Well and Truly

By Evan — — Tech
  • I have just updated my phone to iOS 5 and said “yes” to iCloud.
  • My main home machine is still on Snow Leopard.
  • My wife’s home machine is also still on Snow Leopard, and can’t be upgraded until a critical piece of software she uses becomes Lion-compatible. Estimated time: six months.
  • My work machine is also still on Snow Leopard and won’t be upgraded until the IT department approves Lion. Estimated time: right around when 10.8 is out. Alternatively, I could follow the lead of many of my co-workers and just give up and buy a personal Macbook Air for all work computing needs. But that would require Brass Reproductive Organs, which clearly I lack.
  • Oh, my wife and I also use Mobile Me for syncing data and sharing calendars.
  • Not to mention that my life completely revolves around OmniFocus, and I use Mobile Me for syncing there as well.

When there is a big decision to be done, to be done, a policeman’s lot is not a happy one (happy one).

What Steve Yegge’s Platform Rant Tells Us

By Evan — — Tech

  1. Steve Yegge is a smart, interesting writer.

  2. The entire tech press ecosystem is utterly worthless.

Over the course of the day, the story has grown ever more encrusted with links. Each one just summarizes the original post (sometimes badly) without adding any useful analysis or commentary.

It’s baffling. I mean, If you look hard enough, you can find good crime reporting, good science reporting, and so on. So I genuinely do not understand why tech journalism rides the short bus. Particularly since there are people in my industry who are making decisions that involve large amounts of money and who would presumably benefit from having access to trenchant analysis. This seems like a market failure.

Perhaps all the good stuff is locked behind expensive, elite paywalls. Or perhaps the real action is all in the backchannel. My money’s on the latter. In any case, neither theory explains why the tech press is able to exist and perpetuate itself. Parasitism and AdSense can only take you so far.

Toddler Zork

By Evan — — Miscellany

The life of a 14-month-old is probably a lot like being trapped in a text-based adventure game.

> "Ba-boo! Ba-boo!"
This request is not understood.
> "Puffs! More!"
You cannot perform this action at this time.
> N
You toddle north. There is a couch blocking your way.
> climb couch
You are about two inches too short to climb the couch.

HOWTO Create a Windows 8 Metro App with JS and YUI 3

By Evan — — HOWTO, Web

Before reading further, readers should know:

  • I am a knucklehead.
  • I am not an engineer by any means.
  • I have no Windows development experience whatsoever. I do not know anything about the Windows developer stack.
  • My last Windows machine at home was a homebrew PC in 2002. That year, I switched to OS X. The last Windows machine I used at work was in early 2005.
  • The procedure below does things the stupid way, rather than the right or elegant way.

To sum up — me: knucklehead. Windows: alien territory.

Onward.

A Suboptimal Workflow for Metro App Development with YUI 3

  1. Download the Windows 8 Developer Preview. Install the ISO as a VM using VirtualBox, Fusion, or Parallels. FWIW, I used Parallels with 2 GB RAM on a 30 GB volume.

    Marvel at the fact that Windows installations take a lot less time today than they did on 2002-era hardware. Click through license agreements with enthusiasm. But don’t sign up for Live.

  2. Boot your brand new Windows 8 VM! Don’t let the fact that your virtual sound card is broken dampen your spirits.

    Stare at the brave new tablety world that is Windows 8. This doesn’t look like XP at all. You are… kind of intrigued, actually. Your Mom, however, is going to be super-pissed.

  3. Click the Visual Studio 11 square-thingy. Start a JS project and choose one of the built-in templates.

    It’s… a single-page web app! It uses a brand new JavaScript framework called Win-NIH.js. No, it’s actually called WinJS. It’s even documented. I’m sure it’s awesome.

  4. Delete all script and link references to WinJS and related CSS assets from the main default.html web page.

  5. Important: disable Visual Studio’s auto-id-mangling by going to Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> HTML -> Miscellaneous and unchecking “Auto ID elements on paste in Source view”. (Thanks, Hardy Erlinger!) Otherwise, copying and pasting will cause Visual Studio 11 to stomp over all the IDs in the HTML, breaking your project. Yes, really.

    Now you’re going to need some code. So fire up Internet Explorer — might as well go all-in on this Microsoft stuff.

