For some reason the concept of Genetic Programming got stuck in my head the other evening. At midnight, after spending about four hours reading up on the topic around the web, I came away disappointed. The concept of evolving code the way genes do is fascinating but the results in the field seem to be very narrow and limiting. Thus began this rant.
iBooks and an HTML Experiment
With all of the hoopla last week about the innovative features in the new iBooks 2 I thought it would be instructive to see what could be done with pure HTML 5. I put together a little demo which adapts to screen sizes and has simple interactive content. Here’s what it looks like:
View the live demo here. I highly suggest you load it up on an iPad as well. Try rotating the screen (or make the browser window narrow if you are on a desktop.) Keep in mind this is just a prototype. It’s not skinned or made to look pretty at all.
You can spin the little sphere tree by dragging with your mouse. If you view this on a tablet it will respond to touch events as well. You can click on the photo to see a large fullscreen version. The footer will stay fixed to the bottom. The inline photo and canvas will resize and move to the left edge if you switch to portrait mode.
My goal for this effort is use pure semantic HTML. If we want to scale this up to a full book then the markup needs to be as close to pure text as possible. I’m using only divs with paragraphs and headers for all textual content. The interactive stuff is canvas or img tags. All interaction is standardized and put into reusable javascript files except for the actual dot tree itself (though it does use reusable components). I had to add a little hack to make the canvas resize properly, but that is also reusable. The footer and general layout is pure CSS.
I think the prototype turned out pretty well. It would be easy scale up to a full book with one page per chapter. Table of contents, index, and glossary would have to be written by hand unless we have some automated tool to do it, though I think such tools already exist.
So far I haven’t found much that the new iBooks 2 format does that couldn’t be done with plain HTML. They did add nice columns and shaped floats, but that is part of the CSS 3 specs and could be implemented in the renderer quite easily. (And shaped floats have been hacked into CSS2 for over a decade!)
I do like the look of iBooks Author. It’s a very nice visual tool that should let people create books without any programming experience. The new terms of service are a different issue, but after thinking about it I’ve decided I don’t care. iBooks Author is a tool for formatting content to be sold in the iBookstore. It really has no purpose other than that so the terms of use don’t make much difference. Amazon has their own tools for their own store as well, and I expect them to get better with the advent of the Kindle Fire.
While I would love to see a beautiful visual editor like iBooks Author that formats content for all possible bookstores I don’t really expect Apple to build it for me. Such a solution will have to come from a third party. Fortunately third parties now know that Apple won’t compete with them to build such a tool, so I expect we’ll see something like it soon.
Anyway, back to my HTML 5 prototype. Anything else you’d like to see it do?
Please send feedback and comments to my twitter account @joshmarinacci instead of on the blog. Thanks!
Back in the Saddle
Vacation and travel is over and I’m happy to say things are moving again. I’m feeling refreshed and I have a lot to share with you in 2012; starting with the new book I’m writing for O’Reilly! Read on, MacDuff.
Blogging Year In Review
It would be an understatement to say that the last year has been busy. With having a baby, launching and then ‘unlaunching’ the HP TouchPad, lots of conferences, and pushing out several open source project releases it’s just been one heck of a crazy time. Throughout it all I’ve tried to continue blogging, though not as consistently as I would like. I thought it would be interesting to review the blog stats for the year and see what was actually the most popular posts rather than what I thought they were. The results may surprise you. They certainly surprised me.
Would you pay for Facebook?
or: “Why I won’t work for a social network.”
I’ve had a lot of ideas involving social networking floating around in my head for the past few months. They were finally crystalized into a solid conclusion this week: I don’t want to work for a social networking company. There are really two distinct but related problems with social networking companies, and combined they form a deal killer for me.
HP to Open Source webOS
Today the other shoe dropped. Fortunately it was a soft slipper, not the steel toed boot to the head I had feared. HP is open sourcing webOS.
What does this mean? Well, I honestly don’t know yet. There is a huge amount of planning to be done, but it could be the start of something great. We will have to see. It will be a busy Christmas, that’s for sure.
