SXSW Web Awards Finalists
The SXSW Web Awards Finalists have been announced and the AIR-Austin 2003 Advanced Training is listed in the Developer Resource category. I’m honored to be in the company of my competitors, most of whom are on my daily reading list. In fact, my entry even links to a few of the competing entries: Accessify and the CSS Zen Garden.
- 2112 FX 3D Tips Blog
I wasn’t familiar with Jim Armstrong’s 3D and video tips site, but it looks to be a strong competitor, especially since it’s the only resource not targeted at Web developers.
- Accessify: Tools and Wizards
Most of these tools were put together by Ian Lloyd, who I met last year at SXSW 2003. Now, I believe, Nigel Peck helps Ian run that site, but I’m not sure if Nigel’s involvement includes the Tools section. Incidentally, Ian will be in the South Pacific in March and will be unable to attend.
- Asterisk*
I’ve been following D. Keith Robinson’s weblog for much of the past year. It’s both entertaining and informative, a rare combination in sites mostly devoted to code.
- CSS Zen Garden
In a strange turn of events, I encouraged Dave Shea to enter this competition back in October, and now I think the Zen Garden is most likely to take first prize in this category. I didn’t fully consider that we’d be in the same category, though it makes perfect sense now. :p Oh well, good luck again, Dave.
And good luck to all the finalists in all categories. May the the best sites win.
Group Hug, created by my friend Gabe, is another finalist in the Weird/Extreme category. Is it a service to Man, or a plague on Mankind? You be the judge...
I helped Gabe beta test Group Hug last year and even put a few of my own confessions on it, but I don’t think it was quite so twisted then. I can’t read it anymore; I get disgusted. I guess that’s why it’s in the Weird/Extreme category.
I did donate to the server fund, though. I think he said it was upwards of 100,000 hits a day now. (Can you say, “People’s Choice,” Gabe?) Good luck.
Information design, email threading, and spam...
I’ve been thinking about email usability and sustainability a lot lately. Since upgrading to Panther on my Mac at home, I’ve been using Mac Mail, the email client that comes bundled with Mac OS X. On Jaguar, I was using Entourage, Microsoft’s (almost) equivalent of Outlook for Mac. Before that, I had used Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, and Pine way back in the day. At work, I’ve been using Mozilla Mail on Windows XP for about a year.
Message threading
A lot of new mail applications will let you view messages by threads — that is, they attempt to visually represent the relationship between messages using certain otherwise invisible headers such as “In-Reply-To.” The previous screen shot of Mac Mail shows that some programs allow you group all related messages and optionally view them in a separate color. Another option (not pictured) does not group the messages and therefore signifies the connection by color only; the benefit is that messages can retain another sort order, such as sort by date.
Mozilla Mail and its stand-alone version Thunderbird allow you to see threading infomation in a hierarchical tree view. This is more useful for displaying thread relationships than Mac Mail’s method, but it destroys the sort order capabilities which I find essential. As such, I don’t end up using Mozilla’s threading capabilities very often.
IBM Remail
Bill Keaggy’s xPlane xBlog feed recently tipped me off to IBM’s Collaborative User Experience Group (CUE). CUE has developed Remail, a next-generation email client that appears to be a fantastic example of information design. Remail supports colorized and thread grouping modes like Mac Mail, but adds another representation of message relationship: the thread arc.
This arc is visible in the message window and gives an accurate representation of several layers of information: the order in which each message was sent, the color-coded representation of senders, and the hierarchy of each message in the overall thread. For such a simple graphic, that’s impressive.
In addition to its visualizations, Remail has several other features such as in-sight collections that make it a pioneering work of information design. However, the Remail site lacks mention of one essential feature for any usable email client: quality spam filtering.
The main reason I’ve been using Mac Mail and Mozilla Mail is completely unrelated to their threading features: it’s because they have great spam filters. Mozilla’s spam filter is the best I’ve used, and Mac Mail’s filters are a close second. Out of the several hundred pieces of spam I receive each day, only about five break through my filters. I’ve never gotten a false positive in Mozilla, and I only rarely get false positives in Mac Mail.
Some of you may scoff and say, “Several hundred? Bah! I get several thousand or more a day.” Chances are that I’ve been more protective of my email address than you. I’ve been using several obfuscation techniques, I almost always view email as plain text, and I never view remote images in my mail programs. Loading remote images in your mail reader is the surest way to verify your email address to crafty spammers. Some spam-blocking services put the effort on the sender, but that was never a serious option for me, not even the accessible spam-blocking services.
For the sake of accuracy, I do not know whether Remail has spam filtering. I only know that they didn’t mention any spam filtering features on the site.
Here are just a couple essential features for a good email client.
- Spam filtering. Like pop-up blocking, this feature should never have been needed, but the soulless programmer who wrote the first email-harvesting spider cursed us all.
- Open standards. Just because your email client is the best now, doesn’t mean it will be the best tomorrow. Please don’t make it difficult for me to export my mail in a useful format. (Read: Exporting from Outlook was a bigger headache than I ever want to go through again.)
What email client do you use and why? What features do you wish it had?
Update 2004/01/21: What, no comments yet? How about native support for encryption and digital signatures? Mac Mail has it. Your mail client probably doesn’t.
Moving domain hosts...
I’m in the process of moving my domain hosting to ByteStacker, because Robert has the best virtual server packages anywhere. If you’re interested in administering your own sites with root-level access, check out what he has to offer.
Now, I didn't make this post specifically to plug ByteStacker, but to make a disclaimer about my Linux administration skills. I’m fairly confident that the web site will transfer seamlessly, but I’m not so sure about my mail accounts. In case you have trouble sending mail to my cookiecrook.com accounts, please use my hotmail account instead. My user name there is djcookiecrook. In any case, everything should be back to normal within a week.
In the meantime, I hope you’re entertained by this prank we pulled on a co-worker. He left on vacation, so we closed in his cube.
Update 2004/01/16: The domain transfer was successful. Let me know if you experience any trouble with the site.
Same as it ever was...
I just met David Byrne, best known as the frontman for the Talking Heads. We were both eating lunch at Marakesh, a local Mediterranean restaurant, and had a brief but interesting conversation about PowerPoint and whether or not it makes you stupid.
You see, much to the chagrin of Edward Tufte, Mr. Byrne is (ab?)using PowerPoint to make motion graphics for his music video artwork — pretty interesting stuff, I think. It’s definitely smarter than any other use I’ve seen for that program.
More reading...
Resolutions...
Happy New Year. Let’s get to the resolutions, shall we?
- Take on less freelance work.
I’ve already got a full-time job, and I constantly take on creative side-projects and non-profit work. Less paid freelance will leave me more time to concentrate on the creatively interesting and portfolio-worthy work. The free work is the stuff that keeps me interested and keeps me from burning out.
- Join the gym and exercise three times a week.
What about this one makes it so hard to follow-through? When will science create the workout pill?
- Read no more than two books at a time.
At any given time, I have about six bookmarks in use. They’re usually stuck in three-to-four technical books and two-to-three non-technical books. I think I started reading this way in college when I had to for classes. The benefit is multi-disciplinary study. Books on usability and information architecture often overlap, as do books on typography and color theory.
The problem is that, when reading multiple books, I don’t think I give full concentration to each and therefore don’t get as much as I could from each read. I’m not convinced this limit is the correct answer, but I want to try it for at least a year.
- Finish and launch the AIGA Austin site redesign and rebuild in the Spring, hopefully early Spring.
This is one of those free projects that keeps me interested in design and web work, but it’s also a lot of work.
