I believe I am not the only person in the world who likes to work onlywith maximized windows and Alt+Tab - there are quite a lot ofadvantages to that approach, mainly the fact that you can pull yourmouse to the upper-right corner of the screen and blindly left-click toclose it - without the need to fuss over aiming your cursor just right.
How many times have you seen this before: A window for application A isabove another and only appears maximized, but since Windows XP hasintroduced curved corners for windows, it neglects to cover thecorners. Behind application A's window is another window - application B, which really is maximized - therefore covering thecorners of the screen.
However, when you try closing application A's almost-maximized window with an upper-right corner click, the mouse-click is actually sent to application B's window, causing it to close and you, the user, to get utterly frustrated.
Unfortunately, it looks like Vista isn't going to make any great improvements there, so if you're developing a UI, please try and avoid this - when a window needs to be big - open it maximized; otherwise, please make the window, at most, with 10 pixel margins from each corner of the screen.
All you have to do is use Form.MaximumSize and set it to values received from System.Windows.Forms.Screen.PrimaryScreen.WorkingArea (for a single display system) minus the margin and save headaches from thousands.
Thank you in advance.
Portability of Customizable and/or Adaptive User InterfacesThis March my workplace issued employees a Motorola i760 cell phone, which apart from being pretty sluggish, doesn't work the same way as my personal phone, a Nokia 3100 - the menus aren't the same, shortcuts are different, and so on. What I discovered a few minutes after receiving the phone was that the User Interface was customizable, which didn't cause the phone to suck less, but only to work the same way as my Nokia did.
Customizable and adaptive user interfaces are great, but they're not something every developer does on their own accord. Most of the time, it's 'My way or the highway' when a developer designs a user interface, and since most companies don't hire designers to design their user interfaces, this might turn into a fiasco, as many of you know or
have heard about.
As with my phone, Customizable User Interfaces are interfaces that allow users to change parts of themselves using a special menu or screen chuck-full of options. Adaptive User Interfaces are interfaces that change over time in accordance with how the user interacts with them, such as Windows's Start Menu (when items you don't usually click on are hidden until you click the little arrows at the bottom).
A few days after changing the entire layout on my new phone, a coworkertried to use my phone, but due to the fact that my interface had beencustomized one way and his another and the fact that the phone presented little to no textualor graphical cues as to which button does what (unless manuallyactivated through, guess what, one of those unlabeled buttons), he was unable to do anything like he was used to, got pissed off and had to ask me how to do operate the phone.
What this means is that these types of user interfaces don't work well simply because they're not portable. When I sit on my own computer, logged in under my own username, I have no problem with the user interface - it is as I have set it. On the other hand, when I move to a different computer or even log on as a different user on the same machine, my customization is inexistent and sometimes even worse - the customization is for a different person, with their own preferences. This is a disorienting experience for most users and will usually take them more time to perform any action, as easy as it may be, which contradicts with the reason for creating such complex user interface logic in the first place.
This pretty annoying problem doesn't (or I should say shouldn't) happen in web applications, but it does in windows applications, where to date I've only seen one solution. You too may have seen it yourself - it's the 'Save my preferences to file' method, which you can find in Microsoft Office and Visual Studio, to name only two applications, but the problem with that is that you have to carry that file with you or place it somewhere where you could access it from any computer you may use.
So what can be done about this? In my opinion, the best way the problem could be solved would be to create a central server that would save these preferences (and optionally also all other configuration changes made by the user) to some database and while your application loads, it would connect to said server and download the preferences from it, depending on which user is logged into it. This, of course, does not necessitate the creation of a logon screen in your application, which would be annoying, but rather a special form that would be filled with a their own predefined username and password. Once these credentials are entered for the first time or changed, via a form that will always be accessible from the same location (you may call it the user's 'anchor' in an unknown UI), the server would be queried for the preferences and the application would transform into what the user is already familiar with.
One might argue that this solution poses a security risk, as anyone getting hold of this 'valuable' information could do malicious things with it, but this risk is also present in the current form, where the database is not centralized, but each user has their own 'configuration file' saved on their own machine. Add this to the fact that the information could be held almost anonymously and behind very powerful encryption and you have a very low security risk (I would never say there are no security issues what-so-ever as much as I will never say an application is bug-free).
