“The people who are going to make money are the ones who are going to figure out how a guy who knows how to do something useful and doesn’t care about computer science can sit down and teach the damn machine to do something useful without having to spend four years learning to program.”
Jerry Pournelle

Good food for thought, to say the least. As a prospective computer science student, this both fascinates and worries me. On the one hand, the engineer in me is excited by the thought of creating this kind of uniformly-accessible development environment, but I also worry that if this were to come true, a degree in computer engineering would be worth that much less. I agree that programming and software development is currently somewhat of a walled garden. Anyone unwilling to spend countless hours learning the semantics and logic of seemingly meaningless code is left dependent on the output of those who are. However, it’s this specialization and difficulty of craft that leads to engineers’ high salaries. Cognitive dissonance FTL.

This week’s TWiT is definitely worth a listen, if this kind of thing interests you. They had some interesting things to say regarding natural language programming, too. It’s refreshing to FINALLY listen to an episode where they don’t spend 45 minutes talking about Twitter.

One of the most powerful things about digg is that you come and you hit a button and the number goes up by one. It’s not a question of you like it or you don’t like it, it’s just kind of if you like it, hit it. That’s really important, I think. And it also makes things more positive because it’s not about disliking things.
Daniel Burka

The idea here is that if you center a user’s interaction with an interface around a positive action, then that user is more likely to come away with a positive experience with that interface. In this way, digg focuses on the act of showing interest in a certain story or object. In this sense, there really is no negative aspect to digging. The bury feature isn’t meant to be an outlet for personal disapproval of a story. It’s meant for stories that aren’t appropriate for the site. If you don’t like a story, just don’t digg it. It’s that simple.

This simplicity has directly led to digg’s popularity. The ease with which users interact with the site opens it up to a wide audience. People may only read 20% of the words on a page on average, but plenty are willing to make a single click to show support for a story on digg.

As a side note, apparently if you bury with a purpose (i.e. specifying a story as innacurate or OK, This is Lame), your bury counts for more. Keep this in mind the next time you see a story that shouldn’t be on the homepage.

The idea of truth on the internet fascinates me. Many of my instructors in school have tended to have a serious anti-Wikipedia bent. The majority of my peers fall on the other side of the issue. Can’t say whether this is because of an ingrained technologically progressive idealism or laziness with regard to citation, but the fact of the matter is that the age of collaboration, social-software and other buzzword worthy technologies is upon us. The real questions are how they’re affecting the idea of Truth, how we’re going to deal with them, and what the future holds.

In my opinion, a middle ground must be found. I’m all for the democratization of media to a point, as long as there are enough checks and balances in the system to maintain some semblance of credibility and reason.

Services like StumbleUpon, WordPress, and the sea of social networking websites are great, but the critics of Web 2.0 have a point. At the end of the day, the majority of media in a truly democratic system is noise. For every news-worthy article submitted to digg, there are 40 spam links, 20 dupes, and 10 links to Angelina Jolie photo archives.

If the ideas I’m talking about interest you in the least, definitely check out the documentary. The post on The Next Web features another documentary which I have not yet watched by the same director, IJsbrand van Veelen, about Google. If you happen to watch either, please comment with your thoughts. I’m always interested in what others think about stuff like this.

Normally, what you want your home page to do is give is [sic] a balance between showing the user what they expect to see and attracting them to areas of your site they might not have known about but that you want them to be tempted by.
fadtastic: The New Shop Window / Home Page’s That Sell

The metaphor of a website’s home page as a storefront is a great one. Just as a shopper’s split-second glance in a store window helps determine whether they’ll soon part with their money, a user’s initial experience with a page determines its effectiveness, be it in terms of sales, influence, or branding.

The article mentions the importance of keeping the message simple, which I couldn’t agree with more. Present the necessary information in an obvious and intuitive fashion and then get out of the user’s way. The examples of Apple and Skype are very good. Both companies have always excelled at pragmatically delivering marketing dialogue.

Remember The Milk does it pretty well, too. It’s all about clearly presenting your message (what your product does, what your service can offer, what you want people to know) and leaving the fluff out.

I don’t totally agree with the inclusion of eBay as an example, though. It’s much better than it has been in the past, but still much more nervous and unintuitive than Apple or Skype. I’d be interested to see how the site would fair if they went for the Google search-box-and-button approach. That can be saved for another day and post, though.

The fadtastic article’s definitely worth checking out. There’s a bunch of other useful articles at the end of it too, for even further reading.

Constraints are a designer’s best friend. They’re signposts, not shackles. In a sense, constraints amount to the solution half-built. It is merely up to us to then realize the other half according to what these signposts indicate is appropriate. Nowhere in this concept does self-expression find any valid foothold.
A List Apart: Articles: On Creativity

While getting caught up on A List Apart, this paragraph by Andy Rutledge stuck out. I’ve always thought this without realizing it.

To many people the word “constraint” carries a negative connotation. Constraints are things like a curfew or a short budget.

But to a designer, or anyone working on a project, constraints can be godsends. They act as limitations innate to the task that narrow your focus and thus decrease the amount of overall work you have to do.

It’s like having to mow a manageable, fenced-in lawn as opposed to a sprawling field.

Since I don’t “know” Javascript, jQuery is a godsend. It allows you to take advantage of Javascript’s DOM abilities without having to write tons of code. I’m learning Java in school, so jQuery functions are well within my level of understanding.

The Problem

One quibble I have with jQuery is that pages using it often aren’t as accessible as they could be. For example, if you go to Web Designer Wall’s demo page and turn off Javascript, the demos break. In some cases you only lose the flashy animation, but in examples where jQuery allows you to slide previously-hidden content divs into view, the demos become unusable.

