We’ve had a bunch of extremely generous links in the past couple of weeks… just as we submerged into deadline mode.

Fimoculous picked out this blog, Pulse Laser, as one of the best blogs of 2006 that you (maybe) aren’t reading. Wow! I’ve had much teasing for being described as “the kind of nerd that all nerds aspire to be.” The other blogs in the list are brilliant; it’s extremely flattering to be placed in that company. Thank you!

And if that weren’t enough, we’re also in a list of Best Interaction Design Blogs 2006. Staggering company again, and thank you. Not bad for a blog that started only at the end of September.

Modesty, once thrown away, it difficult to re-establish. So I’ll continue.

There have also been a number of new readers coming from O’Reilly Radar on the 3C products essay series, and also from a great collection of lessons from animation (on 37signals) which links into one of those same essays.

Hello!

What all of that means is there have been a lot of people visiting, with nothing fresh to read.

So, if you’re new here, start with our introductory post.

Then you might also enjoy our most popular posts (our top content to-date as listed by Google Analytics):

• My printer, my social letterbox, on how taking the lessons of the Web to consumer electronics can make satisfying, simple, social products.
• Burtin vs. Ellis/Williams compares a spread from Warren Ellis’ Desolation Jones to a page from a U.S. Army rifle disassembly manual. Comics are in everything.
• Robot arms traverses from from extremely small, mechanical hands to industrial robot arms. Don’t miss the robot-arms-as-DJs link.
• 3C products, The life of products and Experience hooks is a series about the new creative, connected and community-driven generation, Gen C. It introduces the 3C products they demand, and the design challenges we’ll face.
• Visiting a model railway exhibition simply shows what we saw, models and layouts. The comments from model railway enthusiasts are of high value.

The image above, by the way, is from American Look (Part III) (1958). It’s a Chevrolet-sponsored film promoting the industry and style of the 1950; part III focuses on the designers themselves. This particular screen grab falls in the segment described:

15:15:20:00 MS Executives point to a model of car which is unveiled; smile and nod approvingly; senior executive shakes hand of subordinate, pats other on back

It somehow seems appropriate. The whole movie is recommended.

Adaptive Path kindly invited me to their offices this morning, where I muddled through my Making Senses talk, on using the human senses as inspiration for next-generation Web browser functionality.

Revisiting the slides, and the conversation afterward, has shown me how to state the argument more directly:

1. As far as interaction on the computer desktop and the Web goes, navigational and spatial metaphors dominate. On a micro level we talk about direct manipulation of files via icons: Dragging, moving, opening and so on. On a macro level, we have addresses, visiting, and sitemaps.
2. When a person has navigated to something, they can know what it is because of the navigation itself. For instance, you know you’re in London because you followed all the signposts to London.
3. In a world of cheap sensors, many, many display surfaces, and high connectivity, we are presented with information without that navigational context. Furthermore, in areas which have traditionally used the navigational metaphor (mainly the Web), navigation might not be the most appropriate approach to reading the news, buying books, or hanging out in chatrooms. Yet still we approach Web design armed with this metaphor.
4. It’s as important that a thing can be instantly appreciated for what it is, as that it can be navigated to. ‘Instantly appreciate’ means comprehend pre-consciously, just as we instantly appreciate a chair as a chair when looking at it, without having to deliberately deduce the meaning of the pattern of light on our retina.
5. As a guide to what qualities we should be able to instantly appreciate, we can use human and animal senses to show what features we need to recognise of things in the environment. Sensing these features is sufficient to let us intelligently interact, without navigating.
6. To summarise these features, we need to be able to detect: Structure, focus and periphery, rhythms of activity, summaries, how this particular thing is situated in the larger environment (and more). The Web browser, as our sensory organs online, should do this job, instead of leaving it to the websites themselves.

Applying the sensory model to Web design triggers a few ideas:

• The high-level structure of all sites should be represented by the browser in a consistent way, not by each site differently.
• Regular patterns in browsing (such as the sites visited daily or weekly) should be supported by the browser.
• Using the extracted keywords of a web page as its ’scent,’ hyperlinks should indicate how their odour strengthens or detracts from the smell of the current browsing trail.

There are more ideas, but that’s what the presentation discusses and illustrates.

Incidentally, the image at the top of this post is from J. J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which talks about how we see continuously and actively as we move through space. I’d like to consider browsing the Web in the same light.

Web apps are currently undergoing a renaissance–or perhaps they’re fulfilling the promise made when the genre was created in 1999. The technology, skills and community that go to make these web apps is beginning to turn in many different directions. We’ll soon see a number of different web app species. One I find most exciting is Deploy to Desktop. What if the same skills needed to build complex web apps could be turned to making desktop applications, starting from a simple web app in a HTML renderer window, and iterating to use native widgets, drag and drop, and full OS integration? (More about this in my App After App talk.)

We’re on the way there. Three data-points for that journey:

Apollo is Adobe’s cross-platform runtime, based on Apple’s WekKit, that lets you run HTML/CSS/AJAX apps on the desktop. It works offline, includes an API for communication between Apollo apps, and will let you write database hooks to a local or remote persistent store. The Apollo wrapper will be distributed free, like Acrobat Reader or the Flash Player (personally I think this is the wrong model–apps should be standalone, but we’ll see). Some Apollo screenshots.

Next is WebKit on Rails which is exactly what I wanted to see when I gave that talk. It makes it easy (well, easier) to take your Ruby on Rails web app, wrap it in WebKit, the Mac HTML renderer, and run it as a desktop app. See the list of existing projects for applications you can already download.

Last up is Pyro, which wraps 37signal’s Campfire browser-based live chat application and turns it into a Mac app. Features include a badged application icon (the number of unread messages are shown), drag and drop upload, scripting support and more. Someday all web apps will be available this way.