This solution looks not only applicable for vendors - holding their own repository for their applications, but there may even be a few service providers that could provide a central repository for many applications by many software vendors. Payment for this service could be an agreed upon sum per-license sold (or it could even be free (as in beer)).
Getting Things Done (Book review)
Do you feel like you're not being as efficient as you could be? Do you tend to procrastinate and worry that you have forgotten something important? I'm like that, but after reading Getting Things Done (GTD) I think I have improved a little.
If you've never heard of Gettings Things Done before, it's a complete system for relieving your brain of a lot of the work it is currently doing, which will enable you to relax and as a result of that become more productive and reduce your stress level.
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read more: See you in London at @media 2006?In a few days I'm leaving for London to attend the @media conference. I hope it will be as much fun as last year was, but it's a bit different for me since this year I am one of the speakers. I'll only be sitting in on a panel (Strategic CSS Project Management), not holding a full presentation of my own. I'm still a bit nervous about the whole thing, and looking at the names of the other speakers gives me a surreal feeling.
If you're going to @media and see me standing in a corner trying to make myself invisible, come and say hi. I promise I won't bite. Well, unless you start talking about alt tags ;-). I am a very approachable kind of person most of the time, but I do tend to be a little shy among people I don't know. In other words, don't wait for me to start any conversations.
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read more: Safari brings high resolution to the WebEver used a high resolution screen? I mean high resolution as in 'more and smaller pixels stuffed into the same physical area', not just the raw pixel count -- higher DPI (dots per inch). If you are using a reasonably new Wintel laptop chances are that your screen has a higher DPI than the 72 DPI or 96 DPI that used to be the most widely used resolutions.
None of the screens I use on a regular basis are of higher than normal resoulution, so I haven't given it much thought. But the other day I used a colleague's new laptop to take a look at a prototype of a website we're building, and everything was tiny. Sure, increasing text size helps, but only for the text. The images are still tiny.
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read more: 2006 first half-year reviewHere in the faraway Sweden, not quite as close to the North Pole as some believe, we have this long-standing tradition of taking a really long vacation during our short but beautiful summer. For the last few years I have been following this tradition, and I will do so this year as well.
That means there will be very little activity here until my five week vacation is over at the end of July. There may be the occasional Quicklink, but don't expect a whole lot to happen. I'll try to stay away from the computer and spend my time reading books, working in the garden, going fishing, and being lazy in general.
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read more: Indicating language choice on the WebIf you want a summary of some of the methods you can use to make users aware that a website contains information in more than one language, check out my article Indicating language choice on the Web.
The article is published as part of the June 2006 edition of EPiServer TechNews, a newsletter aimed at developers who use the EPiServer CMS. I was first asked for permission to republish my article Indicating language choice: flags, text, both, neither?. Not being very fond of having articles republished in full elsewhere, I declined and instead offered to rewrite the article a bit.
Oh, if you read the article, please resist the urge to view source. I am told that the site will be redesigned during the next couple of months. Let's hope they drop the XML declaration they are currently inserting before the HTML 4.0 (sic) transitional doctype ;-).
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read more: Explore the DOM with FirebugA very useful Firefox extension that makes it both easy and fun to explore the DOM is Joe Hewitt's FireBug. Firebug logs JavaScript, CSS, and XML errors to a console. You can configure which errors to log, so if you don't want CSS errors in the Firebug console, just turn them off.
Want to explore the DOM of the document you are viewing? Just open the Firebug Inspector and the DOM is right there. Click the 'Inspect' button and you can use your keyboard to navigate through the DOM. Anything you select in the inspector is highlighted on the rendered page.
When your scripting doesn't work properly and you can't figure out why, use Firebug's lightweight JavaScript debugger to set breakpoints and examine your scripts as they execute.
Firebug does more than just inspect. It will also let you edit the values of existing attributes, which can be very useful when debugging. If you want to use another approach than 'alert debugging' when working with JavaScript, you can use JavaScript to write text and objects to the FireBug console.
There's more to FireBug than what I have described here, so try it out for yourself.
