Mike Industries

What a great ending to the 2006 World Cup. At least that’s what my friends tell me. Here’s a screen-cap from Comcast’s High Definition TV broadcast during one of the most important plays of the game — a missed penalty kick in the overtime extra time shootout:

I saw three kicks before the Comcast “crystal clear digital HD” signal cut completely out. No audio even. Not until the shootout was over and Italy was celebrating on the field did the picture return to its normal state.

Motherf…

I’ve covered the brutality of Comcast’s unreliable PVR service in the past, but this inability to hold a lousy TV signal at such a critical time is the last straw. I’m switching back to what I’ve missed since the day I got cable: DirecTV with Tivo.

Comcast, you gave me bargain basement rates for a year to lure me in. You even “bought back” my actual DirecTV dish so I wouldn’t be tempted to switch back to satellite. All you’ve done during that year is convince me that you are deserving of every negative thing anybody’s ever said about you.

Now get the hell out.

After two happy years with a Treo 600 and a couple of false starts with a Nokia N70 and a Blackberry 8700g, I have finally upgraded to a brand spankin’ new Treo 700P. I had to switch from T-Mobile to Sprint in order to use it — which wasn’t a thrilling idea — but we’ll get to that later.

Following is a mini-review for anyone considering a Treo, as well as a custom skin to make the device a bit more Mac-like:

Interface, interface, interface

The single most important thing to me in a phone is its interface. Not just how the buttons are arranged but how the device interacts with me. Many Palm detractors complain how about little Palm’s interface and operating system have changed over the last several years, and they are right… but in my view, that’s a good thing. There simply isn’t much that needs changing. I loved my Treo 600 interface, and the 700P isn’t much different. Faster and more powerful, yes. Confusing and more complicated, no.

The 700P’s keyboard is a slight upgrade from the 600’s and virtually the same as the 650’s. If you aren’t very good with T9 typing and you want the best QWERTY keyboard in the business, this is it.

The phone interface itself is typical Palm simplicity. While the iconography and typography could use an update, the navigation is easy as ever. Nothing is more than one-level deep, the menuing works much like it does on a Mac, and most functions are available by using either the touchscreen or key commands.

Since the built-in interface widgets and dialpad appearance looked a little dated to me, I used a combination of two programs and a little Photoshop love to fix the situation.

First off, grab yourself a copy of Palm Revolt and choose the “Aqua Skin” to decrappify the interface widgets a bit. Then, to complete the transformation into a more Mac-like interface, download a copy of Skinner and install this custom dialpad I designed:

Download “Mike Industries Aqua”

Voila! You’ve got Mac!

* Note, the above copy of Skinner is a beta for the 700P. It appears to work fine. If you have a 650, you can download the official release here.
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Yesterday, I went out and bought a brand-new Blackberry 8700g at my local T-Mobile store. I’ve been using a Treo 600 for more than two years now and I just couldn’t resist New Phone Fever for any longer.

I had skipped the Treo 650 because frankly, it didn’t seem much better than the 600, and I was planning on going straight to the Treo 700 until Palm pulled two unfortunate moves on me:

1. They released the Treo 700W a few months ago and it runs on WindowsMobile, leaving me only with tantalizing reports of a “Treo 700P” which would come out some time in the future and run on Palm’s OS. Such a painful wait this would be.
2. When the Treo 700P was finally announced a few weeks ago, it was revealed that it would only run on Sprint and Verizon for the time being, again with the excruciating announcement that a GSM (T-Mobile) version was “in the works”.

Given that I didn’t feel like waiting who-knows-how-long for a GSM Treo 700P, I had a few options:

1. Switch to Sprint and get the Treo. I’ve used Sprint before and they were nice enough to send me free stuff through their Ambassador Program so I don’t have any problem with this, but I have a few months left on my T-Mobile contract and I’m not exactly dying to leave T-Mobile anyway since they are quite good.
2. Wait an indeterminate amount of time for Nokia’s E70… and given my lack of love for their N70, have no guarantee I’ll actually like it.
3. Extend my contract with T-Mobile and pick up a shiny new Blackberry 8700g — a phone which has gotten pretty good reviews.

