The Apple Human Interface Design Guidelines has a section on consistency which reads in part

Consistency

Consistency in the interface allows people to transfer their knowledge and skills from one application to any other... Ask yourself the following questions when thinking about consistency in your product.

Is your product consistent:

• Within itself?
  
• With earlier versions of your product?
  
• With Mac OS standards? For example, does your application use the reserved and recommended keyboard equivalents? (See “Keyboard Shortcuts”.)
  
• In its use of metaphors?
  
• With people’s expectations?.

Recently Torsten's been changing the user interface components used by RSS Bandit from the DotNetMagic library to the Tim Dawson's Windows Forms controls due to the fact that the former is no longer free as in beer. Given that we are changing the look and feel of the widgets Torsten thought this would also be a good time to rearrange some of the menu options and remove some of the toolbar buttons. I tend to disagree. User interface consistency between versions of an application is very important especially when you consider it messes with the muscle memoryof users of older versions of the application.

Torsten has posted screenshots of the new RSS Bandit UI and is asking for feedback. His questions are phrased differently than I'd ask. I'd ask if users want the user interface to be consistent with old versions of RSS Bandit or not? I'd also ask if users prefer that we keep the old DotNetMagic user interface or move to Tim Dawson's UI components?  

If you use RSS Bandit I'd appreciate your comments.

Robert Scoble writes

Lionel, in my comments: "the problem is that it's "common wisdom" that Microsoft has more than $40 billion in the bank, so your point doesn't *sound* true. "how can they talk about resource constraints with that kind of safe deposit""

This is a common misunderstanding. First of all. That cash isn't just given out willy nilly. It's NOT our money! It belongs to our investors. They want to see it spent properly. Translation: don't let Scoble spend it on whatever he wants!

In 1999, Fool.com published an article called 12 Simple Secrets of Microsoft Management . One of the entries is entitled "Shrimps vs. Weenies" and is quoted below

7. "Shrimp vs. Weenies"

Even with its billions upon billions in cash, Microsoft is as frugal as Ebeneezer Scrooge. It's a company that buys canned weenies for food, not shrimp. Until last year, even Bill Gates and his second-in-command Steve Ballmer flew coach. (For scheduling reasons, the company purchased its first corporate jet.) Bucking the trend of most large, wealthy corporations, Microsoft remains in start-up mode where tight budgets are the rule. When you sit back and think about it, this frugality is less surprising and even explains how a company can come to accumulate such great hoards of cash.

This is probably the one of the most frustrating things to adjust to as a new hire at Microsoft; resource-strapped teams are the order of the day. There never seem to be enough devs to fix bugs and ship features or when there are there aren't enough testers to ensure that the code is up to snuff so you end up cutting the features anyway. Asking around about this leads to the realization that to many this is The Microsoft Way. I've heard all sorts of justifications for this behavior from the fact that it leads to managers making better hiring decisions since they never have as much headcount as they want so they don't waste it hiring people they aren't 100% sure will be good performers to statements like "it's always been this way". It's hard to argue with this logic given that this practice (and the others listed in the Fool.com article) have lead to one of the most successful companies in the world with more cash on hand than the annual budget of most third world nations.  

However every time we cut some feature because we don't have enough test resources or scrap an idea because we don't have anyone to code it up, I wonder if there's a better way...

A few months ago Mark Pilgrim posted an blog entry entitled How to Consume RSS Safely where he points out

RSS, by design, is difficult to consume safely. The RSS specification allows for description elements to contain arbitrary entity-encoded HTML. While this is great for RSS publishers (who can just “throw stuff together” and make an RSS feed), it makes writing a safe and effective RSS consumer application exceedingly difficult. And now that RSS is moving into the mainstream, the design decisions that got it there are becoming more and more of a problem.

HTML is nasty. Arbitrary HTML can carry nasty payloads: scripts, ActiveX objects, remote image “web bugs”, and arbitrary CSS styles that (as you saw with my platypus prank) can take over the entire screen. Browsers protect against the worst of these payloads by having different rules for different “zones”. For example, pages in the general Internet are marked “untrusted” and may not have privileges to run ActiveX objects, but pages on your own machine or within your own intranet can. Unfortunately, the practice of republishing remote HTML locally eliminates even this minimal safeguard.