It’s Friday, so let’s see what people have been saying about Pulse Laser…

An easier update first. I mentioned pagefeel, toying with taste, mouthfeel and extra browser functionality. Not only has Ben Gimpert put his culinary talk online, Theomatics of Food, he’s also offered more suggestions for what the browser-mouth could taste. All good stuff.

Now a slightly tougher comment.

Anne Galloway gave us a generous write-up on the first few days of posts, and asked some important questions of my model railway exhibition observations:

Matt’s assumptions about technology, and his expectations of technological progress over time, become very apparent in these excerpts. But what if the values these hobbyists associate with their craft include the beauty and nostalgia of keeping history alive? Or the joyous absorption of manual work and constant maintainance? What if there is a desire to resist automation and ease of use? What could we learn then about what people want and expect from new technological designs?

It’s true, it’s true!

Phil Edward’s comment on Anne’s post amplifies those questions, saying that they’re: “Pretty fundamental questions, in fact - and I dislike and distrust technophiles like Schulze and Webb (and Archigram, for that matter), precisely because they don’t ask them.”

And if that’s the side of us I’m showing, I’m doing something wrong!

I hope what generally colours our work is the preservation of existing practices. While I use technology more than most, I wouldn’t call myself a technophile. I like exploring the possibilities inherent in things, it’s true, and by making and using mainly–can I be a thingphile instead?

But there’s a specific point I should make about technology in the context of this hobby. Here, also, is where my post failed to give the full picture. Take Anne’s point about “keeping history alive.” It feels to me that, 20 years ago when I last went to an exhibition, that the history being kept alive was the railway. New technology went in the service of that modelling: electric points rather than manual points, lights inside trains, electric turntables. The technology felt contemporary, and it felt as if it had been kept contemporary for decades. Today, however, it feels like the history being kept alive is not that of the railway, but of the state of model railways from the late 1980s.

In short: It felt like the hobbyists used to chase technology in pursuit of their modelling more then than they do now, and that’s a big change.

Is this true? I have a low confidence in it, a tiny sample size, and a hazy memory so I don’t even know whether I’m remembering correctly. That’s why I didn’t discuss it… but omitting that comment was a mistake, as my surprise at the technology in play permeated the entire post without any explanation. It’s in that context the absence of computers and monorails stood out for me, not one of a general drive towards progress and automation. (I was as happy as many of the folks there just to watch the model trains move. The smaller the trains the better, for some reason.)

Anne, Phil, I hope this clarification leads to slightly less dismay!

Back in June, at reboot8, I presented a series of web browser enhancement ideas based on an investigation of the human senses. (The slides and my notes are online: Making Senses.)

The concept of taste led me to imagine what it would be like to take a hyperlink on a webpage, and pop it in your mouth (taste starts on slide 7). Just like our tongue picks up a 4 or 5 flavours, but sometimes we really enjoy a salty or bitter taste and sometimes we don’t, what are the 4 or 5 tastes of a webpage that we like depending on our mood and nutritional requirements of the day?

In my sketch, tasting a link involves hovering over it and having a flavour summary pop up. This includes a thumbnail of the page at the end of the hyperlink, it’s extracted terms (corresponding to the smell), and a bar chart of the 4 page tastes (flavour is a combination of all of these). The 4 I chose, with only a little thought, were:

• Is it an outward-linking page, like a contents page, or an inwardly focused page like an essay?
• Is it frequently updated?
• Is the text more in the 3rd person, like a corporate or academic page, or more about the 1st person–subjective, like a blog or journal?
• Do many people link to this page, ie what is its pagerank?

They’re okay, as tastes, I think, but really could be better.

Fast forward a few months…

At eurofoo06, Ben Gimpert presented on the “Theomatics of Food” (he has a culinary background). He spoke about mouthfeel, that sensory experience of taste, materiality, stickiness… it’s a grand word.

Where I really pricked my ears up was when Ben joined taste to mouthfeel. What is the feel, he asked, of the main tastes? He speculated:

• “Sour” mouthfeel: pucker-y
• “Salty” mouthfeel: chewy
• “Bitter” mouthfeel: coating-y
• “Sweet” mouthfeel: crunchy

(I don’t recall whether he mentioned umami/pungent or spicy in this section too.)

Now this I like. Given those 4 tastes, and their corresponding feelings, are what we need to make a first-pass judgement on whether we need the buckets of chemicals available in any given food… could I use these real tastes to make the equivalent 4 for webpages?

What does my browser-mouth taste when I click a link? What are the basic flavours of HTML? What is the pagefeel?

So I think I’ll revise my original 4 web tastes. They’ll still take a lot of datamining to calculate, but that’s fine. Perhaps crunchy pages are like popcorn, ones people stay on for not much time, but when they click away it tends to be on another, almost identical page. Coating-y pages are ones that linger… could these be social sites, where you get embroiled in the community, sticky sites?

Chewy sites are long and worthwhile: academic papers, pages that are knowledge hubs, using keywords from a lot of separate parts of the web. And I’m not sure what pucker-y/sour is. Sour makes me think of lemons, which makes me think of citric acid at the centre of the metabolic cycle, which tastes nasty but is at the middle of all life. Perhaps the equivalent for the web is hyperlinks. Pages with a lot of hyperlinks on them are the concentrated stuff of life on the web, and so they taste very, very sour.

Okay, enough of that silliness.

I still think it’s worth taking huge quantities of every metric we can gather about the web and web browsing behaviour - page linger time, click-away time, search terms, text reading age, word tense, link network position, everything - and datamining it as much as we can. Maybe out of all of that we’ll find some stable metrics for describing pages, possibly even those pagefeels, and those will be great additions to search engines and web browsers.

Alternative taste suggestions welcome!