Category: Geek

If you’re a regular visitor to my site, you’ve probably noticed that I don’t talk about Google (my employer) that much on this blog, at least when it comes to announcing new products that you might want to try out. So, where can you find new Googley goodies? I have a couple of suggestions:

Google Labs
If you’re looking for a place to experience some bleeding-edge products before we consider them ready for a full launch, check out the newly renovated Google Labs. Just added today is what I think is a pretty awesome feature for Image Search, called “Similar Images,” that allows you to pick an image from the results, and from there look for similar images. For example, if you’re looking for images of puggles, you can search for [puggle]. And then from those results, you see a nice shot of a puggle against a white background, and want to see what else is available. So, you click on “Similar images” below that image, and there you go, Google gives you a whole set of pictures of puggles against a white background. I’m not going to include any screenshots here; I want you to get the hands-on experience and try it out yourself. Nature photos are particularly fun, and don’t forget that you can start by refining your search by color to help you find what you’re looking for. While you’re trying it out, see if you can find any fun clusters and post them in the comments. I’ll get you started with one that Jason (Internet baby expert) found just minutes after trying the new feature. Search for [angry baby] and look for a commonly-edited photo of a baby. Click on “Similar images” and enjoy.

Also making its Labs debut today is Google News Timeline, which gives you a calendar-like view of the news. Make sure you go beyond the default view and try playing around with the settings… you can even add more news sources by clicking on “Add More Queries.” I added my own blog as a query, and it’s fun to browse it in this new view! You can find more info about this feature on the Google News blog.

My shared items in Google Reader
If you want to see which announcements from Google I’d like to highlight, try browsing my shared items in Google Reader. I don’t update my blog every day, but I do share things in Reader all the time, and many of them are Google/tech related. Of course you may still have to sift through some silly stuff as well, since sometimes I feel it’s important to keep my friends informed of other important annoucements, like the fact that Hercules in New York is now available on YouTube. You can find my shared items in the sidebar of this blog, or by visiting theinternetissocool.com.*

And please remember that anything I say here is my personal opinion and does not represent Google. KTHX.

* Funny story: I registered theinternetissocool.com a couple of years ago because I was afraid that people would misspell “Wysz” and wanted something memorable and spellable that I could point people to if they asked for my website. I totally forgot that I had it a year later, when I tried to solve a similar problem by registering onlinehaircuts.com. I’ve since redirected theinternetissocool to my shared Reader feed, and some new content is coming to Online Haircuts soon at some point. In related news, I recently acquired wysz.com (the domain name I originally wanted for this site), so everything on thewysz.com will be moved there when I get a chance.

I should be able to specify the size of the displayed/scaled image. There’s quite a big jump between 300 pixels wide and 1024, and neither of them are what I want.

A required title attribute? Who do you think I am? Randall Munroe? I don’t need people hovering over my images and seeing the file name. Remove that red star.

And why is the caption and alt attribute the same thing? I want to add alt text, but I don’t want to use the caption at all, partly because I use a super old-school template which doesn’t do much with it. And I think we can assume that any user who can see the image can also see the caption. So if my caption is the same as my alt text, which is a textual alternative of the image, it’s going to be pretty redundant. Don’t make me look like an idiot by having me post a picture of a tree, with a caption below reading: picture of a tree.

I’m spending hours on a Friday night just trying to post some pictures of a vacation. This shouldn’t be that hard.

Man, do I hate writing posts in WordPress. Inserting links gets all messed up in the latest version of Safari; inserting pictures the way I want them takes forever… bleh.

Picture-filled post coming soon.

Ok, so as Nelson pointed out, shortly after my rant against WeFollow, I went ahead and sent them three replies. Why? Because enough people were doing it that I figured I should just play along and participate. Of course as I indicated in my last post, once this becomes too mainstream (tech goes below the fold), I’ll lose interest.

This reminds me of my use of smileys (or emoticons, if you prefer), and how it proves I can be susceptible to peer pressure if I respect my peers. For the first 12 years of my online life, I refused to use smileys. Well, except for when I used them ironically, but again, I’ll note that this is before I had ever heard of a “hipster.” I think this was when people were just starting to talk about emos, which I later learned were not large Australian birds.

I refused to use them because I saw them most commonly used by people who did other annoying things like using colored fonts, writing *shrug* and *sigh* and otherwise trying to bring emotion into a textual medium. One day, I was shocked to see Tony (Dude, update your blog!) use a smiley in conversation, and I called him out for it. He shot back with something like, “I’ve been using email since the ’80s!” so I decided to refrain from judging him, but still didn’t deem smileys to be good enough for my use.

