The analogue TV signal in Australia will be switched off by 2013. This means that everyone without a digital tuner will suddenly find themselves free of broadcast television. The date for the switch over has been shifted several times as politicians remained convinced that the digital TV (DTV) adoption rates were so low that it would be a disaster if the signal was turned off as scheduled. I remember when the switch over was going to be sometime in 2005, then 2008, and now it will begin by 2011 and be completed by 2013. [click to continue…]
With information overload comes a desire to manage time and increasingly managing attention as well.
Untethered technology gives us the freedom to do nearly anything, anytime, anywhere. It can also enslave us – we feel compelled to use it where ever it is. Technology is neutral. How, when and where we use it is up to us
There are two different concepts that are often referred to as “attention management” – one I’m not going to write about (mainly because I’m still researching what it means and its implications for my daily existence) and one I am going to write about. [click to continue…]
Over the last few months I have witnessed a steadily growing stream of writers declaring news feed, blogging and/or social media bankruptcy, citing such things as information overload, hobbies becoming ‘work’ or even the fact that so many people on the internet can be jerks about such small things. Maybe you’re like Sarah Perez who wrote “Taking a breather from social media? Maybe we’re doing it wrong?“ Perhaps you’re more like Robert Scoble, who wrote in “Has/how/why tech blogging has failed you” that the joy of geeking out on tech walked out at around the same time everyone got obsessed by the business side of things. Or, you might have sympathy for the views of Jason Calacanis who tired of the haters and ‘officially’ retired from blogging (Jason’s scheming something, I’m sure of it). [click to continue…]
Since its debut in 2004, del.icio.us has been the market standard for social bookmarks. Its reputation was further enhanced in late 2005 when it was acquired by Yahoo!. Social bookmarking was going places. It wasn’t that long ago that every second blog (particularly in the tech niches) had some type of del.icio.us widget in a sidebar somewhere. Sometimes it was a simple list of the latest bookmarks the blog author had while other times it was a tag cloud of recently added items. Either way, del.icio.us seemed to be around every corner. [click to continue…]
I understand that content owners have licensing agreements around the world and feel that they can’t open up television programs globally to protect the financial investment of various regional licensees.
However, content owners, you need to understand that if you deny people a way to legally access your product simply on the basis of geographic location, they will get it anyway without you. [click to continue…]
I recently wrote another guest piece for Sarah Perez:
Stocktake time. Despite the fact that Jaiku has everything that the hottest 2.0 properties have, all tied up on one neat basket, Google has failed to get any mindshare at all amongst users and developers. Unless Google has some fiendishly cunning plan for world domination, it really looks like they’ve dropped the ball here.
Note: this tutorial was for version 3.15 of JWPlayer. It is now up to v4.2. The customisation wizard may or may not work with v3.15. An older version of this post demonstrated the customisation by changing colors. However, that code no longer works and has been removed. Hopefully I will provide an updated tutorial soon.
While using someone else’s media player to stream mp3s hosted on your site can be fun (see the tutorials on how to use the Google Reader player and how to use the Yahoo media player), nothing quite beats the thrill of rolling your own media player and controlling it on your own server. Below are some simple steps anyone can take to use the free jwplayer from Jeroen Wijering.
JW FLV Media Player
The JW FLV Media Player is the brainchild of Jeroen Wijering. It is made with Adobe Flash technology and will play not only flv files but any other media format supported by Flash, including our self-hosted mp3. You can get the jw flv media player up and running with a few simple steps:
Download the source files for the media player from here
Unzip the source files and upload them to your own hosted server. I created a new folder on my account called ‘mediaplayers’ and then created another folder called ‘jwplayer’. Take note of the location of the files as you will need this later.
Configure the wizard as desired. I’ve included a screenshot of my wizard configuration and I’ve kept it very basic. The wizard lets you do things such as change colour, size, add playlists (if you have those set up already), add a stop button – stacks of features all up. When you’re finished configuring, click the ‘Update and preview code’ button to see what your player will look like and the code you need to cut and paste into your own site.As a quick explanation, the ’source’ option is where you have uploaded the media player files on your server and the file option is where you have stored your mp3. Also, the ideal height for the slim player is 20 pixels (the default setting) for a single mp3. Larger sizes are useful for when you have a playlist of tracks you want to display.
Copy and past the code into your webpage. As an example, the code generated from my options is: <embed src="http://techwhimsy.com/mediaplayers/jwplayer/mediaplayer.swf" width="440" height="20" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="height=20&width=440&file=http://techwhimsy.com/31_Ghosts_IV.mp3" />
Embedded, the final version looks like this:
And If you are having problems with the embed code (for example, the code shows up as standard text in your blog), try removing all the line returns and replacing them with a single space instead. Also, for some reason that escapes me (but you clever bunch out there probably know), you need to have a space between the end of the code and the closing “/>”.
With all the fuss surrounding the will they/won’t they merger of Microsoft and Yahoo, it has been surprising to see just how many cool and interesting things there are buried inside the Yahoo corporation. There is much more to Yahoo than search, directories, Flickr and del.icio.us. A quick scan of Yahoo! Everything reveals a whole bunch of stuff from the new social news service Buzz to online video editing with Jumpcut to the Zimbra collaboration and instant messaging service. However, what is possibly the most interesting to web geeks is the unsung Yahoo User Interface (YUI) and Yahoo Design Pattern Library, both part of the Yahoo Developer Network.
The YUI is a collection of cross-browser controls and utilities written in Javascript that are intended to be used in developing rich internet applications (think AJAX and DHTML). It is freely available under the BSD licence for anyone to use in commercial applications or otherwise. Included in the YUI is a collection of Cascading Style Sheets including a comprehensive style sheet providing a large range of different grid design options for page layout. The YUI has too many cool things to list here, but some of the cooler applications include a rich text editor, calendars and drag and drop utilities. The YUI is quite a technical collection and is essentially a giant repository of server and client side code.
The Yahoo Design Pattern Library is a practical application of the industrial strength code in the YUI. The patterns are an attempt to offer comprehensive solutions to a wide-range of interface design problems and pull together different pieces of the YUI code. There are design patterns for navigation options (things like tabs and indexes), calendars, page layouts and slideshows. Like the YUI, the Design Pattern Library is free to use by all comers and is licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution licence.
To keep up to date on new additions to both YUI and the Design Pattern Library, keep your eyes on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog at http://yuiblog.com/blog/
Note: as far as I am aware, no part of techwhimsy.com uses either YUI or the pattern library. Now that I know they exist, there’s a very good chance some of the features will make their way into techwhimsy v2.0
