walker tracker daily step count

interaction

Dogmatic slumbers [1]

What I noticed from Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work in The New Yorker for March 17, 2008:

Magic is possible because magicians are smart. And what they’re smart about is mainly how dumb we are, how limited in vision, how narrow in imagination, how resourceless in conjecture, how routinized in our theories of the world, how deadened to possibility. The magician awakens us from the dogmatic slumbers of our daily life, our interactions with cards and hoops and things. He opens a door by pointing to a window.

Placeshout progress

At this writing, there are 11 Placeshout microneogeographers in Ann Arbor who’ve written 5 or more shoutouts. The top 5 cities on the site are (1) Ann Arbor, (2) San Francisco, (3) Detroit, (4) Ypsilanti, and (5) Atlanta. 35 cities in Michigan have at least one place mentioned.

There’s a Placeshout Facebook group.

New feature: RSS feeds per location, e.g. Ann Arbor geoRSS.

Thanks Andre and Derek!

Placeshout: a brand new colony [5]

Late last week, Catherine twitterinvited folks to bulk up Ann Arbor on Placeshout. Three days later, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti are the first and third most “shouted” cities, with San Francisco coming in second. This reminds me of the early, happy days of upcoming.org, when Ann Arbor was one of the locations with the most user and event churn.

So what the hell is Placeshout? Take a look. For context, see Ed’s notes on the KARB/KYIP Placeshout event. Here’s all of my activity on the site.

It’s too bad there’s no API, and no feeds. You can search and Google Maps browse and so forth right on the site, so there’s no pressing need, beyond the standard desire to pipe Placeshout white noise into various filters. Or grab a KML. Or update Placeshout from Twitter (I can only assume that’s what the additional 40 characters in twitterspace are for).

I do like how you aren’t expected to make friends with everybody. It’s enough, at least for now, to see a username you know and think O HAI and just move on with the pressing business of downrating inappropriately positive reviews of Ann Arbor’s crappier brewpubs.

Links for “Facebook: putting the social network to work” [4]

Back from a presentation for SEM Group at SPARK; here’s the linkdump.

People

News

Groups

Events

Applications

Advertising

Income

Taking action

Q&A

Facebook applications I want [2]

Here are three quick rambly sketches of Facebook applications I want — and yes, I’m working on Facebook stuff, but these are applications I want to use, not make.

(1) A flyer tool for group / event promotion. Ideal workflow: point it to a group, get a full-page lo-fi flyer suitable for printing and posting at the cafe or bulletin board. This flyer wouldn’t need to contain much more than a giant Facebook F, the group’s name and picture, some community_indicators — such as number of members, unattributed snippets from wall postings or discussion boards, etc. — and a cheesy “you’re invited!” message. Lots of interesting groups for cafes, venues, and locations, and a flyer is a cheap way to link Facebook to meatspace.

(2) A pageoftext.com style micro wiki application. Individuals and groups already have a strong set of communication tools: posting walls, discussion boards, messaging, and so forth. But for certain kinds of conversations, a wiki scratchpad would be awesome. The generic use case is a way to dodge the Facebook group officer control tower stuff: only officers can make certain kinds of changes to the group, but it’s a hassle — and a risk(?) — to make everybody an officer.

(3) Hunt the Wumpus. With a tileset like this, and anybody who shows up on your profile gets to take a turn (so that the Wumpus never goes unfed).

Single window mode (purple title bar button) in OS X Previews

From the party-like-it's-2000 department:

A couple of the Mac OS X developer previews had a weird purple button at the top right corner of window title bars, where the magical lozenge can be found more recently. This button appeared in a few developer previews, but was removed before the first really crappy public release.

This button was actually a toggle between normal layered windowing and a nasty “single window mode” which allowed only one window to show at a time. Single window mode simply minimized the existing (single) window whenever an action opened up a new window.

For more on this behavior and screen captures of what the button looked like in disabled and enabled states, see John Siracusa’s review of OS X developer preview 3 (start reading around ¶5).

The magical lozenge which occupies the same spot in more recent Mac OSes has two purposes. First, you click it to show or hide the toolbar. The second purpose — and the reason it’s a magical lozenge — you ⌘-click it to cycle between the various icon/text and toolbar size configurations. Like all forms of magic, this one has its downside as well, in that the odd ugly duck application may manage to do something just totally insane when you click the magical lozenge, at least until they fix the thing.