Finally, in the summer of 2006, I found myself at Google, surrounded by geeks. And you know what? They use smileys all the time. I probably started using them just to fit in and not get fired, and didn’t really see a huge value in them. At some point, however, I started to realize the great thing about smileys. They let you say almost anything without risking offense. As someone whose constant attitude of “I can’t believe you took that personally/seriously, you fool” gets me into trouble more often than I’d like, I’ve found smileys to be a great safety net. Let’s take a look at an example:

Without a smiley:

You want to know what else looks like a bug? Your face.

With a smiley:

You want to know what else looks like a bug? Your face. 😉

Pretty neat, huh?

Life used to be so simple. Look at messages that were 140 characters or fewer in length sent by your friends.

It reminds me of the early days of Flickr — a place for people who liked pictures to share pictures. At one point I stepped away from it for a bit, and when I came back, I found MySpace-level antics going on. The mainstream users had found it. There were seemingly automated “join my group” requests, and comments with, I hate to say it, glitter text.

And then there’s Facebook. I used it daily for about a year in school. Now, I log in about once a month and can’t even figure out where to find my own profile, and have to reject a bunch of requests to fight zombies or some other nonsense.

So what happened to Twitter? It looks like again too many people are trying too hard to get in touch with everyone on the planet. As you may already know, I’m never thrilled about meeting new people. And you know what? I didn’t get into computers to interact with humans. I thought that was part of the deal… I mean since when were nerds social animals?

Here’s what made me finally write this: Today, my Twitter home page is full of people writing some variation of this message:

@wefollow #google #search #tech

I don’t know what this means. Yes, I know the hashtag thing, but why is it to this wefollow character? I’m sure I could easily find out with about one click, but it’s a Saturday, and Saturdays ain’t for learnin’ nothin’.

It’s 1234567890.

About a year ago, I took a useful course at Google called Getting Things Done, a system developed by David Allen. The instruction took hours, but I’ll sum it up for you in a few sentences:

Create lists based on location, device, or workspace, not based on project. For example, Keep a list of things you need to do at your work computer, a different list of things you need to do at home, etc. As soon as you know there’s something you need to do, add it to the list so you don’t have to worry about forgetting it. Once a week, spend a little time cleaning up your lists and checking off things that you’ve done.

It’s a good system. Read more about it if you’re interested.

One common implementation of this system was to use Gmail’s labels. You could send emails to yourself as list items, and then organize by label. To check off an item, you’d just remove the label. I used this for a while and it worked pretty well, because Gmail is ubiquitous. I always had access to it on my computer, and when I was out, I could get it on my iPhone and consult my “out” and “shopping” lists.

As you may have heard, Gmail recently added an experimental Tasks feature, which is simpler than using the workaround system of labels that people had created in the absence of Tasks. And, starting today, it’s now just as ubiquitous as Gmail if you use an iPhone or Android device. To take full advantage of it on an iPhone, I recommend creating a shortcut on your home screen as they suggest in the video. You’ll forget it’s happening in a browser.

Disclosure: I work for Google.

Yes, the title of this entry makes an unfairly general assumption.

I’m not an expert on user interfaces but I was just thinking about this and wanted to write it down. I think that people who didn’t grow up with computers were used to being able to see and access the controls for every discrete function of a device at once—nothing hidden behind menus, multi-function buttons, etc. A lamp had a switch that lets you turn it on or off. A car had a steering wheel, a shifter, and a couple of pedals. An oven had a dial to set the temperature. A TV had a dial for the channels, a dial for the volume, and a power switch. A typewriter had a button for each letter. Of course as more functions were added to devices, having a dedicated button for each function became less practical. I always thought it would be funny to see a keyboard for a logographic language with a dedicated key for each word. The keyboard would fill a room and typing would involve a lot of sliding back and forth on a wheeled chair.

The confusion began when interface elements (such as a button) got more than a single function. The old joke used to be that nobody could program a VCR, or even set the clock on it. This is probably because the VCR mainly had buttons primarily dedicated to functions like “PLAY” and “STOP,” and were labeled as such. However, the less common functions, like setting the time, often required complicated actions like holding two buttons as once, and neither of them were labeled “SET TIME TO 8:35 PM.”

As these buttons gained more functions, they received less descriptive labels. “FAST FORWARD” became “FF,” and later letters were removed altogether as “PLAY” turned into “►.” For those of us who grew up with these universal symbols, it’s pretty obvious what each button does, and it’s nice that the symbols are consistent across devices. To the less technically versed, it can be like learning hieroglyphics.