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read more: Use AJAX scripting responsiblySome regular readers may get the impression that I dislike anything related to Ajax and other advanced scripting. I don't. I do however dislike when JavaScript is used inappropriately and without stopping to think about whether it is actually necessary.
I know the feeling you can get when you learn or read about a new trick or technique - you just want to find a problem to apply your new favourite solution to. But a lot of the time the solution fixes a problem that doesn't exist and only creates new, more serious problems, especially when you consider accessibility.
The key is to use scripting to add value for those who can take advantage of it without causing problems for those who, for whatever reason, cannot. I like the term 'Progressive Enhancement' since it describes a mindset and a way of using technology that will help you create usable and accessible websites and web applications. Build the basics first and make sure everything (within reason) works without JavaScript, and then use event handlers to inject usability enhancing functionality.
Shaun Inman's article Responsible Asynchronous Scripting contains more good advice for web developers who want or need to use asynchronous scripting when building a web app.
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read more: Check your site with The ScrutinizerIf you like keeping an eye on how your site is doing in various areas you probably already use tools like the W3C's validator services and Alexa's Traffic Rankings, just to mention a few. But there are many other tools and services that let you study interesting trends, statistics, and technical facts for your site. In fact there are so many that it's hard to keep track of all of them, which is where The Scrutinizer comes in handy.
The Scrutinizer was created by Rosano Coutinho and is a service that allows you to analyze, assess and validate any link using various tools and testers on the web
.
I spent some time having fun by feeding the URL of this site to most of the services The Scrutinizer links to. The actual value of several services is questionable, and a couple unfortunately seem to be defunct. Of the services that were new to me, my favourite is UrlTrends, which displays ranking and link popularity trends for a page.
Do you know of any other useful online tools or testers?
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read more: CSS World AwardsAt the CSS showcase site CSS Mania, a contest is being held to select the best sites submitted during the last year (May 2005 to May 2006). Awards will be given in ten different categories.:
- Site of the Year
- Associations
- Blogging
- Business
- Entertainment
- Institutions
- Media
- Portal
- Web Design (Companies and Portfolios)
- Web Tools
As opposed to many other similar contests, the winners will not be decided by public voting. Instead five judges will vote for their favourites among the nominated sites.
As it happens, I am one of those judges. The others are Andy Budd, Cameron Moll, Molly E. Holzschlag, and Sergio Villareal. And no, sites created by any of the judges will not be included in the contest.
I will place a lot of emphasis on code quality and accessibility when I pick my favourites in each category. Appearance is obviously also important, but I'm not going to vote for a site that only looks good on the surface.
If you're not a judge you can't vote, but you can browse the CSS World Awards categories to find out which sites are nominated. Anyone here involved in the creation of a nominated site?
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read more: HTML validation with Safari TidyA great extension for Firefox is the HTML Validator extension, which uses Tidy to automatically validate the HTML of every page you open in Firefox. This extension is one of the reasons I have for keeping Firefox running all day alongside Safari, my main browser.
But now, thanks to Kasper Nauwelaerts, you can add the same functionality to Safari. The Safari Tidy plugin works in a similar way to the HTML Validator extension, but it does miss a few features.
When Safari Tidy is installed, the rightmost part of the status bar at the bottom of the browser window will display the status of each page you visit. If a page contains invalid HTML, a warning or error icon will be displayed along with the number of warnings or errors. If you view source, all errors and warnings are shown in a list and will be highlighted in the source.
This is the first release of the Safari Tidy plugin, so maybe more features will be added later. (via Veerle)
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read more: HTML vs. XHTML on standards compliant websitesFor the last few years there's been a recurring debate on whether we should use XHTML vs. HTML among those of us who care enough about markup to ask ourselves such questions.
Sean Fraser has taken a look at fifty standards compliant websites to find out which doctype they use. He presents the results (which, not surprisingly, show that the vast majority of the examined sites use XHTML) along with a discussion in Why XHTML™?.
Sean concludes the article by stating his reasons for currently using HTML 4.01 Strict:
- XHTML 1.0 is not forward compatible; XHTML 2.0 will not be backwards compatible.
- Serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml does't (sic) work in IE.
- HTML 5 purports backwards compatibility.
