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  • peliom 2:20 am on October 27, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , design, , , ,   

    RSS is the New Email: A Polemic in ObjC 




    About a month ago I was going on about trying to use a newsreader to keep up with all the RSS flying around. I tried Google News Reader, hated it. I tried about 10 other RSS readers, both web based and client software (mac)… I felt like they all missed the point.

    When I’m reading RSS, I actually don’t give a monkey’s tail about the RSS. RSS is stupid, unformatted, unstyled text with no soul and even less information. The way to consume RSS coming from websites is to read it in it’s richest form: from the website itself. Some client newsreaders go a short way down this path by giving you button to open the article in your web browser. But this is totally lame. I mean, a drunk dog could open up a web browser and sit there through the World Wide Wait and sift through the blink tags and advertisements and try to read the article.

    I am happy to make the first public mention of TikiRobotReader, a Mac OS X application that (eventually) will handle RSS in a way that is not totally dain bramaged. TRR is Open Source, a Cocoa application, and a work in progress.

    The basic idea is that for a given Article, TRR will download the link to the article’s web representation and convert it to PDF so the articles are all nice and shiny and ready for your skimming pleasure, no waiting required. Here is what I want TRR to be:

    Principles of Operation

    • Simple keyboard commands everywhere. Should be operable one-handed while eating lunch.
    • RSS is disposable content. It’s not critical like most (personal) Email.
    • Read the content as presented by the website, not some random choice of Font and Color.
    • Blog posts and status messages from friends are way more important than Yahoo/CNN headlines.
    • Streamline the reading process. No nagging feelings of “should I delete this article or save it?”
    • Download and cache web pages as PDF. Zero latency when switching articles.
      • PDF loads immediately, vs 1-5 seconds for an HTML page to render
      • PDF is a static page, no blinking and bouncing flash ads and animated GIFs
    • RSS is a source of content. Provide easy hooks for the sinks: Sharing and Research.

    The current release is ugly as hell, but functional. At this point TRR is best enjoyed by running out of XCode so you can debug crashes and implement nifty features. I will be using it as my daily news reader in this fashion. But the nightly builds are functional and get the idea across. Feel free to contribute! Design ideas are helpful and code contributions are always a good thing. TikiRobotReader is meant to present RSS the way you, the discerning TikiRobot! blog reader, think is best. TRR will be a great place to implement all those Web 2.0/client features we want but can’t get anywhere else.

    Link to TikiRobotReader nightly build
    Link to TikiRobotReader SourceForge page

     

    • jamie 5:11 am on October 27, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Very nifty. I think I would prefer real HTML to PDF though. It be nice to be able to click on links in articles, as well as on the site itself.

    • rajbot 7:31 am on October 27, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Yay!!!!!!!! Congrats on the first release :)

    • may 8:42 am on October 27, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      hooray!

    • rajbot 11:21 am on October 30, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      I added code to decode html entities and char codes, because I didn’t like those &8217s that were showing up.. I also made it strip html tags.. BUT

      How would html tags get in the RSS anyway? They would have to be escaped I think.. which means I have to do the html entity decode before running the strip process, right? If so, I have more stuff to do..

      Do you have an example of html tags in an RSS feed? I’ve only heard about this, but haven’t come across any..

  • may 4:05 pm on October 19, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: design, ,   

    It’s not even halloween yet… 

    and i’m already thinking of snow.

    This neat toy was made by zefrank

     

  • may 5:55 pm on October 9, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , design   

    Spiffy! 

    spiffybox.gifThis is making me sooooo happy right now. Anti-aliased, rounded corners without javascript OR background images! Pure CSS magic!! (okay, and some PHP too :-) Just enter the background color for your site, the foreground/box color you want, and hit “Show Me the Code.” The PHP thingamabob calculates the colors needed to make nicely rounded anti-aliased CSS corners for your box. Not quite the holy grail just yet …but it’s a nicer solution until we get there.

    (actually, now that i think about it, it’s more PHP magic than CSS, cause the CSS is still cumbersome. I can’t wait til making a simple rounded corner box doesn’t take 20+ lines of code)

     

    • peliom 12:00 am on October 10, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Ridonculous

      But ya gotta do what ya gotta do. Hopefully they will add an option for a larger corner radius, but I bet that would a balloon out to hundreds of divs.

