited upon finding out a technology has finally reached the point that it will be useful and then, in this case, less than an hour or two later after searching for more info I find out that the project has been discontinued.

One of the great promises of HTML5 with CSS3 and Javascript is that eventually, after much wrangling & negotiation, one will be able to write apps that can work across many devices regardless of platform and ecosystem. In the meantime, while we are waiting for HTML5 to have access to the contacts or camera on the mobile you could be possibly carrying, we can use future friendly practices to develop and design flexible web sites and apps.

Until the future web accessible world arrives, from a pragmatic standpoint, many of us if we want to access contacts, or the camera, or a variety of other APIs and features on our mobile devices, we find ourselves delving into hybrid native-web mobile worlds or diving into native mobile apps be it through a SDK or PhoneGap or the like.

Thomas Perl in a post-Nokia World 2011 blog post, Comparing Mobile OS SDK availability by platform, builds an argument for a very salient point for folks who are currently developing for native mobile apps:

"Now, people can argue that one can set up dual-boot or virtual machines to support all OSes, but that's not the point. The point is that if the SDK is available on all Desktop platforms (note that this is not the same as SDK targetting all mobile platforms), developers can retain their choice of Desktop OS on which they develop on, and are not forced to use OS X or Windows for development of apps for the corresponding mobile platform (I also understand the reason why these companies only provide the SDK for their own Desktop platform, but that is not a good reason from a developer's point of view)."

I agree with Mr. Perl. I don't want to be told which desktop platform I must use so that I can develop for a certain mobile. I find working in virtual box to be tedious after a short span of time. I would like the system I develop for to respect me enough to let me to make the choice about what desktop/laptop OS I prefer to use.

Bravo to Android, Qt, and PhoneGap.

I have been compiling a list of links for how to use, design, and develop for the Nokia N9 / N950. The first section tips and tricks is for anyone with a Nokia N9, the second section is links for Nokia N9/N950 designers and developers, and the third is Nokia N950 specific.

Tomorrow, I will publish a list of blogs and podcasts that I have found to be a font of information on the Nokia N9/N950, Harmattan, creating N9 apps in Qt.

If you have any tips and tricks links for the Nokia N9 or N950, be it for users or designers & developers, tell us about it the comments.

Nokia N9 and Nokia N950 general interest topics for everyone:

The Nokia N9 Swipe site:
http://swipe.nokia.com/

Nokia N9 UX Gestures - click on DEMOS (I found the gesture demos invaluable in the first hour of using the N950):
https://www.developer.nokia.com/swipe/ux/pages/getting_started.html

Nokia N9 MeeGo/Harmattan Swipe UI Tips and Tricks
http://blog.wapreview.com/15554/

Nokia N950 Close Apps:
http://my-meego.com/faq/showquestion.php?fldAuto=5&faq=1

Using Firefox Mobile on the Nokia N9 (I have been using a version of mobile FF from Sept on the Nokia N950 and it is great)
http://blog.wapreview.com/15780/

N9 Swipe undocumented feature; activate sane behavior (How to set the Swipe behavior to the gestures you want)
http://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/08/14/n9-swipe-undocumented-feature-activate-sane-behavior/

How to Take Screenshots on Nokia N9 with ScreenshotMee
http://thenokiablog.com/2011/10/13/how-to-take-screenshots-nokia-n9/

FM Radio App
http://my-meego.com/software/applications.php?name=FM_Radio&fldAuto=488&faq=2

Three thoughts floating around my head this morning while eating breakfast and reading the weekly Seal Beach Sun:

1) For all of my gushing two days ago, after spending some time with the Nokia N950 the camera is very good but not great like the N8. The resolution, color, and clarity on the N8 is definitely superior but the N950 has a nice look to the photos that I do like.

2) At Mobile 2.0's end of conf cocktails, I had a conversation with Mike Rowehl of Mobile Monday SV and Churn labs about wanting to develop for the mobile web or native apps. Mike said that the stop up on developing for the mobile web for many devs was monetization. I made a joke that I was satisfied as long as I wasn't living in my car or had moved back home at 40-something. We both laughed, but I could see that monetization meant something else to him entirely.

The conversation keeps coming back to me when thinking about the mobile web: why right now devs prefer to create native apps and what in the heck does monetization really mean any way?

Does monetization mean that I can be self-supporting as an app developer and not have to be taking on clients (my definition)? Does it mean the dev can use the money to buy a house and hire a few employees? Does it mean turning the app(s) into a full blown business? A business that then gets sold to a larger business for a large sum and then you get to join the big cats in Los Gatos?

What thinkest thou?

3) Once again the Seal Beach Sun's Crime Log has produced a pick of the litter winner this morning:

"Monday, Sept 5, 2011 - Rossmoor - Suspicious Person or Circumstances - 10:55am - Kensington Road - The caller requested a patrol check for a man wearing a hoodie who was walking on the Gertrude side of the elementary school. The caller said there has been a recent increase in crimes, including a robbery involving men in dark hoodies. The caller that it was suspicious for someone to be wearing a hoodie at all in September."

Now before you get all upset about hooding profiling, please remember that this is September in Southern California, our hottest month of the year with temps in the 90s to 100s and higher. And the caller was right, anyone wearing a hoodie with the hood up in 90+ temps is cruising for a minor Darwin Award in the heat stroke category.

This Tuesday, August 30th from 9am - 6pm (Central Time, read Texas Time), the Mobile JavaScript Summit will be coming to a browser near you. If you are a web designer/developer who is wondering how to get started with designing/developing for the mobile web and mobile apps or have already started but would love to know more about how to take the web technologies you work in and turn them to mobile, then this will be a great one-day online conference for you.

The great thing about the Environments for Humans' Summits is that the price is low and you attend the conference on your own computer. The software used to present the conference allows the attendees to not only have a video feed of the presenter, also the slides in the main window and the ability to ask questions in real time.

Here are the talks that will be given:

Josh Clark on The New Rules of Designing for Touch
Jonathan Stark on Mobile Apps and the Enterprise
Jenifer Hanen (me) on The Realities of Mobile Design
Simon Laurent and Daniel Pinter on From "It Works" to "Wow! This is Fast!"
Lunch break
David Kaneda on Sencha Touch
Stephen Gill on Phone Gap
Marc Grabanski on jQuery Mobile
Kevin Whinnery on Appcelerator Titanium
Tom Dale on SproutCore

I presented last year at the UX Summit and really enjoyed the online format, I definitely look forward to talking about one of my favorite subjects on Tuesday.

If you would like to join us, please use the following discount code, HANEN20, at The Mobile JavaScrip Summit.

Photo of local morning glories by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8 camera phone.

Tues 07.12.11 - Today was a good day that started with a lovely and fun UX interview with Thomas Mann on Skype video. We had a good chat about mobile devices and travel. I love talking with good sharp, designers as their minds can leap from place to place and connections can be made. Thanks to Thomas!

And then Jeremy linked to Brian's conversation over at Google Plus about owning one's own stuff versus engagement in the here and now on whatever is the big right now online service.

I have been a proponent on this blog and in person of owning your own stuff on the internet for years, even during the boom years of 2005-2008 when everyone thought that the services and Web 2.0 would take care of everything and your data would persist no matter what. I had several memorable conversations in that time period with a few prominent tech folk about how we can't trust a company or online service with our data as we don't know when they will lose funding or lose interest or be sold off to folks who will turn off the service and what we will do about our data when this happens.

As the business cycle waxes and wanes, as companies furl and unfurl, I want to own my photos, my text, and my data. Not only do I want to store my data where it can be seen by the world, but where I pay the bill and can freely upload, download, and back up with ease. For me that has meant paying rent on server space and a domain name since 1999 and having duplication / triplication of backup both to a physical hard drive and a cloud service on top of my server space that this blog lives on, in addition to all the spaces and services that I participate in online.

This blog is my studio, gallery and reception space, as well my living room of which you are all invited to. I may visit many places online and some of them may be second homes, like Twitter, but this space is where my heart lives.

Where does your online heart and home reside? Do you have full, partial or no control over your online home? Do you care?

What happens if you don't want to own your own self-hosted blog, will more projects like Jaisen Mathai's OpenPhoto crop up that will allow all of us to share our data to online services but also have all of it backed up to our own accounts at Dropbox or Amazon S3?

Web 05.11.11 - Photos in Amsterdam by Ms. Jen taken with her Nokia N8. I arrived in Amsterdam at 9:30am after not sleeping on the plane at all, so the first day before Mobilism was spent in a fun jet lag / sleep deprivation haze. After a small nap at the hotel, I took myself off to Brasserie Luden for lunch, then I walked down the canals through the western canal district of Amsterdam. Around 4pm, I found Brian Rieger and joined him, Stephen Hay, Stephanie Rieger, Lyza Gardener, and Peter-Paul Koch (PPK) at the cafe of Felix Meritis.

The evening was a fun speaker dinner boat cruise of the canals of Amsterdam as well as the Ij and Amstel rivers. It was lovely to see Amsterdam from the water and to be able to socialize leisurely with other mobile folk. The best part is we went by the big cruise ship docks to pick up Steve Souder and Andrea Trasatti half way through the cruise. While others went off after 11pm to get a drink and talk some more, the wall of NO SLEEP hit me hard and I went off to bed.

Great first day of Pre-Mobilism in Amsterdam.

"1990 will be seen, I will posit, as being the first year of the great revolution that we are living through. It is also the first year of the great confusion for the vast majority of people who are in power today. ... The internet is fundamentally different, it thinks in networks, not in hierarchies." - Ben Hammersley

Yesterday morning, I woke up nice bright and early due to jetlag, and tried to turn on my computer to entertain myself while it was still dark out. I looked up in the top right corner and saw that my lovely, now 4 year old, MacBook Pro had not been charging the last few hours. In fact, it wasn't charging at that moment and was nearly out of battery even thought the power adapter was plugged into the wall and into my computer.

I took it into the living room and pulled out the router which was on and tried the power adapter there, no luck, no charge. Given that I was a very short time away from losing all battery, I quickly searched for "MacBook Pro not charging" and followed the various instructions to no avail. I then turned it off to save the last bits of battery and then went back to sleep.

I tried again about 8am yesterday and the computer would not take a charge nor respond to the various Apple Support resets. While I was doing the third PRAM reset, the computer simply would not turn on at all. This was very frustrating as the power adapter is less than a month old, the battery is less than 4 months old, and I have a lot of work to do right now. Then for no reason at all, this morning, it decided to start charging again and turn on.

Something tells me that it is time to start looking for a new computer as this one is starting to do its own thing. I really hope it can last for least two more months, as I would rather go to Abhi's wedding in India in June than buy a new computer.

Dear Chick-a-Poo the MBP, please hang on in there...

;o)

One of the things that I most admire about photography and the internet is that anyone can get involved with both.

Within 15 years of the invention of photography, cameras, darkrooms and nascent photographers had bloomed everywhere even in small towns in the 1850s. One of the very first places that a woman could own her own business legitimately in the Victorian era was a photography studio, and women did. For the last 150+ years, photography has grown beyond a specialty into a life, creative outlet, as well as snapshot hobby for billions of people worldwide.

The internet has been much the same in the last 18 years, the barrier to creative entry has been relatively low: access to a machine that can access the internet. Many millions -> billions have taught themselves the rudimentary coding skills necessary to maintain a website or blog online and are expressing themselves thereof.

One of the things that I have loved most about Nokia as a company and as a mobile culture is that they have brought mobile camera phones to millions -> billions worldwide, and regardless of my own personal feelings of the recent (mis)alliance between Steve + Stephen, Nokia has pioneered the mobile camera phone space and will most likely be on the forefront for a least a couple more years.

Beyond the great hardware that Nokia has created for camera phones in the last six years, I have been very excited about the development of Qt and the open source development platforms that Nokia has been rolling out since 2008. My greatest hope is that they will continue pursuing this space and my greatest fear, due to Mr. Ballmer's hate on for all things open, is that they will not.

As humans we are at our best when we are creative and when we share with love. We teach our toddlers and kindergartners to share. Creativity is best served openly, with the transmission of knowledge, mentoring, passion, and the art product freely without restrictions.

If you want to give your art and knowledge away, good. If you want to charge for it, good. If you want to share your source code so others can learn how to code as well, even better. If you want to copyright your material, good. If you want to copyleft it, good. Just create and encourage those around you to do so, be it art, music, photography, code, software, cooking, sewing, knitting, hair coloring, web site creation, writing, blogging, bulding, making, creating, etc. etc. etc.

Regardless, create and share creation.

To that end, my goal for the next six months is to finish my Qt mobile app for photographers, to blog here more often, to photowalk more often, and to get involved in an open source community where I can share my passion and learn from others.

And if at all possible, with all the other travel planned for this spring, I will try to get to EuroPython as I do love the Python community and after all that has gone on the last few bits, I think it is time I participate more fully in the community around my favorite programming language.

What about you?

Are you a web designer or developer who is mobile curious? Are you a web des/dev who wants to jump into mobile, but is not sure where to start?

Are you a seasoned mobile designer or developer who really would like to have your own practice sparked & challenged by a some great speakers on mobile web design & development, as well as mobile web user experience?

Do you just want a good excuse to go to Amsterdam in late Spring?

Come join us at Mobilism:

Mobilism is the first conference that focuses exclusively on web design and development for mobile devices. Mobilism will take place in Felix Meritis in Amsterdam on the 12th and 13th of May 2011. Follow us on Twitter for the latest Mobilism news. Or buy a ticket now!

Mobilism has a great line up of speakers from mobile web world and mobile user experience as well as web design & development. I am excited about participating in and making the mobile web better for all, to that end, I am really looking forward to Mobilism 2011.

Last Tuesday, I wrote a blog post on my frustrations with setting up a Mac OS X and/or Ubuntu Linux Qt install that would also compile Qt's Symbian modules. I received quite a bit of feedback in comments, emails, Google Buzz and via Twitter.

Feedback saying everything from, "Duh, just use Windows!" to "Ugh, I hear you and I also really want a full working for Qt toolchain for Mac/Linux" to nice Nokia/Qt employee-type folk* who checked and double-checked facts for me.

Thank you to all of you for your comments, be they helpful or not, as it spurred on my overly persistent nature and I spent most of Saturday trying out several different options to see what would work to set up a full working Qt Mobility/Symbian/QML development toolchain on my MacBookPro.

1) Per Emmanuel's suggestion, I decided to install VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro rather than fiddling with my previous Bootcamp set up. The pros of VirtualBox is that you don't have to reboot to access the other OS, but merely tab in and out of VirtualBox as it is just another window on the desktop. Very Nice.

