JPowers @ IN3.ORG

Dan Bricklin and the Cold Comfort of Experience

I saw Dan Bricklin, inventor of the first PC spreadsheet program VisiCalc, at the NY Tech Meetup last night. The opening acts were some machine vision and robotics researchers from NYU and Columbia showing their new work to a big but under-charmed crowd. Things ran late, and then proto-blogger Anil Dash gave some admiring introductory remarks and brought out Dan.

Dan Bricklin / Image via Wikipedia

Dan brought out his new book, Bricklin on Technology, a compilation of his blogs, podcasts and essays over the last decade.

He read from the book -- from his old blog posts -- and illustrated his talk with pictures from the East Coast birthplace of computing around Route 128 near Boston back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Dan unrolled ancient scrolls from the before-time: DEC minicomputers, dumb terminals, the Apple II, the revolutionary Harris 2200 page layout machine, the first IBM PC and some promo videos for spreadsheet programs that eclipsed VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel. The audience roared at the 1980s dweebs in three piece suits dancing to a pre-Windows jingle as Dan told about inventing the spreadsheet in a wet basement in Massachusetts. In the background were Gates and Jobs but also the armies of hopeful start-ups, brilliant programmers, careful CFOs, lucky salesmen and visionary inventors who drove computing onto every desk and into every home in those years.

Dan's been there and done that. While he prototyped his great invention on a minicomputer and coded it for MS-DOS and cashed out before Windows, he got back up on the horse and founded Slate, an early tablet computer start-up, and Trellix, an early blog-enabling firm. Last night, he mused about new opportunities in gesture interfaces, multi-user networked apps and the future of mobile computing.

Throughout his talk, Dan would mention some tech -- like the 2200 -- and ask the audience if they'd ever heard of it. Response there was none. The mixed crowd of greybeard engineers, grasping entrepreneurs and biz dev naifs knew little about the roots of the industry that they serve. For them, the world was born with Windows 95 or Netscape or Google or Facebook or the iPhone.

I've always felt that that reaction was fine. I've always tried to avoid chewing the fat with old-timers about punched cards, mag tape and the good old days of Atex and Wang. Whatever nostalgia buzz you get, it's irrelevant that a terrabyte used to be unthinkable and that a computer used to cost more than a BMW. We're all going to live in the future where none of that old junk matters.

And yet.  Humans have been crafting tools since the beginning, and there's a lot we can learn from the way we did things in the past. (Those who've never read Santayana are doomed to repeat him.) The iPhone didn't spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, it's the evolution of a lot of ideas that have been rattling around for forty or fifty years.

But it's hard to see the big picture when you're struggling in the day-to-day and your head is too full of what is rather than what could be. Friday's payroll or the next quarter or your investors' liquidity event is a mere milestone on a long path. Folks like Dan remind us that it's not whether you make Gates money or Jobs money or Page/Brin money, it's what you invent, what you build and what you leave behind.

Social Media: The Narcissphere

"Circulating throughout the narcissphere." A throwaway line from Chris Ayres, LA columnist for the Times of London, has been rattling around inside my head for a couple of weeks. Social networks -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and all the rest -- are all about the "I". Each service is a walled garden of Friends and Followers answering the question: "What are you doing?" The only people in the garden are the people I know, culled from my email address book or vetted by an invitation subroutine. My ego expands with my list of Friends, and I surf for ever more worthy Friends to enhance my Connections.

The Internet has always featured user-generated content: home pages, email, chat lines, fan fiction, blogs, wall postings and the Fifth Circle of Hell -- wrathful and sullen comment threads. But the public Internet also delivers exabytes of professionally-generated content: the academic, journalistic, literary and -- most recently -- cinematic. It's got people we don't like, ideas we're afraid of, philosophies we haven't considered, chances we're not ready to take. It's life. The world. Everything.

Social networks carve up the Net into special interest groups so we mainly see the people who think like we do. No wonder the marketers and spammers are all over social media: we do their research work for them by lining up into the correct psychographic. I think I prefer a life that's not so easily pigeonholed.

At the Movies: Happy Birthday, Helvetica

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the world's most popular typeface, filmmaker Gary Hustwit is producing Helvetica, a documentary about ...

... typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.

The film will be released early next year. Read an interview with the filmmaker in the AIGA journal and visit the movie's MySpace page. Font lovers,  see also the "Thank You for Smoking" trailer.

"Thank You for Smoking" Typography

Jason Reitman's movie Thank You For Smoking is a fine adaptation of Christopher Buckley's biting satire of a decade ago, the story of a tobacco lobbyist with a heart of gold. (I don't remember the heart of gold part from the book.)  One of the best things about the movie is the opening credits, an animated homage to great cigarette pack typography: Futura, Copperplate, Cheltenham, Bodoni plus a handful of elegant scripts. Click on the image to watch the titles on the designer's web site,  ShadowPlayStudio.com. Verdana, Arial and Georgia just don't measure up.
 

Here's the new new Hollywood: The director, 28-year-old son of Boomer auteur Ivan Reitman,  talks about his movie on his blog, maintains a MySpace page and posts videos on YouTube.

Giant TVs, Tiny Cars

The new Sony Qualia 006 is a 70-inch rear projection TV powered by a new liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) chip. At 71.75" wide, the TV is more than five inches wider than the chic Mini Cooper sports car made famous on the big screen by the incomparable Charlize Theron in last year's The Italian Job.

The Mini Cooper is more of an entertainment brand than the Sony TV. After starring in the Theron heist movie, it's been featured in a video game as well as an amusement park ride. Ironically, some 36,000 Minis were sold in the U.S. last year without running a single television commercial.

