Sure Javascript/ECMASCript has been going strong for nearly 15-20 years now, and furthermore shows little sign of slowing down in it’s dominance. Yet, these past few days I’ve been dealing with what I’m calling a “2-digit year bug.” Ya see, I’m trying to support the years before AD100. And it seems that’s a little rough for Javascript to prefer. Fine, fine, I’ll just code around it. But wait, we’re in a new century. What happens in the year 2101? Will future-javascript (or a 100 year old browser) interpret year AD101 as AD2101??

This is where I decided, “But I’ll be dead by then, so do I really care?” I mean, I’ll start caring once: (a) someone besides me likes my open-source socially-enabled RSS reader and/or (b) when the Javascript gods start caring that they don’t support serious (>2000 year old) timelines.

My spin agrees with both sides, in the context of actor-responsibility/meaningless-drone. That itself is a rough divide for humanity; I mean, how many of us are *fully* determined in our thought patterns? Most of us are in small ways, but not in all ways. Further, we are only as determined by what is available to us. If no one is ever forced to turn off the TV, read a book, or read a full webpage, they never will. Humanity is *that* fickle. We’ll live in the present, assuming the past isn’t consequential. The Internet has only “given the people what they want” in that regard.  To this end, Shirky did a wonderful job with the history of new media; theories are only good if they hold water across time & place.

But this consistently distracted state is in some ways my own life. I have trouble filtering out background conversations when in a restaurant, among other examples. I’m sure it’s giving rise to affective disorders (let’s not get beyond simple parole: dis-order = out of order). How can someone know what to love if there is no order or priority to in and out-flow of info, people, experience, etc.

The spiritual consequences are huge then. Jesus’ 2 commands of love God & fellow-man could be well-undermined by this novelty. That’s why I’m agreeing with a friend’s recent Facebook status: “Discipline is remembering what you love.” Discipline isn’t about saying “no,” so much as remembering, and remembering & reflecting is being killed off.

Reflection is a time-intensive activity, one which now-now-now-or-you’ll-miss-it-or-get-too-far-behind media won’t allow for, and as noted, is required:

“The researchers were surprised by the results. They had expected that the intensive multitaskers would have gained some unique mental advantages from all their on-screen juggling. But that wasn’t the case. In fact, the heavy multitaskers weren’t even good at multitasking. They were considerably less adept at switching between tasks than the more infrequent multitaskers. “Everything distracts them,” observed Clifford Nass, the professor who heads the Stanford lab.” — Nicholas Carr

This is exactly what the other side of the debate agrees with as well:

“Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers.”–Clay Shirky

But what I like about Clay’s statement is the next line: “Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read.” Resources maybe anything from mothers to educators, from $ for private tutoring to the publishing industry.. but it is always about time. My own time reading is only worth it if I spend the time to stop every other paragraph or so. Ideas need to sink in for any foundation to be placed. Who wants a skyscraper built on unset, wet concrete? That’s the best analogy I can give for what the Internet is doing: providing shortcuts for our memory, and keeping us from remembering anything. Even the act of scrolling a webpage is vague. Turning a page is much more definitive. I can’t glance-back as easily as I can scroll back & forth. (Ok, maybe not the best example..)

I suppose what this means for future information-design is clearspace. Data can also be held better when it is interacted with. Static graphs are visualization of too many numbers; interaction/overlays, compare-contrast is a beginning for too many graphs. Fickle “daily info-graphics” sent to my inbox or RSS reader only clog my mind, unless they spark interest  for further research (assuming I know where & how to research it!). I’d much rather have the data in contrast with something else, both of which are in connection with present values and personal states of knowledge. This way graphics could be delivered to my inbox for me, which overlap/redundant, and over-time help me learn and meat specified goals.

And finally for a sociological perspective. This little idea about remembering can be expanded further to include any binary-division, even gender-roles. While there’s a pressure from amongst egalitarians to “be equal” between/across genders, there is also a consequence of each gender doing everything, overburdening itself with too much. But that is still no “win” for anyone who would espouse a fascist (Modernist) sociology, where each person must fit the role assigned 100%. (I’m looking at you SB-preachers!)

Update: NYT picked this up too with their own spin that sounds like a good middle ground/awareness campaign.

Below is a simple bar-graph (height = ..height! in feet ) of each of the following:

Notice the extra-ong "still to go" between the WK2 Plane and Space, let alone LEO!

So the consequence? I now have 3 rss feeds: One for Friend’s Statuses (twitter+facebook), one for news (google news feed) and another for everything else from friends blogs to tech-news.

It would only seem obvious that these 3 can and should be on the same rss reader (I use google reader’s iphone interface, even on my main computer).

The trouble with combining these 3 or 4 types of news into ONE ‘technological ontology’ (a single rss reader) is a simple lessons learned from psychology.. there’s lots of theories like this, but I learned it from Urie Bronfenbrenner, “The Ecology of Human Development.” Basically, we all have various circles, some more core than others, of family, friends, and aquaintences. They affect us differently.