Only three of the fifty sites Sean examined use HTML 4.01 Strict. This site is one of those three. In the end, my view on HTML vs. XHTML is that it doesn't really matter. Just remember to write your HTML or HTML compatible XHTML with real XHTML in mind. And use a strict doctype.
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read more: Memorial Day MoviesJen and I saw two movies this weekend, one on Video on Demand and one in the actual theater. Brief reviews follow.
Napoleon Dynamite is the worst movie I’ve seen in at least six years (the benchmark being used there is The Velocity of Gary which, if you haven’t seen it, I am tempted to recommend just so we’re all using the same “absolute zero” mark). Honestly. People apparently love this movie; I cannot fathom why. Jen and I kept watching it, hoping against hope that there would be some brilliant reveal at the end to explain it. Let me save you two hours of excruciating, confused boredom: there is not.
By contrast, X-Men 3 is merely awful. Badly written, badly directed, badly acted, badly FX’ed, and—to top it all off—badly viewed, because there was something casting a shadow on the screen at the theater throughout the movie, and the world’s most ADD child seated directly behind us. (The last scene in the movie involves Magneto, the major antagonist for the entire 3-movie arc: the child’s question? “Who’s that?” If the kid isn’t old enough to remember the major villain, they may not be getting much out of the movie—just a thought.) And the “so secret the theater employees tell you about it on the way in” secret ending after the credits? Bad. If you haven’t seen this film yet, pull a Highlander 2 and pretend it never existed. On the plus side, complaining about the shadow to a manager netted Jenny a pair of free movie passes, and I snuck in an absolutely delicious rice krispy treat from Whole Foods. Unfortunately the previews (Ghost Rider, Snakes on a Plane, The Omen, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, etc) were nearly as bad as the movie.
We also saw Mirrormask recently. It was visually fascinating, but the story was remarkably passive and the ending was flat as a freshly baked crepe, which is too bad since I like most of Neil Gaiman’s stuff. I think the problem is that the passive type of story (where things happen to the protagonist, rather than the protagonist doing things) works better as a book (Jenny would say “as a short story”) than it does as a movie, at least for me.
However, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 comes out soon. Hopefully Johnny Depp doesn’t let me down.
read more: Thoughts on code audienceCP4E get's regularly noted when folks talk about expanding Pythons m???share by commencing more programmers. Similar to the 'create, don't overtake, markets' thought.
Mats Wichmann threw this discussion an appropriate curveball by asking: 'If Python is so easy for humans to program in, shouldn't it also be an easy language for programs to program in ...?'
Fredric Lundh addresses the literal issue here.
I have never analyzed code generation from UML tools before, but a comparison of model to code from a C++, Java and Python example would add insight here, although the tip of the iceburg for Mats thoughts.
Jeff Sutherland threatens: 'Therefore, American programmers must find a way to be ten times as productive or they are history', following it up with the dire need for Model Driven Development and resources. Hmmmm... Python & Java: a Side-by-Side Comparison opens with 'A programmer can be significantly more productive in Python than in Java. How much more productive? The most widely accepted estimate is 5-10 times'.
Wizards fall in there somewhere also, but are just one slice of that taxonomy. I like task automation wizards and that let me save the steps for later use, ideally in a plain text editable fashion. Which leads to...
Embedded Python for 'code that pushes applications' is also an area where python could use more face time. VBScript is a tired poster-boy, and it seems that with the latest OpenOffice/STAR Office, the window of opportunity is being addressed with Python-UNO.
Also, of note: Learning Tree's Python training is no longer supported! Many alternatives exist, including this one during October in Colorado by a University of Wisconsin graduate.
read more: CSS Reboot participants far from standards-basedWhile doing research for an upcoming article I was browsing through a bunch of sites submitted to the CSS Reboot Spring 2006. Most of the time, the little HTML Validator icon in the lower right of my status bar did not display the green checkmark that indicates valid markup. Many sites made the poor thing display the yellow warning triangle, and for several sites it even had to bring out the red icon that means there are errors that Tidy cannot automatically fix.
