I’m aware that this was a gauche position to take, but I originally started out with a question: Do I start learning Ember or do I start learning Backbone? Much to my surprise the answer I left with was: pick up Batman.
There are many ways to consider the different frameworks but in a nutshell: 1) data-binding feels like a superior solution to wrapping moustache {} in script tags, and more importantly, 2) Batman is clearly dedicated to conventions and patterns that I have come to love and admire.
Now, I’m not interested in ‘opinionated software’. I’m interested in getting work done. I’m interested in an application development framework that holds my hand throughout the process. I’m interested in software that makes hard decisions for me, so that I don’t have to repeatedly solve the same problems. As it turns out, I’m also a big fan of the MVC pattern as implemented by dhh et al. I think we’re on to something1.
Yet there is one major problem that almost no framework seeks to resolve, and most attempted to dodge, and that is of server-side rendering.
Problems with rich js web apps
Now, I’m not going to pretend that I’m actually concerned with graceful degradation. Lord knows I’ve sprinkled just enough jQuery into my apps that they wouldn’t work otherwise. I’m also going to conveniently ignore progressive enhancement for the moment, because I’m open to the idea that you have to occasionally burn your bridges in order to move forward.
As far as I can tell, there are two real concerns:
The Google Problem
The Twitter Problem
–
Google
Google can’t parse javascript, condemning your content/app/idea to permanent obscurity.
I’m not super concerned with this. While being able to fully parse javascript on crawl is a phenomenal technical problem, someone’s going to solve it eventually; the economics of the situation dictate it.
However, it’s still something we’ll have to deal with over the next five years, and you’re insanely irresponsible to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Twitter
The twitter problem stems in that when I am looking at a resource (for instance) it is somewhat preposterous that you have to load the application, and then issue another request for the actual data2.
It’s preposterous for two reasons.
First and for all, the resource locator I just pointed to contains all the state necessary to construct the page. The server, that ultimate guardian of persistence, already knows what information I’m trying to obtain. Resources are amongst the most important UI conventions we’ve established over the past couple of decades. The ability to share links to any application or content is incredibly powerful, and it’s not an achievement that we’re not going to abandon.
More importantly, adding a second round trip to your application load can really harm your user’s experience.
Latency is the final frontier
Whenever someone talks about the minified size of their libraries, I can’t help but roll my eyes. Bandwidth is not an issue. Anyone who has worried about shaving a few kilobytes off their libraries has wasted their time.
We all manage to watch streaming HD video on a daily basis. Economics will also solve any bandwidth gaps we may suffer. What remains after that is permanent, in that at the high end our latency time is already mostly dominated by the speed of light.
If you’re genuinely concerned about user experience, it is all about sub ~300ms loading times. We’ll get fatter pipes, but we’ll always have laggy cell phone connections. If you’re careful and intelligent about the way you send data down the pipe you don’t even need all that much javascript in order to achieve the rich experiences we seek.
–
Now you tell this to a lot of js people and they’ll hold up their nose and say that the answer is to build spaghetti evented apps. The one language everywhere paradigm is a nice dream but it’s not necessary (and given the limitations of Javascript, nor is it desirable).
You’re not going to actually be sharing that much code - outside of
validations - between the server and the client. In fact, there’s lots
of code that I specifically don’t want my clients to have access to.
So let’s continue to write apps in our preferred engineering aspects
of choice. As long as an interface gets exposed it doesn’t matter.
You just have to have content on first page load.
This is not to knock against any of the other vendors who gave talks that weekend. For instance, I was impressed with knockout. Steven et al achieved a very cool engineering feat when they openly set out to be interoperable with as many other libraries as possible.
The beauty of something like Knockout - where you get to choose your preferred routing library - is also its downfall; the whole point of an application framework is that it’s some other asshole’s job to worry about maintaining all the glue between the different aspects of the framework.