The sad thing is that neither of my Windows disks would activate on VirtualBox at all.

2) So, I called Windows' Customer Service to see if we could get a new activation code for me, and after two fruitless calls with nice customer service agents who listened to me talk about how my Dell was dead and I was using the really old Windows XP SP2 disk on a virtualization and could they just give me a code. Really, I swear that this copy of Windows is not being used on another machine, no, it isn't. No, PLEASE don't forward me to Sales, Ugh.

Like I said before, I am not interested in purchasing a whole new copy of Windows just to run Qt with Symbian compile & build, as I have other financial goals for the next few months. That $200+ could be better spent in Austin, TX, not to enriching Redmond, WA, - not when I have 2 perfectly good copies of Windows that no longer have working computers attached to them.

This is a dead end for now. But of course, there is a back-door here.

3) After Lucien Tumota of Forum Nokia, advised that I take the wiki info I had that Qt's remote compiler was not working with Ubuntu 10.10 with a grain of salt, he followed up with the nice folks who are on the remote compiler team and confirmed that it is working with Ubuntu 10.10 (aka Maverick Meerkat).

4) By late Saturday afternoon, I had 2 installs of Windows**, both un-activate-able, and 1 install of Maverick Meerkat on Virtual Box. The remote compiler is working on Ubuntu 10.10. But still no long term solution for developing a Qt or QML app for my Nokia N8 on my Mac.

After all of this fiddling, installing, being patient, learning the ins and outs of Virtual Box, enjoying myself thoroughly, I decided that rather than arguing farther up the food chain at Windows Customer Service to get a working activation code, that I would do the following until Nokia and Qt provide a full Qt Symbian dev toolchain for Mac or Linux:

I will develop my app in Qt on my Mac as if I was only developing for Maemo, then when it is time to test for Symbian, I will put the project files in my shared folder, open up Virtual Box, hope my 30 days of non-activation aren't over yet, and then build the Symbian app on the Windows Qt. When my 30 days are up, then I will delete that Windows VirtualBox, and start again.

A hack, yes. A bit overwrought, yes. And yes, it will be 2 hours down the drain to reinstall Windows & Qt to full working order, but hopefully, within 30 days, Nokia will have released a full working Qt for Mac & Linux.

A mobile dev girl can hope, can't she?

* Big Thanks to Lucien Tumota, Henrik Hartz, and Ville Vainio for all the help. Y'all rock.

** Once I got Windows installed on Virtual Box, I then installed Qt SDK from Forum Nokia and Qt for Symbian from qt.nokia.com, so that I could 'harvest' the Symbian folder and sis files for later use, of which the biggest goal is to make sure that my N8 is ready for dev testing.

I have been trying to develop a Qt mobile app for the Nokia N8 since October, except there is one not so small problem: There is no symbian module for Qt for Mac OS X or Linux. There is also the not so small problem that only half the Mobility API has been released, but that is another issue.

It is very hard to build a Symbian^3 mobile application for the Nokia N8, when the only platform that has the full Qt SDK to develop for Symbian is Windows.

Right now, I have only my MacBook Pro and an old Dell with Ubuntu Linux, I don't have a Windows machine nor to I have a version of Windows that will both activate on a Bootcamp partition and will run the full Qt SDK*.

I have installed and re-installed various versions of Qt from various download places to both my Mac and to my Ubuntu install and each time have run into many walls of frustration and still no Symbian module.

Nokia, why does this have to be so hard? I want to develop apps for Nokia Nseries phones, but at this point I have spent more hours trying to get the dev environment running than it would have taken to code an alpha version of the app.

Please release the full & equal Qt SDK for all three major computer platforms**.

Please do release a full Mac & Linux SDK with Symbian, as well as the rest of the Mobility API, soon - before Feb 15, 2011, so there is still at least six weeks to develop & test an app before the March 31st Calling All Innovators deadline.

Thank you.

* And the truth of the matter is that when I converted the Dell to Ubuntu in 2005, it was because I was completely and utterly over Windows in any shape or form. That was a bit more than five years ago. Every time I have to deal with Windows, my chest tightens and I feel my blood pressure raise. Nokia, I love you, but not at the expense of my health & well being.

** Calling the Mac SDK 'Beta' and leaving out major bits but having the docs in the SDK as well as the docs on Forum Nokia act like it is the full version equal to Windows is an evil little mind f*ck.

Yesterday, Chanse Arrington asked on Twitter:

"What are some things I should be doing in 2011 to get more developers on board with Nokia in the US?"

Here are my suggestions as a designer | developer who has been working on an app or two for the Nokia ecosystem:

1) Take over the Forum Nokia twitter account and use it to update followers on what is new content on Forum Nokia and what is new in developer tools for Nokia. Right now the @forumnokia twitter account is just a mimic to the various Nokia marketing tweets that are going around, but it could be SO MUCH MORE.

The Forum Nokia website is a bit of a beast and many useful parts are updated frequently but there is not a full RSS feed for the whole site and the new content is difficult to find, so use Twitter as that RSS feed. Let us know what new articles have been added, let us know about additions to the wiki, use twitter to highlight the best and most useful of Forum Nokia today not just what the upper dudes at marketing think are important this week.

Also use this twitter account to announce webinars, cool mobile & dev conferences (even non-Nokia), contests, blog posts by mobile devs who are writing about Qt/dev tutorials and tips, and what the community is up to, feature apps, etc. And like @NokiaCareUS and @womworldnokia, have @forumnokia have a set of photos of the tweeters for the account & their names so that it personalizes the account.

Use Twitter to make us excited about Forum Nokia's content and thus excited about developing for Nokia devices.

2) Convince the Qt folk to make sure that the full Mac Qt with Symbian & Qt Mobility gets released extra super soon. Like it or not North American mobile app developers love their Macs, even if Nordic/Europeans are still PC/Windows committed. If you want to win over North America, get all of the Nokia dev tools fully working on Mac & Linux as well as Windows dev platforms. Steve Jobs has kindly convinced developers to dump their PCs for Macs over the last five plus years, so rather than fight it or be angry about it just give us all the tools we need to develop without hassle or dual boots or having to switch to another OS. Be developer OS agnostic, make great tools that work across the platforms so that developers can create great mobile apps.

3) Highlight the Qt Quick and other Nokia web runtime tools to web designers and developers on Twitter to show them how easy it is to transfer their current skill set of HTML/CSS/Javascript to developing apps for Nokia devices. There are quite a few great tools for web designers to start creating mobile apps, but they need to know where to start. Highlight videos, webinars, and online blog / Forum Nokia tutorials on how to create mobile web apps and mobile web sites from scratch.

Many of the current resources are native mobile app focused with the assumption that the developers have a full four year computer science bachelors background and are now Java or C++ engineers at large companies, when there are tons and tons of web designers and developers out there who could be reached but are currently being alienated by the current offerings.

Case in point, this last week's Forum Nokia webinar on Qt Quick, where the presenter just assumed that the audience were C++ programmers who had already created Qt desktop apps and were moving into mobile, rather than presenting the material as a great place for web designers & developers with javascript experience to get started with Qt Quick / QML and mobile app development.

I have more ideas, but a great Forum Nokia twitter account, fully powered Qt for Mac with Mobility and Symbian, and a real outreach to web designers & developers is where I would start.

By HTML5, I don't mean the hyped up Everything But the Kitchen Sink HTML5 that has been peddled the last two years by various internet and technology companies, but I mean the semantic web markup language that is the successor to HTML 4.

I have spent the last few years watching as my early bleeding edge adopter friends have been talking about, blogging about, and writing about HTML5, all the while hearing fantastic claims from various members of the the tech related or marketing crowd. I have been somewhat skeptical, as I am a big fan of the stripped down, rigid framework of XHTML 1.0.

I like minimalism. I like my code separated from my presentation and behavior. HTML5 from the beginning looked like a big ole' pot of jambalya rather than the straight, clean formalism of XHMTL. When the W3C announced that there would be no XHTML 2.0, I knew it was only a matter of time before I caved and joined the HTML5 bandwagon.

While that time has come for this blog to convert to HTLM5, my little XHTML/Python coding soul and typing fingers will most likely be still stripping down the code and working on how to get this blog really lean and mean, even if HTML5 is still in its early days and is not a full spec at this point.

Give me a few weeks to settle in with, tweak, and rummage around the new HTML5 code base, please be patient. I have tested it thoroughly on Mac & Ubuntu, but not on Windows. Right now I have only access to IE8, as my old 2004 Dell with a dual boot of IE6 and IE7 died on Tuesday and has gone off to e-recycling heaven.

If you have access to a PC with IE6 or IE7, please take a screen shot of the front page of the blog and of this page, and email the screenshots to me noting which version of Windows & which version of IE (ex: Win XP/IE6, Vista/IE7, etc). I am using Remy Sharp's HTML5 shiv to make the code work in all versions of Internet Explorer, but if you see quirks, please let me know.

Over time, I am sure I will continue to explore HTML5 in more depth but right now, I am happy how this little experiment in transferring the markup of this blog from XHTML to HTML5 has gone.

Ok, friends, family, colleagues, and drive bys compliments of search engines, please be prepared for MAJOR BLOG CONSTRUCTION.

I am going to completely overhaul this blog in the next two days and switch from my somewhat modified XHTML 1.0 Movable Type templates to HTML5 code and templates of my own creation. As is my want for my own blog, I will be doing this live and not in a test dev/stage server type thing. Be prepared for a bit of a bumpy ride and you might see a peak behind the curtain, hang tight.

Wish me well, I am diving in.

After I wrote last night's post on "DIY Mobile Programming: Get Started with HTML, CSS, and Javascript", I realized that I assumed that all of my readers who want to learn to create | develop their own mobile apps are already familiar with and design | develop in HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

This is after I shut off my computer and was on my way to bed, when I realized that maybe those of us in the web & mobile industries need to give more than lipservice to the idea of web education but is it time for all of us to consider that HTML should be apart of the canon of literacy.

Should HTML, in a basic form, be taught in primary school along with reading, writing, and arithmetic?

Yes, I do think it should. The internet, in all of its permutations, is in every aspect of our lives regardless if one lives in the developed or developing world(s). If we don't teach the basics of the markup language of how to develop | create for the internet, then we are leaving literacy half-baked at best for the 21st Century, because if one does not understand the basic underpinnings of the internet, then one is illiterate to a major facet of 21st Century life.

The drive to increase literacy over the last 200 years has been more than making sure the most folks possible can read and write but it has also been the drive to give everyone the skills to participate on a more level playing field in society, as well as to open the opportunity for all of society to rise to the level of the educated. In every country where literacy has risen above 80%, poverty has decreased, self-sufficiency has increased, and the economy grows in proportion to the increase in literacy.

If you can learn to count to ten in another language, you can learn the 10 most used tags in HTML. If you can string to together a sentence or two in your native language, you can learn the semantics and grammar of HTML. With HTML, you are more than partially capable of creating simple pages and apps for the internet, be it mobile or desktop.

When one can create a page or alter a page in their care, then they are no longer audience, but a participant. No longer just a consumer, but a creator.

*******
Ms. Jen's DIY Programming Series:
DIY Dev: Program or be Programmed
DIY Mobile Programming: Get Started with HTML, CSS, and Javascript
DIY Programming: Should HTML be Required for Literacy in the 21st Century?

"If you can build your app with HTML, CSS & JavaScript, then you probably should." - @jonathanstark #wdx (via @garazi)

Some friends recently asked on Twitter what was the best way to start programming mobile apps with Nokia's Qt, as they found that it was not as easy as the publicity from Nokia had purported Qt to be.

I replied: "When devs say a 'framework' is "easy" it is code for "It won't take 15 months of 10 hour days & make you want to KILL yourself.""

Anyone who has developed an application, be it for the desktop or mobile, can tell you that framework makes it so much easier, but easy is a relative term. What easy may mean is that development time is reduced from 6 months to 6 weeks or less. Still not that easy, but easier and a big relief.

For folks who want to learn to create and develop their own mobile apps, but don't have much programming experience or little at all, I would like to suggest starting with developing a simple app in HTML, CSS, and Javascript to get your feet wet and see if you can get your idea up and running either as a mobile web app or as a native mobile app that is coded in HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

As I wrote in DIY Dev: Program or be Programmed a couple of weeks back, there comes a time when your own natural diy urge or curiosity or frustration with a lack of an app drives one to learn how to program a computer, server, or mobile phone so that the itch has been scratched.

Rather than get bogged down in the debate between mobile web apps and native apps, let me give a few links to resources out there to help get you started on creating your own mobile HTML, CSS, Javascript app be it for the mobile web or a native app:

Cross Platform HTML, CSS, Javascript Mobile Development Frameworks:
PhoneGap - http://www.phonegap.com/
Sencha - http://www.sencha.com/
JQuery Mobile - http://jquerymobile.com/
Qt Quick - http://qt.nokia.com/products/qt-quick/

Tutorials and Presentations:
Building Mobile Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
HOWTO: Create native-looking iPhone/iPad applications from HTML, CSS and JavaScript
Forum Nokia on Developing for the Mobile Web
Tips and Tricks for developing Mobile Widgets

Books:
Programming the Mobile Web
Beginning Smartphone Web Development: Building Javascript, CSS, HTML and Ajax-Based Applications
Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Have fun, get coding, and send us/ let's us know what you have created.

*******
Ms. Jen's DIY Programming Series:
DIY Dev: Program or be Programmed
DIY Mobile Programming: Get Started with HTML, CSS, and Javascript
DIY Programming: Should HTML be Required for Literacy in the 21st Century?

Sun 11.07.10 - Sunday: wake up. Brunch with friends. Tea & crepes at Queen Malika in the Castro with Jason. Get in the car and drive back to SoCal via the Central Valley in the rain.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen on with her Nokia N8.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Sat 11.06.10 - 361 days after Wedding 1.0, Cindy Li and Matt Harris got married (Wedding 2.0) at the Aquarium by the Bay. Jeremy Keith made an excellent officiant, the ceremony was lovely, and I loved that Cindy's dad, Mr. Li gave a blessing prayer in Chinese.

After the ceremony, the receiving line was held in the Aquarium proper and we were encouraged to visit the various tanks & displays while the catering staff re-purposed the event room for the reception.

The reception was lovely with all the guests sat at airport code tables. I was at YVR with a lovely set of friends and the reception was delightful. Food, dancing, laughter, catching up.

Congratulations to Cindy and Matt!