I would have thought that most people who have invested the time to learn CSS well enough to participate in CSS Reboot would also have spent some time learning the basics of HTML. Or, if that proved too difficult, at least run their sites through The W3C Markup Validation Service. Seems like I thought wrong. Shouldn't valid CSS and HTML be some sort of lowest level of quality control for any site that participates in CSS Reboot? Yes, that is a rhetorical question.
Sean Fraser has gone through all sites participating in the CSS Reboot of spring 2006 to validate their use of HTML and CSS as well as make note of the doctype they use. The details are provided in CSS Reboot as Web Standards Validation Indicator.
In summary: 71.8 percent of CSS Reboot participants use invalid HTML, CSS, or both. 71.8 percent! And that's on a gallery site meant to showcase web standards-based redesigns:
May 1st 2006 Rebooters simultaneously launched their standards-based redesigns
Not quite.
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read more: New Horizons Presents: Microsoft Office 2003 Tips & Tricks7/28, Waltham, MA Three convenient sessions available.
To RSVP for 9:00 AM click here. To RSVP for 1:00 PM click here. To RSVP for 3:30 PM click here.
Join us in Waltham, MA for a Microsoft Office 2003 Tips and Tricks Presentation and discover how we can all get more out of today's Office.
Learn to take control of your computer with this session reviewing the exciting new features of Office 2003. We will not only cover 90 useful tips in 90 minutes, we will leave you with a handy tip sheet with the steps to repeat what you have learned. These valuable tips will save time every day with Office.
Tips include powerful ways to get organized in Outlook, many formatting improvements in Word and powerful features in Excel for making every day tasks easier. PowerPoint has added many new and exciting features with graphic formatting and animation. Attend this lively session and be Informed, Entertained and Enlightened! “Tips and Tricks” is designed to help you understand how you can use the Microsoft® Office System more effectively to simplify the way you work and maximize your productivity. Improve your productivity, accomplish new tasks, and learn how much is now possible!
read more: Why is the style attribute allowed in strict doctypes?The strict HTML and XHTML doctypes encourage the separation of semantic and presentational markup by disallowing the use of elements such as center, font and strike, and attributes like align, bgcolor, and border. So why is the style attribute allowed in strict doctypes? And why is it allowed (but strongly discouraged
) in XHTML 2.0?
I admit that I sometimes use the style attribute. One example is when a site is designed to have a decorative photo as a background image in the masthead, and the client needs to be able to use the CMS to upload their own images. If the image is purely decorational it doesn't belong in the markup and should be specified in the CSS, preferably in an external CSS file. But doing so would require the CMS to make changes to the CSS file, which few CMSs are set up to do out of the box. Using a style attribute is much more convenient. Every time I use one I feel a bit dirty though. It's like using the javascript: pseudo-protocol or specifying event handlers like onclick inline. I'd rather avoid it.
An alternative approach would be to make the CMS write the necessary CSS to a style element in the document's head section, using a class or an id to apply it to the element that holds the background image. While not the ideal solution it will at least let you get rid of those style attributes.
After reading the above, you'll hardly be surprised that I agree with Emil Stenström: Inline CSS should not be allowed in strict doctypes. It seems like the logical choice since disallowing it would help enforce the separation of semantic and presentational markup. Then there's always the faint hope that it would send a message to those CMS vendors who are particularly guilty of sprinkling style attributes all over the markup their products produce that they are not following best practices.
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read more: Web accessibility to become mandatory in EuropeA long-running discussion related to web accessibility is whether it should be required by law or not. Some believe it is the only way of making organisations ensure that their websites can be used by everybody, while others argue that it should be up to each organisation to decide.
My opinion is that for the private sector the 'let everybody decide for themselves' argument may have some validity, but only some. Public sector websites, however, must be accessible to all, regardless of which browsing device they use or if they have a disability.
That's why I find it very interesting that on 12 June 2006, ministers of 34 European countries endorsed A pan-European drive to use information and communication technologies to help people to overcome economic, social, educational, territorial or disability-related disadvantages
.
Two of the targets of this Riga Ministerial Declaration are to ensure that all public websites are accessible by 2010
and by 2007, make recommendations on accessibility standards and common approaches, which could become mandatory in public procurement by 2010
.
Very interesting, and about time. There is a related memo (Information and communication technology for an inclusive society -- Frequently asked questions) that mentions WAI, so WCAG will probably be used or referenced in some way.