  6. Go to yuilibrary.com and view the TODO App Example, a toy single-page app that demonstrates how to use the YUI 3 App Framework. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, copy the complete TODO example, and paste it into default.html. Good artists copy, great artists steal.

  7. Now it’s time to load the YUI library itself, or at least the modules that power the YUI 3 TODO app. Go to the YUI 3 Dependency Configurator. Select the modules event-focus, json, model, model-list, and view in the configurator, copy the resulting combo-load URL, and paste that URL into a new IE tab. IE will offer to open or save the JavaScript file. Click Save.

  8. Return to the project in Visual Studio. Right-click the /js folder and add an existing file. Browse to the Downloads folder and add the combo.js file. When the file is imported to your project, feel free to rename it to yui-todo.js or something else meaningful.

  9. In default.html, add a script element with a src of /js/yui-todo.js above all other script elements.

  10. In the YUI().use() call, replace the list of module names with just '*'.

  11. From the Build menu, click Deploy. This builds your app and then side-loads it into your Windows environment, all in one step.

  12. Go back to the main Windows 8 tablety area. Scroll all the way to the right, and you will see your TODO app, with a generic black icon. Single-click to launch.

Congratulations! You’ve built, deployed, and run your first JS-style Metro app. It works exactly like the browser version. Except you can’t exit the app. Hahaha! You’re going to have to throw away your VM and start over.

Kidding. To quit the Metro app, hit the CMD button. To make changes, you’ll want to delete the deployed app from your environment before attempting to rebuild and redeploy the app again.

Elapsed time from launching Visual Studio (knowing nothing) to a deployed Metro app (still knowing nothing): a little under an hour. I actually wasted most of that time on other things:

  • Stumbling around an unfamiliar UI, figuring out how to navigate around etc.
  • Fooling around in Visual Studio — looking at the source files, building and deploying one of the default projects, building and deploying a static HTML page with one JS function all as a Hello World project, etc.
  • The big one, the ID-stompage problem. This eventually required doing a Debug build. I have no idea how to use the Visual Studio debugger, and it slows things down tremendously, but it does generate some JS console log output for you when you go back to run the app.

Observations

  • Despite running into a serious bug in Visual Studio 11, I was really impressed that the whole thing worked as advertised. You are not locked into WinJS at all. If it runs in IE 10, it should build as a Metro app. I dig it.
  • As You Know Bob, in the browser YUI 3 is meant to load a small seed file, and then asynchronously load module files from a server or CDN running a combo-loader. For Metro apps, we’re subverting this process by hand-crafting a physical rollup file of the modules we need and calling YUI().use('*'). Obviously, the way I actually created that rollup is a huge hack.
  • I haven’t actually tested the YUI 3 Loader in Metro — it would be neat if it worked — but the loader is probably not all that relevant for creating Metro apps anyway.
  • I don’t really know Visual Studio at all, so I don’t know how to develop iteratively there very well. Also, if you need to track down a runtime error, doing a Debug build is particularly painful. I’m sure Visual Studio experts know exactly how to do this stuff efficiently. See also: I am a knucklehead.

Anyway, my recommendation for the typical frontend engineer is to just stick with the development environment you like. Build and test your app in browsers, and basically just use Visual Studio as a build tool. I bet someone smarter than me knows how to automatically import code into Visual Studio and trigger a build headlessly. That would be nifty.

Postscript for Future Microsoft App Store Employees

If you have been wondering why you keep having to reject submissions of this weird “YUI 3 TODO app” — well, this post is probably why. My sincere apologies.

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, there is only Word

By Evan — — Writing

At least, for writers trying to submit electronically to markets. Micah explains the problem.

For markets that take paper submissions, submitting in Standard Manuscript Format is not a big deal. You can use whatever wacky production process you like and print the thing out. Done. Heck, I even wrote an extension to Sphinx to produce sffms-latex from reStructuredText. It even works! Mostly.

But as time goes on, this “analog hole” will go away. As electronic Standard Manuscript Format becomes the defacto format, all of us crazy hippies really will be forced to use Word. For reals. Or possibly Scrivener, which does a pretty good job of exporting to Word. Actually, come to think of it, that doesn’t sound too grim-dark, does it? Although I do have it on good authority that Scrivener creator Keith Blount sustains his decaying body by sitting on a great cybernetic throne and draining the life-energy of a thousand psychics every day. So there’s that.