Fifteen years ago, to prove a snotty engineering student wrong who said artists couldn't make websites, I taught myself in less than 2 hours how to code a website. Ten years ago, I wanted to do more than just write HTML and use Photoshop, so I checked myself into Long Beach State's Extension and took a class on Javascript and one on Flash Actionscripting, more classes and trainings followed. Five years ago, I wanted to learn even more programming and checked myself into a graduate program that took 1/2 designers and 1/2 programmers and taught them both disciplines.

My programming professor at Trinity after our classes were over encouraged me to learn Python, of which I have done over the course of the last few years. In the last two years, I have had the opportunity to write several full web apps from the ground up. All of this has been hard, satisfying, and more than a bit of a stretch.

But I am glad that I have pushed my own boundaries and didn't listen to the naysayers, not the ones 15 years ago or last week, who said that an artist/designer/webdev can't learn to code/program.

If you can learn to speak/write/read a language and can reason, of which most of us have done at least once, you can learn to program.

Over the last few years, I have found myself getting increasingly frustrated that there is not the mobile app that I want out there or the one that is out does not have the features that I want, etc etc etc. Up until recently, at least from my perspective, programming a mobile application has been hard as one has to be a "real" programmer, the kind that learned Java/C/C++ in a four year Computer Science bachelors degree.

I am an optimist and frequently over commit myself by getting excited about how easy it will be to learn a new technology or language and then find myself more than a bit overwhelmed. But a funny thing happened along the way, C++ doesn't seem so obscure/opaque and/or hard any more. In experimenting with it recently, I found myself delighting in how easy it was for me to learn it and make simple apps. All that programming in python for Google App Engine over the last 18 months has paid off.

This has me excited. Excited enough to go two weeks ago up to San Francisco for the Nokia Developer Day at CTIA to see the demos and presentations on Qt. Excited enough to then go to the Qt Training Days in Austin this week.

I have mobile app ideas running around my head and now is the time to start programming to get them out and about.

*******
Ms. Jen's DIY Programming Series:
DIY Dev: Program or be Programmed
DIY Mobile Programming: Get Started with HTML, CSS, and Javascript
DIY Programming: Should HTML be Required for Literacy in the 21st Century?

In March of 2003, I heard Ben & Mena Trott talk about their blogging software that they started in 2001 after both lost their jobs in the DotCom Bust - Movable Type - and their new company named after the fact that their birthdays were only six days apart, SixApart, at SXSW 2003 and decided to try it out in April of 2003.

Seven years later I am still here, still blogging with Movable Type, still using it as a CMS for clients, and still hoping against bizarre hope that Movable Type and SixApart will continue to innovate in the blogging space. A silly hope now that WordPress has clearly won many hearts and minds, but I do like MT better for a variety of reasons.

Today TechCrunch leaked that SixApart had been bought out by VideoEgg for its advertising network and both would become a new entity known as Say Media.

Various bits of the blogosphere are a bit up in arms about this, although many SixApart / Movable Type veterans are warily watching what will happen next.

For a few months, I have been planning on moving my blog to a VPS, upgrading to MT5, and using HTML5 for templating. All of this planning would also include a major redesign to better integrate my mobile photo blogging with text blogging that I do.

Now these plans will be on hold. I will wait and see what is up. I don't want to spend 40-80 hours on a major redesign and upgrade 7.4 years of blogging only to have the software be unsupported in a few months.

Just in case the new Say Media, formerly VideoEgg formerly SixApart, axes Movable Type, I went an purchased an Expression Engine license today, because I know EE already supports mobile blogging. Due to the complexity of a move and a whole new platform, as EE's templating is rumored to be a pain, versus the free time I have to spend on such an endeavor right now, as well as loyalty to my favorite blogging engine, I will wait and see.

In the meantime, I would like to say a Big Thank You to all the SixApart employees, current & former, who over the last 7 years have made my blogging life happy: Ben & Mena Trott, Anil Dash, Mie Kennedy Yaginuma, Byrne Rese, Jay Allen, Tim Appnel, David Jacobs, Arvind Satyanarayan, Ginevra Kirkland, Beau Smith, and many others. As well as the whole community of Movable Type bloggers, developers, designers, and other enthusiasts who have weathered a great many storms together.

Thanks for a great 7 years, y'all rock.

**********

Update from 9/22/10 at 8:10am : Maarten Schenk at Movable Tips reports that Six Apart in Japan will continue with the development of Movable Type. MT is very popular in Japan and as Maarten reports it has been the most active hive of MT dev and innovation for sometime, so it makes sense that they will continue on. Go read: Movable Type and "Six Apart" live on... in Japan!

Update from 9/22/10 at 8:48am: A tweet from last night as I was writing this article:

I really wish @sixapart had sent an official announcement out to bloggers, devs, & customers before the tech press leaked the buyout.

Actually, this morning this is the part that makes me the most frustrated, is why didn't SixApart send an email to licensees and the ProNet mailing list before letting this get leaked to press? If everything is alright, then longtime customers and developers should be the first to know so that the rumor engine doesn't get started.

Update from 9/22/10 at 12:59pm: Today at 10:33am, David Jacobs, the VP for Services and Products at SixApart, sent an email to the ProNet mailing list entitled "The Future". I won't reprint it here, but basically he reiterates that SayMedia will be continuing to support and develop Typepad and Movable Type, which should have been sent before Michael Arrington scooped the story. Don't say to me, "How could they have know that Tech Crunch would have printed in the night before the announcement?" Companies need to tell their own story first before the press hears it from their sources and tells it for them, particularly in the Echo Chamber that is known as San Francisco/Silicon Valley.

Mon 09.13.10 - Testing mobile blog posting to the Atom Protocol. Photo of one of my roses today with my Nokia N95.

Mon 09.13.10 - Testing mobile blog posting to the Atom Protocol. Photo of Scruffy a few days ago with my Nokia N95.

My personal project of the last few days is to start chipping away at my moblogging app. Roland Tanglao and I have been talking since the Big Adventure in May about working together to get my mobile blogging app idea off the ground.

Basically, I know that if I can get a php script to post to this blog via the Atom or XML-RPC protocol, then I can get my mobile to do it via a python app. I have now spent more than 12 hours spread out over 2 days researching the various protocols, reading docs, and then trying to get several different php scripts to post a simple blog post to Movable Type 4.3's Atom or XML-RPC scripts.

Tonight, I kept getting errors that either the scripts aren't able to authenticate (both Atom & XML-RPC) or with XML-RPC I keep getting a "32300:transport error - could not open socket".

Darned sockets, I shake my fist at you.

Sun 07.11.10 - Ever since I wrote my master's thesis on how Creative Professionals used their Mobile Phones, I remain very curious how folks are using their phones. The tech and mobile blogs and blogosphere very much reward bloggers for writing on either the newest/latest/greatest or on the most detailed, esoteric atomic bits about the latest and greatest, all the while most of the folks around us seem to be muddling along with the mobile or cell phone that they bought from their wireless carrier for cheap.

When folks in my daily life find out that I love to take photos with my mobile phone and then moblog them to this blog, I frequently find the person I am talking to puts themselves down, discounts their own technology skills and knowledge, then confesses that they don't know how to get the photos they take with their phone off the phone.

A year ago, I decided that it would be fun to start a video blog that would, magazine style, ask a wide variety of folks the same five questions about their phones, plus a few sub-questions are asked in each interview, plus whatever other bits folks want to talk about their mobile phones:

1) Who are you, what phone do you have, where did you get it, and do you have a data plan?
2) What do you like about your mobile / cell phone?
3) What have you taught yourself to do on your mobile?
4) What don't you like about your mobile?
5) Either What do you wish you knew how to do on your mobile or what do you wish your phone did differently?

This idea has evolved and as of this evening, I formally announce the launch of Mobilefor.Us: Cell Phones for the Rest of Us.

Mobilefor.Us will be an online space that will seek to inform, share, and disseminate knowledge and confidence in using one's mobile phone regardless if you have the free phone from your carrier with no data plan or if you have the latest & greatest mobile with unlimited data or somewhere in between.

Please come join us at Mobilefor.Us.

Rebecca Blood wrote on "The Slow Web" today:

The Slow Web would be more like a book, retaining many of the elements of the Popular Web, but unhurried, re-considered, additive. Research would no longer be restricted to rapid responders. Conclusions would be intentionally postponed until sufficiently noodled-with. Writers could budget sufficient dream-time before setting pixel to page. Fresh thinking would no longer have to happen in real time.

Go read her article and the cinema post that inspired it.

I am only occasionally interested in blog posts, be it writing them or reading them, that are apart of the hyper-fast web, what has happened right now - usually if it about an earthquake that just happened or a revolution (like Iran last June). I particularly dislike the echo chamber of tech/mobile blog posts that happen within 30 minutes of a press release or a keynote from a company executive.

((yawn))

But blog posts that are written after one has considered the subject, looked at various sides, actually held the device in one's hand, mused on events & filtered them through experience, thought about the repercussions, and then write an informed opinion piece - now that is good slow web.

Forgive me for last night's storytelling rant/praise about Over the Air updating of one's mobile / smartphone. But one point that I would like to pick out from the story's threading is that of ease of use for the customer.

Many in the mobile and computer technology space complain about how users do not update their computers, mobiles or software thus making it more complex, difficult, and at times more expensive for creators, designers, and developers to provide great experiences (giving the the stink eye to IE6). But we can't complain if we are part of the problem in making updating difficult or more complex than it needs to be.

Apple has solved the problem of updating by making syncing between one's iPhone/iPod/iPad as close to automatic as possible when you dock or plug it into your computer. But it creates another problem in that one need's to have access to a computer to update or sync one's Apple mobile products and it can also create problems if you don't want a full sync or update. I have heard quite a few friends complain about both, either not having a regular computer or by syncing unique data on the mobile is wiped out by the sync. Apple makes it very easy but they have control over how the update happens.

Google's Android has solved the problem by making all their updates to any Android phone happen over the air. As I detailed out last night, Android puts a little notice up in the top tool bar that updates are available, the user can then click on the tool bar and a drop down menu will give one the alerts as to which software and/or firmware has updates available. Google makes updating very easy and gives the user the control on when and how much they want to update.

My complaint of the last four years about Nokia's Symbian S60 devices and updating is that the updating can only occur when one has the mobile phone attached by USB cable to a Windows PC/laptop. If one does not have access to a PC or one does not wish to find a PC to update one's mobile, then one goes without. Once one gets a PC of which to conduct the update on, it becomes a multiple step update process that usually includes updating the Nokia Updater software and then updating the phone. Most of the time this takes at least 3-5 times longer than an Apple or Android update. Unnecessary kit, steps, and time just to update.

What was so exciting to me and praiseworthy yesterday was that the Nokia N900 with the Maemo linux-based OS uses the Android model of OTA (Over the Air) updates. The user clicks on the alert in the top tool bar, one chooses the updates that one wants to have updated, and as long as one has data connection it will update. As stated last night, this whole process for a major firmware update took less than 10 minutes. It was truly efficient.

From the user experience perspective, we as creators, designers, and developers cannot assume what the user will have for 'kit' or a computer to update with and what access to connection they will have. Thus I suggest the following for updating of software and firmware on mobile phones and computers:

1) Let the device that needs to be updated be the only device involved. If a mobile, don't force the user to find a computer to conduct the update.

2) Make the available updates be readily noticeable to the user on the front or home screen of the device.

3) Allow whatever connection is most convenient for the user to do the updating. If wifi, then let the wifi do the job. If data connection through a mobile carrier, then let the sim chip do the job. Don't force it to be through the mobile carrier as some folks have very spotty 2G& 3G connections. Don't let the user fear that a spotty connection will brick the device. Conversely, if it doesn't work for the user to do the update only through a mobile connection, then give them steps to get around this.

4) Allow the user to choose how little or how much they want to update. If a major firmware update, then say so in plain language, not the internal language of your company or specialty.

By taking these four steps we can encourage users to update and make the update painless. Painless updates that just work make for a good user experience, excitement for new features or bug fixes, and in the end for brand affection and loyalty.

The ability to update one's mobile phone / device is an excellent service that a handset manufacturer or operating system can offer a customer as it not only extends the life of the mobile but it also expands and builds on the array of services and software available on the mobile.

One of the big enticements for me to consistently choose Nokia mobile phones over other manufacturers has been the high quality cameras, the great hardware, and the software/OS updates that are available for your mobile even a year or two after purchase.

Only one not so small, not so wee problem...

Up until the last year, all of the updates have only been available for Nokia customers with access to a PC / Microsoft Windows based computers, as one would have to use a Windows machine to update the Nokia in question.

Now, I don't know about you, but if you are a Nokia Nseries owner in the US, you are possibly not a PC owner. If you prefer to buy hard to find, high end, well designed hardware, then you have been mostly buying Apple for years and used to paying extra premium for great devices. If you are a Nokia Nseries owner in the US, you may be a creative surrounded by other creatives with Macs, not PCs. And on top of all of that, the PC owners around you might be the sort who don't own or ever run anti-virus and so you wouldn't want to hook your precious, expensive Noka up to their virii-addled PCs even for an update that will take 45 minutes to set up.

On top of hunting down a PC to update one's Nokia, there is the added irritation that every time one wants to update on a borrowed or ancient PC, the Nokia Updater software on the PC wants to be updated itself. And given that the lame computer in question is a Windows machine it means a lengthy download, a restart of the machine, plug your Nokia back in via USB cable and START ALL OVER AGAIN. SO ANNOYING.
Can I type it again? SO ANNOYING.

30-45 minutes to just get one f*ing update. UGH.

If you don't already read it, I recommend putting Charlie's Diary in your feed / RSS reader, as Mr. Stross is erudite and can pin any bug through the carapace with wit & speed.

Mr. Stross recently tackled "The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash" wherein he talks about how Mr. Job's severe control addiction appears to have several strategic as well as personal reasons:

"It's probably no exaggeration to say that Apple's draconian security policies are among the tightest of any company operating purely in the private sector, with a focus on secrecy that rivals that of military contractors. But even so, the control freak obsessiveness which Steve Jobs is bringing to bear on the iPad -- and the desperate flailing around evident among Apple's competitors -- bears some examination. What's going on?

I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future -- the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn -- on an all-or-nothing push into a new market."

For as much as I enjoy owning a good Apple MacBook Pro computer, as the hardware is so very nicely designed and the OS is not Microsoft (this is a theme for me, not MicroSquash, see other blog posts). But the last few years of watching what had been a potentially interesting mobile platform, the iPhone, turning into a closed cult that now involves cops, I must say I am more than turned off.