The full press release is available online: Internet for all: EU ministers commit to an inclusive and barrier-free information society.
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read more: Congress Sneaks Through Online Gambling RestrictionsLast week, Congress
dead-locked on many dangerous surveillance, IP, and other cyberlaw-related bills. But they did manage
to sneak a new online gambling ban [PDF] into the port security bill -- it's an embarrassing, disappointing instance of our country throwing its weight around online, crippling a burgeoning industry and taking away a favorite hobby of
millions of ordinary Americans.
For those who needed a wake-up call that the Internet is indeed regulable, this ought to do it. Sure, some people will be able to
work around the regs, but many won't, particularly in
the near term. Three days after the bill passed,
the stock prices of major online gaming companies crashed, and major companies like Party Gaming and 888 vowed to ban all US customers.
The online gaming business is still rather young, yet it was already roughly as big as the US record industry -- around 12 billion dollars in yearly revenue. While the gaming industry was cut off at the knees, online payment companies like Neteller also
took a nose dive.
The bill doesn't impact all gambling -- it exempts fantasy sports, lotteries, horse racing, and purely intrastate gambling. Domestic gaming companies were either
indifferent to the bill or happy to be rid of foreign competitors. The US has
ignored WTO rulings against this protectionism before, and it could very well do so again.
But forget about the companies -- what about the ordinary people that Congress is ostensibly trying to 'save?' What evidence is there that
'we're addicted to online poker as a people?' Addiction implies disease.
Let me make my bias here clear: I play online poker for about 5 hours a month and head to Vegas with friends to play about twice a year. I make a tiny -- but, for me, quite significant -- amount of spending money that way. And I have a ton of fun doing it.
My poker blog is now defunct, but it should give you a sense of how much and why I love this hobby.
Sample my blogroll, and you'll find many others like me. Some
have even made their whole income from playing poker -- it's their livelihoods.
Like the many people who flock to local cardrooms, Vegas, and Atlantic City every year, most online players don't win money, but they do have a lot of fun. The Internet brought to the fore ordinary Americans' desire to play poker -- it's no coincidence that poker on TV has grown in parallel, and, at least in California, local cardrooms are sprouting up.
And, yes, some people do get addicted. My point is not to marshall a complete argument against this paternalist policy-making in general or this policy in particular, as distasteful as I find both to be.
Rather, I want to highlight that there are millions of ordinary Americans just like me who didn't ask for this ban, oppose it, and will be harmed by it. The industry
invited regulation and taxation, and yet poker players are now facing an outright ban.
Congress completely sold us out -- if you care about this issue, head over to the
Poker Players Alliance site.
[Note: as usual, this blog represents my views, and not those of my employers past or present.]
read more: RIAA Claims Victory, Innovation Has Been 'Contained'![id='vimage_1' src='http://p2p.weblogsinc.com/media/2006/06/riaa_cds.jpg' />According to Mitch Bainwol, who sits atop the RIAA as its CEO, illegal file-sharing via the Internet has been 'contained'. <br /><br />'The problem has not been eliminated,' says Bainwol. 'But we believe digital downloads have emerged into a growing, thriving business, and file-trading is flat.'<br /><br />According to <a href='http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/services/2006-06-12-riaa_x.htm?POE=TECISVA'>USA Today</a>, Bainwol acknowledges that legal digital downloads are making up for long-slumping CD sales, and cites this evidence along with surveys of 12,000 households to back up his statement on containment. <br /><br />Why would Bainwol, stalwart anti-P2P man that he is, come out in the press selling the story of how the RIAA has 'contained' the battle against P2P services? Surely the news that P2P has been 'contained' must be a relief to the RIAA and all those pesky lawsuits will be over post-haste, right?<br /><br />Simply not so, according to Eric Garland, CEO of Internet measurement firm Big Champagne, who says more people than ever are using file-sharing networks. 'Nearly 10 million people are on-line, swapping media, at any given time,'. That May figure is up from 8.7 million people in 2005, he says.<br /> <br />Bainwol's motivation may come from slipping public perception of the RIAA lawsuits. Mitch's predecessor, <a href='http://p2p.weblogsinc.com/2006/06/10/former-riaa-chief-speaks-against-lawsuits-drm/'>Hillary Rosen, recently stated the suits had outlived their useful lifespan</a>. Calling P2P 'contained' in the press would give the RIAA a perfect exit strategy. Using this logic, the RIAA can gracefully point to a time-line that looks roughly like this...