The workaround Mark proposes is that aggregators strip out a bunch of tags from the HTML content of a feed before displaying it to the user. The only problem with this approach is that sometimes users to want  to be able to view this dynamic content be it Flash animations or special behaviors on hovering the mouse over an image via Javascript. Well, in the next version of RSS Bandit this will be a user configurable option, below is what the default setting for the embedded web browser used by RSS Bandit will be.

I'm probably the last geek in the US to have seen Matrix Revolutions and like most I'm of mixed minds about the experience. On the one hand as an action flick the movie isn't bad but as a Matrix sequel there are just too many issues with it that will probably prevent the multiple repeat viewings that I have enjoyed with the previous two movies.

Looking at the comments on the recent Slashdot poll about Matrix Revolutions it seems most people had to come up "deeper meanings" for the movie to prevent watching it from seeming like a waste of money. I've tried but I can't, as a Matrix movie it was anti-climactic especially after the confusing roller coaster ride that was Matrix Reloaded. Like everyone my beef is with the large number of unanswered questions from the previous movies. The paucity of martial arts fighting in this movie was also a minus.

However, if this was the first movie in the series I'd seen I'd probably have considered it a good movie.

The LiveJournal FAQ states

All journals on LiveJournal have an RSS feed, located at a URL of the form http://www.livejournal.com/users/exampleusername/data/rss/, where "exampleusername" is replaced by your username.

Only the 25 most recent entries are displayed on this RSS feed. Protected entries are visible if the user requesting the RSS feed is able to authenticate with LiveJournal and has permission to see the entries. For example, if you view your RSS feed in your browser while logged in, you will see all your most recent entries in it. However, someone who is not logged in, or someone you do not list as a friend, would not be able to see any protected entries in the feed. For most RSS aggregators and newsreaders, this will mean that only public entries are included. This is because they generally do not provide any means of cookie authentication.

I can't tell which stuns me more the fact that LiveJournal implemented an "authentication" mechanism that requires RSS aggregators to reuse steal cookies from your browser instead of using well defined HTTP authentication mechanisms or the fact that they implemented this ghetto authentication mechanism knowing full well that most aggregators don't support it.

Based on my reading of the FAQ, a user has to login via the website then somehow pass the cookie sent from the server in the HTTP response to their aggregator of choice which then uses this cookie in HTTP requests for the RSS feed?  All this, instead of password protecting the RSS feed using standard web practices?

We just got a feature request to somehow support this in RSS Bandit but it seems so wrong to encourage this broken design chosen by LiveJournal that I'm tempted to refuse the request. Is there anyone else subscribed to a LiveJournal RSS feed that thinks having this feature (the ability to view protected LiveJournal feeds) is important? So far, I believe this is the first LiveJournal specific request we've gotten.

Via a post on Don Box's weblog I noticed that quotes from my weblog have been used to further an incorrect assumption about Microsoft's technological direction with regards to XML technologies in the future versions of Windows (aka LongHorn) and other products.

Steve Gillmor writes

A key inducement for migrating to Longhorn is WinFS. FS means future storage, and the scheme is a new file storage system that will make it easier to store and find data. Instead of leveraging the XSD standard, Microsoft designers rolled a new schema language to handle WinFS' new capabilities
...

Clearly, Microsoft wants developers to create tomorrow's applications on Longhorn and WinFS. Right?  So why did Dare Obasanjo, program manager for .Net Framework XML schema technologies, have this to say: "The W3C XML Schema Definition language is far from being targeted for elimination from Microsoft's actively developed portfolio." Obasanjo listed a dozen Microsoft products using XSD, including "Yukon," Visual Studio .Net, "Indigo," Word, Excel and InfoPath

The last three form the core of Office System 2003, which Bill Gates touted as the strategic development platform for the near future at the New York launch. With Longhorn still far away, Microsoft is asking developers to invest in XSD for now—only to have to unlearn and migrate when Longhorn appears in 2006.