As my readers know, for my mobile devices I prefer Nokia (such lovely hardware & great camera phones) and Android (such lovely software) and I am eagerly awaiting the Meego linux based mobile platform that Nokia & Intel are currently working on. I am also excited right now for Nokia's open Maemo and future Meego, as there is plenty of room for a web designer / photographer / developer hybrid, like me, to develop mobile applications in python.

I want great hardware and an open software architecture as well as a whole open ecosystem that welcomes a variety of creative folk to get involved. The future as Mr. Stross envisions where Apple will go in his article makes me sincerely hope that Nokia will make several more iterations of the lovely Booklet with Meego as the linux based OS rather than the current Windows 7, so that I won't have to be stuck in a distopian Job-sian closed cloud-based future for my work and main machine.

As for mobile devices in 2015, I sincerely hope that there will be a diversity of open architectures & ecosystems that inspire creativity, connection and ease of use rather than another great computer world battle that is Apple v. Google or some other such nonsense.

As for other things I hope for in a mobile ecosystem in 2015:

1) I hope that all devices will come with their own solar battery charging array where the solar cells are on the case of the device so that you can flip it over and it will charge while it is not being used.

2) I hope that I will have a small handheld mobile device that will fit in my pocket or hand and it will have a fold out screen that will when full out will be the size of a sheet of office paper be it 8.5x11" or A4.

3) I hope that the OS and software that will run the mobile devices of 2015 will not be a closed system, not just in concept & app store but also not in execution. I hope that Palm's WebOS idea set will be propagated across the mobile landscape so that folks with training in web design & development will be able to code mobile apps and not just C++/Java/Cocoa/Symbian folk.

I hope this because the mobile and telecom worlds have been quite closed due to carrier strangleholds and the high barrier to entry for mobile applications, whereas the web world has had a large flowering of creativity and innovation because the barriers to entry were quite small. If the barriers to creating apps and sites for mobile are low, then in 2015 a 19 year old could create the mobile version of a future Facebook to scratch an itch in his or her community.

4) I hope that carriers will not continue to have such a vise grip on the North American market, but as I suggested in my thesis, that I can buy my mobile device from any number of stores and buy the 'gas' / connectivity from any number of other separate operators/carriers.

5) And then I have a ton of hopes for cameras with complete connectivity in 2015, but I won't go there now... ;o)

I have gotten some requests from a few web designers and developers on what are the best approaches for mobile forms.

My short & sweet answer is to keep it simple and make it flexible. Make sure your forms work with according to web standards best practices: clean code, strip out the extraneous that does not work towards the form's task or goal, and use progressive enhancement when coding the javascript if you use it at all. Resize the screen, are inputs too long or hidden? Test your form: if you turn off your javascript & CSS will the form inputs work? If so, then your forms will work on almost any device out there.

But you argue, "Jen, I am designing for smart phones with good webkit/gecko browsers, so I don't need to worry."

Yes, you do, as you can't guarantee on the mobile web what phone, be it smart or feature phone, what browser, and what screen size will come to visit your mobile or web site and may want to fill out a contact form or purchase something.

Here are some resources to get you started:

Luke W, the king of forms, on mobile forms:
Web Form Innovations on Mobile Devices
Better Mobile Form Design
Forms On Mobile Devices: Modern Solutions

Linda Bustos at Get Elastic on Mobile Commerce Usability: Forms and Checkout

Chris Mills in ThinkVitamin on Coding for the mobile web

WestCiv's Complete CSS Guide, The Mobile Profile

PPK's Mobile with links to his CSS & Javascript mobile tests

If you like the Details & Standards and a different point of view from Luke W, don't miss:
Luca Passini's Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web, under point 3.2 Usability Luca argues that one should Beware of HTML style forms and has a different approach to Managing User Input.

Finally, the W3C recommendation on Mobile User Input

Thurs 04.29.10 - From last night's Jon Stewart show, as usual Mr. Stewart gets to the essence again, this time his love for Apple & when did Apple become The Man. The best part is when Stewart calls Gizmodo's iPhone review "whole video tech prostate exam".

I will use term, "whole video tech prostate exam", about any and all future mobile video reviews and possibly about unboxing videos.

Sun 04.18.10 - Just want to remind folks about the UX Web Summit that will be this upcoming Wed April 21, 2010, at a connected computer near you.

I will be departing for San Francisco on Tuesday morning so that Cindy Li and I will be able to conduct our session together at one computer rather than have a split screen.

If you are in San Francisco on Wed 04.21.10 and would like to get together for dinner and drinks, let me know, as it would be good to see folks, even if briefly.

Next Wed., April 21, 2010 is the UX Web Summit, of which anyone anywhere in the world with an internet connection can attend.

Our online Summits bring the experts to your desktop! Forget about the hassle of travel or leaving family so you can focus on diving deeper into Web design and development topics.

A great user experience (UX) can mean the difference between merely having a web presence and truly engaging your visitors so they'll gladly come back over and over again. Practical techniques to create the best UX are hard to come by, though.

Join some of the Web's most experienced UX professionals as they share experiences culled from working on sites big and small. Learn from the pros how to tackle user experience difficulties head-on with proven methods in use by some of the most popular sites on the Web.

Cindy Li, the fabulous designer and illustrator, and I will be speaking on Mobile User Experience Design, both from the perspective of native mobile apps and the mobile web. Cindy will be presenting on how to best approach the UX of iPhone app design and I will be tackling the UX of the mobile web. I am very excited to co-present with Cindy on this topic as both of us are passionate about User centered design and the mobile space.

More info on our session:

Mobile UX by Jenifer Hanen & Cindy Li Online

Mobile platform has become more and more important part of the web experience, but how do you design for it? Presented by Jennifer Hanen and Cindy Li, this session will cover resources for mobile design, what you need to get started, principles for mobile design, and prototyping your next mobile application.

Topics covered:

* Resources for templates in Fireworks and Photoshop
* Principles to consider when you are designing for mobile
* Keeping the essence of your traditional desktop web site
* Is it a mobile app or website?
* Designing for a mobile location-based mobile app
* Creating a test without coding
* What to send off to Apple to get your iPhone/iPad app approved

The UX Summit will also have sessions by Dan Rubin, Daniel Burka, Juliette Melton, Nick Finck, Donna Spencer, and Rob Goodlatte.

For a registration Discount, go to http://uxwebsummit.eventbrite.com/?discount=UXHANEN10 or use the discount code UXHANEN10 for 10% off!

Sun 04.11.10 - Yes, you have already seen these photos, but I added the ability to use Better File Uploader from the mobile browser so that I can create Lightbox image galleries directly from the Nokia N97's browser to this Movable Type blog install.

Extra excellent!

Photo of Scruffy taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Sun 04.11.10 - Ok, I just got over the toughest part, I was able to upload the photo using Movable Type's 'Upload File' with all thedialog box CSS hacks working.

I am able to save and now will hit publish. When you see this it means I was successful in hacking my Movable Type install to allow me to post and upload photos directly from the Nokia N97's native browser with no plugins to MT or any 3rd party app or site. Wheeeeee...

Update from the N97 a few minutes later: YAY!

Photo taken by Ms. Jen last evening with a Nikon D70s.

Sun 04.11.10 - I am currently hacking my Movable Type installation to allow for direct image upload from a non-iPhone mobile with a webkit browser (Nokia & Android). I am uploading this image from my laptop by pushing a new button on the dashboard that will by pass some of the tricky web/desktop browser javascript that chokes any mobile that is not a Nokia N900.

Next trick is to see if the Nokia N97 can handle this. Beyond altering the header.tmpl, I am also altering the CMS's main css to get rid of all the fixed widths and absolute positioning in the dialog box css.

If this hack is successful, I will post all the code both here to this blog and to the MT Forums for other folks who would like to also be able to use Opera Mini or a mobile webkit browser to upload images from their mobile/cellphones to their MT blog.

I suppose that if I owned an iPhone and used WordPress for my blogging software my life would be much easier as the wide boulevards of Apple & Automatic have many cross connections and tons of developers ready to create an app or plugin for the slightest sneeze.

But as a confirmed dissenter, descending from a long line of Dissenters, who purposely chooses the road less traveled, I have been having a DANGED hard time mobile blogging to this Movable Type blog with one of my Nokia cameraphones ever since Nokia discontinued Lifeblog in all the new mobile phones since 2008.

But I am a true optimist and remain ever hopeful.

And I keep trying new mobile apps, new websites, and new MT4 plugins that promised even the slightest chance of directly blogging from the Nokia camera phone to this Movable Type blog with no, and I mean no, stops or image storage at Flickr or PixelPipe or Shozu or any other 3rd party server or service.

This weekend I decided to revisit the Movable Type iPhone plugin, iMT, that allows one to access a stripped down version of the Movable Type administration area so that one can blog from the iPhone or Android platforms. I had hoped that the iMT 1.1 plugin would accommodate more mobiles than the iPhone or Android platforms.

This morning around 11am, after a day plus of drying out with the battery out and a morning of desiccating Santa Anna winds, I put the battery back into Chick-a-Poo and turned her on.

She works. The keyboard has no sticky keys - thanks to Q-tip & rubbing alcohol, and the touchpad is working just fine.

Yay! No need for expensive repairs or to buy a new computer! Yay!

Moral of the Story: When your computer gets wet, immediately unplug it from the power source and pull out the battery, then let it dry for 1-3 days depending on the humidity or lack there of in your area, use rubbing alcohol to help speed the evaporation process.

Tom Hall, asked at the beginning of March,

How many Twitter follows is too many?

Not followers, but follows. The people who you are meant to be interested in.

I find myself more and more these days getting lost in Twitter trails of people I follow (a measly 361 at the time of writing), wishing I could stop, but pressing on in case I miss something. I got the junk food addiction.

So what's the proper Twetiquette (sorry!) for ensuring you can have a life away from Twitter? ....

Fri 03.19.10 - Lloyd Davis of the London Tuttle Club joined the Los Angeles / Long Beach Tuttle today as a part of his #Tuttle2Texas trip.

In this video taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N86 I interviewed Geoff Hickman, Jeb Brilliant, Lloyd Davis, Al Pavangkanan, Luke Dorny, Francine Kizner, and AJ Pape.

Geoff also made a video where he asked Lloyd about the start of Tuttle and posted it here.

Tuttle2Texas Posterous: tuttle2texas.posterous.com

Thanks to WOMWorld/Nokia for the loan of the Nokia N86 8MP camera phone so that I could capture great video & stills.

Today is the 2nd Annual Ada Lovelace Day, in where I am to blog about a woman in technology that I admire.

After reading Vikki (aka Victoria) Chowney's Ada Lovelace Day post this morning, I decided that I would like to write about two kick ass twenty-something women that I know personally who are both very influential in persuading others to engage in technology: my cousin Caitlin Kilroy and Ms. Victoria Chowney.

On Sunday morning, I had a lovely breakfast with my cousin Caitlin and her mother Robin. During the course of the breakfast, I found myself explaining to my (now ex-) aunt that Caitlin was very influential in getting more than a few of her friends and relatives to join and engage in Facebook. Robin was at first baffled, but when I asked her, knowing what the answer was, how she joined Facebook and now has it logged in and turned on all day every day, she said that it was to keep track of Caitlin on her big adventures.

Last year, Caitlin a tall willowy then 24 year old blonde, announced that she was going to take a year to travel from California to South America via the Transamerican Highway. The family erupted in calls of No Way! I cried bullshit to most of them. If Caitlin were a 24 year old boy cousin, no one would say a damned thing but would instead brag how cool he was to travel through some interesting terrain, but because Caitlin is female there was a big hew and cry.

Luckily, Caitlin did not pay attention to them and just went. Good on her. The family was at first shocked, then my sister and I noticed that Caitlin was posting updates and photos from her adventures to her Facebook account. Then I noticed over time that family members and various friends of Caitlin joined Facebook and started to get over their own fear of technology and Caitlin's choice of travel route to cheer her on via her Facebook Wall and photo comments.

When my grandma or mom would ask if anyone knew where Caitlin was now, my sister Allison & I could give a report due to Caitlin's intrepid use of Facebook no matter the location. As I explained to Caitlin's mom at breakfast, Caitlin is a technology influencer, as folks who previously did not use Facebook to interact are now using it daily because of Caitlin's big adventures and using Facebook to report on same said and connect back home.

Caitlin is currently in LA to get her certification to teach yoga before returning to Peru to teach yoga there. She just assumes that no one will worry as she is just a click away on Facebook.

My other favorite mid-twenty-something kick ass technology lady is London's Victoria Chowney. Vikki in her own Ada Lovelace post details out her own involvement in the technology world via an early career in tech pr, but a cursory read under estimates her depth and breadth of knowledge of the digital and technology spheres as well as her passion for the intersecting worlds of technology, community, and communication.

In late September 2009, Vikki invited me to the launch party of Reputation Online, web community to further deepen the interstices and encourage connections between new & social media & technology with older media and more traditional public relations. Vikki is the editor of Reputation Online and has put a great deal of effort into making the site into a great resource for best practices in social media and new media public relations, as well as expanding the knowledge community in the fields of communications and technology. Vikki's passion and drive to further push the communications field into the 21st century is truly awe inspiring.

So, to my two favorite young women in technology the future is yours, ladies, thankfully. Go forth and kick ass.

*****
My post from last year's Ada Lovelace Day :: Cousin Lynn

This is a short post to let you all know how much I love GoGo Inflight Wifi. It should be on every flight, esp. international ones.

Yes, I am blogging, tweeting, and reading on the web while sitting in seat 24A. Yay!

Thank you, GoGo Inflight!

Dear Nokia,

As a 12 year vet of SXSW, here are my tips and tricks for a great SXSW experience, particularly my food recommendations.

Don't miss the Kickball game at Palm Park on Sat. March 13, 2010 at 10:30. More info at http://www.dashes.com/kick

While I already have my SXSW Interactive Badge & plane flight, I would love to win a white Nokia N86 to take lots of great photos & video at SXSW (see min 3:30 to end of video).

Less than a week away folks! It will be fun! ;o)

Ms. Jen

My one big/small complaint about Google App Engine has been the documentation, as for a long time it was very sparse and even more very abstract. The nice folk at Google App Engine have worked to beef up the documentation and I greatly appreciate it, but most of the code examples are either still too abstract or too simple.

Now that I am many python files into a complex application, I have been trying to refactor some of the code to reflect a one-to-many relationship database relationship and my four hour frustration today was that the example code given for database/datastore model relationships in the Google App Engine Python docs works in the interactive python console but when one translates it to one's models the code does not work.