<br /><ol> <li><strong>We sued some people</strong></li> <li><strong>P2P growth flattened</strong></li> <li><strong>File-sharing was contained</strong></li> <li><strong>We diverted our efforts to stopping those nasty thieves at XM</strong></li></ol><em><strong>All before the PR pressure of suing those who are <a href='http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/12441'>young</a>, <a href='http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,98190,00.html'>old</a>, <a href='http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050204-4587.html'>dead</a> or <a href='http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=245416'>without a computer</a> gains any real traction with average Americans</strong></em>.<br /><br />CEO Garland of Big Champagne points out that the RIAA has made some inroads. 'They have removed the profiteers from on-line piracy,' he says. 'They've also embarked on a very successful education campaign. Kids now know about copyright, and the consequences.'<br /><br />What Garland, Bainwol and USA Today forget to tell you is, the RIAA has also succeeded in stifling innovation. Save for the few indie music distributors on-line (<a href='http://magnatune.com'>Magnatune</a>, <a href='http://www.emusic.com'>eMusic</a>, and the like who offer non-RIAA music only), the digital music market looks like a sea of clones. Subscription services with sub-par quality, similar prices, terms and selection, or iTunes with it's proprietary iPod, fixed pricing structure and non-transferability. <br /><br />They've managed to <a href='http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/'>redefine fair-use</a>, and continue to <a href='http://digitalmusic.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/19/xm-says-prepare-to-fight/'>tweak the definition</a>. They are the only show in town, and that's just the way they like it. The RIAA's cartel status allows its member companies to bully the rest of the industry, <a href='http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5055744.stm'>refusing to license music for other distribution models</a>, <a href='http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20041014-4313.html'>price fixing</a>, and <a href='http://digitalmusic.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/28/cheap-trick-allman-brothers-sue-sony-bmg-over-digital-distribut/'>allegations of cheating artists on royalties from digital downloads</a> are just a few of the strong-arm tactics they continue to pursue.<br /><br />If the RIAA won, this is all they won. A bland and lifeless digital music market with few real players, where a veritable sea of possibilities once lie open to discovery.<h6 style='clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;'></h6><a href='http://p2p.weblogsinc.com/2006/06/13/riaa-claims-win-innovation-has-been-contained/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent link to this entry'>Permalink</a> <BR><a href=]()
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The Two Sides of a DocumentAlmost none of us like to write documents. Writing documents accompanying the development process always seems like a dirty work that has to be done simply because some formal process dictates it. Sometimes, you have to comply with some organizational template for a certain artifact, which forces you to present your knowledge in the “right” manner (which could be less intuitive to you).
Often, writing a document can be quite time consuming. However, the immediate time cost of writing documents is just part of the real cost. Writing extensive documents throughout the development process also has an implicit influence on the development team: it cuts them off from the main development task, which means the flow of development is damaged (I use the term ‘development’ in its broadest sense: starting from gathering requirements, and until designing a test plan and executing tests). Some people realize this cost, and try to minimize it by postponing the document writing until the end of the development. Thus, you can sometime find people writing formal requirements specification at the end of the development phase, just to have such a document on record. The alternative is spending quite some time formalizing a rigid document instead of starting the actual development task when everything is fresh in your mind, and you are just full of ideas and eager to start designing, implementing or testing the product.
So, you might conclude that documents are a waste of time. Still, there are three main goals to writing documents. The first, is supplying a future reference to developers who will have to maintain and support the product. Recreating the reasons for implementing a certain feature, or choosing certain architecture could be more time consuming than documenting it “as it happens”. The second purpose of documents is to enable review to take place. Without a requirements specification it would be difficult to create an agreement with the customer about the features of the product. Without a design specification, it will be hard to conduct a design review and assess the quality of the design. The third goal is less thought of: forcing us to think! Many documents require us to take a moment (although in reality it takes much longer) and gather our thoughts: whether it is gathering what we understood from the customer regarding the requirements, or gathering how we perceive the system in Object Oriented terminology, or gathering our thoughts about how to test the product. Waiving documents altogether, might help us gain some flow back, but the cost might be to rush on to implement something that was not really thought of and reviewed.
