gnegg: January 2008

reddit’s commenting system

This is something I wanted to talk about for quite some time now, but I never got around to it. Maybe you know reddit. reddit basically works like digg.com – it’s one of these web2.0 mashup community social networking bubble sites. reddit is about links posted by users and voted for by users.

Unlike digg, reddit has an awful screen design and thus seems to attract a bit more mature crowds than digg does, but lately it seems to be taken over by politics and pictures which devalues the whole site a bit.

What is really interesting though is the commenting system. In fact, it’s interesting enough for me to write about it and it works well enough for me to actually post a comment there here and then. It’s even good enough for me to be sure that whenever I will be in the situation to design a system to allow users to comment on something that I will have a look at what reddit did and I will model my solution around that base.

There are so many commenting systems out there, but all fail in some regards. Either they disturb your reading flow, making it too difficult to post something. Or they either hide comments behind a foldable tree structure or they display a flat list making it difficult to see any kind of threading going on.

And once you actually are interested in a topic enough to post a comment or a reply to a comment, you’ll quickly lose track of the discussion which gets as quickly buried by newly arriving posts.

reddit works differently.

First, messages are displayed in a threaded, but fully expanded view, thus allowing to skip over content you are not interested in while still providing all the overview you need. Then, posting is done inline via some AJAX interface. You see a comment you want to reply to, you hit the reply link, enter the text and hit "save". The page is not reloaded, you end up just where you left off.

But what good is answering to a comment if the initial commenter quickly forgets about his or her comment? Or if he or she just plain doesn’t find her comment again?

reddit puts all direct replies to any comments you made into your personal inbox folder. If you have any of these replies, the envelope to the top right will light up red allowing you to see newly arrived replies to your comments. With one click, you can show the context of the post you replied to, your reply and the reply you got. This makes it incredibly easy to be notified when someone posted something in response, thus keeping the discussion alive, no matter how deeply it may have been buried by comments arriving after yours.

So even if reddit looks awful (one gets used to the plain look though), it has one of the best, if not the best online discussion systems under its hood and so many other sites should learn from that example. It’s so easy that it even got me to post a comment here and then – and I even got replies despite not obviously trolling (which usually helps you get instant-replies, though I don’t recommend this practice).

The IE rendering dilemma – solved?

A couple of months a IE rendering dilemma: How to fix IE8’s rendering engine without breaking all the corporate intranets out there? How to create both a standards oriented browser and still ensure that the main customers of Microsoft – the enterprises – can still run a current browser without having to redo all their (mostly internal) web applications.

Only three days after my posting IEBlog talked about IE8 passing the ACID2 test. And when you watch the video linked there, you’ll notice that they indeed kept the IE7 engine untouched and added an additional switch to force IE8 into using the new rendering engine.

And yesterday, A List Apart showed us how it’s going to work.

While I completely understand Microsofts solution and the reasoning behind it, I can’t see any other browser doing what Microsoft recommended as a new standard. The idea to keep multiple rendering engines in the browser and default to outdated ones is in my opinion a bad idea. Download-Sizes of browser increase by much, security problems in browsers must be patched multiple times, and, as the Webkit blog put it, “[..] hurts the hackability of the code [..]”.

As long as the other browser vendors don’t have IE’s market share nor the big company intranets depending on these browsers, I don’t see any reason at all for the other browsers to adapt IE’s model.

Also, when I’m doing (X)HTML/CSS work, usually it works and displays correctly in every browser out there – with the exception of IE’s current engine. As long as browsers don’t have awful bugs all over the place and you are not forced to hack around them, deviating from the standard in the process, there is no way a page you create will only work in one specific version of a browser. Even more so: When it breaks on a future version, that’s a bug in the browser that must be fixed there.

Assuming that Microsoft will, finally, get it right with IE8 and subsequent browser versions, we web developers should be fine with

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

on every page we output to a browser. These compatibility hacks are for people that don’t know what they are doing. We know. We follow standards. And if IE begins to do so as well, we are fine with using the latest version of the rendering engine there is.

If IE doesn’t play well and we need to apply braindead hacks that break when a new version of IE comes out, then we’ll all be glad that we have this method of forcing IE to use a particular engine, thus making sure that our hacks continue to work.

Apple TV – Second try

When Apple announced their AppleTV a couple of months (or was it years?) ago, I was very skeptical of the general idea behind the device. Think of it: What was the big success behind the iPod? That it could run proprietary AAC files people buy from the music store?

No. That thing didn’t even exist back then. The reason for the success was the total easy (and FAST – remember: Back in the days, we had 1.1 MB/s USB which every MP3 player used vs. 40MB/s Firewire of the iPod) handling and the fact that it was an MP3 player – playing the files everyone already had.

It was a device for playing the content that was available at the time.

The AppleTV in its first incarnation was a device capable of playing content that wasn’t exactly available. Sure it could play the two video podcasts that existed back then (maybe more, but you get the point). And you could buy TV shows and movies in subpar quality on your PC (Windows or Mac) and then transfer them to the device. But the content that was available back then was in a different format: XVID dominated the scene. x264 was a newcomer and MP4 (and mov) wasn’t exactly used.