Likewise, we can say data from each source must retain it’s affective priority. Notice how different this is than most News/Social Networking Aggregrates, which merely pull in everything without priority. Likewise, facebook and other marketing groups try to get your affectively involved in their little sphere.

With a little finesse and basic coding-think, yahoo pipes allows me to get each level of data from friends, news & otherwise. Reading them one by one allows me to maintain a relatively consistent affect when reading all 500 tweets, instead of trying to have little affective response to a random news-blip, and then to care deeply over another friends’ status, only to return to not caring. Perhaps that emotional flexibility is possible and desireable in kids, but I’m getting too old for that?

In my case, it was a kyocera green-screen on my parents verizon network. It DID have mobile-web (remember those WHTML/WAP-sites?) when I went to Chicago. My next was a color-screened nokia until both myself and the web got serious and my sony-erickson was the fastest GPRS connected phone (which I infrared-connected to my HP WinMo device quite requently!)

Enough about my history, on to my point: I’m a geek, so I loved the capabilities of the phone, no matter how tedious it was. Most consumers aren’t willing to go through the tedium for the glory, and *finally* we have a crop of large-screened phones which allow something aside from left-down-right-up-left-left-down-ok magic of the early Nintendo days!

WinMo tried to be this player years back. Wow! An interface that was colorful, full and wasn’t ridiculously hidden behind 19 menus. It had a Today screen which told me more than the TIME! But Windows/M$ got lazy, were happy to ignore emerging tech while raking in the cash, and Apple took over, overnight.

Now, in the wake of the iPhone, LG & Samsung have created their own semi-smart interaces. I’ve been running the Samsung TouchWiz for awhile now, and I like it. I’ve played with LG’s, and it seems quite on-par.

But just look at this:

Facebook. There. Touch it!

Compared to 4 yrs ago:

Right-Down, Right, ok, Right?

Compared to 10 yrs ago:

There's an interface? Where?

Let’s skip ahead for a minute to the future. When I see something on a blog or otherwise, and I wish to *share* it with someone, I’d like to be able to do that. No one doubts this is a crime. If the person is in the living room with me, I’d like to be able to swipe,circle,copy-paste,drag-n-drop,etc. the item of interest onto my TV or projector, instead of handing over my laptop. After all, that’s what a larger-than-13″-screen is for. How can this be accomplished today when the object of interest is a file? (be it a pdf, image, song or video) This is the easiest: you copy the file to the server, and have the server config’d to display what is newest in a folder.

But what are we to do when the object of interest is a stream, and the stream is not “open”, but bound-in by flash? Examples: youtube, hulu, last.fm, pandora. These things I cannot drag-and-drop. They may have a URL, but the data is not separate from the view: navigating with a mouse through a website/flash start-stop-pause control is still required. I can’t exactly do that with a remote, unless I go hi-tech with a wii-mote; even then navigating the web is clunky.

All I’m asking for is a pure data-feed-URL. One which is Universal.. for all things trying to Locate a Resource, y’know? Until then, it’s either a boycott of Flash, or giving up on the dream of simple resource-sharing. Flash killed the internet. But who’s going to boycott hulu, except Apple & Comcast (who’s trying to buy Hulu’s #1 content provider, NBC!). Wow– now there’s a mess for ya.

Notice that there’s another column I forgot: Android. They’re a variant of Linux, and running on both desktop & netbooks (sort of). Oddly enough, Android on netbooks took all the fire/criticism up front about being too limited. Apple then stepping into the void and filled it with something just. usable. enough.

The only commentary on Apple’s latest device is two-fold: (1) No multitasking? I’m a fan of what I’ve called ‘limited computing‘, but this is a tad too constricting. (2) Likewise constricting is the iPhone AppStore: only those approved by Apple will do.

For the price, I’d rather have AlwaysInnovating’s Tablet/Netbook. It’s effectively the same thing, just with the software I already use. Trouble-spot: all linux software is old-school & menu-driven. Neither linux application communities (KDE nor Gnome) seem to be concerned with this forward motion UI’s.

From Consumers willing to throw their money to the next best-thing, or the more rational, planned among us, we all do not care what a company “can” do. What they “could” do is like a carrot hanging in front of us. We all want the product or relationship which does-as-promised:one which is trustworthy.

Within today’s tech market I see 2 significant, praactical problems behind trustworthiness (aside from “theorhetical” or philosophic distrust in Capitalism or Modernism..)

Trouble #1:  What we treat as mere Commodity, is actually an incredibly powerful (all too powerful!) system for the promise to be fulfilled. Systems fail, especially when insufficient sub-ground (peat!) level knowledge and information is not accounted for. The correlate: What most people “take for granted” (read: take as solid ground, trustworthy) is only trustworthy under certain conditions, not under ALL conditions. The lack of info, concern & detail at this level is why things break for some people and not for others.

Trouble #2: Design/designers face/have created this problem. Designers, working in immaterial wonder-lands have all free-reign to imagine, imagine, imagine. We all wish time and space for this freedom for ourselves. As children, perhaps some of us had such time. Designers need feedback, and they need to take parameters early & seriously. If they cannot work within boundaries, they are not responsible designers, but children. If they cannot see the that they cannot see, harsh reality will exact their fate. But if no feedback is ever given to them, if they are protected from the “production” (materiality) phase, how can they learn?