In the meantime I’m working on a few other projects that I hope to share with you soon. Stay tuned. Thanks!
- josh
Book Report: World of Ptavvs
World of Ptavvs, Larry Niven, 188pp, 1966
If you are a scifi reader but don’t know Larry Niven then you aren’t reading this blog because you don’t exist. However, in the off chance that you slipped in from an alternate dimension where Larry Niven never took up writing, then allow me to explain. Larry Niven is known for hard-SF writing, mainly in the 70s and 80s, though he is still writing today. Unlike contemporary SF that moved on to cyberpunk, steampunk, and singularity visions, Niven still writes about humans exploring the cosmos. He is also quite a stickler for scientific accuracy, to the extent he has created an entire universe called “Known Space” with a history extending from the early 21st century to the 32nd.
Larry Niven is probably best known for the Ring World series, about adventures on a giant ring the diameter of earth’s orbit circling an alien star. The book I just finished, World of Ptavvs, is set in the same universe but much earlier. It also happens to be his first full novel, expanded from several short stories. Given that he was still early in his craft, I was impressed that it was so interesting. Clearly he got better, but even this early work is quite entertaining.
World of Ptavvs is a short novel (almost novella) about humanity’s first-ish contact with an alien species, under the most strange and amusing circumstances. Kaznol, a greedy alien with power of mind control, is accidentally stuck in a stasis field which freezes him in time. Two billion years ago he crashes on an empty planet that eventually becomes the earth of today. In the mid 21st century humans find the frozen alien at the bottom of the ocean and attempt mental contact using a man with slight telepathic abilities (he practices on dolphins who are by this time known to be intelligent). Due to lack of planning on humanity’s part, they accidentally free the alien and in the process the alien imprints his memories on the telepath. So now we have *two* rampaging aliens from billions of years ago bent on conquering the earth.
I know, it’s sounds super cheesy but it’s actually a very entertaining story with some cool twists. Throw in a team from the ARM (CIA of the future), some angry asteroid miners, and a few stolen spaceships and you get a rockin’ adventure. Best of all it’s *short*. Less than 200 pages. In an age when many authors feel the need to produce thousand page tomes it’s nice to read a book that is no longer than it needs to be.
So, should you read it? Yes!
Your Design Homework This Weekend
First, watch this amazing video created by a newspaper industry research group. It depicts the digital newspaper of the future. The surprising part? The video was created in 1994! And yet the newspaper industry didn’t listen to their own research.
Your homework over the holiday weekend isn’t to learn the lessons of the video, but rather consider why it’s advice wasn’t heeded. It did not have any impact on the industry that sponsored it, which is now suffering the consequences.
Does amazing design and research have any real value if it doesn’t effect any change? What can we do to make our design have more impact?
Book Report: Princess of Mars
I’ve always meant to go back and read some of the really old scifi that people have always talked about but I’ve never read. Now is finally that time. As a fan of mainly 50s through 70s (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Niven), I’ve rarely read anything earlier than the late forties. (Jules Verne being a notable exception.) My goal is not so much to read the novels for pure enjoyment, but to determine if they really are worth of their place in history? Were they really that good? Did scifi get better? Has it gotten worse again? In that spirt, lets the the time machine to 1917.
A Princess of Mars
Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1917, 326 pp
I’ve read a few of the Tarzan novels by and never felt drawn into them. With the upcoming film adaption, John Carter, I thought it was time to finally get into the series.
A Princess of Mars is the story of Civil War vet John Carter searching for gold out west in the 1870s. He is mysteriously transported to Mars and quickly captured by a race of tall multi-armed green martians. Thanks to his fighting skills, resourcefulness, and a body accustomed to the heavier Earth gravity; he quickly learns the language of his jailers then escapes with the captive princess Dejah Thoris of the red martians (who conveniently look like really attractive humans). Throughout the book he goes on various adventures across the planet, gaining fame and glory among the martians all while learning the secrets of their planet.
