Year: 2003

Armchair Engineering: Apple should go High-Res

by Steven Garrity

A dumb mockup of an iMac with a giant screen - even though screen size isn’t really what I’m talking about here.I have some unsolicited advice from an armchair engineer to Apple.

Microsoft is planning for the eventual advent of much higher-resolution LCD panels that we currently have. Their next major operating system release will be entirely vector-based, not tied to the pixel or any specific resolution. However, Microsoft’s next release isn’t scheduled until 2006.

Apple already has a vector-based resolution independent user interface that has been maturing for several years. Apple also has control over the hardware (something Microsoft is starting to get right with their Athens PC specs).

Clearly, price is the hurdle in delivery higher resolutions LCD panels – but Apple sells a high-end product to a market that is willing to pay a premium. I think I might be persuaded to buy an Apple if it came with a 17” or 18” display with a 3200 by 1800 pixel resolution (or higher). At that point, text starts to become as readable on screen as it is on the printed page.

One issue that they would have to deal with if they did jump to a resolution like that is those elements that are inevitably pixel-based. While the primary user interface controls are scalable, some applications would surely have some pixel-based elements implemented.

The most important pixel-based element would be the web. While good CSS and web fonts would thrive in a high-res environment, our trusty GIFs, PNGs, JPEGs, and any pixel-specified fonts or CSS elements would be minuscule. On a 200dpi screen 12-pixel Times New Roman would be less than 1/16th-inch tall.

Perhaps a high-resolution aware web browser could scale the page elements up to a reasonable size. Of course, quality would suffer but if your resolution takes a large enough jump, you could double the size of web graphics and things would look at least as good as they do on our 2003 screens.

I could hack together my own setup right now. IBM is selling a 22” LCD with a native resolution of 3840×2400 ($7,500USD as of this writing). A graphics card (or several graphics cards) to power that kind of resolution would also cost a premium. Even then, I’d be stuck running operating systems that might let me scale the font size up, but a typical website (800 pixels wide) would only be about 4½” wide. I’d also have to get a much better digital camera.

Apple is in a position to pull together the hardware (LCD and graphics card) and software (OS X with Quartz + website magnification in their own Safari browser). If they could pull it off for an anywhere reasonable price (maybe $6,000 for a computer and screen), they would take a giant leap ahead of any other platform.

 

Those Sheep Sound like Sheep on TV!

by Steven Garrity

A barf bag with an AOV post on itEditorial Note: However cliché it may be, I have to point out that this post was first written on two sides of a (thankfully unused) barf-bag on a plane.

On a recent flight from one boring city to another, I had a minor revelation. As we took off and gained altitude, I had a clear view of the airport runway layout below. Rather than fascination and intrigue, I though instead of a familiar landscape I had seen out the cockpit of a Cesna years before. That scene, though, had been rendered by the 20MHz 486sx in my parent’s old Packard Bell (more specs). I had a short stint where I played (if you could call it ‘playing’) Microsoft Flight Simulator (something I’ve been thinking of getting into again).

What struck me about this association was that a real-world situation reminded me of something I had first [Editorial Update: flip over barf-bag] encountered digitally (I refuse to use the word “virutally”). The similarity didn’t lead me to think of how well Microsoft’s digital representation reflected the actual scene. Rather, I was struck by how much the real thing looked like the digital version. The difference is subtle, but significant. I had encountered the digital version first — the digital version was my original.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. A few years ago, I accompanied a friend to a December church service at a small country church. In a brilliant display of showmanship, they brought in real live sheep for part of the dramatization of the Christmas story. The sheep let out the quintessential sheep ‘bleat’. I turned to my neighbour and exclaimed with genuine surprise and wonder that “Those sheep sound like sheep on TV!”.

I suspect this will only happen more and more frequently. What have you encountered in the real world that felt secondary to the digital?

 

Dan James documents a quarter-life crisis in the mountains

by Steven Garrity

Dan in the Mountains of BCMy friend and co-worker Dan James is writing a day-by-day account of his 21-day adventure in the mountains of British Columbia. He’s on day 3 of 21 so far and it is a compelling (and often hilarious) read.

A nerdly side-note: a little known feature of our weblog platform provides RSS feeds for each weblog category. As Dan has setup a category for his Outward Bound hiking posts, you can keep up on his adventures with his Outward Bound RSS feed.

 

The Theory of Everything – Now on Video!

by Steven Garrity

The Elegant Universe on PBS.orgHaving gotten so much from Brian Greene’s book, The Elegant Universe, I was pleased to learn (via kottke.org) that it was to be the subject of a documentary of the same name on PBS.

The entire three hour program is available to view in streaming video. Taking a three hour program to the web is an interesting challenge. When dealing with our own challenge of sharing a large amount of video from the Zap Your PRAM conference, we turned to the noble institution that is the Internet Archive. They are providing free bandwidth and storage for our conference recordings, as they will gladly do for any and all free and open media.

Since we were dealing with relatively lo-fi audio and video and presumably a relatively humble scale, simply chopping up our one-hour conference sessions into 100-200MB Quicktime files was sufficient (thanks to Peter for handling the video conversion). PBS has chosen a different technique for dealing with video on the web. They have divided each of the three one-hour programs into 8 chunks of Real or QuickTime video.

This micro-segmentation technique does work quite well for the web, these 6-8 minute chunks of video make are palatable on a computer screen and it is easy to pick up where you left off. That said, I would much rather let the entire video download overnight in a mammoth video (probably one video per one-hour episode) and watch the whole thing as it was intended. Bittorrent could help with the distribution, though it is limited to a small early-adopter crowd so far.

