adrian's wall

With Google I/O approaching it is time to start speculating... Last year the keynotes at Google I/O were very different in tone; the one for Android and the one for Chrome OS. It will be interesting to see if there is any big change this year, now that Sundar Pichai will - indirectly - have a role in both. Google's commitment to the web and the evolution of Chrome has taken them to an extraordinary place.  Soon it will be possible to develop apps using standard web technologies and deploy them to a wide range of environments; desktops running OS X, Linus or Windows as well as Chrome OS. There seems to be a genuine desire to get Chrome apps to play nice in their host environments, not just within the browser. For example the launcher that was part of Chrome OS now has a variant in some desktop environments. The Chromebook Pixel has a touch screen, so developing Chrome apps for a touch interface is clearly on the agenda. So isn't it about time for Chrome apps on Android...

WWDC is upon us and it's good to see so many rumors about Apple's hobby. Let the speculation begin... Of course we're not going to see an 'Apple TV [set]' but there might be tools for developing apps on the existing 'Apple TV [box]'.  But that won't answer the question of how do you bring an Apple-like experience to the whole sorry mess. I suspect my arrangement is not uncommon here in the UK. The TV programming comes through a cable company (Virgin Media) and they're not likely to be changing their UI anytime soon. I have children who love their XBox and who don't want to see it change. I use the cable companies catch-up services but I increasingly find myself watching content from Airplay enabled apps on an iPad. This means that the only things I use the [rather large] TV remote for (together with it's clunky and slow interface) are: switching the TV on/off selecting the correct HDMI input adjusting the TV volume I was exc...

It's been three months since Apple revealed it's vision of the cloud to the world. After its introduction, much was written (e.g. It Just Works ) about how iCloud compares 'philosophically' with others, most obviously Google. Now, supposedly close to launch and with iCloud in the hands of developers, there seems to be surprisingly little written about how that philosophy translates into developing a modern iOS app. Apple promises consumers that things 'will just work'. Just keep using apps in the same way and they will magically remain up-to-date across all your devices - in truth I'm not sure more magic was promised. Apple might be making a similar offer to developers. In principle iCloud means that an ObjectiveC developer with XCode can create and distribute apps containing this magical ingredient without having to learn any new skills, without having to develop any cloud-based components at all. What's more, with relatively little extra work, they c...

There has been a lot of discussion recently about whether Google has, in their DNA, what it takes to 'get' social. Well I think I 'get' social but I'm not sure how much my life is improved by getting the news 30 mins ahead of everybody else and I'm pretty certain that I don't need to actually see people go through the arduous process of constructing a reply in real-time. So I'm well disposed to the idea of a ' social layer ' that improves the processes I'm already familiar with - although a better analogy might be a ' social render ' that can be used to fill in the gaps and smooth over the rough transitions. A good test will be how Google contacts are handled. Google contacts is a tremendous asset. With an Android phone, all you need to do is enter your Google credentials and your email, calendar and contacts are there. I've got an iPhone and, with slightly more configuration, you can do the same thing. The thing is that Go...

I don't blog much and I'm curious as to what, on those odd occasions, finally drives me over the edge. It seems to be a desire to clear my head of some on-going irritation or a minor thought that just won't go away and needs to be expressed. Writing it down seems to be a way of exorcising it - just like writing a note to myself and leaving it on the kitchen table helps me sleep if I'm travelling the next day. Of course blogging about it brings in the dubious advantage of turning the whole process into a public display. There is a possible upside - the right to wear an "I told you so" T-shirt when the rest of the world realises that you really did identify the crux of the problem and offered a simple "Why don't they just...." solution. The downsides seem rather more numerous and more likely; people are privy to the odd things that bother you and, worse still, you're not even right about them. I write this because I feel a deep resevoir ...

What does it take to start blogging again? A new year? A new decade? Or the opportunity to pointlessly speculate about an as yet unannounced product? The question that keeps coming back to me is " Can they do it again? " Not " Can they break into a new, billion dollar market? ", not " Can they redefine the way we distribute and buy apps? " but " Can they reinvent the way we interact with mobile devices? " I remember the time before the iPhone was launched. We had an HTC running Windows Mobile in the office with a touch screen and a dinky little stylus - you could use your finger nails if you angled them just right. OK, it was a bit fiddly but it took most of the fear away when entering a long URL into the browser's address bar. But we knew there were better things coming. We had all seen those iPhone mockups - the one's with a virtual, circular scroll-wheel floating over the interface. We couldn't wait. And then there it was ....

David Galbraith has noticed Google testing out what he calls 'adballoons' on Google Local. Searching for hotels in New York brings up a pair of blue sponsored links for two specific hotels ('W Court Hotel' and 'Courtyard Manhattan Hotel'). Clicking on these brings up the balloon on the map. By comparison, searching for hotels in San Francisco brings up a generic sponsored link for 'San Francisco Hotels' which takes users to a new page.

I've just tried creating an item in Google Base of a new item type Spatially Referenced Photo with: two details called geo lon and geo lat ( I tried including the colons but it strips them out ) with values of type Number a label of geotagged - unfortunately the label was rejected as 'misspelled' I've asked for an exemption so here's hoping... Update: as of Nov 21, 2005 6:42 PM Google Base does like 'geotagged', check out a Google Base item pointing to a geotagged Flickr picture of the Mill Race in Cambridge. Tags: geotagging

So, before hard evidence comes to light, let me speculate... I can submit structured data to Google Base for them to do with as they please. No doubt there will be a facetted-browser for users to search through that data and maybe even an API. But will third-party search engines be able to index any of it? Web sites can be crawled/scraped, blog publishing provides a pinging mechanism. Will Google Base provide a mechanism that doesn't fall foul of Google's terms and conditions of use?