    • rajbot 9:13 pm on October 12, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      This site has a rundown of more than 45 different CSS-rounded-corner techniques..

    • may 9:44 pm on October 12, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      and people wonder why i pull out my hair. sigh. but I’m glad someone has gone to the trouble of putting that list together! :-)

    • Travis 3:57 pm on January 2, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      I love this!! I use it all the time! It’s so quick and smooth!!

  • may 4:40 pm on October 9, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: design,   

    My favorites are nasty, selfish, and horse puke 

    misprinted1.gif

    A lovely collection of scribbly scratchy fonts, free for your downloading pleasure.

    (via del.cio.us)

     

  • peliom 10:53 am on October 4, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: design, , ,   

    Come See Mang’s Exploratorium Exhibit “Three Drops” Today 

    Time: 12pm
    Place: Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA
    Ditch that corporate job for a while and come check out an Exploratorium exhibit that Michael Ang helped create. It’s called “Three Drops” — an interactive video piece where you can play with water at three scales: molecular, a single drop and … ??? come find out!! I love mang’s stuff and I can’t wait to see it.

    Link to Three Drops on Flickr

     

    • may 11:22 am on October 4, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      I wish I could go but i’m unfortunately down in p.a. today :-( oh well, maybe i will see it over the weekend.

    • Q 6:24 pm on October 5, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      This reminds me of a project I saw (in video – not in person) a few years back. I want to say it’s by Golan Levin, but the google, it does nothing.

      I wish I could make it up to check it out. This is right up my alley – except for the artistic and “actually working” part.

      mq

  • may 1:20 pm on October 3, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , design,   

    This is what we look like! 

    tikirobotDandelion.gif

    according to this neat applet that lets you visualize your website as a graph. I forget what these types of graphs are called (tree graphs? it looks kind of like a dandelion to me) Anyways, here’s what the dots represent.

    blue: for links (the A tag)
    red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
    green: for the DIV tag
    violet: for images (the IMG tag)
    yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
    orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
    black: the HTML tag, the root node
    grey: all other tags

    Some graphs for other sites are over here.

    (via Drawn!)

     

    • peliom 5:18 pm on October 3, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Oh my goodness we don’t have nearly enough <TR> tags!!! This just won’t do. I’m going to go make a few hundred tables.

  • peliom 4:13 pm on September 29, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , design,   

    Crashes in WebKit: Dodge or Parry? 

    I love WebKit. It allows you to embed an HTML view anywhere in your app. It’s an HTML view that behaves exactly like Safari because …. well, Safari uses WebKit. Having a fully functional HTML view is an important part of almost any modern application. Unfortunately though there are some bugs, some of them crashing bugs, especially if you use WebKit in a way that is outside the common path that Safari uses. And these bugs won’t be fixed for most users until Leopard ships next year.

    Here is an example. I was debugging this for many hours. Somewhere a piece of the WebView is getting over-released and causing a crash. This type of bug is notoriously hard to analyze and fix. I thought it was in my code, but it turns out it was in WebKit.

    2005-07-24 01:29:26.070 macbook[4264] *** Selector 'release' sent to dealloced instance 0x8faf1e0 of class WebHTMLView.
    Break at '-[_NSZombie release]' to debug.
    2005-07-24 01:29:26.086 macbook[4264] *** -[NSAutoreleasePool dealloc]: Exception ignored while releasing an object in an autorelease pool: *** Selector 'release' sent to dealloced instance 0x8faf1e0 of class WebHTMLView

    So what can I do? A major feature of my application is downloading a load of web pages and converting them to PDF files. WebKit is a great way to do this. Well, really it’s the only way to do it. Except for the crashing part. So after giving up on fixing this over-release crash, I split out my html-to-pdf code into a separate, small command line program. It works great, and is just the thing for “defensive programming.” For example if some random web page I load has a plugin that crashes webkit, it will only crash my helper program, not the app itself. iChat uses a similar technique for video conferencing (look around for “vencoder”). My command line webkit program size is 68kb.

