Trying out the brand new Yaika service today, freshly delivered from my friends in Estonia.
The sky outside my window...
Yaika is a "lifestreaming" application, a mashup of videostreams, audiostreams, blogs and much else, all wrapped up in a very fresh and attractive design.
For such an ambitious and complex service, it is quite remarkably stable and glitch free.
Give it a try - it's fun!
I frequently find myself writing about the mobile and web interface of Playyoo, and other services and products. But the fact is, Playyoo's mobile interface is a web site, styled for mobile phones, and Playyoo's "web site" can, at least in principle, be accessed using a mobile device powerful enough to support it.
The distinction, clearly, is not in the technology, but in the type of user activity we're trying to support in each case. The mobile interface is strongly tuned to deliver the right content quickly, and to bypass conventional search mechanisms. The "web" interface is designed to support a more engaged. more complex set of activities, and in many ways is the auxiliary interface in Playyoo (as opposed to, say, mobile Facebook or mobile Flickr, which, whilst useful, are essentially heavily watered down token efforts).
The term "mobile" can equally well describe the user's situation as well as the target device. But "web" is far less specific, and implicitly it means "the user is sitting in front of a computer with a large screen and a broadband connection". And more and more this is going to become a very shaky assumption.
So what's the opposite of "mobile" ?
I've just read Joshua Porter's book, designing for the social web, in under 1 day. I wish I had had it to hand 1 year ago. Porter manages to pack a huge amount of insight and great advice into under 180 pages. His style is easy to read and concise.
I've discovered quite a few new tricks which could be, and should have been, incorporated in Playyoo. I'm also relieved to say that I discovered a few things we've done right, or at least not too wrong.
In the whole book, I only found one thing I disagree with. Discussing user feedback, he says:
Actually, there is a third choice. If you really don't want to succeed, you can disagree with the feedback.
This, I think, is a little extreme. It also conflicts with the idea that any product, including a web application, benefits from a strong vision. Obviously, disagreeing with all feedback would be plain stupid, but I can't quite accept that all feedback is relevant.
Anyway, this is a minor point. Designing for the social web is a great little book, and deserves to become a classic. Highly recommended.
I'm trying to get Movable Type 4 back under control, as a first step towards making some desperately needed bug fixes and updates to this site. I've gone back to using default templates (not an easy process in itself), so that I can start to use MT properly rather than fight with it.
At least, now, I hope that comments work again. Sorry.
I've been working a lot in the last few days with the new Mac version of Microsoft Powerpoint, and I have to say I am really impressed. Unlike most Mac heads, I never really got on with Keynote, mainly because it seems to be principally designed to make Apple corporate presentations. And nice as they may be, they're not for everyone. The biggest issue I have with Keynote is that it seems horribly complicated to create your own templates. In old versions of Powerpoint, this was not too difficult, although of course creating and using multiple masters was arcane to the point of absurdity.
But Powerpoint 2008 is a huge leap forward. Apparently, it can't do transitions as well as Keynote, but frankly, transitions are about as hip as (old) Powerpoint clip art. Powerpoint 2008 is beautifully integrated with OS X, runs smoothly, and has some really killer features. It is fun to use and inspires creativity, not "death by Powerpoint". It's worth the price of an Office 2008 upgrade, easily. How better can I put it ?
Amazing that the same company can turn out something like Vista...