Over time, the interface elements became even more generic. Again focusing on home audio/video equipment, remotes started to receive a joystick-like component (up, down, left, right, and enter). Some were replaced with a single touchscreen, with perhaps a couple of hard buttons for volume. And, as the manufacturers received complaints from users (or the people who were in charge of selling to and/or teaching the users), a few more hard buttons were added that could be programmed with various other single functions or macros.

But while video equipment may have always had some confusion associated with it, even traditionally familiar devices were no longer immune to these changes. Digital clocks became cheap, and were slapped on almost any electronic device imaginable from to bump up the feature list. Just think of how many places you can check the time in your kitchen. Many of these clocks read 12:00 for their entire operating lifetimes.*

Cars were affected as well. First, changes were limited secondary functions like the radio, which saw its traditional hard buttons replaced with confusing interfaces like BMW’s iDrive wheel. It made some sense to people used to computers (navigate, select/execute), but it is the perfect example of how simplifying an interface is not just a matter of removing as many interface elements as possible. Now, even functions like changing from “DRIVE” to “PARK” in a BMW with automatic transmission is accomplished with the push of a button, instead of the familiar and perhaps more satisfying “clunk” of a traditional shifter.

Which brings me to portals. A site that is a portal (and I’m not even talking about the modern versions, which are more like customized dashboards), can be easier for someone unfamiliar with its functions to understand. Everything is right there, whether you asked for or are interested in it or not. The same portal which may be appealing to the less-savvy user may appear cluttered and busy to the user who knows that they can have an interface where they just get exactly what they want, when they want it. To use an offline example, a beginner computer user simplifies things by putting a shortcut/alias to every single application (or document or website) on the desktop. A power user uses an application launcher. Something else that I’ve noticed while blogging recently: I use fewer links now. Before, I would link to something if I thought some of my readers might not know what it is. Now, I assume they know to highlight it and search.

And that typewriter that had a button for each letter? Well, how many of you remember explaining how to type names of people in pre-smartphone cell phones with three letters per key? Think that was tough? Soon, you’ll only have one button to choose from.

* The cool thing about that sentence is it makes sense for either tense of the word “read.”

Well, if this is the last Apple keynote at Macworld, I certainly can’t skip my obligatory commentary.

iMovie
I’ll likely be buying the new version of iLife so I can get going on my project to archive my home video library. I will use it primarily for organizing my library since I do editing with Final Cut, but the new editing features should be great for people editing simple home videos.

iPhoto
Face recognition and geotagging are useful features. I’m using Picasa for now because it syncs with the web interface. I used to be a primarily iPhoto/Flickr user but things got out of sync quickly as I reorganized my photos. It looks like this new version is a little better: if you make a change on your published album it will be updated online, but it doesn’t look like a two-way street (I may be wrong), and I’d really not have everything centered on my single hard drive. I trust the cloud more. So I’ll probably use Picasa for my primary photo management, but I can see myself hopping into iPhoto for stuff like photo books or maybe some slideshows for the fam.

GarageBand
I wasn’t paying too much attention at this point, but I think the artist lessons is a cool feature that I won’t use, but many people will. It’s always been a fun app.

iTunes Plus

I haven’t clicked BUY as of this writing, but I’ll probably just go for it soon.

I’m glad they’re about to bring the entire catalog to iTunes Plus. Apple gets a lot of flak for DRM, but I remember the launch of the iTunes Music Store when I was in college and everyone else considered online music as something that must be stolen, so I understand why it may have been a necessary evil to get the major labels to participate in the first place. Now, however, I see absolutely no reason for it (if they labels don’t see the value in online music by now forget them), so I’m glad I’ll be able to play my music on any device of my choosing. Now that DRM (on music, anyway) is about to die and never be missed, can I start asking again for iTunes Pro?

iWork
I don’t currently use iWork, but the updates look nice for those who do. I won’t be buying it since Google Docs does what I need for free. If I did a lot of presentations, however, I would totally get a kick out of controlling them with my iPhone. Keynote is still rare enough in the business world that it can really make your presentations stand out.

MacBook Pro
The new battery life sounds awesome, although I do understand the concern about it not being removable. The unfortunate part about this is that those who really do need longer-lasting batteries probably need to be able to swap them out, since plane journeys can last longer than eight hours. I’m not in the market for a new laptop yet, but if I were, this one would be at the top of my list.