    So to any other developers seeing this crash, or to anyone thinking about using WebKit as a data processing tool rather than a web browser: fork off a separate process. It will save you a lot of heartache and make your application crash much less.

    Link to the WebKit Homepage

    Update! … rajbot sez:

    The great thing about WebKit being Open Sores is that you can embed the latest versions of the frameworks in your app, and set the right env variables to tell WebKit to use those instead, like the nightly Safari builds do..

    That’s a good point. I might just do that. And that way I can just fix the bugs myself if I need to… yay! :-)

     

    • rajbot 5:09 pm on September 29, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Is the bug fixed the subversion repository? I come across tons of WebKit bugs that are fixed in the repository. The great thing about WebKit being Open Sores is that you can embed the latest versions of the frameworks in your app, and set the right env variables to tell WebKit to use those instead, like the nightly Safari builds do..

    • rajbot 5:11 pm on September 29, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      P.S. WTF is wrong with our templates? Nothing is rendering correctly.

    • peliom 5:39 pm on September 29, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      I used the <code> tag which apparently doesn’t work very well. <tt> to the rescue!

    • Maciej Stachowiak 3:10 pm on September 30, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      We’d appreciate it if you could check if the bug still exists with a recent nightly of WebKit, and if so, report it at http://bugs.webkit.org/

    • Tom Andersen 8:25 pm on October 23, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      I found the problem, I think. Ok so I am a little late.

      When you do the offscreen webview thing, you need to call

      [_webView setHostWindow:someWindow] on your webview. That is in the docs
      what I found was that I got your exact problem until I added the webview as a subview of the window:
      [[someWindow contentView] addSubview:_webView];
      [_webView setHostWindow:someWindow];

      Then in dealloc, remember to release everything (i was using a shared stub window so I only call removeFromSuperView.
      dealloc –

      [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] removeObserver:self];

      [_webView setFrameLoadDelegate:nil];

      // remove the subview from the host window:
      [_webView removeFromSuperview];
      [_webView setHostWindow:nil];
      [_webView release];

      Also like the seperate task idea. My problem was that I am already in a ‘helper’ task!

      –Tom

  • may 7:42 am on September 21, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , design, ,   

    PARK(ing) Day 

    sf_parking_5.jpg
    Today is Park(ing) Day here in SF – a day to temporarily transform a metered parking spot into a PARK.…at least until the meter runs out! Here’s an email Arena sent about it

    Today I will be volunteering to help deploy the “Temporally Displaced Open Space” in the downtown area of San Francisco — part of PARK(ing) Day. Or, to put it more succinctly, I’ll be hauling dirt with my bicycle trailer.

    If you get time today (Thursday), check out some of the installations all around downtown (one near Axis Cafe in front of CCA(c) and one in front of Ritual Roasters on Valencia). This is a one day art installation to visualize the potential of parking spaces as green spaces.

    Consult the map:

    http://communitywalk.com/map/19478

    or the website:

    http://rebargroup.org/projects/parkingday/index.html

    and please pass those links on to anybody that you think would be interested …or make a PARK(ing) space of your own, it’s an open-source project.

     

    • Travis 6:28 pm on September 21, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      This is so awesome! I’m so doing it one day! Where are the animals in the park? I would bring some dogs and a few ducks…

  • peliom 12:10 pm on September 20, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , design   

    Buy Rite is the Future! 

    Three years ago, when I had ants in my pants to start my own business , I had an idea. The idea was inspired by Delicious Library. DM had very cleverly made use of the the Mac’s iSight Camera to read in the barcodes of your DVDs, CDs and so on. All the better for cataloging your loot. “But” …. I was thinking … “there are cameras on cell phones too. What if you were in a store, scanned the barcode of something you want to buy with your phone and then your phone instantly showed you whether the product was made by a Sucky Company or not. Based on your own definitions of suckiness, of course.”

    I was very happy today to see the iBuyRight project, which attempts to do exactly that! (Thanks to Adam for the link).

    Unfortunately it appears there is some drama between one of the founders of iBuyRight and the UC. Down with parasitic institutions! Support Lilia Manguy!!

    Link to Lilia Manguy’s experience.

