Dylan's thing

Friday evening

I put together another little 8tracks mix whilst trying to decide what to do tonight. I still don’t know what to do tonight, but at least I’ve been able to listen to some music. Be sure to listen to the last track.

Quotes, ideas and questions from Designing for the Social Web

• What is your audience doing?
• What do people have to do in order for us to be successful?
• Identify your social objects.
• Choose your core feature set. Find your social objects’ verbs (many will translate directly into features).
• Take note of any collections of objects, this may be a feature.
• Who is it for? Who is going to use it?
• What is it? Is there a tag-line that summarizes this?
• What does it do?
• What are its capabilities?
• Where can I use it? Is there a mobile version?
• When can I use it?
• Why is it important to me?
• Why will my life be better as a result of using this? Explain with benefits, not just features.
• How does it work?
• How can I take advantage of this?
• How do I get started?

TDD steps

1. Write a test
2. Watch it fail
3. Make it pass, fast (committing whatever sins necessary in the process)
4. Remove duplication, refactor

Shell Meme

Inspired by Lincoln Stoll, I ran:

And got…

368 git
45  cd
20  mate
14  ls
9 irb
5 ruby
5 merb
4 sudo
3 open
3 nano

Notes on iPhone development

• The language is Objective C 2.0 and the framework is Cocoa Touch.
• Only one application can be run at one time on the iPhone. If your application isn’t running, it cannot do anything.
• Your application has one window and this is fixed at the size of the iPhone screen.
• Your application has a sandbox. This is the only place your application can read and write files.
• It is crucial for your application to be as quick and snappy as possible. Starting up and shutting down your application must be very fast, this includes loading data and saving data (when exiting, applications have a time limit of 5 seconds before they’re killed automatically). Don’t lose data when shutting applications down.
• The iPhone’s resolution in 480 x 320px.
• Usually about half of the 128mb RAM the iPhone has is available to your application.
• Cocoa Touch will let applications know if they’re running out of memory. It’s the application’s responsibility to free up memory, otherwise they’re going to be killed.
• Cocoa Touch doesn’t support garbage collection.

Sunday night bedtime mix

I’ve made a gentle 8tracks mix tonight and I’m going to try out the embed thing below:

Internationalisation and tagging

At last night’s Web Standards Group meetup Richard Ishida, the Internationalisation Activity Lead for the W3C presented some guidelines and tips for designing international web–pages. Richard’s talk was followed by a thought provoking presentation on “How to make the most out of eGovernment” by José Manuel Alonso, the eGovernment Lead at the W3C.

Richard’s talk triggered a few thoughts inside me regarding i18n and tagging.

According to Information Architecture for the Word Wide Web, “Free tagging, also known as collaborative categorization, mob indexing, and ethno–classification, is a simple yet powerful tool. Users tag objects with one or more keywords. the tags are public and serve as pivots for social navigation”. Content is tagged collaboratively. Whereas classification is the process of describing things according to common characteristics, my view on ethno–classification is that the descriptions are related to one’s own culture. There isn’t always a link between culture and language, but it’s often present.

In a situation where tags are created automatically (via a service Reuters’ Open Calais perhaps) tag translation can be kept from being a problem. But in situations, like in Flickr, where people from different cultures and speaking different languages use an international site and can apply tags to common content the issues may not be trivial. In these circumstances is it appropriate to translate tags? I asked Richard this after the presentation, his opinion was that tags shouldn’t be translated. Why wouldn’t tags be translated?

Translations of small, descriptive words may have undesirable results. A translated tag may go from being 6 to 20 characters long, or a certain language’s translation won’t be available due to a lack of context around the word. Tags could be language specific, and this may be related to the culture from which the language came from. Tags may be misspelled. Some tags are proper nouns and many are slang. Some of the issues just mentioned are also completely relevant to localising user interfaces.

Could you attempt to work out what language tags are written in and then translate tags to the current user’s preferences or to the site’s default? Or to hide tags written in languages other than the current language preference? The imagined benefits from translating tags are outweighed by details and trivial issues. Flickr seems to have decided not to translate tags (or comments, titles and so on) and that seems to be a good decision.