That said, I won’t let complaints about format keep me from enjoying the series. I’m off to watch it now.

 

Paying for Fewer Features

by Steven Garrity

I’ve heard many people complain that Apple is charging too much (or that they shouldn’t be charging at all) for the “point releases” (10.2, 10.3, etc.). I completely sympathize with these complaints. The last two point-releases, 10.2 and 10.3, each costs $129 US ($179 Canadian).

However, I have to stick to the position that I’ve long since taken on software upgrades and pricing. I would love it Adobe would stop cramming crap new features into Photoshop and Illustrator. Rather, I would like them to spend a few months without adding any new features and just make everything better. Take the startup time down a few seconds, subtly refine the UI, fix bugs. I would pay.

This is what Apple has done with OS X 10.3. There are some new features, but the important improvements are subtle and all over the place. The end result is that the system just feels better. That’s worth the money for me. I wish more developers would focus on solidifying and simplifying rather adding more and more features.

My favourite part of the design process is the latter stages, even post-launch/release, when a slew of tiny improvements that seem independently insignificant add up for make the end result seem more mature and mysteriously better. For example, I would love to see the subtle changes that Matthew Haughey has suggested for the new A List Apart site implemented.

In the early stages of development of Mozilla Firebird there was a rule that each release (and there were frequent releases) had to be smaller (file size of the download) than the previous release. This forced the developers to keep simplicty and efficiency in mind and encouraged the optimization of existing features as much as adding new features.

I think where this gets lost is when the marketing department (curse them!) starts to get control over the feature list. I’m convinced that Microsoft Office changes its “skin” with each version just to look like something new and worth paying for.

 

Do we all need a personal system administrator?

by Steven Garrity

My family has embraced the home computer. They use Hotmail to keep in touch with relatives. They use a scanner, despite absolutely terrible software that came with it (Canon). They use MSN Messenger to chat with friends (a lot). They use Microsoft Word to write papers, letters, and memos and print them off on an Epson printer ink-jet.

The trouble is, every few weeks, they’re Windows XP computer becomes overrun with spy-ware, viruses, and general crap. A knowledgeable friend told me that if you put a plain-old Windows XP, unprotected, directly on the Internet, it will be compromised in hours. I thought he was exaggerating. After another visit to my parent’s computer, I know that he is not.

They have pop-up windows coming up when you don’t even have a web browser running (some spy-ware app). I ran a slew of anti-virus and anti-spyware apps and discovered hundreds of unwanted apps and files.

The trouble is, I would rather dig ditches in the hot sun than do tech support. I am terrible at it. My girlfriend tells me that it uncovers an ugly and angry side of me. I have no patience. I find doing tech support more stressful than almost anything else in life. It is a massive personality/character flaw of mine.

So, I’ve come to the conclusion that my parents do need someone to help them with their computer, and that I’m not sure I can do it. So what do I do? I thought about buying them an iBook (or eMac). That would solve a lot of the spyware/virus issues. However, I’m afraid it would uncover a whole slew of new issues. They would have to learn a new OS – not matter how good it is. I would be less able to help them, as I’m less familiar with OS X than I am with Windows.

I wish I could give them a simple locked-down system with a word-processor and web-browser, and not let them (or anyone) install anything else. I could probably do this with Linux, but that would be a whole new can of worms – and I’m not really qualified.

They are willing to pay someone else to help, but I have no-where to point them. Most tech support at local computer firms is too expensive and the people can be clueless.

Surely I’m not the only reluctant-relative-system-administrator (while talking with Stephen DesRoches about this, he enthusiastically agreed). What can we do to make this easier (for me and my parents)? Help!

My plan for now is to block of Saturday afternoon and re-format their machine, put it behind a hardware router (as a firewall), and hope it doesn’t happen again.

 

Hypocritical Greenery

by Steven Garrity

Two semi-random environmental notes from a complete evironmental hypocrite (me):

Thumbnail of waste movement mapFirst, Tessa Blake, who shared her fantastic soon-to-be-release film, The Pink House at the Zap Your PRAM conference mentioned the weekly Chicago radio show This American Life. When I saw the link to This American Life on Matt Rainnie’s new weblog, I knew it was worth checking out.

The first thing I saw on the This American Life website was this amazing map of the movement of solid waste in the United States. It speaks for itself.

While I admit to only having copped the context-free statistic and not having read the article yet, I thought it was worth sharing anyhow: Slashdot links to an article that suggests that:

“A staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material is required to produce each gallon of gasoline we burn in our cars, SUVs, trucks and other vehicles.”

 

Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0

by Steven Garrity

Mozilla LizardI’ve been using and enjoying the products of the Mozilla project more and more lately. I’ve been hooked on Mozilla Firebird for a while, and my recent Mozilla Thunderbird theme was my first real contribution (if you could call it that) to the movement.

I’m very interested in the success of the project, and so I have written a short article outline some recommendations and ideas for branding Mozilla.

For those too lazy/busy to read the article (or those who understandably might value their time more than my words and ideas), here’s the 10-second version:

The Mozilla Project should adopt a simple, strong, consistent visual identity for the Mozilla products including consistent icons across applications that mesh with the host operating system.

Read the article in full and please feel free to comment in reply to this post.

Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0

Recommendations for the branding and visual identity of the Mozilla Foundation’s product and project line.