So what you got was a device, but no content (and the compatible content you had was in subpar quality compared to the incompatible content that was available). And you needed a PC, so it wasn’t exactly a device I could hook to my parents PC for example.

All these things were fixed by Apple today:

There is a huge library of content available right here, right now (at least in the US): The new movie rental service. Granted. I think it’s not quite there yet price vs. usability-wise (I think $5 is a totally acceptable price for a movie with unlimited replayability), but at least we have the content.
It works without a PC. I can hook this thing up to my parents TV and they can immediately use it.
The quality is OK. Actually, it’s more than OK. There is HD content available (though maybe only 720p one, but frankly, on my expensive 1080p projector, I don’t see that much of a difference between 720p and 1080p)
It can still access the scarce content that was available before.

The fact that this provides very easy to use video-on-demand to a huge amount of people is what makes me think that this little device is even more of a disruptive technology than the iPod or the iPhone. Think of it: Countless of companies are trying to make people pay for content these days. It’s the telcos, it’s cable companies and it’s device manufacturers. But what do we get? Crappy, constantly crashing devices, which are way too complicated for a non-geek and way too limited in functionality for a geek.

Now we got something that’s perfect for the non-geek. It has the content. It has the ease-of-use. Plug it in, watch your movie. Done. This is what a whole industry tried to do and failed so miserably.

I for my part will still prefer the flexibility given by my custom Windows Media Center solution. I will still prefer the openness provided by illegal copies of movies. I totally refuse to pay multiple times for something just because someone says that I have to. But that’s me.

And even I may sooner or later prefer the comfort of select-now-watch-now to the current procedure (log into private tracker, download torrent, wait for download to finish, watch – torrents are not streamable, even if the bandwith would easily suffice in my case – the packets arrive out of order), so even for me, the AppleTV could be interesting.

This was yet another perfect move by Apple. Ignore the analysts out there who expected more out of this latest keynote. Ignore the bad reception of the keynote by the marked (I hear that Apple stock just dropped a little bit). Ignore all that and listen to yourself: This wonderful device will certainly revolutionize the way we consume video content.

I’m writing this as a constant sceptic – as a person always trying to see a flaw in a certain device. But I’m sure that this time around, they really got it. Nice work!

My PSP just got a whole lot more useful

Or useful at all – considering the games that are available to that console. To be honest: Of all the consoles I have owned in my life, the PSP must be the most underused one. I basically own two games for it: Breath of Fire and Tales of Eternia – not only by this choice of titles, but also by reading this blog, you may notice a certain affinity to Japanese Style RPG’s. These are the closest thing to a successor of the classical graphic adventures I started my computer career with, minus hard to solve puzzles plus a much more interesting story (generally). So for my taste, these things are a perfect match. But back to the PSP. It’s an old model – one of the first here in Switzerland. One of the first on the world to be honest: I bought the thing WAAAY back with hopes of seeing many interesting RPG’s – or even just good ports of old classics. Sadly neither really happened. Then, a couple of days ago, I found a usable copy of the game Lumines. Usable in a sense of when the guy in the store told me that there is a sequel out and I told him that I did not intend to actually play the game, he just blinked with one eye and wished me good luck with my endeavor. Or in layman’s terms: That particular version of Lumines had a security flaw allowing one to do a lot of interesting stuff with the PSP. Like installing an older, flawed version of the firmware which in turn allows to completely bypass whatever security the PSP would provide. And now I’m running the latest M33 firmware: 3.71-M4. What does that mean? It means that the former quite useless device has just become the device of my dreams: It runs SNES games. It runs Playstation 1 games. It’s portable. I can use it in bed without a large assembly of cables, gamepads and laptops. It’s instant-on. It’s optimized for console games. It has a really nice digital directional pad (gone are the days of struggling with diagonally-emphasized joypads – try playing Super Metroid with one of these). It plays games like Xenogears, Chrono Cross, Chrono Trigger – it finally allows me to enjoy the RPG’s of old in bed before falling asleep. Or in the bathtub. Or whatever. It’s a real shame that once more I had to resort to legally questionable means to get a particular device to a state I imagine it to be. Why can’t I buy any PS1 game directly from Sony? Why are the games I want to play not even available in Switzerland? Why is it illegal to play the games I want to play? Why are most of the gadgets sold today crippled in a way or another? Why is it illegal to un-cripple our gadgets we bought? Questions I, frankly, don’t want to answer. For years now I wanted a possibility to play Xenogears in bed and while taking a bath. Now I can, so I’m happy. And playing Xenogears. And loving it like when I was playing through that jewel of game history for the first time. If I find time, expect some more in-depth articles about the greatness of Xenogears (just kidding – just read the early articles in this blog) or how to finally get your PSP where you want it to be – there are lots of small things to keep in mind to make it work completely satisfactory.