As several people have pointed out WinFS schema and XSD do completely different things. A few people have suggested that Microsoft "embrace and extend" XSD to make it suitable to describe WinFS types but bitter experience has shown that this course of action usually leads to confusion amongst our customers and recrimination from industry watchers. In the words of Chris Rock, "You could drive a car with your feet if ya want to, that doesn't make it a good  idea!".

However Steve Gillmor's piece does point out the fact that the next couple of Microsoft releases targetted at developers will be bringing a number of new technologies for developers to learn and there will be pushback from those who don't see why they have to adjust to the changing landscape. Just today, I got an email from someone who pointed out that users of data access technologies in the .NET Framework will now have almost half a dozen distinct query languages to chose from when retrieving data including OPath, XPath, XQuery, and SQL. There are reasons why each one exists

• OPath is an object query language
• SQL is a relational query language
• XPath is a dynamically typed language for addressing parts of an XML document
• XQuery is a statically typed language for performing sophisticated queries on one or more XML documents.

However stating it bluntly there are twice as many query languages that will exist whenever the next version of SQL Server & Visual Studio ship than in the last version (OPath & XQuery are the new comers). I suspect that much the same way Steve Gillmor is writing "the sky is falling" style articles about the fact that there will be a schema language for describing WinFS types seperate from that for describing XML documents (yet as Mike Deem points out no seems to be asking why not use SQL 'CREATE TABLE' statements to define WinFS types) there will be similar complaints about the amount of choice we are giving developers with regards to data access technologies and query languages.

Sometimes I wonder whether developers would prefer an Über-language with everything and the kitchen sink integrated into it. Would developers really prefer that instead of having divergent query languages we just had one (i.e. SQL) with proprietary extensions for the different data domains which was used ubiqitously everywhere to query XML documents, in-memory objects, relational databases, text files, etc? If reporters like Jon Udell and Steve Gillmor are to be believed then this is the preferred approach to building software since on the surface people get to reuse their skills except that things will work differently than they expect. I'm actually curious to hear from developers who read my weblog as to which approach they think is preferrable. For example, should one use SQL to query relational databases and XPath/XQuery for XML or should SQL be the universal query language used by all with any additions needed for XML querying being grafted on to it in most likely a proprietary manner? 

This inquiring mind would like to know.

Last night a went to an Irish bar with a couple of friends to watch the Rugby World Cup. It was a well-fought match that went into overtime with a number of tense moments eventually resulting in England being victorious over Ireland Australia . The price of admission was a bit steep ($20) but raucous bar atmosephere was a fun way to watch my first rugby match. It reminded me of American Football with no pads and soccer-isms like "offsides", "throw ins" and "free kicks". The fact that the ball could only be moved forward by running or kicking which explained all the backward passes was also quite different from American Football. Definitely an interesting experience.

Last weekend I was at the Drunk Puppet Nite which also turned out to be an interesting experience.  Although, the fliers make it seem like it's all puppet shows there were at least three dramatic pieces without puppets of the nine or ten I saw. The quality of the show ranged from very good to abysmal. Some of the puppet shows were funny because they were well done (the one with the kid whose talking toilet convinces him to steal laxatives so he can get to "eat some butt chocolate")  while others were because they were so poorly done (two guys who seemed to have been tripping off of acid with hand puppets arguing about who ate what from who's refridgerator) . Other aspects of the show were just plain weird, for instance the scene that consisted entirely of two matronly women at a church service [complete with choir music in the background] who ate bananas in a very suggestive manner. The show cost $15, considering that this is the price of two movie tickets or three movies from Blockbuster I'd say that price was a little steep and $10 would be more fair. In definitely, beat sitting around the house though.

On an unrelated note, one thing that connected both nights in my mind was that at both events I was the black guy. Just me, no other persons of African descent were in the audience. I'm completely used to it now but often wonder if it shouldn't bother me in some way.  

Anyway, I'm off to get a haircut.

Robert Scoble writes

We talked about a bunch of things. I laid out some things that I'd like to see RSS become. I'm gonna talk to Dave about that.

For instance, I have a vision of a day when every single Microsoft employee will have a weblog. Now, what happens when you have 55,000 people weblogging inside of a corporation? Well, for one, I want to see weblogs in different ways? Why shouldn't it be possible to see results from a search engine in order of where you are on the org chart, for instance? So, how can you match RSS data up with your domain data that's stored in Exchange and/or other corporate data stores?