I’d been wanting to try a Blackberry for awhile since just as many people swear by them as swear by Treos, so I chose option #3.

After playing with this thing for about a day, I am convinced it falls into the category of a dreaded “sidegrade”. That is, a device which is an upgrade in some regards and a downgrade in others. For this reason, I may not keep it past the 14 day trial period. For those of you thinking about getting a Blackberry 8700g, here are the positives and the negatives (at least compared to a Treo):
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Seinfeld fans will note the Teri Hatcher reference in the title of this post, but I just tried out ABC’s full-episode streaming video service which launched a few minutes ago (around 2am this morning), and it is indeed quite nice.

Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias, and Commander in Chief. They are all available online now if you live in the U.S. — free of charge. This isn’t some B-reel lineup of shows starving for attention. These are ABC’s most popular programs, and now thanks to Disney Brass, the ABC team in Burbank, and the Disney Internet Group in both Seattle and North Hollywood, they are viewable on any computer with a broadband connection. No more PVR-induced BitTorrenting for me… at least with ABC shows.

I have a special regard for this product because it was the last project I worked on before leaving Disney to start Newsvine. My work was in the proof-of-concept phase and the final product doesn’t share a single line of code or element of design, but I still feel an affinity for what has been accomplished here. I think it’s really, really great.

Some items of importance:

• This service is fully cross-browser and cross-platform. No Internet Explorer/Windows Media mess to worry about. I’m so glad Flash video won out in the end, and although Steve Jobs had nothing to do with it, I’m sure he’s happy that these shows look and work great on Macs.
• This is perhaps the nicest looking Flash video I’ve ever seen. Not only are the video dimensions nice and large, but the picture is extremely clear and not choppy at all. You can tell a lot of work went into the encoding and delivery process. It’s also interesting to note that this is 400k and 700k Flash streaming and not progressive download. Progressive download has been a lot more common than streaming in the past and it’s nice to see such a great example of true broadband Flash streaming in action.
• As great as this service is from a design and engineering standpoint, what’s been accomplished here from a licensing standpoint is just as significant. Disney has wanted to stream television shows for several years now. I remember working on early prototypes a few years ago, but the problem back then was that internet rights had never been negotiated into the deals of the network’s most popular shows. This wasn’t specific to ABC but to all major networks including NBC, Fox, and CBS. Most people think that when a show like Desperate Housewives airs on ABC, the network has full ownership of it. That is not the case. They generally have rights to do certain things with it (viz. air it on TV, sell it on DVD, etc), but only recently have networks begun including internet distribution rights in these deals. It looks like we’re finally starting to see the fruits of these new licensing terms, and it’s a great great thing.
• My only complaint here is the lack of ability to pop the video full screen. I remember talking to Macromedia about this awhile back but can’t remember what their answer was with regards to whether or not they’d ever be able to build this functionality into the Flash plug-in.
• Actually, I have one other complaint and that is that the video is not available internationally, but hey, you have to crawl before you can walk.

So head on over to ABC.com and check this thing out for yourself. I’m sure it’s just the beginning of a lot more video-related initiatives to come at Disney. Big ups to everyone over there and to all the peeps in the Seattle office!

One more thing: I believe this is officially a “trial service” which will run until June 30th. Hopefully it will do well and continue on long after that.

I had a very simple idea yesterday to get Gmail to work through IMAP and wanted to share it in case it is of use to anyone else.

Warning: This is clearly not rocket science and I’m positive that thousands of people have already thought of this and are already doing it. It just didn’t occur to me until now.

The problem: I like mail applications better than web-based mail. I am especially not fond of the way Google’s threads work. I understand that this format works for some people… it just feels weird to me though. BUT… a Gmail account is great to have because of its free storage, spam filtering, separation from my own domain, and search capabilities. So very conveniently, Google enabled POP access to Gmail accounts several months ago. That’s great, except I don’t like POP either. It’s fine for people who only use one computer, but the second you begin using a multiple machines, it’s a synching nightmare.