It has been my experience all the way along that the code examples in the docs are either very basic and don't reflect dynamic datastore usage or that they are very abstract. I have found that it is good to read the docs for the theory of how it should work and then go look at an example of actual working production code from the samples to see how it really works and then spend multiple hours to make the theory work to your code based on how the implementation of the theory worked for someone else.

My experience in PHP is that the code works as advertised. My biggest frustration(s) with PHP is the (1) danged punctuation ({;}); plus a few more ;;;;, which leads to debugging purgatory, and (2) that in reading the various Php.net docs and the blogs out there one has no real idea what really are best practices in PHP right now as there is so much cruft code, old code, and competing code examples on the net.

Python is so beautiful and clean without the punctuation nightmares of PHP, but it is so difficult to transliterate abstracted Python code examples for Google App Engine's webapp & datastore written by ethereal Python engineer ninjas and then try to figure out how to make it work for those of us who have not ascended to the level of deity but still have our feet on the ground while we scratch our heads or pull out hair in frustration in our attempts to 'correctly' solve problems rather than hack away.

((O.o))

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I hereby declare that I had a failure, more like a forget-ture, in February to label any vaguely mobile | web dev | design posts as Project52 and develop them into articles.

So Sorry. It has a been a busy month for work & various family bits, so I am begging your forgiveness.

I shall start back up again before the end of this week, which would/should/shall be Week 8 by Thursday.

Hold me to it.

Photo of a DimeStorePretty.com hair pin purchased on Etsy taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N900 on 12.01.09.

If you know me, you know that I really don't like jewelry at all, but I do like a good sparkly hair pin. Forget a diamond ring, or the necklace, or the diamond tennis bracelet, but give me a few lovely vintage rhinestone hair pins and I am very happy.

All that said, recently, per my usual, I have composed whole paragraphs of wonderful, amazing, world alerting blog posts in my head though I am nowhere near a computer. Once I get to a computer I have completely forgotten what I wanted to write about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... I could talk into my mobile and record my thoughts as I compose them. I could text myself the ideas as I have them. I could email them to this blog. YES, I KNOW.

But it doesn't happen.

If the business dudes in their suits and BMWs get to wander about like crazy people, gesticulating wildly with their hands, while talking loudly into their bluetooth headsets, can someone please invent a super cute 1940s rhinestone wifi to my blog hair pin so that I can walk around or drive around town talking to myself as it gets transmitted to my blog?

Please?

After months of going going going, it has all caught up with me this week and I am exhausted in a bad way. I am off to bed soon. Yes, shocker, before midnight.

But I have a few posts I would like to write and by writing them now it will remind me to do so in the next few days:

1) Voice Mail Transcriptions: Spinvox vs. Ribbit vs. Google Voice

My quote for the week in an email: "I have had Google Voice for months now. The transcriptions suck pustulated monkey butt. "

2) My Final Final Wrap up to the Nokia Booklet 3G. Somehow I was prescient in all my moaning about the evils of Windows 7 Starter and how I wished wished hoped against hope that Nokia would partner with a linux distro to put a proper OS on the Booklet, and on Monday Morning, Feb 15, 2010, OPK & Intel answered my prayers to the mobile deities: MeeGo.

3) A few assumes that there will be at least three things in my list but I have forgotten the third due to tiredness, so instead I will delight you with this link from the New York Times on how the seafaring history of humans has been pushed back another 60,000+ years if not more:

On Crete, New Evidence of Very Ancient Mariners

Go read it.

Plus a small lament:
Oh, Google App Engine, why oh why did you wait until only the last few weeks to get semi-decent docs? Oh the agony you could have spared by putting those up months ago.

Contrary to all of the uproar this past week, I like Google Buzz, but with a reservation or two.

I like that Buzz is a version of Jaiku, which I love love love, that is attached to my Gmail & Latitude on my mobile phone. I like that most of the people I liked best on Jaiku are already on Google Buzz and are already my friends due to being in my address book. I really like that I am not limited to 140 characters, as I am on Twitter, and that to interact with Google Buzz I just need to log into Gmail.

Google did ask if I wanted to have Buzz attached to my Gmail account and I said yes. Google also asked if I wanted my Google profile public, which I edited and then made public and searchable.

My only but about Buzz is that it would have been much better if Google Buzz had asked if I wanted to make all my address contacts and Google Reader follows to be my friends in Buzz. I would like to have opted-in rather than logged in with over 100 people I was following automatically! 100! Woah!

I can't really go unfollow them now. And by automatically having me follow the folks in my address book who are on Buzz, it took away the fun game of joining a social network where one has to search for one's friends or other interesting people. Google took away the exploration phase.

Google, please allow for opt-in, not opt-out. And don't forget to let us explore to find our own friends rather than finding them for us.

First off, I love the name. easypeasy

Second off, I love the first paragraph of copy on the Easy Peasy website:

Why was your awesome netbook shipped with that horrible operating system? Your netbook is not a typical laptop, so why should you use a typical operating system? easypeasy is harder, better, faster and stronger than what came with your netbook. And did I mention it is 100% free?

I shall install Easy Peasy on the Nokia Booklet 3G today and see if there are any differences from Jolicloud.

Screenshot photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Wed 02.10.10 - In the last two weeks of trialing the Nokia Booklet 3G that WOM World/Nokia sent to me, I have had a range of great to ok to just bad experiences with the Booklet, but all of them have been predicated on the Operating System (OS) and not necessarily the Booklet itself. I am of the opinion that the Booklet is a great little mini-laptop that is beautifully designed but hampered with a crappy OS in Windows 7 Starter. It would be great if Nokia were to install an OS that had the same level of polish, attention, and design that the Booklet itself has.

Here are my thoughts after two weeks of testing, installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling alternative Linux based Operating Systems in the form of a Pro & Con comparison of the hardware, and the various potential OSs of Windows 7 Starter, Ubuntu, and Jolicloud:

Pros for the Nokia Booklet Hardware:
Beautiful hardware design
3G with a sim chip port in a netbook is excellent and frees one up to be able to work on a computer anywhere
Lovely screen
I like the chicklet style keyboard, even if a bit narrow
Truly long long long battery time: 10-12 hours. I have yet to run it all the way down.

Cons for the Nokia Booklet Hardware:
I don't like the touchpad, rough surface, works poorly in Win7

Overall: The Nokia Booklet 3G is a lovely, little mini-laptop. The only thing cuter is Jackie's pink Eee PC. The Booklet would be cuter than the Eee PC if it came in hot pink or deep purple.

****

Pros for Windows 7 Starter:
Native 1280x768 screen resolution

Cons for Windows 7 Starter:
Wow! Win7 Starter sucks.
AT&T Sim chip does not *just* work for the 3G side, Al and I had to add our own settings & it still didn't work. It finally did about 3 days later.
Multitouch on the touchpad does not work or works very badly and intermittently.
Win 7 on the Booklet is slow. Sometimes molasses in a blizzard slow. Unexceptably slow.
Can be quirky on start up and starts in Airplane Mode with wifi/3G turned off. Odd but true.
Windows 7 Starter does not let the user do a lot of normal tasks like change the background, so I had to download a specious 3rd party app to rid the desktop of the Win7 logo.

Overall: Windows 7 does NOT live up to the hype. While it may appear to be an improvement over XP or Vista, any OS is an improvement over those two, so it is not saying much. Windows 7 Starter is a bad little OS. Nokia's biggest mistake is not the 1 GB of RAM or Intel Atom chip speed on the Booklet, but the inclusion of Windows 7 Starter as the OS as the Windows Bloat slows down the hardware. If Nokia wants to be in bed and having relations with Windows (each to their own), then for the price of the Booklet, they should have Windows 7 Ultimate as the shipped OS, as it is more polished and for the $600 price unlocked the Booklet does deserve a polished OS.
Did I mention how damned slow Windows 7 Starter is to do any task? Ugh.

****

Pros for Ubuntu via Wubi:
Super fast install of Ubuntu via Wubi which uses bit torrent.
Wow! Ubuntu is much nicer than Win7 Starter! Can I say that again?!
AT&T sim chip 3 G data *just* works in Ubuntu after you answer 3 questions, no fiddling with properties & preferences.
Multitouch does work on the touchpad and it is *fast* (it worked on the first two times I installed Ubuntu through Wubi, but not the last two times)
Ubuntu is fast on the Booklet, none of the hesitating or slow loading of Win7.
Ubuntu comes shipped with over 25 applications that provide a wide range of office, graphics, web, and developer tools and programs, including Nokia's QT.

Cons For Ubuntu:
800x600 screen resolution. As of Jan 29, 2010, don't try the kernel mod fix to make the res 1280x768 as recommended on the Ubuntu wiki, it makes for a very unstable install, wait for the Ubuntu dev folks to make a stable fix.
Sometimes the multitouch works great, sometimes it runs too fast.

Overall: Ubuntu is my favorite OS for the Nokia Booklet 3G hands down and miles ahead of Windows 7. While at the time of writing this, I could not get the native screen resolution to work with the Ubuntu fix, the Jolicloud folks did, so the Ubuntu folk should not be far behind with a workable fix.
The best part of Ubuntu on the Nokia Booklet is that the OS has a light footprint which makes for a fast Booklet and even though light & fast, Ubuntu is powerful and comes with or one is able to download easily any and all developer tools to really work on the Booklet with Ubuntu. I can code and deploy Django, Google App Engine, and Nokia's QT with Ubuntu, which I would not be able to do fast or easily with Windows 7 Starter or Jolicloud on the Booklet.
I really do think that Nokia should do a co-promote with Ubuntu's Canonical and ship a version or a dual boot of Ubuntu customized / polished up for the Booklet, as it is provides much more programs and functionality than Windows. For all the naysayers that don't think Ubuntu is polished enough, if Nokia were to work with Canonical, much of the polish problems could be solved within a few weeks with a team of devs & designers on the project. The main points are to make sure the native screen resolution and multitouch always work, as well as the syncing with one's mobiles. If one really wants Windows, then provide a dual boot. Many folks would be happier with Ubuntu after 30 minutes of using it, not just a geek like me.

****

Pros for Jolicloud:
Native Screen Resolution of 1280x768 out of the box (or install as the case may be)
Different User Interface desktop layout
Apple/Mac style keyboard shortcuts work to close windows (ctrl+w) & exit programs (ctrl+q). Ubuntu & Windows do not do this.
Touchpad is fast for moving the cursor.
I like the black background & the colors & icons are easy on the eyes.

Cons for Jolicloud:
First time I tried to install last week, it kept quitting. It worked tonight, but it was very slow.
Slow start up load
Froze completely the 1st time I asked it to use the AT&T sim chip for data connection, had to force re-start.
2nd time I tried to use the AT&T data, it froze again. Not working.
Different User Interface desktop layout
Multitouch does not work, two fingers won't scroll
While Jolicloud is built on Ubuntu, it does not have as many programs & applications available without downloading or using the package manager
Jolicloud takes over any install of Ubuntu on the Booklet and I had to uninstall both to reinstall Ubuntu to get it to load again.

Overall: Jolicloud has a great deal of potential, esp. as a netbook OS for non-power/non-geek users. The User Interface has quite a bit of polish, the native screen resolution of the Nokia Booklet works on startup on Jolicloud, and I love that some Mac/Apple gestures & keyboard shortcuts just work. The downsides to Jolicloud of non-working 3G, missing programs & tools that Ubuntu ships with, slow load time, and the lack of multitouch on the touchpad make Jolicloud unworkable for me as a geek user who would like to use the Booklet as a mini-laptop that is a mini-dev box. But I will not discount Jolicloud as their developers are ambitious & very responsive and many of these issues may be solved within the month or two.

***

Conclusion:
I may expire waiting for Apple to deliver a cute, tiny, light, fully powered 10 inch MacBook Pro. Nokia has done the next best thing by making a cute, tiny, light, well designed 10 inch Nokia Booklet 3G. But... it is under powered with a bad operating system in Windows 7 Starter that slows the machine down and makes for a bad user experience. Sorry, but the Windows 7 experience does not cut it, even in the upgraded $80+ Ultimate version.

As with many Nokia products the hardware is beautiful, but the OS is either lacking or the wrong fit for the beautiful hardware. In the case of the Booklet, Windows is a wrong fit, but there are options out there and Nokia should give the customer a choice of a great user experience with the Booklet.

Nokia needs to step up their game and either develop a kick ass version of the Maemo OS for the Booklet, which would be delicious, or work with Ubuntu to make a Nokia branded version of Ubuntu that would make the Booklet experience a delight to use and worth the $600 unlocked asking price.

At this point, I would love to buy a Nokia Booklet 3G if it had a great OS, but not if it comes shipped with a bad OS at $600 when I could get a pink Eee PC at $275 and install Ubuntu on it for free.

Tues 02.09.10 - Today, Jackie Ojeda, singer of Bella Novella and talent buyer for Alex's Bar , and I talked about her super cute new little pink Eee PC netbook that she bought for taking notes at nursing school and to communicate more effectively while on tour with Bella Novella

The last week, Jackie got to see and test out the Nokia Booklet 3G netbook that I had with me, of which she liked, but when she went to buy a netbook she was turned off by the AT&T 2 year contract for the $199 price on the netbook or the $600 unlocked price. She was able to get the Eee PC for $275 without any contract, even though it does not have 3G nor GPS as the Booklet does.

We both agreed that the best part is that the Eee is pink.

Project 52 : Week 5

If you haven't read Paul Graham's essay "Hackers and Painters" yet, and you are a maker / creator / creative, go read it.

I read it about 4 or 5 years ago for the first time and reread it this morning. Today it resounded as I have been frustrated at myself for what I perceive to be my failure at software engineering, as I when I code, I think of how I would apply paint. When I get stuck with trying to code in Python or PHP, I draw in my sketch book until I can get unstuck. Many times if I can't solve a problem, I do something else or go to bed and my brain will serve me the answer or solution while in the other activity or when I wake up.

Much like Mr. Graham describes in the essay, I build web apps and web sites much like I would build a painting or a whole dinner, I think about the whole idea, I get the ingredients or supplies ready, and then I start to make | code | create | sketch | paint. Scrub out what does not work and repaint | recode. I don't plan it the app out extensively before hand, I code in the browser. I am not the type who writes out pseudo code beforehand, or does wire frames, or designs in photoshop.

