Web 2.0.11562 beta

OK so I tried a bunch of twitter clients for OSX 10.5, both desktop apps and dashboard widgets. Here’s my take on them.

• Beak - outstanding UI, but can only use one account at a time now (early beta) - this is the one to watch!
• Destroy Twitter - poor UI: dark theme w/ low contrast, small fonts, NO support for unicode even displaying tweets! Seemed to devour large amounts of system resources => not ready for primetime.
• Nambu - so nice, it’s plain vanilla look is misleading, it actually does all the important stuff including supporting multiple accounts and an organized UI that makes sense!
• Syrinx - nice UI, single account use only
• Tweetdeck - good UI, no support for multiple accounts, shameful lack of unicode support
• Tweetie - best UI of all, slick support for multiple accounts - the winner!
• Twhirl - fairly good UI, supports multiple accounts but gets annoying if more than a couple because you end up with lots of little windows open, shameful lack of unicode support
• Twidget - a dashboard widget that’s compact and reliable, nice choice if you want to use a widget for Twitter, supports one account
• Chirp - another widget, a little prettier UI but takes a lot of room, basic functionality to support a single account
• Twitterrific - not as exciting as the name implies
• BlueBird - not bad, this has the best icon of the bunch (nice blue egg in nest) but seems to only update when it feels like it, and actually displays new tweets BELOW old ones. Multi account support but it’s clunky.

Also I should mention I like splitweet in the web app category, and will need research to pick my faves in iPhone category.

Graeme Nelson shared a database wrapper class for sinatra that encapsulated Sequel so that he could run migrations and gracefully use it in different environments. It’s nice because then it just does the right thing in development, test and production (or whatever) and keeps your main code cleaner.

Here is a modification of that class that I’m using. I’m still using the old ORM - ActiveRecord, so the (minor) changes I made to his class are only to make it work for AR.

To use it be sure to create a .twitter directory, and place your tweetlist.yml file in there, formatted like so:

Well my first sinatra app and it took one day to write. It’s trivial and useless, but was just a joy to write nevertheless. If rails is an armored tank then sinatra is a dirt bike. Good watching: screencast by @bmizerany covering some of the main topics.

Anyway to share some joy, let me say I love that there are no controllers, no helpers, no routes file, etc. Rails has so much stuff I always feel like I’m spending a lot of time jumping around between files. Actually a lot of that is due to my trying to learn the latest edge rails feature, try a new plugin, install some new gem, refactor a bit of awfulness from last month, and oh yeah, actually try to add some new feature. So here it’s all straightforward and so there’s nothing to do but write code, no distractions. I learned a couple neat things, like using “pass” to mimic rails’ before_filter functionality.

I also decided to give HAML a try on this experiment as well, and it gets a rave review too. Drop dead easy to learn the basics in 5 minutes, and it puts out such clean markup compared to erb that I’m gonna use it in other projects. Who knew templating could be this good?

This video from MIT Media Lab, that eternal source of optimism and experimentation, shows a cool new wearables demo dubbed the sixth sense. Anyone who’s read Vernor Vinge recognizes this notion of overlaying contextual information onto the actual visual targets one encounters in daily life. Watch the video - really, it starts out slow but gets better.

In Vinge’s book “Rainbow’s End” people this capability is commonly embedded in contact lenses. I see something identifiable, and a processing system will fetch relevant data from the Internet to offer me more detail. If I’m lookijng at a landmark, for example, the system should fetch historical, architectural, and current visitor info about said landmark, and layer it onto my display in a semi-opaque manner.

Here they’ve taken a pragmatic approach to advancing toward this goal. They are projecting the detail onto nearby surfaces, which is much easier and cheaper. In sci-fi there are always going to be situations where mission-critical information will be retrieved, just in time, and displayed only to the hero or villian. But in more mundane day-to-day situations like shopping, this system wouls seem to be a great stride forward. Bravo MIT Media Lab!

Three cheers for the future of our technology policy. The clearest thinker I know of on these matters is headed to Pennsylvania Ave. Nothing official announced AFAIK but it’s widely speculated that she will hold the title of special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy.

She understands the complex world of technology policy like few do. Most experts understand only a very narrow swath of the tech-policy landscape, which includes managing spectrum allocation, setting national broadband policy, regulating telephone and cable companies’ oligarchy, furthering the discussions around nanotechnology policy & biotech policy, and my fave - Internet policy!

DNSSEC needs to happen ASAP, a coherent national Internet defense policy needs to be articulated ASAP, the barriers protecting the telcos that have accumulated in recent years need to be torn down ASAP, and more. I’m so tired of the complete lack of leadership from the executive branch in recent years. Let the market work has been the mantra, and the results have been:
1. we see degraded service and predatory activity from the big players (I’ll pick on Comcast slowing down Internet access for certain applications as my example)
2. we see the regulatory framework constructed by Congress (just recall those terrific “Internet is a series of tubes” videos from Ted Stevens if you think Congress is capable of doing a good job with this)

So in my view we obviously need policy leadership from the top of the house, otherwise it’s relegated to Congress, and we all know where that leads. Ms. Crawford can draw upon her experience at ICANN and her knowledge of regulatory issues from her teaching experience at Yale and Michigan law school courses about communications policy issues. Go Susan go!

Yeah as much as I hate to be a lemming, I registered my name in this TLD today. The underlying idea is slick - keeping more domain-specific information within the DNS system itself. DNS has proven to be the most important and robust protocol powering the Internet since TCP/IP. We really could not function in our day to day activities without the ability to resolve domain names. Think about it - no email, no websites, and yes … no twitter!

Selling people vanity domain names is old hat of course. The .NAME TLD came out years ago and people (including yours truly) bought their names in this TLD. Now this one is different in that the contact info for the registrant is provided directly by the nameservers. Whether this idea is going to gain the critical mass needed remains to be seen.

Nielsen Online reports that Twitter continues to grow at an astounding rate. Something on the order of 1380% year over year, and 50% from January to February. I for one don’t think that torrid pace is going to fade quickly either. Nobody understands twitter at first look, but it invariably wins the hearts and minds of developers and users alike.

The Internet itself grew at an astounding rate as first email then the web turned into the killer apps that made the underlying ‘net indispensible. In spite of the telcos’ efforts to build “smart” Internets, the model that won out was the most flexible one - a dumb transport mechanism deferring all intelligence to the endpoint applications. That made it infinitely useful and flexible, for so many cool things like twitter that could not be envisioned in earlier times.

Twitter itself is also simplicity of purpose, leaving vast room for value-add services at the endpoints. They try to do nothing but deliver a simple, easy to use, easy to interface with service. And let the programmers of the world do the rest. Simplicity.

Been so long since I made a pie at home, so I bought the basic ingredients. I used the ready-made dough from the grocery, reluctantly, but it sure saves a lot of work. All I needed beyond this was a good mozzarella, some tomatoes, basil. Everything else is optional, but I went for pepperoni, pesto sauce and mushrooms.