Sunday, June 19, 2005

Dave Winer : Another way of looking at it -- RSS is great for news, but not everything is news, some things, like the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or the elements of the periodic table, don't change. Or change slowly, like the teams in major league baseball, or the top home run hitters. For information like that, knowledge, representing the relationships between nuggets is
what's important, and that's where outliners like the OPML Editor, that's now in beta, excel.


www.podcatch.com :

OPML is dynamic like RSS. But is intended for a slower shearing layer

Fast changing news is a line. Slower changing facts might be a tree[1].

[1] Though not all knowledge is a tree, of course.

Thursday, June 16, 2005

On first glance, UI Patterns and Techniques looks like one of the better attempts to apply design patterns to UIs.

Bruce Eckel has a good post on Object Design which I commented on.

I'd also really like to see some of the diagrams he came up with.

UML looks to me like it has the curse of all diagramming methods. It loses a sense of time in a way that text somehow doesn't. Maybe because text still has a temporal dimension (or flow down the page) you sense time passing as you read it. Looking at diagrams, your eyes wander backwards and forwards across a static landscape, trying to find the movement.

There is no movement in a static, 2D image.

What? Another blog?

Phil! What are you playing at?

I'm not sure. I've been writing everything for so long on my wiki where I indulge in all manner of interconnections between things ... but WikiIsLikeFoldedProtein, powerful, dense, but unintelligable.

These new blogs are attempts to unwind the wiki in various ways. To extract threads and themes that make sense and tell a particular story to a particular audience.

This blog is about TheSwingBetweenTimeAndSpace The issues of translating from one to the other.

It's about design and design that's aware of time. It will cover the Alexandrian pattern story, some issues in software and interface design, but go off in a more poetic direction. Maybe even indulge in some more visual experimentation too.

Expect sporadic, aphoristic posts here ...