Jordan Hall – programmer and geek

I recently wrote an article on the company blog regarding the Apple iPad and its potential effect on the mobile web.

“The release of Apple’s ever popular smartphone, the iPhone, back in mid 2007 caused a huge development spike in websites and dynamic web applications designed the mobile devices. Of course, the vast majority of these mobile website were developed specifically with the iPhone in mind, however the results were beneficial to pretty much all smartphones with the capability the browse the web and with some form of web browser application.

So, why do I think the iPad will slow this development in the mobile web market? The iPad is a mobile device itself is it not?

Well, perhaps not. Apple’s iPad does indeed use an operating system very similar to the iPhone, with backwards compatibility with almost all of the iPhone’s downloadable apps, and yes, it is mobile in the true sense of the word – it can be easily carried around unlike a full desktop computer and much more easily than a typically larger and much heavier laptop. However, the one aspect of the iPad which stands out is its native screen resolution of 1024×768″

If you’re interested, feel free to read the full article on how the iPad may affect the development of mobile websites in the near future.

Ubuntu 10.04, currently in development, has hit the second alpha release. As a quite update, here are some of the features you can see in the Alpha 2 release of Ubuntu 10.04.

• A new graphical boot screen manager called ‘Plymouth’ which is to replace the currently used xsplash and usplash boot screen systems.
• The user menu and power/session locking menus have been split into two distinct icons, marking the first steps into the development of Ubuntu 10.04’s social networking features including the ‘Me Menu’.
• Improvements in the manner in which restricted drivers are handled allows you to now have multiple nVidia graphics drivers of different versions installed simultaneously. Activating an individual driver is then only a matter of a few click and a restart.

In terms of application changes, the PiTiVi Video Editor has been added to allow home and professional users to perform various tasks to create new videos or editing existing ones. It comes with a variety of features including different video/audio effects, time-line management, dubbing and the like. A quick screenshot of the PiTiVi video editor is shown below.

Many of the existing default games in Ubuntu are planned to be replaced over the course of the development cycle for Lucid Lynx. gBrainy is the first new game to enter the scene, and is a brain training game, which is essentially a fun and extensible logic, memory and intelligence test. It resembles, it some ways, the brain training exercises and games for the Nintendo DS.

Rhythmbox Music Player, the default music playing application which ships with Ubuntu has seen some usability improvements in the way of a new application indicator. Application indicator’s are a new attempt to standardise and regulate the difference between notification and effective quick access menus for specific applications which require or desire interaction beyond the scope of their main application windows.

On a more heavily technical side, Alpha 2 of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx brings with it the complete removal of ‘hal’, the now legacy hardware abstraction layer. The removal of hal will allow for faster boot up, shut down and improved, speedier resuming from suspend and hibernation mode.

For additional details about Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 2 and the changes it brings, see the official Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 testing page.

This article is pulled from a previous site of mine, and relates to the starting of a forum board and the negative cycle of not having enough users registered to entice new users to join. It primarily focuses around the idea of using a vBulletin plugin to artificially inflate the number of online users in a vBulletin powered forum board.

When starting a new forum board based on the vBulletin forum (or in fact an forum software), one of the most common problem is making the board popular and getting users to register. The problem most people face is that users will not register on a forum board that looks completely empty! I mean, who would?

So, how can you do this? People will not register if a board is empty – that much is obvious. I’ve recently had to artificially inflate the user count and online users for a vBulletin forum, by request of the forum board owner. Luckily, I found an excellent plugin which does just this. Not only does it increase the counts for online members and guests, but it also lists real usernames.

It is implemented by grabbing the existing member names from the database and appending them to user list at the bottom of the forum home. This plugin is very ingenius and pretty believable – good if you are starting up a new vBulletin powered forum board.

You can read more about the vBulletin Fake User plugin on this website.. Note that you will need a vBulletin.org account and a valid vBulletin license to download this plugin.

Retrospectively, I do not believe this is necessarily the best manner in which to entice new users to any form of community for it provides little motivation to join beyond the active community. If the ‘active community’ (which in this case, would not exist) produces no content worthy of the potential member’s time, why would they feel the need to register or sign up?

I have and still do run a few online communities, including vBulletin forum boards. During this time, I have found new and interesting content to the specific niche (if one exists) is the key for all forms of online social activity and indeed, for drawing in new users. If the content is interesting enough, people will come either in surges for time sensitive content or as a new member registration trickle effect over time.

I previously discussed some of the new social networking aspects coming in Ubuntu 10.04. These mainly focus on the brand new Me Menu which is a personalised menu that holds and controls all your social networking and assists with broadcasting to microblogging services. Some related changes are the new changes to the indicator applet and attached messaging menu.