How about seeing data from corporate webloggers based on revenues? Or other metrics?

Also, one thing I miss is being able to tell readers what I think are my most important items.

A number of these features have nothing to do with RSS, although I've seen several people claim otherwise. Scoble's post is just the most recent. Lots of people (including myself) see RSS news aggregators as being a step towards building a universal information aggregator. The closest thing to universal information aggregators that exist today are Personal Information Managers like Microsoft Outlook. At it's most basic description, Outlook is a mail reader meaning it nows how to use SMTP to send messages from one server to another; and how to retrieve messages  using either POP or IMAP. However over time Outlook has evolved into my primary interface to accessing information about people I interact with in a daily basis. I usually ask Outlook questions like

1. Where are all the messages I've received from person X [about topic Y]?
2. Where all the messages I have to respond to in the next Z days?
3. Where are all the messages I received between date A and date B?
4. Who is person X in my organization (who's his boss? what is his title?) 
5. What is person X's schedule like for today or for the week?
6. What meeting rooms are available for today or for the week?
7. What do I have scheduled to do today?
8. What is person X's phone number or email address?
9. How do I let everyone who sends me a message know that I'll be on vacation?
10. Show me internal discussion forums or mailing lists about topic X?

All of this functionality is exposed in a consistent user interface and it is hard for me as an end user to tell whether SMTP, IMAP, POP3 or whatever else is being used to service these requests. This is the same direction I believe people will want to go with news aggregators especially when I read some of the forward thinking feature requests that come from people like Marc Canter and Ray Ozzie. Even though at its most primal, an RSS news aggregator is a client that polls for messages in RSS format using HTTP there is a lot more functionality people want from want from clients.

The obvious (and in my opinion the wrong) way to solve these feature requests is add a lot of extra yet optional functionality to the base protocol, RSS. However using the Outlook example, it is clear that one doesn't need to completely go this route to solve the problem after all not all 10 of the pieces of functionality I described above have to do with SMTP (although a lot do). 

There are two reason's why I find WinFS interesting when it comes to build a universal information aggregator. Both of which have been pointed out by Mike Deem, the first is that  WinFS will be an item store which means that it will be possible to store abstract concepts such as "person" or "contact" on your file system as opposed to just concrete files such as buddylist.xml. The second is that WinFS's schemas play an even larger part in making WinFS what it is. The idea that there will be a common schema for “Person“ and “Document“ and “Album“ that can be shared, and extended, by thousands of Windows applications. The really important thing is having a shared concepts and schemas for both local applications and globally networked applications. Being able to actually store a person's contact info, weblog posts, mail messages, schedule and more on the file system and have these all linked together without the limitation that they all have to be the same file or that one must tie their client application to a database products makes developing a lot of the functionality I get from Outlook or that Scoble would like to get from an RSS aggregator much simpler. Being able to retrieve a calendar event from the Internet as XML either via some XML Web Service or HTTP GET then map that to a local concept of a calendar event on my machine which could then be used across applications would be very useful.

Of course, WinFS is currently at a stage that people like Diego Doval would call vaporware so this is just supposition on my part from reading Mike Deem's blog and conversations we've had as opposed to stuff that actually will ship in a future version of Windows. Even then the programming model may leave much to be desired, e.g the following code snippet from Mike Deem's blog

For example, to find all the people who live in the New York metropolitan region, you would write code like the following:

Person.FindAll(“IncomingRelationships.Cast(System.Storage.Contacts.HouseholdMember).Household.OutgoingRelationships.Cast(System.Storage.Core.ContactLocations).Location.MetropolitanRegion = ‘New York’“ );

So needless to say it isn't a slam dunk that "WinFS will solve all our problems" but I think the general ideas and functionality it brings to the table could prove very useful. In the meantime, I plan to hack the features I believe should be in a universal information aggregator client into RSS Bandit and will work with likeminded souls in moving the state of the art in that direction.

