Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:09 pm on 1/28/2008
I’m not sure what it is about AppJet. Did it really make it more possible for me to say, truthfully, unto you on this day that I made a web application yesterday? Or does it just make it feel more possible, and I could have done it just as easily with some other batch of technologies? I don’t know for sure, but when I think about writing login code, again, I get all angry, so I suspect the former.
AppJet is itself a web application, one that gives you a single text field in which to write another web application. You do this entirely in JavaScript, using some extras they’ve added to do stuff on the server. JavaScript is my favorite language, and it’s lovely both to see it get the respect it deserves in recent years, and to be able to use it to bang out web sites that do stuff. So far, I’ve made a few things: the first and simplest is MarkdownMe, an insta-service for taking text marked up (um) with Markdown and rendering it as HTML - techs out there should feel free to use this in Greasemonkey or Enso commands, as I’m doing. Another is an ongoing wiki project, which started as my first big AppJet experiment (MarkdownMe was spun off from it) and is becoming a testing ground for some wacky wikis-and-group-forming ideas I’ve got.
And the most recent is The Bucket of Truth, an electronic-wallet app I built solely because dammit, I needed it. It does exactly what’s necessary (except for the parts I haven’t built yet… I guess those are not so necessary) to track my spending against a monthly entertainment budget, and it does it fast, with no damn styling that just borks up my Treo anyway. I totally love it. And I really did write most of it yesterday.
In other nerdy news: as long ago as 1999 I was trying to build a web-based outliner - a simple one, not all mind-mappy or oriented around lengthy text notes, but just like the most basic single-level outlining you can do in a tool like OmniOutliner or Radio or Word’s outline mode. In 1999, JavaScript in the browser just wasn’t quite up to the task. Well, now the tools have matured, and after a 2.5-year break, it’s on again in a big, big way. The goal is to have something up for you to play with before the summer. In contrast to the Bucket, it is suave and handsome. Drop me a line if you want to get early access.
Lastly, Fictionsuit recently changed servers; in the future it’s going to be a testing ground too, for some thoughts I’ve been having about forums. Big, big thoughts. More on that soon.
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 11:08 am on 1/16/2008
Enso is now freeware. If you run Windows (and there have been allegations of a forthcoming Mac version, although Quicksilver is very good), you need to give this a try. You’ll never know how much time and attention you are wasting in your Start menu if you don’t. And don’t worry, you’ll still have access to something Caps Lock-like - it just won’t trip you up if you fat-finger Shift or Tab, ever again.
The theories behind Enso come from the work of the late Jef Raskin, who more or less created the Macintosh interface. After that went the way it went, Jef left Apple and went on to take ideas from the Mac and combine them with ideas from the command-line world, as well as some rather lovely new ideas like quasimodes, into the legendary, commercially failed machine the Canon Cat. (For a taste of why the Cat was loved by its users as well as why it was discontinued, take a look at Raskin’s open-source project Archy. Not very beautiful, indeed forbidding-looking, but run the tutorial video and its power becomes clear.)
The theories are Raskin’s, but the code behind Enso comes from his son Aza and his now-ex-colleagues at Humanized. As you can see from the Humanized website, the mistake of neglecting appearances was not made again in Enso. It is as gorgeous as it is snappy and resourceful. And unlike the first-glance inscrutability of Archy, Enso is simple - it pulls one salient idea, that of “leaping,” from the elder Raskin’s work and snaps it right into Windows as though it’s always been there. (Note that the actual “leaps” from the Cat and Archy are full-text searches, which Enso doesn’t do.)
Aza Raskin and his co-Ensoers are (mostly) now employees of the Mozilla Corporation, specifically of Mozilla Labs. Labs is already getting up to a lot of interesting stuff, and it is about to get a lot more interesting. I hope that Enso development doesn’t completely abate, or that we get something in a similar vein but even more awesome.
(Want more UI thoughts? Here’s a video of Aza Raskin doing a tech talk at Google. If that doesn’t grab you, root around some more in the Humanized weblog. And, I am sorry I was away. To quote Ze Frank, I didn’t forget about you, and I like you.)
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:31 am on 10/16/2007
Remember Fictionsuit? Yeah, me neither. Well, now you can make your own projects!
Enjoy! And do not ask me for new features.
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:51 am on 9/10/2007
A friend asks me, not judgmentally but apropos of nothing, “What kind of parents will World of WarCraft players be?”
