iPhone Remote and iUbiquity

July 29th, 2008 Mark Szpakowski

Apple’s Remote iPhone app is a true jewel: it does one thing really really well. In my case, I have an iMac upstairs in my home office, wirelessly connected over AirTunes to my downstairs speakers. Now I can be in the kitchen and, with the Remote iPhone app, see all the songs and podcasts on my iMac, including cover art, and select the piece I want to play, as well as setting the volume for it. Simple, brilliant, just right.

It does have one gotcha – you have to “pair” it with your iTunes library so it knows which library to connect to over WiFI, and to do that you have to be tethered (by USB cable) to its Mac (or PC). This is something the app does not make clear – it says to go to iTunes and find your iPhone listed under Devices: well, Devices doesn’t appear if the iPhone is not cabled to the machine, and, being in a wireless mindset, you may not expect to have to physically connect. Yeah, I know, magical thinking. But, design is also how to get it working.

But there’s a much bigger implication here. We’re entering a world where the desktop is disappearing, to be replaced with computing devices everywhere (ubiquitous computing), whether you can see them or not. The handheld device, the one that you carry with you or is part of you, has a huge role to play here: as the universal controller for all the devices in your immediate context. As you walk into a space, you should be able to have all the computing devices there adjust themselves to you, and be driven by you, so that you can make use of the limitless computing, communicating, and visualizing power they offer. Every room can be your situation/war room. And the device to bind them all? It’s the one you have on you. The iPhone is the first sign of that. 

Posted in Techné | 3 Comments »

OpenID slays password antipatterns!

July 6th, 2008 Mark Szpakowski

Evan Prodromou’s open source Twitter-like site identi.ca supports OpenID for logging in. This basically means that if you have set up an OpenID with an OpenID Identity Provider, and you want to sign in to a site that supports OpenID login, that site sends you back to your Identity Provider site to authenticate with your password, waits for your Identity Provider’s secure handshake verifying that you really do own that OpenID, and then lets you in. The key: your Identity Provider is the only site where you enter the password for your ID. This is a huge win, and avoids some evil anti-patterns. A bonus is that you can use that same OpenID with multiple sites, and none of them needs to know your password. This also means that Single Sign On is really easy.

Here’s a walk-through of how OpenID login works on identi.ca (the process is similar on any site that allows logging in using an OpenID). First, the site gives you the option of using a conventional username/password Login, or of using an OpenID login:

Since I’m already registered on identi.ca with an OpenID, I choose that option, and am asked to enter my OpenID. In my case I’m using the iNames form of OpenID (=mark.szpakowski), which I type into the form.

Note that there is no password field!

When I click the Login button, I am taken to my Identity Provider, 2idi.com. That is the only site to which I ever present my password!

I enter my password there (if I need to – if I’d previously authenticated here, and my session here was still alive for my current browser, 2idi would not need this step to know who I am!), and then 2idi and identi.ca perform some handshaking in the background which assures identi.ca that I am indeed =mark.szpakowski, and identi.ca logs me in.

Why is this important? Well, consider the hellotxt site, which offers to aggregate and display status updates from any site I belong to. However, to do this it asks me to login to each of those sites, using the Username and Password for each of those sites. For example, for the Brightkite site:

This is scary! As Earle Martin says, “hello.txt is also full of password antipattern. I don’t think so…”. Do I really want to enter all my usernames/passwords for all the sites I belong to on some other site’s page?

If my sites supported OpenID, this could be deftly avoided: I simply enter the OpenID I use for each site, but I only type in my password on my trusted OpenID provider site. And in fact after the first time I do so, I don’t need to re-authenticate with my password as long as I don’t close down my browser session.

The preceding has been a public service announcement….

Posted in Techné | 2 Comments »

Financial markets live on price-inflating bubbles?

July 1st, 2008 Mark Szpakowski

Avner Mandelman has an interesting, and possibly critical, argument in a recent Globe and Mail article, In a world where money moves at a mouse click, Fed’s in a tough battle. Excerpts:

Money supply is the monetary base times the velocity of money. The first is how many dollar bills and dollar deposits are in circulation. But the latter is how many times each dollar (virtual or physical) circulates in a year.

The Fed can control the first – but it cannot control the second.

50 years ago a dollar bill changed hands perhaps four or five times a year. Then, when business began to be done by credit cards, this rate increased dramatically. And today, when many individuals and corporations pay their bills online, where payments are super-fast, the velocity of money has soared yet again. So even if the Fed withdraws some monetary base, it is that second part of the equation that today matters most. Furthermore, that research also showed that once money velocity approaches instantaneous, the money supply tends toward the infinite.

But because there are not that many opportunities, this electronic money latches on to anything with a credible story and moves fast into the new category. This movement starts the category moving – which causes more hot money to slosh into it – which in turn causes Wall Street to satisfy the money-slosh by generating more product.

The most recent such bubble was subprime mortgages, which were sliced and diced and packaged, then traded electronically – until they crashed. Now we are seeing the beginning of a commodity bubble.

So we’ve had the dot com bubble, housing, commodities (food!), and now possibly energy.

If this is true, then we have uncontrolled systemic forces artificially inflating prices, creating wealth for a few, and suffering for literally millions. If it is true, it is costing the world billions, if not trillions, let alone human lives – surely changing or stopping this should be a number one and immediate priority. So how can we validate, verify, and graphically communicate this? Can Global Sensemaking tools, Gapminder, et al help?

Is this a critical acupuncture point that needs immediate confirmation and decisive intervention? Are there other global systems effects that are operating on their own, like Artificial Intelligences not obeying the three laws of robotics?

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