I've been a big fan of Michael Lopp's blog, Rands in Repose for a long time as well as his previous book, Managing Humans. I just finished his new book, Being Geek, cleverly available as an iPad friendly ebook. Being Geek collects some of my favorite Rands in Repose entries with new material, resulting in the perfect handbook for the working nerd. Lopp covers everything from finding your next gig to navigating the people and situations you'll find in the average corporate ecosystem. Lopp's delivery is friendly — like an older brother dispensing the wisdom gained over years of learning the hard way — and the material is insightful and introspective without resorting to weepy-eyed navel gazing. If you're a geek or have a friend or significant other who is a geek, then Being Geek is worth a look.

I've been using Axure RP for a while now and I'm constantly amazed by how much fun it is and how many cool features it has. I'm really excited about the Mac version. After using Axure on a number of projects, some of them pretty involved, I've started compiling my wishlist of features.

• Dynamic menus. Axure provides menu widgets for both horizontal and vertical menus with dropdowns and flyouts as well as tree navigation widgets. It would be awesome if I could populate these dynamically from the Sitemap. This is a feature that competitor Protoshare already has.
• Better sizing options on tree menus. The tree menus are really cool, but there isn't very much control over the size and I can't make a menu item break into two lines. So if I have a long page title (not recommended, but I'm not in charge of everything!), then the tree width stretches to accomodate the long title. Text wrap combined with a way to control the width of the tree would solve this problem.
• Inline links. Currently the only way to make something a link is to make the entire object a link. If you're creating a typical "footer" navigation with all text links separated by pipes you can't make each item a working link unless you manually break them apart. Very tedious.
• Dynamic breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are a very common navigation aid. It's possible to simulate dynamic breadcrumbs using variables, but it's fairly tedious and painful. Breadcrumbs based on the sitemap structure of the page would be awesome!
• Universal stacking order. Masters are a wonderful feature that makes it possible to make rapid changes across an entire site without having to touch every page. However, a master placed on a page follows the stacking order of that page. Typically this works out just fine, but occasionally it can be a problem. Case in point, I recently worked on a project with a common header. I put that header in a master. In a subsequent round of changes I added a modal dialog activated by a link in the common header. I put the dynamic panel for the modal in the header master so it would be automatically added to all pages. Unfortunately, the header wasn't always the top item in the page stack. On most pages there was other page content that was added later. This content didn't occupy the same x,y space as the header so the stack order wasn't important. It became important when I added the modal which did occupy the same x,y space as the page content. I was forced to touch every page containing the header to bring it to the top of the stack which partially defeated the purpose of the master. If there were some way to give masters a universal stacking order, maybe this problem could be resolved. Something similar to the z-index, perhaps.
• Open link in new window. Currently a link can be set to open in current window, popup window or parent window. It would be great if it could be set to open in a new window. This is a common behaviour (which can be annotated in the specification fields), but client's are literal.
• Auto Labeling. It would be great if menu items would be automatically labeled with the text of the link (which could then be overridden. This would save alot of tedious work.
• Interactions between masters. Suppose you have a dynamic panel on one master. If you place that master on a page, you can manipulate the state of the panel from a link/object on the same master or on the page on which the master is placed. You cannot, however, change the state of the panel from a link/object on another master.

Apple has finally announced their new tablet device, the iPad. With it comes the Apple apologists and the Apple haters, each with their take on why the iPad will be the greatest thing since, well, the iPhone, or why it will be an epic FAIL.

It's difficult to gauge at this point what the ultimate impact of this device will be, and frankly, I think it will take a year and a second generation version before the verdict is in. As I watched Steve Jobs on stage with the iPad I was continuously reminded of the PADD devices used by the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek. It might not be the first version, but I believe this device will find significant inroads into how we work in a way that was promised by Tablet PCs, but never delivered because of weight, a clumsy OS, etc.

As with any Apple device, the debut of the iPad has been marked by the things that are absent: a camera, Flash support, etc. This should come as no surprise to anyone since Jobs has been eliminating things from his creations since the iMac launched without a floppy drive. I remember the hue and cry about how the lack of a floppy drive made the iMac a joke. I guess Apple had the last laugh.

VIrtually every device that Apple has launched since then has left pundits gasping at what was missing. And almost without fail the devices have been a resounding success. I fully anticipate that the iPad will eventually get a camera, but it won't be the same as a camera phone. Apple will add some twist that makes sense with the new device. It might even be something they wanted to launch with this version but left out so they could reach one their most important goals: a $499 pricetag for the base model. As the cost of the hardware decreases, Apple will include more features -- but features designed specifically for the iPad.

Perhaps the biggest missing item on the list, though, is Flash support. My initial reaction was disappointment. As I've thought about it more, however, my disappointment is tempered by a few thoughts. There are primarily three uses for Flash: video, games and ads. I'm certainly not disappointed by the lack of ads and most, if not all Flash games, as John Gruber points out, are designed for a mouse and keyboard and wouldn't translate well to the multi-touch interface. This is not to say that some enterprising Flash developers wouldn't create games specifically for the iPad, but personally, I can live without the games.