Enter IMAP e-mail. With Dreamhost’s IMAP e-mail setup, I can maintain an unlimited number of e-mail accounts with over 20 gigs of storage space and keep it all automatically synched between as many computers as I want. Awesome.

The only problem is that while Gmail supports retrieving of e-mail via POP, they don’t via IMAP. So what can I do if I want to continue using my Gmail address for filling out forms on the web and benefit from its excellent spam/phishing filters? Easy! Set it to automatically forward to a special IMAP account! Since Gmail’s auto-forwarding feature leaves headers for the most part intact, I can now receive fully synched, fully intact copies of all my Gmail messages to any computer I happen to be on. Here’s how:

1. Set up a new IMAP mailbox with your mail provider. The address could be “abcdefg@yourdomain.com”… doesn’t matter. It’s not public-facing.
2. Set your incoming mail server to its normal settings.
3. Set your outgoing mail server to “smtp.gmail.com”, check “Use SSL”, and use port 465.
4. Go to Gmail’s POP/Forwarding settings panel.
5. Turn on forwarding and forward to the special address you’ve set up.
6. Set Gmail to archive your mail after forwarding.

That’s it. You’re done. Gmail over IMAP. That such an obvious solution has escaped me for this long is evidence of possible senility. Excuse me while I go stir my fiber drink.

Being a Mac user, I’ve always had a problem with Firefox. I’ve thought long and hard about tasteful analogies for my relationship with it, but I keep coming back to a somewhat shallow one: Firefox is like the girl in school who you knew you should probably date because she’s intelligent, multilingual, and funny, but she just wasn’t very attractive to you.

Safari, on the other hand, has been the opposite: Hot as hell and lives right down the street, but offers little more than instant gratification of primal needs.

Many people who can’t stand to be without both types of relationships have evolved into “browser polygamists”… or, people who use multiple browsers during their normal daily routine. Jon Hicks could be considered the king of the Browser Polygamy movement, hopping from application to application with the recklessness of a late 70s porn star. Jon likes multiple browsers, and he’s not ashamed to admit it.

I, on the other hand, have never liked using multiple apps for any chore, whether it be browsing, e-mail, design, code, or whatever else. I want a single point of entry into whatever I’m doing.

And so it was with great interest that I started playing around with the latest Camino betas a couple of months ago. Camino you say? Wasn’t that a truck that late 70s porn stars drove around in? Nope, that’s the “El Camino“. This is Camino, the web browser; an application I remember using back when it was called “Chimera” in the early OS X days.

Camino is like Firefox with a beautiful makeover. I’m not talking about Lee Press-On Nails and an Ogilvie Home Perm… I’m talking an X-Code workout regimen, a healthy diet of Cocoa, and a Quartz mineral bath. Think of Firefox as Paris Hilton — gets all the press, will compile for anybody, and is a bit strange looking. Think of Camino as younger sister Nicky — much cuter, a bit more refined, and up until now in the shadow of her sister.

Anyway, with today’s announcement of the official 1.0 version, Camino has finally emerged from the shadow of its older sister to become a true contender in the Mac browser space. It looks better than Safari and it feeler faster than Firefox… that’s a great start. Here are some more things I am loving about Camino:

1. It’s a snap to import all of your Safari bookmarks.
2. The interface is outstanding. Not only is it truly Mac-ish in appearance, but as mentioned above, it’s actually more visually appealing to me than Safari.
3. It’s faster than Firefox in all ways, and it seems faster than Safari in certain, but not all occasions. When browsing from page to page within a site (viz. when all JS and CSS are already in cache) you can barely even see the pages repaint. It does seem a tad slower on full page fetches, but as Camino team member Samuel Sidler says, “speed is subjective”.
4. Safari’s preferences are limited, but in Camino, almost everything is configurable. Apple’s decision to keep Safari simple isn’t a bad one, as most casual Mac users don’t want to see 1000 options in front of their faces (see: Adium… which I love, by the way), but it is really nice to have a good, highly configurable browser to use again.
5. A more comprehensive History display.
6. It supports all of the same WYSIWYG web editors that every other browser besides Safari does. Incidentally, this is really my only major beef with Safari from an internals perspective as this point. But it’s a huge beef.
7. Everything Hicksy says here and Om says here.