The Martians call their planet Barsoom, so you will often hear the novels known as the Barsoom series. Burroughs wrote 10 more in the series over the next thirty years though I get the impression they get progressively derivative as time goes on.
Princess of Mars was his first novel but it’s much better than I expected. The science is horrible by today’s standards because it was written in a time when we believed Mars had canals, water, and possibly intelligent life, but for the time it was pretty visionary. He reasonably explains the different societies, lighter than air travel, light based power sources, and the thin but sustaining martian atmosphere. Pretty good for the time it was written.
Make no mistake: this is a swashbuckler. People of the teens and twenties liked their buckles fully swashed, and swashed they shall be. The Princess of Mars has exotic women in skimpy outfits, green bug-eyed villains, oodles of chase scenes, and sword fights by the score. It’s quite fun to read and imagine it played in a theater between The Lone Range and Flash Gordon. Being public domain and free on the Kindle doesn’t hurt either.
Conclusion
So, is it worth reading? I say yes. It’s a fun and fast read as well as a piece of sci-fi history. You will find references to Barsoom in many later works throughout the 20th century. It also inspired a generation of authors and scientists from Clarke to Sagan.
Flash is Dead. Long Live Adobe
The twit-o-sphere came alive last week with the news that Adobe is canceling their Flash for Mobile products. I even briefly joined in. Many see this as evidence that the open web has won (it has), or a justified comeuppance for Adobe’s historical slights to Apple (it might be), or perhaps vindication of Steve Jobs’ rant anti-Flash (it was), and maybe even that Microsoft was really to blame (it’s a stretch). Lost in all this, I wonder, is the effect this actually has on Adobe beyond their short term problems.
Lets step back a minute and consider what Adobe actually does. They have some enterprise backend products for document management and (amazingly still used) a server side platform in Cold Fusion. They have some cloud products (Acrobat.com) built on the the Flash platform. Then there is Flex, an enterprise application platform designed to steal Java developers from Sun, as well as a mobile advertising and analytics platform (Omniture). And of course Flash for mobile.
Oh yeah. And they also make Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, and a bunch of other industry leading graphics and content creation tools so pervasive that some have called them the Adobe tax.
This really sounds like two different companies, doesn’t it? I’m not exactly sure when, but at some point Adobe strayed from focusing on high quality content creation tools for designers and artists. They entered the “platform space”: trying to be an enterprise company, a software as a service company, and own the mobile content market. That’s a whole lot for any company to do, especially one who traditionally focused on content creation tools. In the end I think it just became too much for one company to do, and it takes away from the thing they are good at: killer tools for designers. If killing of mobile flash lets them focus on their core competency then this is a good thing for everyone.
Adobe is known for tools used by professionals to create content. The Flash designer tool is used by professionals to create animated interactive content. Currently, the format of the final output is a SWF file. Do the purchasers of this tool care? Not really. Flash designers want to create content that is viewable by the most people. The audience wants great content accessible from the most devices. Neither of these two groups of people gives one whit about the actual format of the bits. Flash, the runtime, was simply an end to a means. With HTML 5 technologies becoming viable for interactive animated content, the Flash designer tool can simply output a new binary blob to be uploaded onto web servers. The designers won’t care, the audience won’t care. Everyone will get on with making/viewing their content and Flash Designer CS 22 will sell millions of copies. This really isn’t a big deal.
Well, except for one group of people who really truly do care about mobile Flash: the makers of iPad competitors. Apple’s refusal to allow Flash onto the Safari mobile browser created a market opening for a device that *would* play Flash. While it was never a big factor for webOS, it was a flagship feature for the BlackBerry Playbook and various Android Tablets. They’ve now lost a checkbox in their feature war with the iPad.
No matter. The world will move on. The mobile web is built on HTML 5 standards. And in 5 years the mobile web will simply be the web; which may foretell the end of the desktop Flash plugin as well, but the end result is the same. Adobe will continue to sell world class content creation tools. Tools which output whatever format the world actually wants. And now, finally, the world wants HTML 5.
Long Live the Web. Long Live Adobe.