     

    • rajbot 10:29 am on September 21, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      There is no reason why the same the thing couldn’t be implemented by typing in the UPC and sending it via SMS or IM. The camera thing is useful, but really, it’s just a gimmick. SMS is enabled on many more cellphones than MMS.

      It’s bewildering that in 2006 you still can’t text a UPC to Amazon and get back Amazon’s price and average star rating.

    • peliom 12:08 pm on September 21, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Yeah, the real work is in the back-end infrastructure. Maybe Amazon just hasn’t thought of this feature yet …..

    • may 3:43 pm on September 21, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Well you can send an SMS to 41411 with AMAZON in the message followed by an ISBN # and get the list price as well as Amazon’s price for any book. Hee, you can even send an SMS with TIKIROBOT in the body :-)

    • may 4:13 pm on September 21, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      oh, I just discovered you can also text FORECAST followed by a zipcode for the weather in any city. there are lots of other keywords here!

  • may 3:44 am on August 9, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , design, , ,   

    ZeroOne in San Jose 

    zero1.jpg
    ZeroOne is an international art & technology festival that’s happening in San Jose this week so my office is taking the day off tomorrow to check it out! Since I was enlisted to organize the day out, I thought I’d post some of the things I culled over here too (these are sort of biased towards location based, sound, and telephony projects, cause well, that’s what we do at work. But there are lots of other neat projects to check out!)

    At the San Jose Museum of Art as part of the Edge Conditions exhibition

    • Listening Post
      is an “art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.” Sort of like We Feel Fine but amplified!

    (More …)

     

    • Anonymous 7:51 pm on August 9, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks for the clues of what to do!

    • rajbot 10:33 pm on August 9, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      I saw pictures and video of SRL’s Big Walker being resurrected and lost it. I can’t wait for the SRL show!!

    • may 7:49 am on August 10, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      i’ve never seen an SRL show so i’m pretty psyched too!

      oh and i’d gotten an extra ticket for arena, but now she can’t go so if you know of anyone who might want it, lemme know.

    • may 7:52 am on August 10, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      also, if you can make a day of it, the ZeroOne exhibits pass is a sweet deal! $20 gets you into all the ISEA Exhibits, The Tech Museum, and the San Jose Museum of Art.

    • rajbot 9:25 am on August 10, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Yup, I know someone who needs an SRL ticket!

  • may 11:06 am on July 16, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: design,   

    A proposal for improving literacy 

    This could very well beat seeing your name in crackers.

    tikirobot_bodyFontSm.jpg

    No serifs mixin with san-serifs here so this should get by the Family-Friendly-Traditional-Values committee no? :-)

    You can get your own name or check out the whole alphabet over here.

     

    • rajbot 9:58 pm on July 17, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      TikiRobot begrudgingly supports homotypography if it means improving literacy. But remember the Slippery Slope! So wet and well-lubricated. Mmmm… homotypography..

      Some statistics:

      One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Many do not even graduate from high school.
      58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
      42% of college graduates never read another book.
      80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
      70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
      57% of new books are not read to completion.

  • may 11:43 am on July 13, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: design   

    An ingenius logo 

    a-style.jpg

    potentially not work safe. only if you stare at it long enough.

    (via anil, the jay-z of blogging)

     

  • may 5:49 am on July 10, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , design,   

    Bio Mapping 

    biomap

    This looks interesting. Bio Mapping is a project by Christian Nold, an artist in London, that “allows the wearer to record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)… a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location.”

    This can be used to plot a map that highlights points of high and low arousal. By sharing this data we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.

    David Smith, a writer for the Guardian, has an account of how it works over here. Maps like this become even more interesting I think when you begin to overlay information from other maps like this one.

    (via SmartMobs)

     

  • may 12:04 am on June 21, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: design,   

    we feel fine

    We Feel Fine is by far the most beautiful and inspiring thing I’ve seen on the internet in years….it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen anywhere in a really long time! In short, the project visualizes a live database of several million feelings scraped from weblogs on the internet every 10 minutes, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings each day.

