Friday, March 14, 2003

Will the Real RSS Please Stand Up? Of course, I am meddling in matters beyond my ken, but it seems to me that this and this should at least look vaguely alike.  They don't, and yet they're both RSS 2.0.  Yes, I understand about namespaces and all that crap, but just because you can do it with RSS doesn't mean that you necessarily should.  The reason I am looking is that my Radio aggregator is acting up with FreeRoller feeds.  I though it was FM RadioStation but that doesn't appear to be the case.  Or maybe it still is. I don't know.  All I know is that I've got the same stories repeated over and over again in my aggregator, and it's buggin' me. 6:08:37 PM

Algorithm- and Randomly-disturbed Graphics. One of the things that's always bugged me about playing computer games is how square everything is.  It looks dumb.  You put a texture on that thing and it looks like a box with a crappy texture on it.  Sometimes the textures are pretty detailed, but it's still a flat surface.  Look around you.  How many flat surfaces do you see?  The thing is, nothing around is flat, not really.  You just need to look close enough to find something different. What I want to see is scene generation where increased level of detail is automatically generated at the polygon level, where you don't often have polygons.  You have algorithms for generating polygons, and algorithms within those algorithms, so as I get closer and closer to the rock wall of the cave, I can see more and more detail coming out, sparkles and stones and crystals and whatever else is in the designer and artists' minds. If these nested definitions of "what is" are formed into libraries, it becomes easier to specify the general shape of a scene, what objects are in it and how they relate to each other, and then much of the detail becomes generated automatically.  The designer can limit her influence to what is different about the scene, the special things that need to go into it as features, or areas of interest, or beauty. 12:39:32 PM

Icons and Panes. When we take a window and iconify, we are creating a "small version" of it.  The icon is a representation of the window, and to some extent, the contents of that window.  Some windowing managers support the notion of a "rollup", which is just a title bar.  I don't see any advantage to doing this over what I get by, say, minimizing a window.  I've got the title bar right there on the bottom of my screen, where it can't be covered by something else. Within an application's own views, in its more complex state, we don't seem to have progressed very far in finding intermediate representations of information.  By intermediate I mean something that is smaller than the normal, detailed representation, but doesn't take up the same real estate.  I have been wondering lately if this is due to constraining ourselves, in the large part, to rectangle-based interfaces.  Would other shapes such as ellipses make better use of real estate? There is a notion of the "thing I am focused on" -- that can live at the center of the ellipse.  I can see somewhat less information before, and somewhat less after.  I populate those "corners" with other information (context) of value to me. It's about focus and context again.  From a geometric standpoint, how do we most efficiently present multiple sources of information? The Haystack project is an aggregator showing all kinds of neato information on the screen at once.  I don't think that's very helpful -- after all, I'm about to do something with some of it, right?  Why do I have to constrain myself to a little corner of the screen.  Where are the smooth transitions from one focus-and-context to another? 12:26:20 PM