This possible contradiction between the purpose of documents and their interference with the actual development process could be resolved by taking the new approach of addressing the three goals separately. Consider what will happen if we will create one version of a document for gathering thoughts and reviewing them, and another, more formal and strict version, for future reference (as needed)? On the face of it, we just made the problem worse: more time will be spent on this non-mainstream task, since we will generate two documents instead of one. The answer lies in the fact that in order to serve the review goal and the thought-gathering goal we do not need a full-scale formal document. This means that during the mainstream development effort we won’t have to spent valuable energy on “proper” documentation which complies to the organization standards and templates. During development we can settle for a lighter artifact, which will still force us to think, and could still be reviewed, but it will not have to be qualified as a real product documentation. The real documentation that will have to be used during maintenance could be written after the development is over, based on the lightweight artifact.
The idea is that the initial version of a document, which is being created during the mainstream development, is a completely free form document. It should have no predefined boundaries, limitations or fixed structure. The writer of this lightweight document is the one controlling its structure and content: whatever helps her gather her thoughts about the task that she should implement will be written down. This artifact could be the basis for a formal review process, but it is not the structure of the document that will be reviewed. The thoughts and insights themselves are the target of the review, so the form in which they are arranged on paper is not important at this stage. The writer of the artifact is also the one deciding when the document is done: when there is no more added value in forming it. When all the insights are written down in a manner they could be reviewed and be used in the actual implementation of the task – the document is ready. The writer of the artifact can only benefit from using less rigid form of writing a document. Using, for example, Mind Mapping can elevate creativity and spark new ideas while gathering thoughts and insights. Such an artifact could be easy to review, as well as being a solid basis for a formal document later on.
At the basis of the suggested solution lies the recognition of the fact that various documentation artifacts are important in the long run. We are not trying to avoid them. If the development process at your organization says a requirements spec is important – it probably is. Yet, we distinguish between the different goals the document serves. We argue that for the short run, writing a full-scale requirements spec (or design specification or test plan or any other kind of document) might interfere with the development process. It will force the person responsible for the document to stop all other work, and mold her thoughts and insights into a predefined template. This by itself can cause that person to loose some creativity during the development process. So instead, we let her create some lightweight artifact, which will not hold her back in the actual creative work. It will provide her, however, a chance to gather her insights, and others to review them. Only after the creative work is done, will she make herself some time to write the full-scale document for future reference.
So, the first advantage in this approach is that it has minimal interference with the flow of development on the one hand, while maintaining the two short-term goals of documentation on the other hand.
The second benefit is related to the first one: since the cost of writing such a lightweight document is minimal, it could be easily created upfront, before the actual implementation of the task it describes. Thus, there is a good chance it will influence the task itself. New ideas could emerge while gathering the thoughts in this document, which might have an effect on the product. If some new insights are sparked during the actual implementation of the task, the artifact could be easily updated as well, due to its agility.
As stated above, although on the face of it there are now two documents for each document in the conventional approach, our new approach actually saves time during development. The writer of the lightweight document spends the minimum amount of time required to gather her thoughts. The benefit is increasing creativity, which could save time while implementing the actual task (for example by revealing better solutions to implementation problems during this thought-gathering stage).
The key thing to remember is that the writer of the artifact has a complete control over its content and structure during development, as long as it could be effectively reviewed. If the requirements could be easily described in a simple diagram, free style text or any other mean the writer sees fit, there is no need in writing a full-scale requirement specification. This is not to say such a document is not important. It might be crucial to have a requirements specification in order to understand the system in the long run. However, such an extensive document could be generated offline - after the development is done. This way, we enjoy the better of the two worlds. We have a lightweight tool for gathering thoughts before and during development, in a manner that enables other to review them, without having major overhead. We also have a more extensive documentation of the development process as needed for the long run, which is created offline such that it does not interfere in actual implementation of a task.
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