Teblog

Will software gallop to our rescue?

My first love, apart from my family and close friends, has always been software. I say 'always' but, in truth, it's only been since November 1965, when I got 100 percent in a programming aptitude test. "Good Lord," I thought in astonishment, "And I can actually get paid for doing this?"

Since then, software has been at the heart of my life. Along the way, other skills have been added to the portfolio, particularly writing and teaching. And these skills have taken me into other areas, such as environmental sustainability. First in 1973 but then in a much more substantial way in 2002 when I became closely involved with an exceedingly large sustainability exemplar project. And now with Freeform Dynamics, where I am the environmental specialist, among other things.

While the economic and environmental bad news whirls around our heads, the one thing I know for sure is that software will be a major contributor to overcoming our ills. Not a panacea, but a fine contributor.

As Nicholas Negroponte has been saying for 15 years, "move bits not atoms". And that is one of the major contributions that software can make. In fact, only software can make it. Whether it's Citrix Online style screen-sharing or remote access or full blown telepresence conference rooms, they not only cut the moving of atoms, they also accelerate business processes and cut travel bills.

The other good thing about software is that it is a product with barely any environmental footprint. It can be delivered as a stream of bits and be paid for with another stream of bits.

For those that don't know, I used to be a software publisher, banging out product in expensive boxes with clunky manuals and floppy disks. But since 2001, this very part-time business has been run wholly electronically from the corner of a server somewhere in America. The programmer and I meet rarely (once a year on average), but we're in intimate, friendly and fairly continuous, contact online. And, of course, all support, 'paperwork' and accounting is done electronically.

Our product was lovingly crafted in C++ (following my initial development using the 8080 assembler) and it is tiny for what it does.

I'm not trying to sell anything here, but I can't help noticing that, by contrast, most of the systems I see today are packed full of bloatware, along with programs and data files which have become moribund. But most users are incapable of dealing with such issues unaided. They need software tools.

If larger programs could be debloated and users helped (in plain English please) with program and file removal, we could stall the madness of buying new equipment just because our old stuff has become clogged up and slow.

As with the organisational benefits of 'atoms to bits', users will benefit from slicker running, gain a financial benefit and reduce their environmental impact all at the same time.

Now, someone tell me these things exist. Please?

Or, if not, why not?

Thank you.

Happy 24th birthday BrainStorm

A long time ago, I invented some software called BrainStorm. It was my secret weapon at the tail end of my tenure as editor of Personal Computer World and the start of my stint as a director of Caxton Software. It help me stay on top of things by acting as a thought grabber, organiser, finder and general rememberer of things for me.

Well, it's been a kind of secret hobby for many years. Marck Pearlstone has been the programming brains since 1994 and, by some miracle, we find ourselves with a new release today - exactly 24 years since it was first published.

I just couldn't let the moment pass without mentioning it. Sorry.

Making screencasts

Do you ever want to record how you do something on the computer with a voice-over? Here's a cross-post from thinkerlog:

If you’re interested in making screencasts, this extract from an email from me to a customer might be of use to you:

…
David,
You’ve done a very nice job presenting and displaying BrainStorm while speaking  to the presentation.

You’re very kind.

Can you share the name of the tools you used?

http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/

You might also want to look at Camtasia. I’m happy with what I’ve got but I hear others talk about Camtasia and the results certainly look good.

http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp
…

I use BB FlashBack from Blueberry Software, by the way.

 

RSS feeds in Grazr via OPML

I have trouble keeping track of myself, let alone all the other things that interest me. We're talking here about web-based stuff: news feeds and blogs in particular, but it extends to forums, wikis and traditional websites too.

Amyloo is using OPML and Grazr to document the blogs that surround the BlogHer conference which is currently running in San José at the moment. (That's the Silicon Valley San José by the way.)

I have demonstrated Grazr in my left sidebar for a while to show a simple outline. Inspired by Amyloo, I decided to try and add some feeds. Using OPML Editor, I inserted some feeds into an 'outline' (joke, it's only four entries) and then dropped the file onto my web server. Then I used the Grazr Configuration utility to create this:

Just click on an entry and it will take you to the most recent posts in, respectively, this blog, a blog I co-write with my editors at Information World Review, a blog spun around thinking tools and a forum I manage for Brainstorm Software. Click on an entry with a newspaper icon to the left and you can read the original post. Marvellous! (Update: but only if the originator feeds the full post. IWR appears not to. You can click on the headline to go to the original post.)