For a couple of years now, I have jokingly called myself a 'Professional Art Weirdo' whenever someone asks what I do for the living. This title always confuses other web professionals who know that I am a web / mobile developer. In 2007, I found myself at a programmer's conference full of Java folk, while in a small group setting everyone said their names and very detailed descriptions of their Java skill sets, when it was my turn, I cheekily said, "Hi, I am Jen and I am a painter." Then I passed on to the next person.

All jokes aside, I was delighted and relieved to read this essay this morning, as Mr. Graham quite nicely makes a defense for the intersection of programming and art as creative | maker disciplines rather than programming as engineering or science. I would love to see more artists learning to program and more programmers learning to paint.

Go read it.

Wed 02.03.10 - William Sisti, aka Flyinace2000, tweeted me today asking if I had seen his twitters about installing Mac OS X on the Nokia Booklet 3G, here is the transcript of our Twitter conversation:

William: @msjen Have you been following my tweets lately? I got OSX on the Nokia Booklet 3G. about 9 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 I have been a twitter near blackout for the last 3 days due to my TweetDeck being down. Are you going to blog how you did it? about 9 hours ago

William: @msjen I did OSX only now. Working on finishing walk through that i will post in soon. Still ironing out details. www.unboundmobile.com about 9 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 A blog post with specifics would be lovely. Did you dual boot or OS X only? about 9 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 Is it your own bought Booklet or a review trial one? Mine is a trial, so if I can't dual boot w/o harm, I will let you try. ;) about 8 hours ago

William: @msjen It is on loan but i had permission to do whatever i wanted to get this to work. about 8 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 Did you install any of the mac software like iPhoto, iMovie, or the like? iMovie would die an evil death on 1gb of RAM, though about 7 hours ago

William: @msjen I didn't bother too. those applications require GPU support that the gma500 can't provide. about 7 hours ago

The point to having a mini-laptop is to be able to work and play on it when out and about. At this point, Windows 7 Starter that comes shipped on the Booklet is a non-starter, but Ubuntu via Wubi really is a great alternative if one is willing to live with a 800x600 screen resolution until a stable driver for the Intel Poulsbo chip is worked out, as Ubuntu sits lightly on the Booklet and is a power house of a OS plus it comes with creativity and productivity software.

Wed 01.27.10 - #37 the Nokia Booklet and I are not only back on speaking terms, but with great affection. Thanks to Andrew Currie and Steve Rowlands who recommended Wubi as a fast and very painless way to get Ubuntu Linux running on a netbook without harming the original Windows install, as of this morning, I now have a working dual boot of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Nokia Booklet.

And when it is time to ship #37 back to WOMWorld/Nokia, all I have to do is log into the Windows side of the install, go to the control panel and uninstall Wubi in the normal Windows fashion and the whole Ubuntu side will be gone. The machine will then return as it came.

The best part for me, is rather than spending the next 11 days of my trial period struggling with Windows and ultimately disliking the Booklet, I get to spend it enjoying the Booklet, use it as a mini-laptop, and being able to evaluate it as the lovely piece of hardware that it is.

Once Andrew got Ubuntu working on his trial Booklet, #38, via Wubi, he announced mid-day that he had uninstalled Wubi and was on to try Jolicloud. It appears that Andrew is going to test every possible way to set the Booklet free of the confines of Windows. Good on him.

Now that #37, my trial Booklet, is free, I am going to go deeper and see what the capacity of the Booklet is now that it has been set free. Many of the reviews of the Nokia Booklet 3G is the surprise or disappointment on the part of the user on how under powered the Booklet supposedly is in terms of RAM (1 GB) or in terms of the Intel Atom processor. Today as the Booklet wizzed along happily a good speeds under Ubuntu, it hit me that the Booklet may be 'underpowered' for an inefficient hog like Windows, but the Booklet was a speedy little fellow(ess) under Ubuntu.

For a mini-laptop, does it need to have bigger laptop sized RAM & processor or does it really need a better, freer, more open Operating System that is more efficient with the hardware it has?

Point in case, the Booklet allegedly has a multitouch touchpad, but for the life of me I could not get the two finger scrolling to work under the Windows OS, but in the Ubuntu side the touchpad is by far more responsive and is really fast at multitouch. Same hardware, different OSes.

Photo taken of the Booklet screen by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Tues 01.26.10 - Today was also a busy work day, thus my only accomplishments in making progress with the Nokia Booklet was to download and install the Oceanis Change Background program that Vaibhav of The Symbian Blog recommended.

Apparently the version of the Attack of the Redmond Drones that Nokia installed on the Booklet, Windows 7 Starter, is a non-starter in that it does very little and really is only there to irritate the Booklet's owner into returning it or paying MicroSquash $80+ to upgrade to Windows 7 Home or Ultimate. Since, I have no intention of giving any $$ to the dreaded Mordor, I mean, Redmond, I instead put a call of help out to Twitter and my mobile Tweeps delivered.

When I installed Oceanis Change Background, it put a very amusing cartoon in places of the Windows logo, of which I have taken a photo of and placed above, the caption that satirically sums up MicroSquash:

"It's a revolutionary approach really... Instead of developing new software adjusted to the user's needs, we've started developing new users, adjusted to the software's needs."

I also let the Booklet phone home to Finland and update itself and add Nokia Ovi Suite and the Nokia Social Hub. Ovi Suite is just the new name for Nokia PC Suite which is the way one is to supposedly manage one's mobile device's relationship with one's PC, but my mobile, currently a Nokia N97, is a Protestant and does not need to a middleman to manage its relationship with its deity, the MacBook Pro in this case. So, I closed Ovi Suite when it wanted the N97 to come to confession and make a connection.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Project52 : Week 4

Mon. 01.25.10 - Late this morning the Nokia 3G Booklet arrived from the folks at WOMWorld/Nokia for a two week trial review period. I am quite excited about this, I do love to tinker about on a new computer, especially one as lovely and beautifully designed as the Nokia 3G Booklet.

It is cute! It is tiny! It is solid! It is light in weight! It is well-made! Did I mention it was beautifully designed and cute?!?

And then....

I turned it on and I was confronted with the... evil blue background with the light waving Windows logo. Gah.

Fifteen minutes into my new love affair with #37, I had to turn her off and put her back into her wrapping and two boxes and then put her box under my bed, because Windows 7 had so elevated my blood pressure that I was ready to call DHL to take #37 back to London and then write a scathing review of how F*cking Evil Windows is and How it is the Worst Possible Decision... blah blah blah... all because I spent 15 mins trying to figure out how to change the damned Windows background into something more eye pleasing. Big, deep breath.

So, I returned to the work project that is on deadline for tomorrow and then surreptitiously searched Google for 'Nokia 3G Booklet Hackintosh', 'Nokia 3G Booklet Ubuntu 9.10 USB live boot', etc. Yes, I spent most of the rest of the afternoon deep in dual work mode and researching my options for a USB live boot of a real OS, an OS that keeps one's blood pressure at normal.

Which computer or mobile operating system one likes is not just a matter of brand preference, or what your friends like, or what you have already spent the time to learn, it is also about a mental metaphor and mind map. And that mental metaphor / mind map may still be uncomfortable even after learning how to use a system. Sometimes, one just has to give up an operating system that does not fit one's mental processes and move on to one that does. After reluctantly using Windows for years, I happily and with abandon switched over to Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X about 4 - 5 years ago and have never looked back.

I gladly pay the Apple Tax to get lovely, well designed hardware and OS. I am also happy to pay the Nokia Tax to get kick ass mobile cameraphones, even if I continue to be bewildered by Nokia's hard-on for all things Windows and how their Symbian mobile OS is mapped to Windows and its metaphor. One of the reasons that I am so excited about the Nokia N900 is that its OS is Maemo which is a lovely mobile version of Linux.

All of this adds up to, right now I just can't open up #37 the lovely Nokia 3G Booklet again, until I have time to create a USB stick with a live boot of Ubuntu or Moblin for the Booklet.

Project52 : Week 2

File Under: I didn't need to see the shit squeezed out of the intestines before they are turned into sausage casings...
OR
Fire Under: How did the drafting of the specs for the new HTML5 and web standards turn into a serious detour in to the spider webs of Mirkwood?

Wow! The Twitter-verse erupted this last week on WTF is going on in HTML5 world:

"is there a good concise blog post anywhere explaining just what happened to HTML5 / WHAT WG last week? Seeing the trees, not the forest." - @mezzoblue

'Thinking of getting this framed: http://icanhaz.com/specdance" - @adactio

"Pleased that http://whatwg.org/html5 is back to being a spec called HTML5 (and more) rather than HTML (including HTML5). Thank you @hixie." - @adactio

" '#HTML5 is a beautiful mess': Sitepoint podcast with moi, @lloydi, @cssquirrel. Transcribed as well, thanks @sentience http://bit.ly/5rJmbS" - @brucel

"#html5 punch-up featuring @marcosc, @hixie, @shelleypowers, @johnfoliot http://bit.ly/4Ojp2v" - @brucel

And there are many more Tweets from Jan 8th to 15th on the subject of HTML5, the WC3, WHATWG, and the spec deliberations.

I am unabashedly a fan of strict XHTML 1.0, as I love the element tag minimalism and the strict code typing. If I code a site in XHTML 1.0, be it transitional or strict, I have few worries on what device will the site work on and I have fewer cross-broswer debugging issues than if I write in HTML 4.01 or the like. I realize that others want more features and the early specs of HTML5 appear to make better semantic sense, but the web standard spec and full browser adoption is supposedly years away.

I don't like to watch the tech sausage being made, I much prefer to let folks duke it out behind some closet doors and then when the browsers adopt the spec, then I will learn it. My passion is in mobile and the web that works for all, not to be the first to use or develop a tecnology. On top of all of that, I am a minimalist. I prefer lean, mean, and elegant over busy, full-featured, and many-optioned.

I first noticed this week's brouhaha when Dave (@mezzoblue) tweeted his call for someone to interpret and explain the forest for the trees (first tweet quote/link above). Tonight was the first time I had the opportunity to go through my feed reader and read some of the blog posts on the HTML5 rupture of the last 9 days.

I started by reading Dori Smith's post, My (current) opinions on HTML5, on Backup Brain which was a good summary of the situation and how it effects the various parts of the web design and development ecosystems. Dori is clear sighted in the matter and I noticed quite a few comments, upon clicking on the comments, I was treated to John Foliot's stident interpretation of Dori's take on HTML5 and Web Standards.

I clicked over to Mr. Foliot's web site to find that he was in full defense / offense mode all at once. ((O.o))

Mr. Foliot referred to Andy Clarke's "Keep calm and carry on (with HTML5)"

Faruk Ateş attempts to find the forest for the close examination of the trees in "The Battlefield of HTML5"

Bruce Lawson, Ian Lloyd, and Kyle Weems weigh in with a SitePoint podcast on "HTML5 is a (Beautiful) Mess"

Mark Pilgrim asserts that nothing has happened other than the HTML5 spec is in the Last Call phase. Mr. Foliot continues his offense/defense bit.

Wow! See what I miss when I am working rather than reading... Wake me up when the spec is ready and the browsers are using it. Then we can slather the HTML5 up in some garlic oil, cook it up on the grill and make some beautiful, accessible web sites and apps.

No Mirkwood spiders, please.

Ashe to ashes, dust to dust. Pixels to electrons, electrons to delete().

As a person who studied art, art history, and graphic design in the first round of my college education, I spent a lot of time reading about and studying artists and designers of the past. We know and study those artists and designers by the physical objects, paintings | journal entries | letters | etc, that were left after their deaths. We know them by their objects.

How will future generations know about our generation when we have spent so much of our time and efforts tossing the physical object to the wind and embracing digital ephemera? For the first 10 plus years of the internet revolution, the giddy joy was in the ephemera, the shifting sands of the bytes blown by the winds of chance and a forgotten domain registration. But the winds have shifted, a few of the early generation of internet pioneers have passed away and now we wonder what will happen to their writings, photos, and their primary sources when the domain expires or the hosting goes past due?

How will future scholars know who were the true pioneers, the giddy bon vi-bloggers from the corporate marketing shills that followed fast on their heels? Do we give the college freshman of 2567 CE/AD an introductory digital studies of Steve Ballmer meets Proctor & Gamble, or do we protect the writings of internet and blog pioneers such as Brad Graham and Lesile Harpold who died too early to write a will or a set up a trust that considered their seminal writings and blogs to be passed on to a university collection?

Now some would say, it is just the internet - here today, gone tomorrow. I would counter that we don't know what others in future eras will want to know and what will be just assumed about our era, and that more the more well preserved primary sources we leave the better for future scholars and pundits to be able to analyze and learn from our time in a way we are too close to see with any clarity.

A discussion started on the "Remembering our friend Brad" Metatalk post between Matthowie, barbelith (Tom Coates), Maximolly (Molly Steenson), myself, holgate, and a few others how to preserve blogs to an archive that can be accessed past the time the domains have expired and the files deleted off the web hosting server.

Tom suggests that:

"We should consider talking to George Oates at the Internet Archive to see if they have any options for this kind of situation. They might be the perfect place to put sites after someone dies like that."

I agree with Tom that the Internet Archive is a great place to start, as I use it to find all of my own 1996-2001 website archives given that I can't find the files on any old disks anymore. But the problem with the Internet archive is that it does not bring any photos or other image files, only the text from the sites that it archives.

After watching in the past few years the work that George Oates did with the Library of Congress while she was still at Flickr, I wondered if we should be considering a long term strategies that would go beyond registering a blog's copyright or even a periodical ISBN with the Library of Congress or other Copyright Libraries (such as Oxford or Trinity) but should we not also be archiving our text, images, and presentation (css) files to the copyright libraries for future study and access?

In the Metatalk thread, I asked:

"Previously if one was a writer or artist or scholar or otherwise historically/culturally significant, one would give one's writings & 'collection' to a university library. What do we do with our websites & blogs past the time we can pay for them?

How can we know now what might be significant for study 100, 200, 500, 1200 years from now? How do we archive bytes?

Some folks are printing out their blogs to custom ordered books, but this is not necessarily the best solution, as what will the children or grandchildren of our friends and families do with those books? Will they end up at flea markets along with 78rpm acetate records? But maybe that is good, the randomness of the find.

By choosing to engage in the frontier online space, we have chosen to some degree to toss the long term to the wind. The suggestion of the Library of Congress, or other institutions that function as a cultural respository, may be a good bet for the long run in terms of keeping an archive of text|image|ephemera, as after 2 recessions, I don't trust the market to keep a reliable archive.

If we can now register our copyright with the Library of Congress or the Copyright Libraries (such as Trinity, Oxford, etc), and we can get an ISBN or periodical number for our blogs, how do we start to archive the actual posts and images to a repository.