The way I see it, the biggest advances in programming productivity over the past couple of decades have revolved around making some poor asshole upstream from you worry about maintaining the platform on which you write your applications.↩
The video goes from September to May; I cropped it to match the music. The song is the first movement of Philip Glass’ Violin Concerto No. 1. For some reason the top red banner didn’t render properly. I have no idea why youtube didn’t render a 720p version.
Differences in reportage
There are several interesting things going on here.
The thing that stands out the most in comparison to the nytimes is how the BBC’s editors behave more placidly in their content curation. Where the nytimes crams its homepage with as much information as possible, the BBC picks the most important story of the day and runs with it.
I suspect this difference comes down to a dramatic divergence in the sheer volume of content both organizations feel the need to showcase. Where the BBC is happy to file short, factual pieces, the nytimes house style seems to force them into multi page arrangements. Where the nytimes quantifies the BBC strives for brevity.
This can be seen most clearly when you compare their coverage of the Chilean miners:
One pleasant upshot of this, however, is that the nytimes’ homepage is more dramatic. If I want to know the most important story of the day, the BBC will do me right. If I want to follow an event with bated breath I might be better served by the nytimes.
See how they covered the Egyptian revolution:
There is another great thing about the above video: you can see around 1:56 how the news cycle briefly moved on once the pace of new developments slowed down. I feel like this has nagging implications on our own perceptions of foreign events. You can see how the two sites share a large portion of photography and how quickly a subject gets dropped once it stops being news.
Woe betide protestors in Bahrain and Syria for being late to the party and living in uninteresting countries. Heaven help you once your civil war stops featuring dramatic reversals, like in Libya.
(Note: this more a limitation of our collective attention span. We just have a limited capacity for empathy. I didn’t even mention the Ivory Coast.)
Anyhow, I also produced a video comparing their coverage of the Japanese tsunami:
So, which news organization should I follow?
Frankly, the nytimes features a lot of noisy, America-centric news pieces. Just by watching the timelapses I felt vastly more informed on “what is happening out there” based on what the BBC decided to feature.
That said it’s important to keep in mind that the nytimes offers a “global edition” which was not captured by my timelapse, and that the BBC you get on TV in the UK has a more domestic bent than their global news website.
The BBC offers a very broad, yet shallow coverage. They’re great for quick summaries, but all too often they seem almost alergic to drawing conclusions. I’m infuriated by their policy of putting everything in quotes; it’s as if they’re trying to absolve themselves of any responsibility for interpretation.
The nytimes on the other hand produces awesome multimedia illustrations for the stories they cover. Their biggest problem in my humble opinion might be a reticence to embrace the medium; all of this quality work gets hidden in a side bar and becomes lost to the tides of time. They also have excellent photography editors.
Could you now espouse some bullshit on the nature of media in these tough digital times?
Certainly!
Once an iPad equivalent drops below $100 it will stop making economic sense to pulp hundreds of tonnes of trees and ship them out on a daily basis. If you don’t operate on a mandated subsidy it’s going to be difficult to justify ongoing costs in news coverage. Especially given that there’s some mounting evidence that news simply isn’t profitable.
The upshot of this is that in the meantime quality news coverage is going to contract and we’ll probably suffer somewhat on a intellectual, moral, and democratic level, etc, etc.
I’m not too concerned; our democracies emerged without the modern news distribution apparatus’ and we’re suddenly starting to see corps of semi-professional, semi-volunteers picking up the slack on a local level. The next ten years are going to be crummy on almost any vector you want to pick, but at least we’ll be experiencing the last and most complete expansion in distribution and access to information.
This is incredibly exciting. This will never happen again. Everything we do now will be taken for granted and ignored by future generations. We’ll figure things out eventually.
You're a web developer, though. Your opinion is meaningless. You are wasting all of my time. You can barely write as it is.
I, uh, hrm.
Whatever. For some miracle I've kept reading this far. Tell me about things you're actually qualified to talk about.
Okay!