Well Google do seem to be trying to do things to limit the problem of spam blogs hosted on blog*spot. They've introduced a 'type in the letters' test when posting to a blog that looks suspicious. Of course if you're posting via the Blogger API then its just rejected. More recently I note that the Atom feed for a blog*spot hosted blog has a <summary> tag with all the markup removed. By contrast a blog that is FTPed to an alternate host has a <content> tag with markup present. UPDATE: seems to be back to normal - I know it just looks like I might have flipped the 'summary' switch but...

There doesn't seem to be many rules/conventions governing what you get when you request a feed representing the on-going results from a search. For example at the botton of a Google Blog Search page you can get an RSS or Atom feed with 10 or 100 items. With Technorati you can add a search to your Watchlists and then get an RSS feed. In Bloglines you can subscribe to a search but you never see the feed itself - or at least if you try to edit the subscription you don't. However I am more interested in the feed itself. They all work fine if all you want to do is subscribe to them in a news reader, but what if you want to process the results further? Such feeds supply the necessary <link rel="alternate" type="type="text/html" ... but couldn't they also supply the associated third-party feed itself? Consider the simple example of looking for 'geotagged' blog entries: its easy enough to get a set of references to blog entries which match t...

CNV00014-1 Originally uploaded by acuth . So Flickr knows how to post to Blogger! geo: ( 47.3399 , 0.5116 ) tags: geotagged geo: ( 47.3397533 , 0.5108643 ) Check this out on mylocalguru

Looking over my previous post on hReview, I have to confess that it doesn't look as supportive as I had intended. So here - with my apologies - is a mark two... hReview defines a microformat that can be used in both traditional web pages and blog posts. It can do this because it is essentially self-contained and makes no assumptions about how the content is published. This post considers the question of whether microformats, in general, should take advantage of different publishing techniques and, if so, how. I start with the observation that a number of the elements of hReview would appear to mimic elements familiar to typical a blog publishing environment. For example comparing hReview with Atom (0.8) : hReview Atom summary title reviewer author contributor dtreviewed published updated permalink id where required fields are shown as field-name . The question arises about what should happen if an hReview is published as [part of] a blog post? For example what...

I'm glad to see that Bloglines intends to do something about search this summer . Afterall web-based news aggregators have such potential; they have a far more intimate understanding of what a person is interested in than any web-based search engine and they have access to a far more complete set of data than any desktop-based news aggregator. Clearly some of it is going to relate to improving the results that come back from the 'search' box. Here's hoping that includes a personalised component. By their very nature news aggregators make use of a user profile; specifically a personalised list of subscribed feeds. Furthermore a feed seems to be a new and useful unit to work in. There are things I can say about my relationship to a feed that I cannot say of individual posts. For example I might wish to say 'ignore any unread posts more than two days old' for some feeds. Obviously such an ability would not only relate to search, it would have a direct impact o...

What Unicorn? - an hReview Jun 1, 2005 by adrian cuthbert product Blade Runner ★★★★★ I managed to see the director's cut of this film with an individual who asked at the end 'What Unicorn?' - you know who you are! <div class="hreview"> <h2 class="summary"> What Unicorn? - an hReview </h2> <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20050601T2121"> Jun 1, 2005 </abbr> by <span class="reviewer fn">adrian cuthbert</span> <span class="type" style="display:none">product</span> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/" class="item url fn"> Blade Runner </a> <blockquote class="description"><p> <abbr class="rating" title="5">&#9733;&#9733;&#9733;&#9733;&#9733;</abbr> I managed to see the ...

Blade Runner is one of my favourite films. Tags: this_is_an_hreview_2 <p> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/" rev="review">Blade Runner</a> is one of my favourite films. <br/> Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/this_is_an_hreview_2" rel="tag">this_is_an_hreview_2</a> </p>

microformats may well represent a path from where we are today to the [lowercase] semantic web. If so, one of the first waypoints along such a path could be the emergence of aggregators capable of taking advantage of suitably marked-up content. Applying a 'microformat' approach to tagging, Technorati introduced the rel="tag" approach to marking-up tags. Technorati also supply the corresponding aggregation service, e.g. see posts tagged with microformat . Given this minimalist approach to tagging, the hReview specification comes as something of a surprise. It seems to represent a format developed independently of the environment in which it is most likely to be used. The rel="tag" approach makes a major, simplifying assumption. This is that the tag refers 'to a major portion of the current page (i.e. a blog post)' . I am assuming that it could apply equally to a blog entry in an RSS/Atom feed. Thus an aggregator can associate a tag with two p...

This is a test post in support of SmartLink of which more later... I've encoded an event based on hCalendar , namely Web 2.0 Conference : October 5 - 7 , at the Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA An example of a page with more events encoded in hCalendar can be found here

This is a test post in support of SmartLink of which more later... Without giving away too much, here is my UK test address CB4 0WS .

In a previous post I tried to describe how I thought technologies like SmartTags and AutoLink ought to behave. With greasemonkey in Firefox I've been able to build a proof-of-concept demonstrator. For the moment I'm calling it Smart Tag/Auto Link. SmartLink is based upon the idea that content authors should mark-up content that can be 'smart-linked', using standard XHTML constructs. This has two advantages: it effectively provides an 'opt-in' mechanism for content providers it doesn't require 'magic' to identify what can be smart-linked and thus provides a much more extensible approach. of course there is one fairly major disadvantage: there isn't any suitably marked-up content out there, with the exception of some test posts I've put together for the purpose. Getting Started If you want to know a bit more about SmartLink then click here . Alternatively if you want to see how SmartLink behaves and you're using Firefox t...