Fort Totten, originally uploaded by combustionchamber.

waiting patiently, originally uploaded by combustionchamber.

corridor, originally uploaded by combustionchamber.

What could this post be about? Michael blasting Microsoft again?
Yep.
They make it too damn easy for me. This bit of exhaust has to do with the new ‘vision’ piece for 2019 posted over at istartedsomething.
Microsoft has a vision for things in 2019 and it involves lots of touch screens and e-ink – all networked together. That’s great. And the film short is beautifully produced. It reminds me of of The Island and Minority Report combined with a good helping of Target – all mixed together.
The vision piece is the easy part. A lot of other companies could have produced something similar. The hard part is applying that vision. Maybe if another company were proposing this vision I might have an easier time believing it was possible, but not Microsoft.
This is a company who originally claimed Longhorn (aka Vista …aka Windows 7) would have 3-D rendering within the OS because, you know, 3-D immediately makes thinks better (that pesky 2-D Exposé on OS X sucks!).
Steve Jobs nails it when discussing concept cars in a Time magazine article from 2005:

“Here’s what you find at a lot of companies…You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! …What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

When Jobs took up his present position at Apple in 1997, that’s the situation he found. He and Jonathan Ive, head of design, came up with the original iMac, a candy-colored computer merged with a cathode-ray tube that, at the time, looked like nothing anybody had seen outside of a Jetsons cartoon. “Sure enough,” Jobs recalls, “when we took it to the engineers, they said, ‘Oh.’ And they came up with 38 reasons. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of begrudgingly did it. But then it was a big hit.”

arc90 lab

Danka Studio

A little late to post this, but my copy of The Feltron 2008 Annual Report arrived a few weeks ago.
…and it is lovely.

I’m not quite sure why I’m doing this, but I thought I would open up my stats to everyone, at least for a little while. There’s a little checkbox in Mint letting you do this. Shaun Inman must have put it there for a reason.

They’re not too impressive, but I know there’s stats junkies out there like me who might enjoy them.
Statistics for Daily Exhaust (and The Combustion Chamber)
Update: To clarify, Mint is only tracking pages I have added the mint code to. It works the same as Google Analytics.

Safari launched Safari version 4 Beta on Tuesday. There’s some good things and bad things about it.
I won’t go through every facet of the update (you can find a list on Apple’s site). I’ll be focusing on the features that stand out to me the most.

Tabs

Tabs are the most obvious UI change in Safari. In version 3 and earlier, Safari had inverted tabs placed below the address (and bookmarks) bar.

before:

Now, tabs are integrated into the top window bar and serve 2 functions:
– a draggable bar to move your application window around
– a group of individual tabs you can cycle through
after:

the bad: Because the top bar is now serving a dual function, it’s harder to focus/select an individual tab. This is because Safari’s first response to an interaction (click/press) with the top bar is to treat it as an application window you can drag. If the interaction hierarchy were flipped, and tab selection was first priority, window dragging would prove to be nearly impossible.
While you can focus a tab by carefully clicking anywhere on the bar, it takes a few tries, unless you start to train yourself to move straight to the right corner of a tab, where you’ll see the ‘grip’ lines.
Bottom line, Fitt’s Law is being comprimised.
the good: On a positive note, about 20 pixels of vertical screen real estate is gained with the combined browser/tab bar. Economy of space is a great thing and it’s especially relevant on laptops.

Web Inspector – Design Consistency & Data Visualizing

A great feature that I probably won’t be using very much is the Web Inspector. For developers out there that use programs like Firebug within Firefox, the Web Inspector will look very familiar. It allows you do to look behind the scenes of a given page and view the HTML and style sheets as well as see how quickly all the elements within a page load. Coupled with the Activity window, it’s a great way to debug websites.

Like all things Apple, its not only how well the Web Inspector works that makes it great, but how well it’s visually designed. When I toggled from Elements view to Resources view, I was again pleasantly surprised to see that they had appropriated repurposed the iTunes Resource visualizations for the iPod and iPhone:
Web Inspector – Resources:

iTunes – iPhone capacity:

RSS Feeds

I don’t get the option to choose what application/service I want to use to read feeds when I click on the RSS icon in the address bar. Firefox gives me the option to choose Google Reader.

What happened, Apple?!

Address Bar & AutoComplete

This is the clincher for me. Safari 4 Beta does not let you type in any part of the address, or title, of the site you want to go to. This has become an integral part of navigating the web for me and the best improvement from Firefox 2.

It’s a feature that’s easy to overlook until you don’t have it anymore, then you realize you can’t live without it.

Summary

Safari 4 is in many way’s a solid step up from from Safari 3. Nothing feels broken or incomplete, and it is dramatically faster (as reports have claimed). Along with the autocomplete issues, the lack of add-ons is the only other major drawback that’s keeping me from switching from Firefox 3. Adblocker, Delicious, Tabs Open Relative – sure I only have 3 add-ons, but they make a world of difference when browsing.

For the non-techie user, Safari is an excellent choice.
It’s like a Porsche without power windows and door locks – sure they’re drawbacks, but the car still drives like a dream.

Who gives a shit if Obama’s speech is good? We all know he’s an amazing speaker.
How about we focus on how he presides over this country?
You know, how he actually does his job, not on what he wants to do.

Editorial: Ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark
Great recap on why Windows Mobile 6.5 blows:

At a distant glance some of those updates seem pretty neat, but get up close to them. The swiping and scrolling gestures are awkward (as noted by Chris Ziegler in his hands-on), in fact, they seem to work almost opposite of what is truly intuitive and “finger friendly.” The honeycomb menu is a glorified grid, a sign that Microsoft has gone out of its way to avoid a grid — but they fail to see (or don’t care) that regular grids make a lot of sense. They essentially fixed something that wasn’t broken.

Whether they admit it or not, I realized that Creative Labs is happy being in second place to Apple in digital media players. If they thought they had a chance to be #1, they wouldn’t be making accessories for the iPod and iPhone.
If you can’t be the greatest, be part of the greatest.

I was watching the movie Transformers last night with my wife, occasionally rattling off the names of the various aircraft that show up – A-10 Warthog, F-22 Raptor, MH-53 Pave Low…. and on and on. She asked me how I knew all these names and I explained it was the result of growing up with a father who played flight simulator & war games (OK, I played them too).
As we watched the movie, I decided to read up on these aircraft on Wikipedia, since my knowledge was very superficial. As I skimmed through a few articles I began to get really frustrated and realized why there’s people bitching about how the openness of Wikipedia isn’t necessarily a good thing.
Here’s an example from the entry on the F-22 Raptor (emphasis added):

The opportunity for export is currently non-existent because the export sale of the F-22 is barred by American federal law. Most current customers for U.S. fighters are either acquiring earlier designs like the F-15 or F-16, or else are waiting to acquire the F-35, which contains technology from the F-22 but is designed to be cheaper and more flexible.

Currently? Current to what? Granted, this entry is probably not the best since the subject of the entry is still fairly new, but at what point in the future will someone decide to update the wording to reflect events that have transpired?
While you can see when an entry was last updated, is that the best way to check on relevance and accuracy? My friend Bryan suggests setting an entry as closed after it is completed and that not be editable until a certain point in the future. While Wikipedia has explicitly policies and guidelines – the website is open and thus, errors will show up. Given the amount of entries, not all errors are going to be found in a timely manner.
Keep this in mind if you’re a teacher, student, or just someone reading up on aircraft you saw in the Transformers movie.