A Billion Square Feet of Skin

Our visual environment keeps getting more beautiful. As digital imaging technologies mature, old time sign painters have been replaced by grand format digital systems that can blow up any PhotoShop image to the side of a ten story building. And as this picture of Times Square from Wired New York reveals, a lot of the best looking signs have the best looking people, often with the fewest pieces of clothing.

According to InfoTrends/CAP Ventures, the wide format outdoor graphics market is one of the fastest-growing areas of digital printing. By 2008, giant ink jets are expected to produce more than 1 billion square feet of outdoor graphics in North America.

More Augmented Reality on a PDA: Multi-User Game

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about augmented reality on a personal digital assistant with a link to a video from a Finnish company that created an AR visualization of a new building. This morning at a Vienna University of Technology conference in Austria, a team of developers will demonstrate The Invisible Train, "a mobile, collaborative multi-user Augmented Reality (AR) game, in which players control virtual trains on a real wooden miniature railroad track. These virtual trains are only visible to players through their PDA's video see-through display as they don't exist in the physical world. This type of user interface is commonly called the magic lens metaphor.

The computers in our pockets are getting very interesting applications: from calendar, contacts, and to-do lists to mobile telephony, digital imaging, email, Web access, WiFi links, MP3 playback, GPS, multimedia, pocket video and now the "magic lens." A few more doodads and we'll finally have reinvented Spock's tricorder.

Songs About Fractals, Ikea and Modern Life

Jonathan Coulton is a software designer from Brooklyn who composes and performs very smart songs about math, shopping, gambling and other golden moments. His song about Benoit Mandelbrot, fractal pioneer, has a particularly poignant refrain:

Take a point called Z in the complex plane
Let Z1 be Z squared plus C
And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C
And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on
If the series of Z's should always stay
Close to Z and never trend away
That point is in the Mandelbrot Set

Jonathan performs at the mind-expanding Poptech conference in Maine where I saw him last year. Listen to his tunes, check out his literate lyrics, and buy his new album, Smoking Monkey. How often do you listen to music that makes you feel smart?

Watering My Garden Should Be Easier

Back before desktop publishing and graphical user interfaces, the hot high tech in publishing was the minicomputer. I sold dozens of these Data General Nova series minis (pictured above) into typesetting and publishing houses in the late 1970s. The main system console was a Teletype keyboard/printer, but when the going got tough you had to enter system patches and diagnostics on the front panel switches. Each number or command was represented by a particular series of up and down switches, with a switch at the end to "deposit" or record the data into a register. I spend several lifetimes entering DG assembler code that way, sometimes doing it over and over again in case I made a mistake.

The interface was perfectly user-abusive -- the opposite of user-friendly -- but in about ten years the mouse, the menu and some smart thinking about the user interface came along to make computing a lot friendlier and more forgiving. Nowadays everbody who uses a computer expects a Windows-style interface. Everybody who uses a VCR expects the little boxes and triangles for play, rewind, pause and record. Everybody who uses a phone expects to select options from a menu with an up-and-down cursor. Our best technology works hard to be obvious and simple to use with a relatvely standard interface.

Except for electronic water timers for garden sprinklers. I've used several different models (two pictured at right), and they all suck in the same way: their user interfaces are awful, abusive, opaque. You would think something simple like: "Turn the water on every day at 6 a.m. for one hour." would be easy to set, but these gardeners' marvels have simple-minded computers that are no help to the user, blind interfaces that are impossible to check, and esoteric functions that are too complicated to apply.

The main problem with these technology bricks is that electromechanical engineers built them with as little grace and wit as engineers are capable of. They're clocks, but on the GreenThumb EasySet there's no display to tell you what time the machine thinks it is. They're meant to sit at faucet-level in an unlit garden, but the Gilmour 9400 has a low contrast LCD display with tiny unreadable characters. There are complex formulas for skipping a day or boosting the flow on weekends, but they're way too hard to program. At $40.00 or so they're more expensive than most pocket calculators, but they have a minimum number of buttons so every button has to do two or three jobs. You never really know if you've got it working. When I'm not at home, I put a bucket near the sprinkler to collect some water so I know that the timers actually turned the water on like they were supposed to. They make me feel so stupid.

Here's what I want: A wireless browser interface for my electronic water timer. If I'm lucky enough to have WiFi access in the garden, I should be able to call up the unit from anywhere on the web, set the time and check the action. Maybe I have to bring a WiFi laptop near the faucet to set the timer. Or maybe the logic unit detaches from the plumbing part so I can bring it within WiFi range to configure. I wouldn't need any buttons or displays on the unit itself, just a simple CPU and WiFi link, and I'd be able to have the most customized watering schedule -- Sundays off while I'm pruning, extra flow during August, no water during eclipses, whatever else you can think of -- with feedback that tells me when the water actually flowed. I want an information technology approach in the garden that matches the automation and ease of use I've come to expect in the rest of my consumer electronics products.

Personalized Digital Confetti

There are a lot of digital printing services on the Internet. You can get anything from 4"x6" snapshots to 6' wide grand format sign segments from your downloaded picture files. One of the coolest is Confoti.com which prints your photos onto 1" diameter confetti disks. Send up to 10 different images and get a bag of custom confetti — 800 two-side custom image pieces plus 2,400 smaller generic pieces — for $16.95. That's roughly nine 8-1/2"x11" pages of two-sided color printer output die-cut and mixed with generic confetti. Confoti also prints stickers and durign the conventions this summer showcased both Bush and Kerry campaign confetti.