First things first, I was wrong when it comes to automated archives. The nytimes doeskeep an archive. So does the Boston Globe. An enterprising fellow keeps a detailed archive of the BBC News. I’m a lot less pessimistic about preservation.
Andy Rutledge came out and redesigned the nytimes frontpage. It’s pretty, he has a lot of good points and I agree with him when it comes to information saturation. Some people think he’s missing out on a few important details. In the meanwhile they’ve all put forth interesting ideas that are better articulated than anything I can contribute.
This is probably best critique of the critique I’ve found to date. I’m just going to bring out what I think is the money quote:
Why not take a page out of blog design and have a running tally of your most recent major headlines? This way I can visit a news site any time of the day and see what I missed previously. Can’t you safely assume that a majority of the readers aren’t going to scan the whole front page for something that interests them, especially if you are trying your best to draw their attention with major headlines?
I can’t prove it but I’ve been saying this for years now. I think that’s probably the best move forward, but I suspect that’s going to require a paradigm shift in how we think of content management systems.
A final note
This is all I have left to say about timelapses. I’m astonished you’ve read this far. Give me a shout if you have any questions or comments.
After I posted that nytimes-lapse video earlier this week a lot of people wrote in asking me about how it was accomplished.
The accident
No one just “ends up” with with 13,802 screenshots. I fully planned to make something not entirely unlike that video – but it was supposed to last two weeks, not nine months.
About a year ago I was doing my best trying to not fail at finishing my undergraduate thesis. I was also being constantly harassed by my advisor to create a demo that would justify all the office space I was occupying.
The problem is that I had what was an essentially undemoable project. It took weeks of user interaction for meaningful results and its very premise hinged on being kind of invisible.
So, I decided that I could try to make a point by illustrating just how much stuff there is on the internet and to this end I set up a cron job and… promptly forgot about it. It went on until I received an email from my hosting company telling me that my server had exhausted all of its disk space.
It took about two or three evenings and most of a weekend to put together, which I colloquially refer to as “about four days”. The vast majority of the time was spent downloading, uploading, carefully editing out the full page ads, rendering, reordering files, and slowing down the interesting bits.
Okay, I have a folder full of jpegs. What now?
Install ffmpeg. It’s a tool for manipulating video and audio data. Make sure you enable x264 and liblame support. Ubuntu users feeling frisky should check this guide out, tho compiling it from source is probably unnecessary. OSX users can install it through homebrew.
Go into your screenshot folder, rename every file so that its filename is a number that increases sequentially starting from 0, and type the following in:
Don’t get me started. ffmpeg is a crazy complex tool. It was written by a guy who is just frighteningly smart. It’s hard to use, and most of the flags are configuration options for the codec being used.
No one really knows how to use it. I’ve spent a lot of time getting it to work. People trade magic incantations for it over forum posts. If you care about quality, you should be using a preset.
The key things to know:
-i defines an input file. %d.jpg is a pattern matcher for digits.
The first -r defines input frame rate, the second -r defines an output framerate.
The defaults work well enough (for screenshots). It’s hard for me to spend any more time thinking about this.
I'm going to take your word on that
You should. They’re excellent words. Prime verbiage right here.
Wait, how the hell am I supposed to rename 12,000 files?
I wrote a script. It’s easy, when you’re a programmer.
So... how did you edit this?
Like I said, I wrote a script. It made looking up specific images and repeating certain frame sections easy. It was okay. It was tolerable.
I timed the number of frames to match up with the length of the song.
Should I use Youtube or Vimeo?
My heart says Vimeo, but they reject weirdly sized videos like mine. Youtube accepts a wide variety of formats, but I kept having issues where the first 5 seconds were corrupted and full of grey frames.
Thanks! I’m conflicted over how I should feel about this. On the one hand all of the attention was exhilarating and intoxicating, yet on the other I could feel the raging rampant narcissism I engaged in slowly poisoning my soul.