    We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”….once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence…

    The feelings are organized in a series of different visual “movements” and each sentence is linked back to its original blog post for context (which is both disturbing and comforting at the same time). “Murmurs” in particular, reminds me a little of Slide…a ticker of expressed human emotions that can even be focused down to very specific ones (and filtered by age, gender, weather, location and date). I’d launch the applet and play with all the movements for a while before reading the statement and methodology behind the project, if only because it really is mesmerizing and best experienced without too many a priori notions i think.

     

    • rajbot 11:20 am on June 21, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Very slick implementation! I love the ‘mounds’ view. Maybe the coolest applet ever written :)

    • may 12:11 pm on June 21, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      that’s my favorite view too! i think i’m going to get a projector and have the whole thing projected on a blank wall in my apartment. it’s one of those things i’d never grow tired of looking at :-)

  • peliom 11:45 am on May 19, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: design,   

    Accidental Design Perfection 

    This document came up as a search result for “screensaver security.” It’s the quintessential LOL. The layout is perfect, the fonts are flawless, the NSA seal is in color. You think it’s a joke but it’s not a joke.

    Unclassified indeed.

    Link to the PNG screenshot and the original PDF (3mb)

     

  • may 10:56 pm on May 18, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: design   

    medical id bracelet 

    bracelet

    My friend Doria was visiting from New York last weekend and gave me this bracelet that she designed and made with a laser cutter. This one is made of rubber but she also made these beautiful leather ones as prototypes for a medical ID bracelet (for a class at NYU). Here’s more info on her project.

     

    • rajbot 7:30 pm on May 19, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      These are cool!

      It seems your friend is the same program as mang! small worlds :)

    • kelly 5:26 pm on October 9, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      I was googling medical id and came up with your friends bracelet. I actually go to the corcoran school of art n design and am doing a project on womens medical issues- does she have a website/blog other than that one page with current contact info?

    • kimmie 10:13 pm on August 14, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      i would love to get one that looks like this. it’s a medical bracelet a would actually wear. is there a place she sells them or was it just an idea?

    • may 9:35 am on August 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Hi! She doesn’t actually sell them unfortunately but if you liked it you might also like the pieces made by Nervous System. They use a similar technique and sell their pieces on Etsy and on their website. http://www.tikirobot.net/wp/2008/09/29/radiolara-necklace/

    • Jana 7:03 am on April 5, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Hi there,
      well, im diabetic as well and i was looking for something to wear, but everything really looks bad :D
      is there anything new with your friend?
      Is there a way how to get such bracelet?
      Looking forward hearing from u.

    • may 10:55 am on April 5, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      She hasn’t made anymore unfortunately but I’m going to bug her today about making them! I’ll let you know if she does!

  • may 12:40 pm on April 3, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: design,   

    If you’re the least bit inclined to have words emblazoned across your chest… 

    you might consider these.

    available at busted tees

     

    • rajbot 1:06 pm on April 3, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      I totally didn’t understand that Tom Is Not My Friend shirt, so I had to google it. Apparently it’s a myspace thing.. Here is an explaination, as well as a Friend of Tom shirt:

      Newbie Myspace users are immediately friends with Tom, whether they like it or not. He doesn’t ask to be friends, he just asserts himself and gets right in there. Tom is just that kind of guy, he assumes you are into him. Sorry Tom, I got enough friends…

      I can’t believe MySpace users would pay $18 for a Tom Tshirt. I have a silkscreen.. we totally need to milk this.. If only we knew more about myspace…

    • may 2:19 pm on April 3, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      yeah, I’m pretty embarrassed that any of this occupies any part of my brain. sigh.

  • bobslobster 7:21 pm on March 18, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , design,   

    Phonecall for Tasty! 

    Need to tell your friends about that sweet lobster harmonica you just bought? If only the phone on this shirt was for sale.

     

  • rajbot 12:10 am on March 18, 2006 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: design, ,   

    Squirrels are Nature’s Ninjas! 

    I always knew squirrels were sneaky creatures of the night, but this tshirt proves it!

     

    • rita 8:26 pm on March 22, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      ive been warring with the squirrels in my yard … i shake my stick at them in anger, but they dont seem to care. the squirrels in this neighborhood have pot bellies … im serious.

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