Besides absent, you mean? Well. There are those people who seem to feel that having a child is the ultimate in avatarism - that is, that same impulse that keeps people paying Blizzard $14 a month so they can point at their character and say “look how awesome” is clearly operational in child-rearing amongst stage mothers and other railroaders, with the showbiz auditions and/or med schools and law careers of their children taking the place of elite-level mounts. The rest of the MMORPG phenomenon is harder to map to parenting on these terms, and truthfully, I don’t find parents in particular very interesting. I mean, I like my own parents fine, they’re interesting. And yours are too, I’m sure; look, that’s not what I meant by “particular,” really, I just - oh, just go to the next paragraph already.
See, parents are only one of the many conduits through which kids learn to be human beings. Teachers are another big one, and television is too. And now, yep, computers, networks and games are a huge and growing part of it. So let’s switch gears completely and talk about the psychology of achievement, and the way WoW and games like it (reaching all the way back to the roots of Dungeons and Dragons in the late ’70s) exploit our basic drive for status.
A friend who wishes to remain anonymous puts it this way, in a post about friends who get nothing done due to a WoW habit:
And I extend my loathing to Blizzard, which must know exactly what it’s doing, too, since they work so hard on making that nothing feel like something. Not just through game design, but through emphasis on a meta-game that helps assure its addicts that it is a meaningful activity, a dynamic social interaction, a shared artwork that all its players participate in. I declare this to be a colorful icing of bullshit that masks the endless grinding, the overlapping missions, the constant pleasurable stimulus to the I’m-getting-better-and-stronger register that is the heart of MMORPG play and the reason that it’s very easy to keep at it for hours and hours.
(Emphasis mine.) Huzzah, psychology of non-achievement. On which subject: here’s a book called Generation Me (found via danah), all about the pitfalls of a self-esteem-focused educational system. Which sounds like a terrible thesis, at least if you’re a card-carrying member of the nurturant-parent moral model like I am. But that’s just the fallacy of the excluded middle rearing its head: as a comment on that Amazon page says, self-esteem is great and necessary for kids, when it’s based on an actual achievement - something to feel good about yourself for. It’s when self-esteem for its own sake is the prize you put your eyes on that problems start to result.
How do we bring this back around to WoW? I’m thinking it might - might - be materially better to base children’s self-esteem on virtual achievement than on no achievement at all. Replace the methodology of self-esteem at all costs (although I don’t think this methodology is really all that common anymore - at least, if they used it on me, I didn’t notice! *rimshot*) with a somewhat safe, controllable online environment in which kids can “achieve” things and build up their sense of themselves (where your “sense of yourself” literally equates to your on-screen avatar).
I mean, this’d be totally execution-dependent; for starters, if you don’t want kids to see right through the supposed achieveyness of it, thereby potentially taking you right back to square one, then you’ll have to make sure the environment in which they’re achieving things is also a tool they can feel in control of to some degree, that they have input into and help create. I’m thinking here of the desks from Ender’s Game - windows into a virtual reality that reflects the issues, fears and drives of the child who interacts with it. In short, the “colorful icing of bullshit” to which my friend referred will have to be made real. We’re obviously still a long way from that, but I think that with their emphasis on distributed story-building instead of concentrating a game’s story in the hands of the author-referee, story games are waving a hand in the general direction.
Just to drift further, a final thought: it is said (not by me, necessarily; I’m persuaded but not convinced) that men’s ways of talking tend to emphasize status differences between people, whereas women’s ways of talking emphasize connections between people. The gaming lineage that runs from D&D to WoW: all about status. By going back to the tabletop and starting to figure out how to make the game about designing the game world together, are we now inventing an entirely new, more connection-rich - and therefore more essentially female - tradition of gaming? (Boy, is this one a can of worms. I’ll have to expand on this in another post; and yes, I’ll find you a link about that central status-vs.-connection argument when I do.)
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 6:26 pm on 8/12/2007
Those of you in my Extreme Fan Club may already have noted that my site indexcards.com is no more. It was difficult to turn down an okay sum of cash for something I hadn’t used in 18 months, just to preserve my first shot at fulfilling a dream I no longer have. Onward to the future, I always say. And the future is a domain-parking ad page.
But I have preserved the old indexcards content. I created indexcards.com in 1998 and it got featured by Project Cool, which was oh nevermind, and before too long the weblog model had cemented and obsoleted my model, which, to be fair, was deliberately obtuse and arty. But even at the time of its death it was the only place I could have posted the sort of things I put there - the only purely creative space I had online. Or it would have been if the admin page had been working.
I’m going to need another one of those maybe. We’ll see if I cook something up.
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