• Left:
  • Calendar
  • Contacts
  • Web
  • Photos
• Right:
  • Maps (associated with contacts)
  • Journal (dual-pane)
  • web also (wait, which side do I view webpages on.. both?)
• Middle:
  • Clipboard-Pocket

This is it? Doesn’t sound like much. So what do I use my laptop for these days?

• Libraries of media, for which iTunes & Amazon are trying to be the end-all. For this, I likely will run a streaming media source, or keep my library on a home server, so the laptop neWed not have a multi-terabyte drive.
• Basic file editing/viewing, for which Google Documents is trying to be the end-all. And so long as your online (or whenever local caching of GDocs hits) this might work. But Google doesn’t support various Journal formats at present.

Web viewing

There doesn’t seem to be any web-organization, just a list of tabs/Safari-like window-images. My use of the web falls into the 2 categories previously mentioned: the daily views of interest & responsibility (like reading the news & checking the bank) and researching the latest idea & interest I had, or for classes.

File-Viewing

I wanna make sure this has full office & PDF file editing & annotation, otherwise, it’s not a laptop replacement. Clearly this thing won’t be creating the office-heavy/design-heavy files.. but it should have full-view of them.

Filetypes supported are likely OneNote->PDF instead of the millions of incongruent filetypes presently on any one system. Others’ ability to edit & comment on PDFs at present is limited. This is an early-collaboration tool, not a late-collaboration, final-product kind of tool.

Pocket

There is a heavy amount of visual drag-and-dropping, specifically of web/PNG images. But I deal with excel and photoshop files too. Will previews be auto-generated for these as well? How will I know which spreadsheet is which when I place it in the pocket? Sometimes filenames *are* handy.

Minor

We didn’t see any online chat-abilities with the contacts, something my nokia N800 did well.

The 2 biggest hurdles for development:

1. Metadata heavy
2. Handwriting heavy

However, “Computer as a Desktop” or “Desktop on the Computer” is a failed ideal of the early, by-gone days of computing. Simply: everything is not and cannot be on your personal computer *screen* let alone actually on the computer.

I’m a huge computing fan, I even PDF my readings for class (thanks to an old printer/scanner my wife’s new fancy-pants mac can’t use!). I annotate the PDFs & highlight them accordingly. I’m very document heavy, being a BachArts instead of a BachScience guy.

Compared to the image above, I’ve got only 3 piles of junk on my upper right & left corners: 2 book piles on the right & 1 ‘organizer’ on the left which holds everything from my keys & cellphone to pens, coupons & my external harddrive. And sticky-notes. Stickies can be moved, computer notes cannot so easily (yet). Cell phones & keys are much more ‘real’ objects, requiring separate spatial existence — like the kleenex box nearby. No computer will replace kleenex (I hope!).

So with all this, I’m not convinced the “desktop” metaphor is worthwhile, or even warranted. Sure there’s lots of files in folders on my computer, but (a) search has replaced some of that and (b) files and folders are in cabinets, not desks..

So, iTunes and other newer applications take on the library metaphor. You search a library; it is referenced, accessed and used. But that is just for an app, not a unifying theme between apps (though a good argument could and should be made why this shouldn’t be so!). User folders on Mac & Linux are now folder-lists of Documents, Media-types (pictures, music, videos).. Various netbook UI’s have ran with this as well. But none hold together any more than the files-in-folders theme. iTunes has it’s own folder inside your music folder. I know why this is, but shouldn’t there be a platform-independent format for these datasources?

And the desktop folder itself? Is there ever any real purpose to it? Most mobile platforms don’t have one and most linux geeks don’t place their files on the ‘desktop’. Microsoft Courier lacks a desktop as well, instead merging the desktop and the clipboard into one middle-bar for all things temporary (which most ppl use their desktop for).

Really looking at a normal, original desktop, it’s more a matter of objects which are acted upon with tools. Applications are the tool-set these days, but they fail to interact and avail themselves *on the desktop*. Desktops are loaded up with file *icons* not the file itself. Mac tries to maintain this file-window independence, but it’s just a jumble of windows overtop background pictures and icons. I cannot go from an open spreadsheet window and start making it pretty with a document design editor. These apps are mutually exclusive, and ruining any desktop metaphor.

All this critique is pointing towards a unified file format which all applications agree upon, and all have access to modify at anytime.

Clearly this is an idealism which won’t occur without limits placed. And such limits break the very nature of ‘general computing’ over which the Mac/Windows debate rages.

I’m a huge fan of limited and thereby differentiated computing: the workstation should not be running the same UI as a eJournal (Courier!). And neither of them are sufficient for the task of media center.

We once had a division of these 3 tiers with servers, desktops & mobile devices. Then WindowsNT was thrown on servers & XP(and NT variant!) was thrown on faux-tablets UMPC’s. This UI/codebase permeation is inverse of the ideal, where the low-level is the universal, and the high-level is specialized to the task.

Moblin 2.0 has a chance with this for at least one front.