Swindle

After much internal debate and turmoil, I finally succumbed to the idea of purchasing a Kindle. I must say that I’m quite pleased with the product, having been an early adopter of the Sony Reader and paying dearly for it, with the added insult to injury when Sony decided to drop support for it’s PRS 500 on the Mac a couple of years later. Yes. I own a Mac now. I cannot ever imagine visiting the Free Software Foundation again, having turned over to the dark side so radically by purchasing more than one DRM-infested, anti-libre product of the agents of darkness in the same year.

Back to the Kindle. It’s got a great big 9.7″ display that’s very crisp. The battery life is good, and e-ink technology just seems to be getting better. Screen repainting has room for improvement – I don’t see much of a difference between my three year old Sony and the new DX when it comes to the page refresh speed. I do see a marked difference in the sharpness of the image which makes reading PDFs with small text much more easy to handle. The auto rotating screen is nice except when trying to read in bed and if you don’t mind reaching out awkwardly to flip the page. The Sony Reader on the other hand has smarter button placement.

The highlighting feature is a cruel joke. Anything that requires you to maneuver a tiny joystick to select text clearly hasn’t considered the important market segment with hand-eye dis-coordination. Also, the placement of the said joystick – otherwise referred to as a 5-way controller – is poor IMHO. The DX is also great for magazines and PDFs with it’s large form factor. The built-in 3G is dangerous and runs the risk of bankrupting the Kindle owner.

I’m curiously watching the Kindle’s forays into social features such as showing the popular highlights by exploiting the naivete of users that opt to store their highlighted text on the Amazon servers for safekeeping.

In summary, I do love my new Kindle, despite its shortcomings.

Behold, the blinking marquee

I recently picked up “Handcrafted CSS” at the local bookstore and flipping through it has revived my old love of design.

At the heart of this process is the separation of content, style and behavior in DHTML that evokes notions of beauty in the code that drives the pretty layouts on the screen. The books introduce and codifies some of the aesthetic precepts and takes the reader through the reasoning and creative process of an artist which is quite intriguing.

I remember a particularly interactive web site I was involved in many years ago at a time when the browser wars were at its bloodiest and when the world was being slowly drowned in text that blinked and marquees that scrolled and when the mood struck, marquees that blinked. It was a dark time, when many of the world’s creative types cried themselves to sleep at the fate of browser compatibility and the pain of being caught in the cross-fire between Netscape, IE and Opera.

To drive the point further home, behold, the horror.

I drifted away from the world of design for a while after that, with a number of deep-seated unresolved issues that linger to this day – most having to do with the marquee tag. In case you hadn’t picked up on that already.

Generally, a good design is seen as one that can withstand the innate standards-hating marquee-loving nature of browsers, so that it looks pleasing no matter where it is rendered and at different resolutions, with *hit turned off (like Javascript and even CSS). Throw into this mix, the need for accessibility features and we introduce a whole new dimension of complexity when thinking about design. Thankfully, this forces the designer to think along the lines of separation of concerns or things get out of hand very quickly.

This is where it pays to think of DHTML interface design in terms of markup, presentation and behavior in the same way we look at models, views and controllers. This may not be new to most of you, but I feel as if I’ve been time warped from a time when presentation anti-patterns ruled and the <blink> tag was at the forefront of browser innovation.

Another interesting book that’s keeping me up at night is “Smart Things – Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design“. Ubicomp ftw. More on this later.

Mahavilachchiya needs you!

Several years ago, I got the opportunity to visit a small foundation in the middle of the jungle in Mahavilachchiya that made a strong impression on me and my friends in the LKLUG. We were there to teach kids computers and introduce them to the wealth of free and open source software. As an active community, we have been to many advocacy and training sessions, but this one was quite unlike any other.

There was an element of danger going into a “border village” where the threat of terrorist attacks were ever imminent and the kids lived in fear. Despite the warnings we received from the elders, it was clear to all of us that this had to be done. And to this day, the only regret has been that we have not been able to do more.

What we found in Mahavillachchiya was the most hopeful thing I’ve ever seen in the most hopeless of times under the worst circumstances. It was truly an oasis and a budding fertile ground for changing the lives of an entire generation in the region. A generation that had been ravaged by war and poverty and yet retained the innocence and hope to smile through the ordeal.

Most of what we do in our lives are not important. The petty goals we strive to achieve, the victories that we expect to provide us with fulfillment in life, when examined more closely, pale in comparison to the selfless work performed by remarkable people to bring an entire generation out of a vicious cycle. Here’s a chance for you to do something truly worthwhile that will affect the lives of many.

Mahavilachchiya and Horizon Lanka Foundation need your help. It needs to raise 1 million Rupees by the end of the year to meet its financial obligations and to continue its good work. The equivalent of 9,000 USD, this is the first step in helping the foundation continue to be the positive change agent to the hundreds of rural kids in Sri Lanka.

If you would like to help with this initiative, please contact Nandasiri Wanninayaka (wanni@horizonlanka.net) to see how you can help. Wanni is the founder of this initiative and is a truly inspirational character.

You can also contribute to HLF initiatives on GlobalGiving.org.