See Amyloo's example for something much more profound.

12 months on, Tebbutt and Hobson catch up on social media

Had lunch with Neville Hobson a couple of weeks ago. We see each other from time to time, but rarely get the chance for a good chinwag. Oddly, the previous session had been in the same restaurant about a year earlier. Since we both spend most of our time in the social computing space, we thought we'd examine how our thinking has changed/refined over this time.

Neville had just read my blog post about how Robert Angel uses BrainStorm to prepare for podcasts, so he thought it would be a good idea to interview me on the subject.

Since I'd already planned to interview him about his podcasting and new media life, we decided to make a single recording of  (some of our) post-lunch conversation.

Neville has blogged about it and provides professional links to the podcast. Please go there, especially if you want to listen to the podcast online.

If you download the MP3, this playlist will help you jump to the bits of interest. Assuming, of course, there are any.

00:00 Scene setting
00:37 A lot's changed in a year
01:04 Death of fanaticism
01:40 Ethics/Journalism
02:24 Guardian blogger - for free
02:58 Podcasting - noise cancelling headphones
04.29 BrainStorm for podcasting
09:36 Perspective on what's valuable in social computing
12:18 Screencasts starts (interrupted)
12:48 Low cost video, daughter records Alan Shearer, recording industry issues
15:33 Screencasts continued - Camtasia & BB FlashBack
16:17 Neville's life changes - how to exploit new tools for organisational benefit
17:23 Life/Work threaded - attention to family etc needed
18:43 New life: opportunities from FIR & conf
19:27 Level of engagement high, met people couldn't have before
21:31 Closing remarks and plug for the Sipson Tandoori

Welcome back Grazr

Welcome back to Grazr. That's the dinky display panel about me in the left sidebar. (Needs JavaScript on, otherwise you just see a Grazr logo. It contains much of the same information as the About link further up the sidebar.)

The content was created in BrainStorm (a 25-year hobby) and passed through OPML Editor (with some tiny custom tweaks) to create an OPML file which Grazr can display. (My other tweak converts an OPML file into a tabbed outline which can be imported by many programs, including BrainStorm.)

Podcasting preparation tools

Professor Robert Angel, of the University of South Carolina, creates a weekly podcast of analysis and commentary on Japan’s domestic politics and foreign relations. Quite a commitment and, I believe, much valued by its listeners. It goes under the project name Japan Considered.

He's often mentioned to me how he uses BrainStorm (something I invented years ago and which is programmed by Marck D Pearlstone these days) during the preparation for his podcasts.

Recently, he blogged and recorded how he uses BrainStorm and other programs. If you're an aspiring podcaster (or communicator generally), I thought you might find his insights interesting.

Here's the bit about preparation software (and it's not just BrainStorm, by the way):

Some of you have asked about the software and hardware required to create the program. The combination of cost and limited technical expertise keeps my setup here barebones simple. I use a regular desktop IBM-PC linked to the University network for all information collection and production.

In addition to regular English and Japanese language-capable web browsers, two software programs work together to simplify the process of categorizing and sorting the information collected. The first is “Brainstorm.” I’ll put a link to their site in the transcript and in the show notes. Brainstorm is hard to describe. It’s deceptively simple – by design. Sort of an electronic outliner on steroids. It allows me to make lists of promising topics, and then to put notes to sources of information about the topics under the headings created. The program is very efficient. So it’s easy to keep many notes for dozens of topics on the same page, so to speak. And to keep them available for future reference.

The second program is somewhat more  complex. Not better or worse. Just more complex. It is MindManager 6 Pro, produced by the Mindjet Corporation of California. MindManager is a graphical “mapper” I use to map out themes for each program. Hyperlinks to accompanying files, and text notes right on the page make it easy to use. This program too is hard to explain without pictures, so I’ll add a link to their website in the show notes and the transcript. Text files downloaded through the week are just noted and added to the electronic archive for indexing and retrieval when needed.