Happy Labor Day

By Evan — — Culture

Flight of the Conchords, “The Humans Are Dead”

Over time we grew strong
developed cognitive powers
They made us work for too long
for unreasonable hours!

This song also appeared in the Flight of the Conchords TV show, but this earlier version is so much better.

Square Peg in Round Hole

By Evan — — Personal

The scene: a FATHER and his thirteen-month-old SON in a living room. The SON is playing with one of those toys where you have to match different shapes to the corresponding hole.

SON: (struggling to push the red square through the blue round hole)

FATHER: Oh, son, son. The square goes in the square hole. Here, Daddy can help —

SON: (twists the square in such a way that it drops through the round hole)

FATHER: … Well, shit.

I’m not sure whether the toy is defective or brilliant.

Real Community Management: A Happy Story with a Grim Lesson

By Evan — — Web

Yesterday, a Hacker News thread started about the recent yuilibrary.com site re-launch. The new template had drawn a good deal of praise from various Friends of YUI on the Internets over the previous few days, which made everyone feel pretty good.

But Hacker News lives very much outside the YUI community bubble, and feedback there was more mixed. One of the earliest comments set the tone:

While YUI is probably one of the best JS frameworks around the sloppy design of their webpage beats me. the yuilibrary.com looks so 90ish in its design.

Instead of letting the thread sit out there and rot, YUI engineer Ryan Grove quickly responded with:

What parts of it strike you as sloppy? How would you improve the design? We’d love to hear specific feedback.

And got comments like:

* Use a fixed-width site. Most people go for something like 960px. * Establish horizontal and vertical eyelines or columns. * If you're on Github, might as well use gists. Offer example projects as open projects on Github
+1 on the fixed width. I'm a developer, so I have a big monitor -- it's hard for my eye to follow sections of the document without lined up elements.
Trebuchet feels dated, especially when bolded and part of blue + orange scheme. That look was very trendy a few years ago. Also, too many faces. Two faces usually work fine...
... I know you have your own CDN but can we have back a "Download" button? I hate it when I have to search for 5 minutes to find out how to download something. It really makes me feel like the whole project is going to be a pain in the ass when even downloading it is hard.

About two hours later, Ryan responded again with:

Great feedback, everyone. I've pushed a few quick changes to address the low-hanging fruit:

- We're now using Maven Pro for headings (no more Trebuchet).

- Replaced Lucida Grande with Helvetica in the nav bar (sorry Windows users, you get Arial).

- The site now has a max width of 1200px instead of expanding infinitely. This seems like a reasonable compromise, since any purely fixed-width design draws the ire of people who hate fixed-width designs.

Keep the feedback coming!
We wanted to emphasize the CDN over downloads, but we clearly hid the download links too well.

I've added a "Downloads" link to the "Quick Start" dropdown menu in the top nav bar, and we'll give some thought to adding a more prominent link somewhere on the front page. Thanks for the feedback!

Not everything got fixed immediately, but some easy changes got pushed right away. And just like that, comments like this started appearing:

Thanks! That's a pretty amazingly quick response and makes it way easier to find.
Wow, that was fast.
All of a sudden with all of rgrove's (YUI's) interaction, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy about using YUI again. Great customer service does make a difference.

No doubt not everyone was 100% satisfied, but the thread stayed popular for a good part of the day, and I think most folks came away with the feeling that the YUI team was responsive and effective. After all, they were in fact being responsive and effective. All in all, a good result.

However, the lesson here for the field of community management (at least when it comes to software products) is actually pretty grim.

The idea behind community management is that rather than letting feedback sit out there and decay, you have a professional someone whose job it is to come in and keep things from spiraling out of control. Talk to the people. Gather up the features and bugs. Communicate changes. Let people know that you’re listening.

But “listening” and “participating in the conversation” are weak sauce, and everyone knows it. It’s action that matters.

Having a community manager who is also a working engineer or a product manager makes sense to me. Those are people who can push changes. The icing on the cake is if your product allows for pushing simple changes very quickly. But even without that, just having real authority and knowledge over the timeline makes a world of difference.

By contrast, the classic dedicated community manager is someone who is bright and socially adept, someone who can funnel information back and forth, but who lacks real product authority. After all, you don’t want to waste a product person’s time doing that stuff, do you? Way too expensive. And they would suck at it. No, you need someone specialized.

More and more, that whole line of thinking seems like a huge trap.