Jake Herringbone

Speaking truth to HD FUD

So pretty much everyone knows about the big switch to digital TV that’s coming in February. You know why? It’s been advertised heavily by companies that think they can sell you something you don’t need, by misleading you about what’s really going to happen on Feb 17. I’ve seen ads for it, and I don’t usually see a lot of ads in the course of my daily activities, so I’m guessing most people have seen them too.

It makes me mad when my poor grandmother thinks she has to buy an HDTV because they are shutting down the old TV. No one has to buy a new TV, and no one has to buy a new antenna, and in fact

You probably don’t have to buy anything.

Really, you don’t. Maybe you’d like to go buy something, after all, this is America (unless you live somewhere else). But this big digital switchover only affects you if you’re watching analog broadcast TV right now.

If you pay a cable or satellite bill for your TV, you don’t need to buy anything.

That’s assuming that your cable company hasn’t decided to change your service on you to take advantage of the confusion right now. There’s no reason your cable company can’t give you the same thing they have been.

If you have an antenna, and you get bad reception all the time, but you got your TV after March 2007, then you don’t need to buy anything!

That’s how you know you have broadcast TV now. You probably get up to adjust the antenna now and then, or there’s a big one on your roof. But your antenna is just fine, and your TV is just fine, too! There’s perfectly good digital TV coming over those same airwaves, exactly the same way as HD radio is overlayed on regular analog radio.

You can get that digital signal on your TV, because there has been a mandate from the FCC that:

By law, beginning March 1, 2007, all television reception devices (including TVs, VCRs, DVRs, etc.) imported into the U.S. or shipped in interstate commerce must contain a digital tuner.

If you have only thirteen channels, and you get bad reception all the time, and that bad reception looks like snow on your TV, and your TV is a few years old, then you may have to pay around $30 max.

All you need is a digital-to-analog converter at $40-$70 – and you can get a coupon from the government for $40 of that.

So please, if your grandmother is like mine, please help to clear up the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that’s being spread around the digital TV switch.

(On a side note, it makes me crazy that PCs still only have analog video on them. That’s 40-year old scan-refresh technology out of TVs. Your grandma is replacing it by February, but you just got it in your new Lenovo ThinkPad? Outrageous.)

Tags: analog, digital, DTV, grandma, HDTV

Site-specific Browsers

To start, an announcement: I’m going to start work at Google in September! I’m in California now, and partly moved to Sunnyvale, one town south of Mountain View, home of the Googleplex. Google is kind of like a college campus, where I can do awesome coding without feeling political pressure to deal with bosses, or pressure to get into the business side of things to have a viable career path. Yet as terrific as that is, I have a dark secret that makes it an unlikely place for me to work: I don’t like web applications.

At first, I wondered if webapps were just the fashion. They’re easy to code (at first), trivial to deploy to many client computers, updates are mandatory so you pretty much don’t have old clients still running. The fashion shifted to creating web applications and now that’s what we get. Even for internal company systems, where you have control of the client machines, and your app is intended to be used as the primary work interface for a good chunk of a person’s day, I see a lot of big organizations writing a web app without considering a rich-client app. And now I’m not sure it’s just fashion – it seems to be the way we’re headed.

The browser is built for browsing

One problem with web applications is that they all run in this web browser program, which is a Multi-Document Interface. (More specifically, a TDI) Inside that browser, you have a number of documents going on. You’re reading some news, you’re logged into a company IT system, you’re shopping for a t-shirt, you have a couple pages you were reading but lost interest in, and of course your webmail. On IE7, Safari, or Firefox, you’re probably managing those documents using tabs, all within one browser window.

Now, you also have some other programs open, and you have developed whatever mechanism you’re comfortable with for switching – maybe the mouse, maybe ⌘-Tab. This works well, you have icons that represent each program so that your brain’s exceptional image-processing can figure out where you want to go without adding any reading tasks in the middle of your task-switching.

All those tabs in your browser don’t cooperate with your app-switching mechanism, that’s the problem. For the documents you were just browsing, this isn’t a big deal – your browser is good for browsing. But your webmail and your corporate IT system – what are those doing in there? Those are web applications, and should be in the same context-switch with the rich client applications. I don’t want to remember that Firefox is the first thing to switch to, then use a different means (I recently found ⌘0-⌘9 for choosing the active tab) to get back to my webmail.

Then there are the other issues with MDI’s: they don’t play with Expose, and it’s not always possible to drag a tab out onto another screen if you’re actively using two of the documents at once. Popup windows don’t get associated with the document that opened them.

Launching and quitting the Web Application

If I want to do banking, I’d like to launch my bank’s application from my Dock (actually I use Overflow) just like my other apps. When I’m done, I’d like to exit my banking application with ⌘Q.

In the browser, there is a very different way to accomplish this. I’d either find a bookmark (which would be mixed in with browsed pages) ar I’d put something in my toolbar, or just start typing a URL. I usually find the latter is the quickest, which is kind of dumb because I’m typing a lot of characters to get to this place I go all the time. Then I probably have to navigate to my personal account login, which is another dreaded pageload or two. When I’m done, I have to log out.