Do we lobby our congress|political critters to set aside resources for blogs that are periodicals to be archived OR as Matthowie suggest do we donate to an institution such as the Archive.org foundation and make sure that it can function as a cultural archival NGO?"

Is the Library of Congress or the various other copyright libraries up to the task of the pioneer digital generation donating their archives to the libraries in question or do we donate to the Internet Archive so that they can provide a more robust non-governmental/academic solution to archiving blogs and pioneering digital media?

Ashe to ashes, dust to dust. Pixels to electrons, electrons to save().

Photo taken today by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N900

Tues 12.01.09 - Rabbit rabbit. With the greeting to the new month out of the way, I would like to alert you to several interesting takes on Nokia's strategy and mentions of the N900:

GigaOm's very own Om Malik had a chat with Nokia's Tero Ojanperä last week and Om now has a wee bit more faith in Nokia's direction. Read it at, "For Nokia's Ovi, the World (Minus the US) is Enough."

Analyst Michael Gartenberg questions What's the future of Nokia? on Engadget's Entelligence:

"Second, Nokia's services strategy is as muddled as the fruit in Don Draper's Old Fashioned. Ovi sounded good when it was announced but it's now gone through so many iterations, with different services added, dropped, and changed that it's hard to know what's in and what's out. Comes With Music has been reported as having as few as 107,000 users worldwide, and Nokia's put off bringing it to the US this year, leading me to wonder what kind of future it has as a service. The N-Gage project not only resulted in two failed phone designs but the service itself is on its deathbed."

As a Nokia mobile phone owner, I have felt quite burned over the last four years by Nokia's frequent changing around and dropping software and services. I won't even invest any of my data at Ovi, as I don't want it to go away in 2 years when Nokia has changed its strategy again or the project manager has moved on along with the marketing manager to another project and the new folks in charge don't care and move on to new divisions themselves.

The big reason that I am so excited about Maemo is that Python comes already installed and integrated on the Nokia N900, so I can code my own apps and not worry about will they be supported 12-18 months from now. I don't code in C, C+, Objective C, Java or Symbian, so most of the world of mobile application development is closed to me, but I do code in Python. While one can install python on Symbian and run a PyS60 app on a Symbian phone it is not without hassle and if you want to share the app, then the other person has to install Python on their phone too, thus creating a large barrier to entry.

Roland Tanglao and Croozeus are also both excited about pre-installed Python on the N900. Yesterday, I was on the Maemo.org website looking at the various apps available for download and the ones in development. The best part was finding out that many of the apps that I would want to use or contribute to are coded in Python. One of the great parts of any Open Source and/or Linux community is the ability to contribute to projects and to the code base, and now for me it is even better that I can contribute in Python. Furthermore, I am very excited that Maemo community has an active PyMaemo sub-community.

Yes, the Nokia N900 may seem a bit too geeky to some, but in the long run, I do think Maemo will bring in developers who have been alienated by Symbian's high barriers to entry and the whole certification / app signing troubles, developers who will have more choice in programming languages, more choice in how to contribute & distribute. More choice means more mobile applications available to everyone.

*******
Related N900 Posts:
Nokia N900 : The Artist Phone
Nokia N900 : The Gold Standard Test
The Nokia Flagship Face Off : Nokia N900 vs. Nokia N97 : Part I, Night Video

Some how I have hit the Google Wave invite jackpot* and now have 38 invites to give away. If you want one, please comment on this blog post with your email address and I will send you one.

***Update*** : Sun 11.29.09 - Thanks for the folks who have requested an invite by a comment so far. I have two requests before giving out any more invites:

1) Please put your email in the email box in the comment form rather than in the comment itself, this protects your email as only I can see it.

2) Please put the URL of your online space in the URL box, as if I am going to invite folks I want to be able to see your website or twitterstream and say hi.

****UPDATE**** : Mon 12.07.09 - Thanks for your comments and replies, but the invites are now over and done. If you commented here and did not get an invite, it was because you didn't give me your URL after I asked for it above. I hope you enjoy Google Wave.

* T'would be nice to hit the lottery jackpot instead... but one has to work with what one has got... ;o)

I know it is good to be a DRY, Agile programmer and not repeat yourself, but I have a hard time being "lazy" due to a problem with perfectionism.

I have been working on finishing up additions to a web app in PHP that I coded last year and for each day that I *should* wrap up, I find One More Thing that should be polished A Bit More, just One More Thing. Last week, I fell down a hole of internet research about the latest developments in PHP security. This was bad, because there have been new techniques on how to best beat the bad boy hackers, so this week I found myself making a few changes to reflect best, current secure practices of the most recent cutting edge.

This is the right thing to do, right?

Well, bits of the app then needed to be recoded, and then a few more changes, and then test the database, and then some more recoding, and I had a huge refactoring snowball rolling down a hill attacking me. Gah. But in good conscience, I could not leave the client with security holes.

Where do you stop? Right at the letter and law of the contract? A few extra hours of work if you find some new information on the latest and greatest practices? Or do you just do it and refactor the whole app for professional pride and a good job well done?

Let me know where you draw the line.

I don't know about you, but I have had a little list of blog upkeep items that have been on my to do list for ages, but haven't had the time to research and then execute them. After thinking about a few of them for some time, oh like a couple of years, I decided recently to make a real paper list and make it happen.

Here are the things I wanted to do:
1) Figure out how to get thumbnails of images to appear in the excerpted version of this blog's RSS and Atom feeds.
2) Think about how to keep the evil sploggers (spam bloggers who scrape feeds) at bay AND keep my regular feed readers happy with a good feed. I have had my private full feed for at least two years now & announce it frequently but folks who want a full feed didn't know about it.
3) Even though Perl is not really my friend, I have wanted to figure out how to alter the Atom script for this blog so that when I use Lifeblog or PixelPipe to mobile blog from my camera phone to this blog that the photo will be uploaded into the file directory of my choice and not the default main blog directory.

A few weeks ago, I dedicated a few hours to attempting to bending the Atom and RSS feed templates to my will. Unfortunately, Movable Type 4.x is very dependent on the Asset Manager for knowing where the images are, and due to challenge #3, I was not able to fix #1 with any satisfaction, as all the fixes required the Asset Manager to know where all the images are and by default the Atom script uploads all assets/images to the main blog directory, which causes a messy main directory with my daily mobile blogging. To solve this, I have been manually moving images to a proper image directory and then updating the blog post later, thus the Asset Manager can't keep up with me. Poor thing.

Persistent artist vs. computer program. Who is going to lose? In the long run, the program. Until I solved problem #3, problem #1 was a null point.

I solved #2 by resetting my public facing feeds to be a bit bigger excerpts that would show the images but would excerpt any article over a certain length. I use the .htaccess file to stop any lifting of images. And I still have the private complete feed for anyone who emails me and lets me know that they want the url.

Today, I decided to conquer the moblogging directory issue and attempt to make Perl bend to my will.

Update about an hour later: I was able to get the script working and the next post after this will be a tutorial / reminder to me on how I did it.

The Fix: How to Change the Directory that Movable Type Uploads to When Using the Atom Protocol (Lifeblog, PixelPipe, etc)

Updated a few minutes later: Ok, so the path is right, I am just missing one bit in the Atom file to make sure that the photo is being uploaded into the right directory.

The Fix: How to Change the Directory that Movable Type Uploads to When Using the Atom Protocol (Lifeblog, PixelPipe, etc)

'Sita Sings the Blues' is a very delightful feature indie animation film that combines 1920s jazz vocals with the ancient Indian story of Ram and Sita and the parallel story of the animator Nina Paley and her husband Dave.

Worth watching for the interplay of animation styles and narrative, of which is the interstitial bits of the three humorous arguing narrators. Even more worth watching for the gorgeous visuals.

Sita Sings the Blues

I am not much of a video recording person, I only remember to switch my camera phone or digital camera to the video mode when it occurs to me that the photo I want to take will only make contextual sense if there is sound and the image over time. I usually notice this after the person has started speaking or the action has began, thus my videos tend to be truncated.

Oops.

To top it all off, I really hate the post-production process. In other words, I hate editing video. In grad school, we had to do an intense 2 week course in video and editing, and I hated every moment of it, other than the editing instructor was a hot 40-something Irish gentleman. But not even Gerry could convince me that editing was worth my time, although I did enjoy watching him talk. Luckily for me, in my final project team we had a member in Shonagh Hurley who not only loved editing video and but could spend hours creatively editing.

Unfortunately, Shonagh is in Dublin and I am in SoCal, so when I need to trim or splice together video segments, I am a bit screwed. And why?

I went to the Google I/O conference back in late May and by early June I was on the Google Wave Dev Preview Sandbox thingy. By and large, unless one of my tech friends was gushing about wanting to see Google Wave, I haven't logged in in the last four months unless I was giving a demo.

Sorry folks, I am not and have not been participating in the rather fascinating, from an anthropological point of view, hysteria that has surrounded Google Wave the last few months. And that hysteria reached a crescendo in the last 24 hours.

Google Wave is interesting for its potential, not the beta form it is in now. The potential is a great interconnected collaboration tool, the current reality is IM on speed. And since I am not a fan of IM chat, I don't log in much.

The other key thing is that unless your friends or colleagues are on the system, most of the power of what Wave can do is stripped away. It was great to be on it with thousands of other developers, but most of the conversations were around tech details.

Photo by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Thurs 09.24.09 - Martin Ramsin presenting the Ovi SDK to the folks at the Ovi Developer event in London.

The new Ovi SDK Beta utilizes the new Ovi API and javascript, which makes it a good place for web designers and developers start to on creating mobile apps.

While the Ovi Dev day got off to a bit of a rough start before lunch with a small conceptual conflict between the verbal democracy of the dev crowd vs. the business-styled approach to presenting topics that Nokia folks are so fond of.

After lunch things got back on track when the presenters spoke of more concrete and relevant topics such as the Calling All Innovators UK, an open panel with last year's winners, and Martin presenting on the release of the OVI SDK.

I had a very good conversation after wards with Nokia Forum's Jouni Toijala about how to get more web designers and developers involved in mobile application development.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Tues 9.22.09 - A big Happy 3rd Birthday to Moo.com. Big thanks to Richard Moross and all the lovely folks at Moo for the great photo cards they make and the lovely party.

"Freemont Troll" by Roshan V on Flickr with a CC License.

I am honestly getting wearied by all the wars being waged online in the name of gadgets, devices, and software.

You love the iPhone? Good for you.
You love your Google Android G1/G2? Excellent.
Love your Nokia Nseries or Eseries? Even Better.
Are you a die hard Wordpress fan? Fabulous.
Can't believe that any designer or developer worth their salt doesn't use Expression Engine? Hmmm... me neither, esp. since the EE folk throw a much better party at SXSW than the Automattic crew.
Are you Windows all the way? MacBook forever? Ubuntu for the win?
PHP partisan? Ruby on Rails raconteur? Django devotee?

Good for you. Good for your neighbor. And good for your perceived enemy.

First and foremost all of the above devices, software, dev frameworks, and operating systems are tools. They are tools to communicate, tools to create, tools to prototype, tools to view, tools to do business on and with, tools to publish, tools to build a system with, etc. etc. etc.

Depending on your usage, needs, culture, time frame, profession, and preference will determine which tool, device, software, operating system will be best for you. Maybe you have a try a few options to know which is best for you. Maybe you need time, maybe you need to discuss it with your friends online and in person. Maybe you need time to physically try the various options.

At the point where you have written or gotten excited about your new device/tool/software online is where the troll can come in.

For whatever reason, some folks want to go past a bit of teasing or a bit of good, honest debate with solid backup arguments to build their case; some folks want to troll. They want to mock, to drag a discussion or debate into a space that is no longer about sharing one's excitement or learning from each other and into a space that is about bullying or badgering the other person into the troll's point of view. A troll can and will argue beyond the point of normal communication and good manners to get their point across or lead the general discussion into a very fruitless place.

This is frustrating. Very frustrating. We have all been online long enough to know what is good manners and what is not. We all choose to use the tools we are using for a reason. If you want to convince a friend to try another tool, do it with persuasion, not with trolling.

It becomes even more frustrating when folks who are professionals in a field in and around technology become devotees to one product and are unwilling to explore the other options out there, esp. as the devices or software grows over time.

Recently, I had to unfollow a person that I liked on Twitter due to the fact that this person started many fights with anyone who was not an iPhone owner. This person chose to take any mention of any other mobile device as a time to point out the superiority of the iPhone, even when it was nonsensical and not on topic. The person would then pursue the argument with Direct Messages on Twitter that would attack one and one's choices.

Love your iPhone that much? Good. I am very glad for you.

I choose to use Nokia Nseries devices for their cameras and moblogging abilities. As of the date of writing this blog post, the iPhone's camera is not up to my standards. Sorry, but true. Please don't send me Direct Messages on Twitter harassing me about using an obviously inferior Nokia, it is uncool and unworthy of our friendship or even mutual respect professionally.

Next year or the year after that there will be another device(s) or tool(s) that will excite everyone's fancy. And just maybe it won't excite yours or mine or someone we know, but maybe it will.

In the meantime, let's all remember that these devices or software or systems are just tools, tools to accomplish what we want to do online or create with or communicate with. None of these tools are worth trolling for and thus breaking relationships over.

Instead let's use these tools to create and communicate with in a way that builds relationships, communities, systems, and applications. We can respectfully choose to disagree, we can also attempt to persuade others to our point of view, let's even debate, but let's not troll over tools.

Om Malik in yesterday's post, The Evolution of Blogging, concludes with the argument that those of us who are lifestreaming on our blogs rather than Facebook, because we want to be our own 'digital repository' or as I have called it the last few years "Own Your Own Stuff", will need to have our blogging software evolve to handle more real-time streaming.

"Millions of Facebook users will have no reason to use any other service for the foreseeable future. And even when they decide to leave, they'll realize they can't, for they'll have stored their photos and videos into the service, which has no visible way of exporting such data. It's the ultimate lock-in: control consumers' data and you control everything.