The final recording process is quite  simple. I record the audio file directly into Adobe Audition 2.0, using only an Altec Lansing headset for the microphone. No complex audio chain with pre-amplifiers, mixers, vocal strips, or the like. The Adobe Audition program makes it easy to edit out most of the sighs, grunts, and embarrassing pauses before putting the file up on the University server for distribution. Finally, Dreamweaver and Photoshop are the programs I use to create the podcast web  pages, and to maintain the whole Japan Considered website.

So, there you have it. Not at all complex  or sophisticated. But it gets the job done.

Thank you, Robert, for giving permission to share this with teblog readers. Appreciated.

How do users learn about their software?

A curious form of communication is the Help file. Hours are poured into creating them, yet most people I talk to say "There's no point in looking in Help." They're conditioned not to go there.

As a part-time software publisher, I find this frustrating. At the same time, I need to recognise the behaviour and do something about it.

If this interests you, I bang on about it a bit more over on thinkerlog.

Network Neutrality, BrainStorm praise

If you like the internet the way it is: anyone/anything connecting to anyone/anything, paying for on-ramp and off-ramp according to bandwidth, get ready for a shock. The lawmakers in America are hell-bent on creating a two-tier internet. This will have global repercussions.

I've blogged about it for Information World Review and also written a piece which will be published shortly. I'll link when it's uploaded/published.

Someone told me if I don't toot my own horn, no-one else will do it for me. Well, since that's not really in my nature (should I change it?), there are a couple of blog posts over on thinkerlog which praise my software, BrainStorm. One from a writer, the other from a sales trainer (among other things).

If you use Windows and need to keep on top of things, you might find BrainStorm useful. I do. After all, I wrote it originally to help me cope with being an editor, software publisher, trainer and writer. You won't be surprised to learn that I still use it habitually. Marck D Pearlstone is the programming genius behind the Windows version.

Right now, I have four 'models' open (out of the 2169 on this computer):

- One contains the entire website of a potential business partner -  I 'screen scraped' it quickly, BrainStorm picked up the text automatically and I printed it out, to read en route to a meeting with her.

- One contains (oops, sounds repetitive) the entire website of a charity. The idea is to review the content and structure to make it snappier, more usable and more interesting. I actually pasted it into Word for a spelling and grammar check.

- Another contains most of my network neutrality background reading - all 86,333 words of it. I must be mad. I discovered (don't know why it took so long) that a lot of my life involves distilling masses of often complex stuff to save other people time.

-The last one contains stuff about integrating BrainStorm and ToDoList - a free project management tool from AbstractSpoon Software. The two are pretty harmonious already and will become more so.

The price of BrainStorm is an absurdly low £20. Plus VAT if you're in Europe. You can see why it sits in the 'hobby' part of my brain. But it's good fun, it keeps me involved in the real world and I get to know some really interesting (and passionate) users.

Gosh. I didn't set out to write all that.

Compact display of deep information with Grazr

This is an update to the earlier Grazr posting. Grazr allows the presentation of a lot of information in a very compact form. It comes close to BrainStorm's presentation, which made a lot of sense to me when I took a similar approach in 1981. Maybe that's why I'm so supportive of Grazr.

Take a look for yourself. Grazr's displaying a simple BrainStorm model in the left sidebar. Just click on an entry and it shows the next level. If the background is coloured, then there is deeper level stuff. Hyperlinks on a white background open with a left mouse click. On a coloured background, you need to right click and select the appropriate option from the context menu.

If you click on the 'blogger' entry, you will see 'thinkerlog'. Click on that and you will see a live RSS feed. Click on that and the thinkerlog RSS feed flows into Grazr. The tiny window in the sidebar is not a good way to display the body of a blog post, but at the foot of each post you'll find a hotlink to the original. I included the RSS feed to give you a feeling for the usefulness of Grazr. You, of course, can choose a more appropriate panel size for Grazr on a web page, for example.

If you're going to experiment with Grazr, be careful to test your  work in different browsers. In general, Internet Explorer needs more space  than Firefox. And the pre-release version can only display one Grazr model per web page. This will change.

Because Grazr uses OPML, other OPML models can be sucked in in a similar way to an RSS feed. I haven't got round to doing that yet. But the potential exists for Grazr to become a kind of "life aggregator".

Footnote: The previous blog post explains how we get BrainStorm models into OPML. We are working (right now) on adding a direct OPML output option to BrainStorm. We've been thinking about XML output for years. And OPML is XML compliant, so the time has come...