What don’t I like about Camino? Well, really only three things:

1. The seemingly slight lag in full-page fetches (although I could be imagining this).
2. The lack of a Javascript debugger and other extensions.
3. No native spellchecking.

So with that, I will now be trying out Camino as my primary browser for the next month or so. If you’re lookin’ for a change, I recommend you do the same.

Note: Observant readers may notice that I first compare Firefox to a smart woman and then to Paris Hilton. Two separate analogies. Try not to confuse them.

One of the really great things about having such a cool group of early Newsvine users is that people think of great new stuff every day. About an hour ago, Fraser Mills posted an item on Newsvine pointing to a great news visualization he just built with Newsvine data and the Google Maps API. I’d call it a “mashup” but that term has always made me think of pureed food, so I stay away from it.

There are three things in particular that I think are cool here:

1. Fraser is building things off our API before our API is even officially released or documented. That is awesome and it’s a testament to the power and flexibility of tagging and XML data. I remember that people started building Peppers for Mint long before The Wolf documented his API as well. I think that’s just great and I encourage anyone who is interested in Newsvine APIs to post their requests to the official Newsvine Blog.
2. Aside from freeform location tagging, we actually have 225 regions around the world which we haven’t exposed to users yet. Once true location data like this makes its way into posts, wire articles, and seeds, the map will be even more useful. You’ll be able to zoom in on Seattle, for instance, and get stories down to the micro-local level.
3. It’s good to get a look at how Google Maps potentially displays news items. I’m very curious as to how Yahoo Maps compares, because as a designer, I like the Yahoo Maps skinning capabilities a lot more. Justin Everett-Church’s example of Yahoo Maps piped into Flash and set against a pirate theme is an example of what I’m talking about. We place a high premium on everything looking great and I’m wondering what some of the tradeoffs between the two mapping APIs are.

A few months ago, I made a concerted effort to eliminate all RSS feeds from my news aggregator which met at least one of the following conditions: 1) Signal-to-noise ratio was under 25%, 2) Feed was updated more than 10 times a day, or 3) A good percentage of the items were re-blogged from other sources.

Two of the first sites to walk the plank were unfortunately both Gizmodo and Engadget. While I’ve enjoyed both sites immensely over the past couple of years, they both match all three criteria above, and since eliminating them from my blogroll, I’ve been able to keep my “RSS lint” down to reasonable levels.

This week though, I may have paid the price for being out of touch with the gadget rumor mill. Thanks to Om and his damn persuasive writing style (not to mention Jason), I ordered a Nokia N70 phone over the interweb. I’ve been using a Treo 600 for the past two years and although I still love it, I’ve just had a new-phone-itch for the past couple of months and reading about the N70 was enough to get me to finally scratch it.

It seems like a whale of a phone, and although I’ve never liked Nokia’s interfaces in the past, this one looks pretty nice. For all the high-tech features on the N70, the kicker that got me to actually purchase it was a fairly low-tech one: an FM radio. FM radios in Seattle are a lot more useful than in most other cities because we are home to KEXP, the world’s greatest commercial-free radio station. Being able to listen to commercial-free live music on my phone is a huge plus.

The only huge downside of the N70 to me is the lack of a QWERTY keyboard. I’ve gotten so used to the Treo’s keyboard that it’s going to be hard to use T9 again.

So I ordered this thing for about $500 (which is probably too much) and it should arrive next week.

No sooner do I check the status of my delivery last night that I now find out about the Nokia E70, due in the first quarter of 2006. Oh my god! Look at this thing:

Not only does it have almost every feature of the N70, but it’s smaller, flips open to reveal a QWERTY keyboard, has 352×416 resolution, integrated WiFi with VOIP, built-in push email support, spoken Caller ID, and a million other features as well.