The most significant issue related to Flash and web browsing is video. Currently much of the video published on the web uses a Flash video player and this will present some problems, especially on a device that Jobs touted as the best device for using the web. However, as more developers begin utilizing the video capabilities of HTML 5 -- as both Vimeo and YouTube are already starting to do -- this problem will quickly go away. While we as developers may be forced to support multiple video formats for many years to ensure that all of our visitors can watch our video content (I'm looking at you, Microsoft), I predict that by the end of 2010, this problem will be substantially diminished for iPad users. Like the iMac and the floppy drive, the iPhone and iPad will drive continued adoption of HTML5 standards and non-Flash video as an option. 

It's interesting that some bloggers (John Gruber, Gina Tripanni, Andy Baio) have been sharing their Flash visitor stats to show that Flash enabled browsers are on the decline. While this does appear to be true, I don't believe the numbers are quite as compelling as they might appear. The Lifehacker numbers show a 300% increase in Flash-less browsing, but that still only equals ~6% total. Gruber's numbers are around 32%, but likely only about 7% are actually completely Flash-less -- the rest are using Flash blockers that allow you to click to view Flash. I suspect that many users of these plugins are more interested in blocking Flash ads then surfing in a Flash-less world. In fact, I would suggest that this is a far more significant statistic for media buyers and ad agencies then it is for Apple.

I don't know if the iPad is significant inflection point for the industry the way the iPhone was. I do know that I am looking forward to a device that fits better for reading, video and casual web surfing. Hopefully the iPad fulfills my wishes, and even if it doesn't, it still feels like one step closer to Star Trek.

Recently, I was part of a presentation to the team about social media. It's interesting to see how widely varied our knowledge and perceptions as a company of fifty people are. We bring to the equation the biases and limitations of our experience. "Social" means interacting with people; and just because it's interacting online, doesn't mean we're necessarily any better at it—or more comfortable with it—then we are in person.

But that's not really my point. During the discussion following the presentation, one of my colleagues asked about keeping up with and participating in the the ever increasing sources of conversation. It's a problem that I have been wrestling with for the last few months, especially as my focus has turned increasingly toward social media. The textbook answer, and the one I suggested to my colleague, is that we must each decide what is important to us and focus on that. I further suggested that it is ok for a company or a brand or an individual to only participate in those networks and conversations that best engages with their core audience.

That answer, of course, is somewhat glib and facile and ignores the fact that even when culling down the signals to only the most relevant, the flood of data is still more then we can process. So what next? Are better tools the answer? Perhaps. But it is far more likely that fighting the information overload battle with better tools is at best an arms race of cold war proportions. Information is increasing at an exponential rate and new tools are not really keeping up. So what next?

One idea (and it's certainly not a new one) is the concept of editors and curators. Steve Rubel wrote about this a few years ago on MicroPersuasions. In his post Rubel suggests that the difference between a curator and an editor, is that the editor must fill a finite space and the curator seeks only to unearth treasures that fit a purpose or viewpoint. I might extend this to suggest that the editor seeks those things that are timely, while the curator seeks those which are timeless. John Gruber, the noted Mac philospher and pundit, is an editor. His posts are always timely and generally insightful, even when they are short and pithy—or perhaps most often when they are short and pithy. Jason Kottke, on the other hand, is a curator of the "liberal arts 2.0" and a shining example of how a good curator can provide a steady stream of new and relevant content.

Shaun Inman recently launched a new feedreader, Fever, which purports to take "the temperature of your slice of the web and show you what's hot." Based on your personal collection of feeds, Fever calculates which posts are most relevant to you by looking at how many other sites are linking to a particular topic. While an interesting idea, I believe that Fever suffers from two fundamental flaws. One technical and one existential. The technical problem comes from Shaun's decision to make Fever a server based app, thus limiting its utility to programmers, developers and other fellow geeks with the necessary skills and infrastructure to use it. Second, and more importantly, it attempts to determine relevance based on mathematics and relevance is a much fuzzier proposition.

Fever does, however, represent an important step on the journey to machines as editors and curators. But until the singularity, I'll continue to look for the Gruber's and Kottke's to keep me informed and safe from drowning in the information ocean.

There are certainly many things in this country that need to be fixed or improved. The recession has opened the floodgates of public works projects to improve or repair infrastructure across the country. It’s The New Deal for a new century.

One key piece of infrastructure that hasn’t benefited, however, is broadband internet access. Perhaps overlooked is the wrong word since, in our current environment, broadband is private enterprise. Unlike our physical highways, sewers, water and electricity, internet access has remained the purview of deregulated telephone and television carriers. Is it any wonder, then that the United States ranks 15th in a recent Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development study?

Worse, yet are the frequent pockets of households where high-speed internet access is available, but only from one carrier, creating a mini-virtual monopoly. So, it is with great interest that I read a recent MediaPost article reporting that a Minnesota appeals court has “ruled that Web service is a utility that towns may finance with bonds.” This ruling is in response to a 2007 bond issue from the town of Monticello, Minnesota for a municipal owned fiber optic network.

While this ruling only effects towns in Minnesota, it’s another step in the path to building sufficient case law to support similar efforts across the country. Of course, this is only one plank in the universal broadband platform. The federal government needs to make it a priority, like universal healthcare. Until the issue is addressed with the same weight as these other social issues, our national communications infrastructure will remain at the whim of business.