Security

A big problem with my online banking is that my bank’s session is stored as state in my browser. If I load a URI from my bank site, it’s treated as authenticated. But what if I’m browsing a page with an image in it like

http://mybank.com/account/transferMoney?toAcct=012345&amount=100.00

and my browser requests that? It will send along my session cookie and give you $100 from my account. That’s dumb. My bank’s application shouldn’t be running in a shared environment with untrusted stuff I’m reading online, it should be a separate app and if it wants to use cookies and HTTP, great, but they should live in the banking app only.

Interacting with the rest of the computer

This is a problem Adobe AIR and others are trying to address with the “Rich Internet Application” concept. I should be able to drag files into GMail to attach them, have my webapps give me Growl notifications, have them add things to the MenuBar, and so on. Maybe they should be user-scriptable in Greasemonkey, like you’d do with Applescript on a Cocoa app. To me, this is actually the least compelling problem with web applications, mostly because apps that need to do these things are delivered as Rich-client apps already.

There’s also the issues that Mark Finkle writes about: the web application should probably run in its own process, and doesn’t need all that extra chrome or toolbars. I get most emphatic when I talk about the Back button. It’s based on this idea that you’d like to return to the document you were viewing when you followed the link that brought you here. Web developers go to lots of trouble to try to make the back button do something reasonable in a web application. Why is it even there???

The Solution

Site-specific browsers are the best way to resolve all this. The web application doesn’t have to change – my bank doesn’t need to be involved to fix this problem. We just need a convenient way to spin up a Webkit into a little standalone app.

Here are a few approaches:

• Gabe’s Browsair turns a site into an Adobe AIR application
• Some Google apps have been turned into Mac apps: Mailplane, GCal.app
• Mozilla’s Prism (previously WebRunner)

None of this has really caught on, as far as I can tell. I have been on this bandwagon for several months and I haven’t seen it go anywhere. This needs to get solved!

Dear Al Gore:

We still haven’t shown people that global warming matters to them in a real, present way. And they’re not going to take action until it gets bumped a little higher on their subconscious priority list.

Let’s make a cartoon short, showing the changing of the seasons in 100 or 200 years. Maybe there are some trees that stay fixed throughout the cartoon, and we start with fall when they drop their leaves quickly. Then there’s a wet, sloppy winter with occasional deep freeze spells. Spring rolls around and there’s some chirping of birds and little green sprouts sprouting. And then summer arrives, with the distorted optics of heat from the oven, and burning, screaming children running by.

It’s a little grotesque, but you can do that in cartoons – Southpark has demonstrated that.

Irony

Look for a blog post about this
Originally uploaded by AlexEagle

I was opening this DVD late one night, and as you might expect, I was very excited to see Owen Wilson in a war movie. Turned out to be an awesome movie.

The packaging, on the other hand, was un-awesome. I don’t open a lot of DVDs, since the movie fairy drops things in my computer from time to time. The amount of work I am forced to do, just to open something I purchased, is insane. The cellophane is shrunk-wrapped in such a way that there’s no handhold to get the tearing process started. Then, these serious stickers are on THREE sides of the case before it can be opened.

So, the irony is that the security device is “enclosed”. Is stealing DVD’s really such a giant problem? It’s hard to imagine that I could open all this packaging in less than 3 minutes and steal the disc out of it. Maybe the enclosed security device is an RFID that can get picked up at the front door.

But, just like the classic joke about the best contraception for trumpet players*, what this DVD packaging really does is make me less likely to buy something so unpleasant to own. Even once I get this disc in the player, I’ll have to wait for whatever junk at the beginning that’s flagged as “non-fast-forward-or-jump-to-menu-able”. When you compare this experience to my alternative, it’s just silly that someone would pay more for something of significantly less value.

* (their personalities)

IMAP, how I missed you!

Dear GMail,

I’m leaving you because you didn’t fulfill me the way a real mail service can. It was great that you were free, but free POP3 doesn’t fill that spot in my heart the way a paid IMAP can. Back in college, I promised to be forever faithful to IMAP, but you were sexy, and I needed a mail agent so badly, it was easy to fall for you.

This morning, I knew I made the right choice. I flipped through my mail on my phone on the way to work, and deleted some things, and when I got to my computer at my desk, the mail was deleted. My drafts and outbox are on the server too, so I can start an email on my phone and finish it later.

I know, you expect me to use your interface. I’m supposed to use my browser when we hook up. Even with beer goggles, I’m sorry to say, you weren’t hot, so I was using native mail apps whenever we talked. I can’t even tell you how frustrating it could be when my three mailboxes that you touched your POP3 would get their own separate copies of mail. I think my other friends were upset about our relationship, too, because their messages would get lost in one of the inboxes that I couldn’t keep up with.

I know, you wish I could see through the protocol to who you really are… but I can’t. I’m so sorry, and by the way, please forward my mail to my new IMAP account. That way I don’t have to tell anyone we broke up.
-Me