So I think with this N70 purchase, I have officially broken my own buyer’s remorse record. It’s supposed to arrive on the 14th and today is the 10th, so that’s negative four days. Oh well, at least the N70 gives me one thing the E70 doesn’t: an FM radio for KEXP.

Dear Comcast and/or Motorola and/or Microsoft,

Last night, my college played Gonzaga in one of the biggest college basketball games of the year. I had dinner plans so I set your DVR up to record the game.

Being that this was a sporting event, I set the option to end the recording 30 minutes late, just in case the game took longer than the allotted two hours.

I got home, watched a crazy basketball game, and was preparing for the final four minutes when the recording stopped. The two hour mark had been reached.

And so thanks to your aforementioned worthless device, I missed a last second victory by my Washington Huskies. Oh, and 60 Minutes mysteriously didn’t get recorded last night either.

Get your damned device working already. It’s about to go out my window.

I’m a huge Bloglines fan and have used it as my only newsreader for almost two years now. It’s a smart product created by an even smarter person, Mark Fletcher. Almost every single feature Bloglines has added since launch has been implemented with the utmost of care and has improved my experience on the site incrementally. Yesterday, however, the site added two features which are in need of fixing. In their announcement about the feature additions, Bloglines asked users to express their thoughts about the changes publicly, so that’s what I’m doing.

Problem #1: Keyboard Shortcut Hijacking

I didn’t even know this was possible, but somehow, the addition of keyboard shortcuts to Bloglines has completely disabled system-level shortcuts in my browser. Bloglines, probably in reaction to Google’s new shortcut-heavy newsreader, has added all sorts of key commands to help users navigate through their feeds. Unfortunately, now I can’t hit Command-W to close my browser window. Nor can I hit Command-Q to quit or Command-T to open a new tab. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on, but it’s definitely Bloglines because if I’m not on a Bloglines page, the key-commands begin working again.

My first reaction was that although this is obviously caused by Bloglines, it’s a bug in Safari that it’s even possible for a site to cause such a crippling. But then I switched over to Firefox and the same thing happened! What the hell! Any key-command gurus know what’s going on here? And is this happening on PCs too? It’s very very weird. I’ve never seen a web page that can cripple a browser like this.

Problem #2: Unread vs. Keep New

As part of the feature upgrade, Bloglines added something I’ve been wishing for a long time they had: the ability to differentiate between items that are truly unread vs. items I’ve specifically indicated to keep as unread. The difference here being that the latter are news items I’ve specifically noted as important, but I just haven’t had the time to go through them yet.

So the good news is that this feature has been added. Yay. The bad news is that the interface for it is not intuitive and it’s already annoying me. To the right is a diagram of the current implementation. Notice that some entries have one number and others have two separated by a colon.

Take the Kottke example. “0:9″ means that there are 0 items I haven’t read and 9 items that I’ve specifically indicated deserve further review when I find a moment. Other entries, like Meyerweb, have only one number. The “2″ means simply that there are two unread items. These numbers change wildly from month to month from me. Sometimes a site like Kottke will have zero “keep new” items and Meyerweb will have four… it just depends on where I’m at in my neurotic newsreading cycle.

The problem with this interface is a subtle one: First of all, colons imply either “time” or a “ratio”… neither of which apply in any helpful way to this situation. Second of all, there’s no intuitive clue as to whether the first number means “unread” and the second number means “keep new” or vice versa. Bloglines is forcing users to develop this association over time and it’s just not very helpful to do that.

To the right is what I propose. Notice the lack of colons. Notice also that the “unread” number is the only number in bold… thus more closely mirroring what Bloglines users are already used to: bold equals unread. The “keep new” number is set in light gray and unbolded to help you establish a quick connection that it represents a totally different thing. Furthermore, it mirrors the mail application analogy that what you haven’t read is bold and everything else isn’t.

So anyway, that’s my two cents about the Bloglines update. Please address these two issues and I’ll continue to sing your praises as the best way to consume RSS on the web.