In his recent article entitled Binary Killed the XML Star? Kendall Clark writes

Many XML proponents and users came out of various binary exchange and format camps, and they are very unwilling to return to what were for them, or so it would seem, dark days. In this case, however, given the real power of those who most seem to want a binary variant -- including Sun, IBM, and Microsoft -- they may have to adopt a carefully tactical plan to limit the damage, rather than preventing the fight completely.

This claim by Kendall Clark seems to contradict the conclusions in the postion papers provided by both Microsoft and IBM at the The W3C Workshop on Binary Interchange of XML Information Item Sets.

IBM's position paper concludes with

IBM believes that wherever possible, implementations of the existing XML 1.x Recommendation should be optimized to meet the needs of customers. While we expect to see non-standard binary forms used internally within certain vendors’ implementations, including perhaps our own, we are not yet convinced that there is justification to standardize an interchange format other than XML 1.x. We thus believe that it would be premature for the W3C to launch a formal workgroup, or to recharter an existing group, to develop a Binary XML Recommendation

Microsoft's position paper concludes with

For different classes of applications, the criterion (minimize footprint or minimize parse/generate time) for the binary representation is different and often conflicting. There is no single criterion that optimizes all applications. Consequently, a binary standard could result in a suite of allowable representations that clients and servers must be prepared to receive and process. This is a retrograde step from the portability goals of XML 1.0. Furthermore, the optimal binary representation depends on the machine and OS architectures on each end — translating between binary representations negates much of the advantages that binary XML has over text.

Besides the position paper from Microsoft there've have been many comments both in Weblogs and mailing lists from Microsoft people against this movement for a standardized binary XML format (oxymoron that it is). There have been weblog posts by myself, Joshua Allen and Omri Gazitt (all of whom work on XML technologies at Microsoft) decrying the movement towards binary XML and thus potential fragmentation of the XML world.

There have also been a number of posts by Microsoft employees against  standardized binary XML on mailing list such as XML-DEV some of which have been quoted on Elliotte Rusty Harold's Cafe con Leche XML News website

I fear that splitting the interop story of XML into a textual and Infoset-based/binary representation, we are going to get the "divide and conquer" effect that in the end will make XML just another ASN.1: a niche model that does not deliver the interop it promises and we will be back to lock-in.

--Michael Rys on the xml-dev mailing list, Tue, 18 Nov 2003

XML has succeeded in large part because it is text and because it is perceived as "the obvious choice" to many people. The world was a lot different before XML came around, when people had to choose between a dizzying array of binary and text syntaxes (including ASN.1). Anyone who tries to complicate and fragment this serendipitous development is, IMO, insane.

--Joshua Allen on the xml-dev mailing list, Tue, 18 Nov 2003

Unfortunately, it seems that Kendall Clark must have missed the various discussions, weblog posts and the position paper where Microsoft's view of the importance of textual XML 1.0 were put forth. 

Robert Scoble writes

Rob Fahrni answered back and said "Scoble's on one of the best teams inside Microsoft." I've landed on a good one, yes, but I totally disagree that it's the best. I've seen tons of teams that are doing interesting things. By the way, he says Visio is a failure? Well, does the Visio team have any webloggers? Does it have an RSS feed? How are you supposed to sell software if you don't have a relationship with your customers?

On the surface it reads like Robert Scoble is claiming that if you don't have a blogger on your team nor an RSS feed then you don't have a relationship with your customers. This is probably the funniest thing I've seen all week.

Scoble's post reminds me of the Cult of the Cluetrain Manifesto article by John Dvorak. It's always unfortunate when people take a bunch of decent ideas and turned them into near-religious beliefs. Being in touch with your customers in an informal and accessible manner is nice but it isn't the only way to communicate with your customers nor is it necessary to make you successful.

I love my iPod. I love my TiVo. I love my Infiniti G35. I love Mike's Hard Lemonade and Bacardi O³. None of these products have official webloggers that I'm aware of nor do they have an RSS feed for their websites that I'm subscribed to.  Furthermore, if competing products did it wouldn't change the fact that I'd still be all over the my iPod/TiVo/G35/etc.

Blogging and RSS feeds are nice, but they are the icing on the cake of interacting with and satisfying your customer needs not the end all and be all of them.