This is because the sliding effect is implemented by styling the elements to be hidden with display: none, effectively removing them from the page. When the jQuery function is triggered (generally by a user’s click), the element is toggled to an active state and slid into view.

So when you turn Javascript off, you’re left with the CSS display: none hiding your content.

And so I set out to find a way to implement jQuery’s content-hiding animations while retaining accessibility. In particular, I attempted to create an accessible accordion-style menu, meaning that the menu defaults to showing all content sections when Javascript is disabled.

The Solution

Since the root of the problem is that the display: none in the stylesheet hides the content, all we’d have to do is remove this line of CSS, right?

Wrong! If you do this, then the accordion loads with every section open by default, with Javascript enabled. This isn’t ideal since we’re using the jQuery effect to only show one chunk of content at a time. So, ideally we want a way to only render the display: none when Javascript is enabled.

After a bit of research and a single line of code, I’ve got a fully functional, accessible sliding accordion menu. Within the jQuery API, there’s a set of functions for manipulating a page’s CSS. Using the css() function, I was able to add the display: none to the accordion’s content paragraphs using jQuery instead of CSS:

$(".accordion p").css("display", "none");

Here’s the result:

Click to view demo

Since the paragraphs are styled to be hidden by jQuery, it defaults to display all content when Javascript is disabled. We now have the best of both worlds: the classy sliding jQuery animations and a fully accessible menu. Success!

For more information on jQuery and examples of it in action, check out this article on SitePoint and the second article in Cameron Moll’s 4-part series, The Highly Extensible CSS Interface.

The colors and layout are all but identical. The only difference is the orientation of the black and blue portions. I can’t decide whether or not it’s possible that it’s a coincidence.

A part of me wonders if it’s even post-worthy. Favicons serve a distinct purpose in making sites more recognizable and it seems someone designing a tech-oriented site (with a digg widget on the front page) would know about del.icio.us.

Is it reasonable to speculate on favicon plagiarism?

After reading the latest one on digg, I’m struck by a great revelation: these articles don’t prove a damn thing. It’s like professing to the world that you prefer Coke to Pepsi, except masquerading the article as a legitimate technology piece. That being said, the article in question is an outlier in that it goes a bit into the logistics of the case in question, as opposed to being some guy talking about how his new OS choice has increased his fertility and helped him lose weight.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu and respect anyone willing to take the time and effort to try new things. The world needs more people who are up to trying software alternatives. My beef is that the situation and opinion of other people shouldn’t influence your own. Yes, Ubuntu works for many people who like to talk about it a lot. But you may be different. Inversely, many more people are happy with Windows or OS X. More power to them.

My advice to anyone reading this is to try software alternatives and find the perfect setup for you. My view is that all of the world’s software is a giant, metaphysical toolbox in the sky. I can pick and choose between many different applications and frontends in order to finely tune my computer to my personal workflow and computing style.

Imagine that you want to write a recipe for making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Imagine that the person you’re writing the recipe for has no idea what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is, so you have to write explicitly what to do, step by step.

The resulting recipe would be very long and contain a lot of seemingly-trivial tasks that any idiot should take for granted like “find a jar in cupboard labeled ‘Crunchy Peanut Butter’” and “transfer a glob of peanut butter from the jar onto bread using a butter knife.”

To relate this example to programming, the person you’re writing the recipe for is a computer (compiler), the sandwich is a program, and the recipe itself is an algorithm. All a program is is a set of directions telling a computer what to do, step by step.

So, back to object-oriented programming… imagine now that you’re writing the same recipe for a person who knows a bit about the culinary arts. You won’t have to explicitly tell them every step. You’re recipe will be much shorter:

1. Get 2 pieces of bread, 1 jar of peanut butter, and 1 jar of raspberry jam
2. Spread peanut butter and jelly onto corresponding slices of bread.
3. Put two slices together.
4. Eat! (optional)

This is object-oriented recipe-making. You assume that the person knows what they’re doing and thus you can give higher-level instructions. In object-oriented programming, the program that you write takes advantage of already-written packages of code (called object classes), and allows you to tell the computer what to do without having to go into the nitty gritty details of every complex task.

In the sandwich example, the more complex steps of the second recipe can be abstracted as objects to be used in the sandwich-making algorithm.

Who said algorithms can’t be tasty?

The internet’s ablaze with talk of the the freshly-announced MacBook Air, so naturally I’ll speak my mind.

The MacBook Air is definitely a step in the right direction. Like almost everything else Apple touches, its industrial design resembles perfection. Smooth, curvey, and paper-thin; the thing looks slick as hell.

Also akin to everything Apple touches, it’s obscenely priced. Starting at $1800, it’s definitely the bank-breaker of the sub-laptop class. Asus’ EeePC is like $400, for comparison’s sake.

What’s amazing is that if you want to swap out the stock 80gb 4200rpm hard drive for a 64-gb solid state drive (ZOMG NO MOVING PARTZZ!!1one), it’ll cost you $1300 more. (see Apple store) I know solid state drives are new and shiny, but seriously, Apple? $3100? Sigh.

Another minor gripe, at least for some people, is that <a mce_thref=” />it lacks a user-replaceable battery. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, but something to keep in mind, knowing how wonderfully stable Apple’s history with batteries has been.

So, in a nutshell, The MacBook Air is, like the iPhone before it, a definition of “overpriced,” but exactly what the industry needs.

Hear that, Dell, HP, Sony, et al?