For others -- whom I would loosely define as "power users" -- today's blogging software and services are the best option for becoming a repository of our digital creations, because they are more open, more extensible and at the end of the day, give us more control "

Malik mentions Posterous, Tumblr, and WordPress's P2 theme as blogging platforms that are moving towards evolving blogging, but he does not mention Movable Type's Motion. As someone who is serious about owning her own digital repository, I haven't gotten on board with Posterous or Tumblr as they are both hosted and ultimately are yet another space on the web where my stuff gets atomized. I am planning on exploring the possibilities of Movable Type's Motion soon, when I have some time. ;o)

On another note, Fast Company has a great magazine cover article on Nokia Rocks the World: The Phone King's Plan to Redefine Its Business, of which they start with a great few paragraphs:

"The gathering in the courtyard dining room at the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca has the feel of a meeting between the Mafia's dwindling five families and an emerging Balkan gang looking to join forces. Instead of bookmakers, drug smugglers, and racketeers, the endangered species assembled are music executives from the industry's remaining major labels, including Warner and Universal Music, and an agent from the Beatles' Apple Corps.

Despite the general tension typical of an industry in free fall, there is a reunion vibe and everyone greets one another warmly over cocktails, throwing out a bit of cocksure swagger to project the notion that they can still deliver a hit. Still, nobody in attendance would deny that the days of record companies making a killing in the music industry are over.

The hosts for the evening are Nokia's 43-year-old executive vice president of entertainment and communities, Tero Ojanperä, and Eurythmics founder and Nokia consultant, Dave Stewart. The two make for an odd pairing: Stewart with his quintessential British rock-'n'-roll-ness and Ojanperä with his Finnish-savant electrical-engineer-ness. But tuning in closely to Ojanperä's precise, inflected words, it's hard to elude his magnetism, a cross between Andy Warhol mystic and James Bond villain."

The article both gives a good overview of Nokia's efforts to both woo the music industry and their recent forays into applications and services, as well as giving a few fun tweaks at the "Finnish-savant electrical-engineer-ness" meets "Baltic Mafia". Blessings on the Finns, I <3 the lot of them!

Developers and Designers need each other and need to work together. (duh.)

All of the super exciting internet / computer eco-systems of the last 15 years have had developers and designers involved together as a tight team: HTML/CSS - Web Standards, Ruby on Rails, Django, Mac OS X, the iPhone app world, etc.

By exciting eco-system, I mean that the platform, device, or system has grown beyond the company or small core group of folk who created/originated the system, a growing that goes beyond all the usual vendors for the company/core to take a life of its own in a wide range of design & development professionals and hobbyists who expand the ecosystem to a dynamic space that is much greater than any marketing budget could every afford or create.

This is definitely the case of the Open Source LAMP proponents, the HTML/CSS web standards folk, the Ruby on Rails & Django communities that have had designers working with developers from the very beginning. By dint of Apple's penchant for design, designers have been on board fully with developers to expand the iPhone and Mac OS X applications and universe.

While I love using Android and Symbian mobile devices, it has recently become glaringly obvious to me that both of these communities don't have the same co-working / symbiotic relationships with the design community that the above eco-systems have. Yes, Google and Nokia/Symbian can afford high end designers, but what about the community outside of Google, Nokia, Symbian, and their paid vendors?

The Google I/O conference while multiple thousands strong in developers, programmers, and business dev folk, was very poor in terms of designers and any integration thereof.

Android and Symbian dev folk, we need to get designers on board in teams working together from the very beginning of projects to get the eco-system more than just aesthetically pleasing but also to balance the platforms to think outside of the dev/programming box and to grow the eco-systems dynamically as well as spread the goodness.

Design is more than aesthetics, it is an essential part of of balancing the right & left brains as well as the needs of the creators with the consumers. By creating a space for both designers and developers in teams, at conferences, and getting the dialogue moving between both communities means that we build balance applications, devices, and web systems that are usable and delightful.

To grow our communities, to build great apps we need to think of the disciplines of design and development as feeding into each other - feeding ideas, cross polinating, cooperation, and coordination.

Design + Development = Developers <=> Desingers

Ok, Nokia / Symbian and Google / Android, let's figure out how to get more designers and design thinkers involved in community based projects from the ground up. Let's start with design tracks at your sponsored conferences and meet ups between developers and designers at the conferences, why don't we?

Or even better, why don't we all agree to meet up and have a Android / Symbian conference to cross-pollinate between platforms and invite designers of all stripes (web, mobile, interaction, and user experience) to join us?

Update: Sun 07.26.09 - To clarify, I wrote this post because there has been much talk amongst tech bloggers and early adopters that the reason that folks are buying the Apple iPhone is because of the App Store and not buying Nokias or Android phones due to the poor showings on their app stores. I think this point is debatable, as most of the folks I know who purchase phones find out about the App Stores after purchase, not as a point to purchase.

But I do think it is instructive for those of us who are tech folk/early adopters and|or professional developers|designers to examine the web and mobile communities that have been successful, of which my point was that the communities that are growing organically without millions of dollars of advertising & subsidies from the companies behind the technologies are the communities where both developers and designers are both excited about and actively participating in.

To this end, I think that it would benefit Nokia's Symbian community and Google's Android community to draw in more User Experience | User Interface | and good old school Designers. At this point, both of these communities are programmer|engineer heavy. As Mike M. states in the below comment, designers & design thinkers bring an equal set of different skills that are absolutely necessary to the web & mobile site|app|software development process.

To Answer a Few Folk on Twitter: I don't think that Apple has their mental market share amongst designers due to their TV advertising. I know more top end designers who are working on Ruby on Rails and Django projects than Apple iPhone projects with developers. It is not just about big money, but where is it exciting and challenging to create. A place to create where one can make a difference, prototype quickly, and also make money as well.

PyS60 Developers Blog: http://croozeus.com/blogs/

Mobile Lenin on PyS60 ( Mobile PyS60 author) : http://mobilenin.com/pys60/menu.htm

Nokia Open Source on Python for S60 : http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/pythonfors60/

Fri 06.12.09 - Will PostOffice for MT post this cron job email now that I have the correct cron job command?

Update: Yes, it did, but not with the cron job command that my server support team said would work, but with the one that Movable Type said would work.

Update at 4:48pm: Sorry, it ran a couple of times too many before I deleted the test email out of the inbox.

For two reasons, email photos to this blog is going to be an imperfect way to moblog:
1) If one does not delete or move the email out of the inbox, after the cron job runs, then the PostOffice plugin will post again the next time the cron job runs - at least when using Gmail.
2) One first has to resize the photo in the phone before emailing, otherwise there will be a large photo - both in pixels and kilobytes - that is posted to the blog.

With the G2 Ion / HTC Magic phone, I downloaded PicSay from the Android Market to do the resizing and emailing all in one go, as the PixelPipe Android app did not send the photo resized.

Given that a super-user/moblog addict like me spent many hours over days to set this up, no wonder why regular folks don't want to blog from their phones to a blog that lives on one's own server but prefer instead if they do moblog to a hosted service. gah.

Oh, Lifeblog, Oh Lifeblog, why did Nokia discontinue you? You were such a lovely and perfect moblogging app for Nokia phones...

Thurs 06.11.09 - Will PostOffice for MT post this cron job email now that I have the correct cron job command?

Update later in the evening: No it did not. The support fellow at my server gave me a new command for the cron job and it did not work, so I just triggered the script via the command line and it did post. Now back to the cron job drawing board.

Fri 05.29.09 - I have set up the Post Office plugin for Movable Type to see if I can blog from email, if so then the sting out of life after Nokia's great but now discontinued moblog software - Lifeblog.

Update: Thurs 06.11.09 - Two weeks later, I finally have the Post Office moblog plugin for Movable Type working with tech support from Dan Wolfgang at Uinnovations. Big thanks to Dan for the 4 lines of tweaks to make this work.

Now I just need to get my server to help me on why the cron job is not working, I was able to get these posted by using SSH to trigger the task. Once I can get an hourly cron job working then Post Office will make my moblogging life easier from any camera phone that can email. w00t!

The next two weeks are going to be very busy with me flitting here there and everywhere for (mostly) business purposes.

On Sunday, I will drive up to the Bay Area for some Python Rehab. Actually, I am going to some training but it sounds much more fun to say to people that Python and I aren't speaking right now, due to some tuples, and so I am checking myself into programming rehab. No seriously, I keep getting tuple errors (little ass*s)...

If you live in SF or Oakland or South Bay and want to get together for dinner, I am trying to get folks together either Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday evening in San Francisco proper.

And then sometime, not quite sure when yet, late next week, I will be flying to Germany for a big adventure of which when I have a bit more info, I will blog about. Yes, this another one of the WOM World / Nokia adventures. This one will involve Industrial Design + Manufacturing + Photowalks, which means it will be AWESOME. I love factories, esp. if I can take photos and ask lots of questions.

Rather than flying back to LA after 4 days in Europe, I have requested that I get dropped off in London. I plan to be in London until the 28th of June at the very least and I will be attending Tuttle Club at the ICA on Friday, June 26th. Thus, if you are in London-town from the 25th to the 28th and want to go for a photowalk or to dim sum or to a museum with me, let's meet up.

Fri 06.05.09 - At Tuttle Club LA (really LB) this morning, I demo'd the Google Wave Sandbox to those assembled. Vaughan Risher video'd my demo/spiel. Ernie Hsiung and Kyle Ford were kind enough to be logged into the Wave Sandbox and participate in the three of us producing a Wave to demo to the Tuttle folk. It was fun.

Vaughan wrote the following to accompany the video on Vimeo:

"Jenifer Hanen (@msjen) got to go to the Google IO conference this week! She showed us Google Wave up close and personal. I was literally 2 feet away from a computer that was actually connected to it. Crazy.

People you see in the video - Jenifer Hanen, Jeb Brilliant, Al Pavangkanan, and myself. You'll also hear the indomitable Geoff Hickman's voice in the background."

The best part is the preview has me in classic family photography mode - eyes closed. ;o)

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Here is my transcription of two sessions from Day 2, 05.28.09, of the Google I/O 2009. Per my usual, the following is a combination of live quotes from the speaker, notes off the slides, some paraphrase and a few of my own asides.

So far, Brett Slatkin's Offline Processing on App Engine: A Look Ahead has been my favorite of the day. Lunch conversation with Prashant and Bastian was delightful.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Thur 05.28.09 - Google I/O keynote was Lars Rassmussen, Stephanie Hannon, and Jans Rassmussen giving a demonstration on the new Google Wave that is currently in development and the team is inviting the attendees of Google I/O to participate in developing the product and open source code before public release.

Here is my transcription of two sessions from Day 1, 05.27.09, of the Google I/O 2009. Per my usual, the following is a combination of live quotes from the speaker, notes off the slides, some paraphrase and a few of my own asides.

Chris Nesiadek's presentation on Android's Interaction Design was my favorite of the day.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Wed 05.27.08 - Due to my plane being an hour late, I may miss the first session on how to code for Android. Even if late, I am looking forward to the Google App Engine and Android sessions today and tomorrow.

If the folks at Starcut are going to proudly announce that they mobilize brands and media and charge a newspaper to mobilize the said newspaper's website, then they should educate themselves on the standards of the mobile user experience.

Major rule of the mobile web: Give the User a Choice. Don't assume that they want the full website or that they want a reduced site for mobile. Just because a script has detected that the browser coming to the site is a mobile browser, doesn't mean the reader/user wants to be forced into a locked sandbox with no exit. Don't assume that every user wants to reduce their data usage, some of us have unlimited plans. Give the user a choice.

Here are a few examples of Mobile Sites that do the User Experience right by giving the reader/user a choice to either view the mobile version or to switch over to the "classic", "full", "regular" version of the website:

Why does this matter? Well, not every Nokia or Sony Ericsson or Blackberry or insert name of mobile device is a smartphone with Opera Mini or a version of the Webkit or Gecko mobile browsers, but then again, not every Nokia or Sony or Blackberry or other mobile device is a simple device with a simple mobile web browser.

I think it is great that more and more websites offer mobile versions that are stripped down and load fast for mobile devices, but if you are going to strip out choice along with kilobytes, this is not good.

My Nokia N95 has a full featured web browser that renders most websites, except heavily AJAX sites, quite nicely. I have an unlimited data plan. Between my Nokia's browser and my data plan, I want to see the full version of most websites unless I need information quickly and then the mobile version is usually fine.

Not yesterday.

Yesterday, I left the house in a rush to meet up with Lauren Isaacson in Encino so that we could have lunch together before she departs for Vancouver. I was heading north on the 405 and passing the Long Beach Airport when I realized that I left my paper copy of the LA Times Food section. So, I did what I would normally do in this situation, I opened my Nokia's web browser and typed "latimes.com", instead of getting the usual, full web version of the LA Times website, I was forced into the mobile version of the site with no exit out.

No link to the full version. No links to the Food section. No ability to get out of the reduced web version. I then went to Google to search for the article and the Google search took me back to the front page of the mobile site with no link to the full version of the LATimes.com. Here is the mobile site that I saw with no link to the full version of the LATimes.com at either the top of the mobile page nor at the bottom:

I was very frustrated.

I was mad in the immediate situation of trying to locate information that was still live on the full version of the website but I was unable to get to the information because the mobile version of the site did not let me go there. I was mad as a web & mobile user experience designer to experience bad UX design first hand. I was frustrated that Starcut has probably charged the LA Times a lot of money to piss off loyal readers like me.

In the end, I had to use a desktop computer at Lauren's parent's house to search the LA Times' website for the article on the restaurant we were to go to. Itzik Hagadol is excellent, especially their 20 salads for $8.99.

But the lack of ability to exit the LA Times's mobile site from a mobile browser is not excellent. It would be excellent if Starcut would revisit the site and add a simple link at the top or the bottom of each mobile page, giving the reader/user the option to go to the full non-mobile version of the site from their mobile browser.

Ernest over at Darla Mack's S60 News & Reviews just posted a comparison review of the Nokia N97 vs. LG Viewty Smart: Side By Side Comparison. While Ernest didn't have both devices in his hands to do a review, he did use the Omio Comparison Widget to create a tech spec side by side comparison.

About halfway through reading the side by side tech spec showdown between the Nokia N97 and the LG Viewty Smart, I thought, "Wait a minute, this should be a comparison between the Nokia N86 and the LG Viewty Smart, not the N97!" I followed the link to Omio's site and made my own tech spec showdown between the two upcoming 8 megapixel camera phones to be released this summer from Nokia & LG, see below after the jump / below the fold.

Folks, the Omio Comparison Widget is hours of entertainment if you are a deep mobile tech geek who gets off on which specs are better. For me it was minutes of entertainment and I will be waiting to get the camera phones in my hands to take actual photos and see how the mobiles perform under a mobile blogging geo-tagging photowalk photography test.

Although, I will say from the descriptions in the tech specs in the below comparison of the LG Viewty Smart, Well, hello! The LG Viewty Smart will allow for manual focus as well as automatic? Hello! Now we are starting to talk photography!