Currently, in the Ubuntu 9.10 (the latest stable version of Ubuntu), the indicator applet and messaging menu looks like the following screenshot taken from my computer.

Looks relatively bland. It essentially list the current communication or social programs for instant messaging, microblogging, e-mailing and general social networking. It also list any recent communications, stating the user name of the contact you’ve spoken to recently (not shown in above screenshot). Many new improvements are planned for the next iteration of the messaging menu and indicator applet (currently at version 0.3). The following design mock up of the messaging menu emphasises the most important and visible changes for the end-user.

As you can see, there is a lot more content in the new messaging menu. One of the important points is the ability to access certain programs actions directly. So, for example, if I wanted to send an e-mail to someone, I could just click the messaging menu and hit ‘Compose New Message’ which would very easily let me start writing and e-mail without the need to find my e-mail application, start it and locate the ‘compose new message’ button, which can easily vary in location and appearance between applications. By adding this action to the messaging menu, this has the effect of not only making the option easier to find, but also – potentially more importantly – it abstracts away the specifics of the application itself and draws the focus towards the user, their desire and their content.

In my opinion, application abstraction is very important. Most users do not wish to ‘use Evolution’ or ‘use Thunderbird’, they want to ‘check their e-mail’ or ‘compose a new e-mail’. Allowing them to do this regarding of the e-mail client they use reduces the learning curve significantly. The same principle applies to many other applications, including those outside of communications, such as productivity applications. Users tend to want to ‘create a new document’, ‘draw a picture’, and ‘check a budgeting spreadsheet’ rather than ‘open OpenOffice Write and create a blank OpenDocument Text file’, ‘open image editing software and create a new blank image’ and ‘open spreadsheet application and locate/open relevant file’. Even saying the specific non-abstracted alternatives takes a long time, but essentially the users content should be priority over the application itself in the vast majority of cases. One says that work is on a spreadsheet, an image or a document and not an Excel, GIMP or Writer file.

The new messaging menu brings on this concept of application abstraction with the instant messaging system. You can see in the second and third sections of the menu, instant messaging contacts and recent microblogging activity (mocked up as messages from ’sabdfl’) are shown as independent of the application which controls them. In this case, it would be likely be Empathy (for instant messaging) and Gwibber (for microblogging) that controlled these sections, but note the application name itself in not even mentioned, as it is not relevant to the actual social actions, which again demonstrates abstraction away from the specific applications and a focus on user content.

The final two sections indicate e-mail notification from GMail and IRC conversations with XChat. In these cases, definitely so with the GMail e-mail notifications, it is relevant to display the application name as this is an important part of the relevant content itself (the e-mail account).

Hope this quite summary gives you a good idea of what changes are coming to the messaging menu and its attached indicator applet in Ubuntu 10.04. More information is available about the new messaging menu at its design specification while these is additional information about the new indicator applet available on the applet’s Lauchpad pages.

What are your opinions on the new messaging menu? Will it affect your social use of Ubuntu? Will it affect your work flow? If so, how?

Google, who brought forward the specifics of the ‘do no evil’ ideology within consumer visible software, is refusing to host an open-source project due to slight, almost humorous, modifications to its license, denying ‘evil’ use of the licensed software.

Douglas Crockford selected the MIT license for his JSMin program to reduce JavaScript code syntax in such a way to make it still functionally identical but smaller in size to enable bandwidth savings when these JavaScript files are downloaded by end-users’ web browsers. Ryan Grove continued to utilise this license for his variation of JSMin called JSMin-PHP, appropriately rewritten in the PHP language. This specific license however, contains a variation from the original MIT open-source license, as it includes the following line of text, originally inserted into the license for assumed comical value.

“The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.”

Since Google’s code hosting solution, imaginatively called ‘Google Code’ only allows hosting of code licensed under very specific open-source licenses, this single modification acts an additional condition which Google is not willing to accept. This means JSMin-PHP can not be hosted at Google Code simply due to this licensing issue.

The developer of JSMin-PHP, Ryan Groove has the following to say about this, on his blog.

“As Google (and some others) interpret it, this additional requirement constitutes a vague use restriction and thus makes the license non-free. Chris [DiBona] explained that if I were to remove that line from the license and ‘return to a proper open source license that we support,’ then jsmin-php could stay on Google Code. Otherwise, he said, ‘we can’t host you,’

… Of course, I can’t change the license, because it’s not my license. It’s Douglas’s license… All derivative works and copies of jsmin.c either include this license or are in violation of it.”

If you are using Google Code to host your project, be warned, Google are very tight on their licensing restrictions. What do you think? Valid reasoning or over the top enforcement of open-source licensing terms?