My friend Jason saw Surviving Eden and reviewed it here. Give it a read.
I didn't go to San Francisco this weekend after all, so I was able to catch the beginning of the SBIFF. Every year, I forget how bad the weekends are. There are far too many people trying to get into the shows. The lines are completely chaotic, the volunteers are overwhelmed, and no one knows what the hell is going on. I showed up to one show more than an hour early and still didn't get in. Most frustrating. But things will be much better tomorrow, after the tourists go back to LA.
I read an interesting post yesterday about Ruth Reichl's recently published Gourmet Cookbook. While it was a mammoth reference work full of excellent content, its readers were up in arms about the (disturbingly familiar) color scheme. Apparently the yellow accent color was impossible to read under kitchen-light conditions. An illuminating example of how monitor-perfect design can completely fall apart in the real world.
Hopefully no one is trying to read my blog while making coq au vin.
I saw Dinner Rush recently. This was actually a SB Film Fest movie from 2001 that I passed up at the time. Very bad cal on my part. It turned out to be a great little movie. Highly recommended, especially if you dine out very often. It offers a great snapshot of what goes on in the kitchen of the nice restaurant where you had dinner last weekend.
This was a good and enjoyable movie for the first ninety-five minutes of its one hundred minute length. The last five minutes turned it into a kick-ass movie. I'd love to talk about the ending, but I won't spoil.
It's been on IFC lately, so you may still be able to catch it. (Oh, wait. I checked the listing. It's actually on tomorrow.)
In the spirit of fairness, I signed up for the SocialText thirty-day free trial.* So far, I've just logged in to look around, so I'm a long way from a comprehensive review. But they do have some nice features.
I think my favorite thus far is the "quick edit." Basically, when you click on the link to edit a page, it immediately switches to the edit window without reloading the page (thru DHTML trickery). Likewise when you preview the page: the interface changes without a page reload. Your new content is rendered and loaded through a remote call while the enclosing page stays static. It makes for a very fast, very smooth experience. I like it.
As someone [ed: need reference] said recently, GMail and Google Suggest (see how it works) have really raised the bar on Web user experiences. If you're not planning on some complicated javascripting and XMLHttpRequest remote-calling, your web application is going to feel old-fashioned pretty soon.
* It's a shame that SocialText only offers a thirty-day free trial. I'll never be able to pay the money for a real SocialText license (at least, not as an individual). But I do want to see how they continue progressing over more than just the next month. Which is why I think they (as well as JotSpot,) need an open demo site.
I think I'm heading up to San Francisco this weekend with some friends for Ashley's birthday. I'll be missing the first two days of the Santa Barbara Film Fest, which has been a highlight of every year I've been here. But they show most of the movies more than once, so I should be able to catch everything I want to see when it comes back around later in the week.
In any case, I've already looked over the schedule for the first few days and I didn't notice many films I'm dying to see. I'm worried that the roster isn't as good this year as it has been in years past. But it's awfully hard to judge from a single paragraph description. One sort of has to take one's chances and trust in the fact that the films have been consistently great.
But a weekend in SF should be a blast. We're staying here. We don't have much of a plan yet, but Ashley's never let that stop her before.
This post from Ed Sims dovetails nicely with what I wrote last night about designing the blank-slate phase for your app. He reminds us that your software only has one chance to make a first impression.
So while you spend time building some great features and making your product more scalable, do not forget to spend time, lots of it, in the areas that customers touch and see. This means making the install process as easy as possible (this is where appliances can help in many cases) and making your GUI intuitive and easy to use.
So put some thought into how your software appears and behaves straight out of the box.
I haven't had a lot of time to play around with JotSpot yet. But I did login and poke around a little. As I was doing so, I was reminded of a couple of posts (1, 2) that 37Signals' Jason Fried wrote on the 37Signals blog, Signal-vs-Noise.
Jason wrote about the challenge of designing an application's "blank-slate" phase — what it looks like before the users have added any data. Jumping around a new wiki application for the first time, I was stuck by how important this step is, particularly for wikis.
There's a new book out called The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business. The website is here. The author's blog is here.
It was reviewed today on Slashdot. Judging by what I read in the review, it seems to make a even broader and more formal case for some of the behaviours for which I praised Atlassian at the end of this post. It's nice to see this idea articulated as a coherent and consistent intellectual framework. I feel strongly that openness should be our default choice. We should only limit information where there are specific, real reasons to do so.
Consider it added to my reading list.
Tim Bray points to this unspeakably brilliant Wikipedia page.
And then John Udell follows up with a screencast showing how this particular page has evolved. If you were ever curious about just how a wiki works, then you should watch this movie.
I love it when encyclopedias are funny.
Jonathan Nolen 