PEAR::LiveUser: Architecture & Functionality

Grok Headline matches for PEAR::LiveUser: Architecture & Functionality

We Are All Connected: The Path from
Architecture to Information Architecture

We Are All Connected: The Path from
Architecture to Information Architecture 01/07/2004 06:41 PM
In this article, author Fu Tien Chiou describes a link between traditional architecture and Information Architecture, showing how the Information Architect uses a set of blueprints that builders -- designers and programmers -- can construct. 1217

We are all connected: The path from
architecture to information architecture

We are all connected: The path from
architecture to information architecture 11/11/2003 04:46 AM

More FTP functionality

More FTP functionality 07/15/2002 11:40 PM
CNET Jul 15 2002 11:00PM ET

The New Musical Functionality...

The New Musical Functionality... 07/17/2004 08:20 AM

Over the last few months webloggia has been full of discussions about the new musical functionality that's starting to emerge around the web. I wasn't immune from this trend - I wrote about MediaUnbound (On MediaUnbound and Recommendations Engines) and linked to the (currently pretty awful) Music Recommendation System for iTunes. Dan Hill has also been talking around the subject, talking about first So cialising mp3-based music listening and then about whether wh ether recommendations scale. And those minxes over at 2lmc linked and commented upon the views of people who are suggesting better ways that iTunes could handle transitions between songs. And of course the new version of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store also now has the user-generated iMix feature - standard web-native functionality which allows people (and now people in the UK, France and Germany rather than just the US) to put mix tapes on the web where other people can rate and/or buy them. And that's just the tip of the iceberg...

Then of course there are the staples of this new musical functionality - from the rapidly-becoming-indispensible audioscrobbler (which uses the flexibility and granularity of net-enabled MP3 playing devices to create charts, lists and recommendations) through to the self-generating radio stations like last.fm and launchcast. And then there's all the little hook-in tools like iChatStatus (publish current listening to iChat's presence display) and Kung-Tunes (publish current listening to the web) that have slowly becoming integrated into my life without my really noticing how they all hook together, communicate, branch off and build upon each other.

All this new funtionality is emerging at the same time (or at least starting to be adopted at the same time) because we're beginning to see a world in which a decent number of early adopters are now starting to do a substantial portion of their listening on digital devices. Obviously the iPod has been the major success story here - the definitive product that has been encouraging people to do the necessary work to transfer their music into more easily manipulatable digital files. But the increasing prevelance of broadband and wireless connectivity is helping too - becauase it's the connection of these appliances to the internet that has created the explosion in interoperable, interconnected devices, applications and people. Clearly, the number of people listening to music through these channels is still tiny compared to the entire music-consuming public. There may be many people using iPods, but there's still an adoption path for moving all your listening into digital jukeboxes and being perpetually connected to the internet (ubiquitous, always-on, non-computer-centric internet in the home is a bit of an obsession of mine at the moment).

But this small proportion looks like it is set to grow. One of the first questions you have to ask yourself in any organic R&D role (which is I think how I'd characterise what I do) is am I a freak or am I an early adopter? You have to have some sense of how much your instincts and excitements are in tune with real people in the world because otherwise you cannot possibly evaluate how those people might respond to the products, concepts or propositions that you think are exciting. In this case, it's becoming fairly clear that people who are listening to digital music and in connected ways are very definitely more like early adopters than they are freaks. They're pointing in roughly the right direction. And there are now enough of them that it's becoming more and more worth people's time ot build little tools or widgets or applications or paradigms or appliances or business models around them. Which in turn appears to be making the whole area still more attractive, creating a feedback loop that is pulling more and more people towards new ways of listening. I don't want to sound too cheesy but I'm afraid I can't help myself - it's pretty clear that we've reached a critical mass and that new musical functionality is about to explode. The only question now is what will be there when the smoke clears?

Over the next few days I'm going to write about some of the core trends that I'm seeing in people's use of digital music, attempting to extrapolate from some current behaviours that we're all observing around us - concentrating on how people wish to interact and use their music. I'm not going to spend too much time on the way some people may wish to legislate against these desires or build around them - because I believe for the most part that any attempt to do so will inevitably fail. Competing models that more adequately fulfil those needs will rise to take over in their place. The model that meets the most needs (while having the least obvious incumberences) will probably win in the really long-term, even if the market, commercial advantages or monopolist practices deform it in the short to medium term.

I'll be talking about four major areas that seem to me to be indicative of the unevenly-distributed musical functionality of the future - (1) portability and access, (2) navigation, (3) self-presentation and social uses of music and (4) data use and privacy. These trends within these areas are - I believe - representative of much larger trends across the consumption of all text-based, audio-based and video-based media and so it might be possible to draw conclusions beyond the consumption of music. I am however not planning to do so. And I make no claims that these areas of enquiry are absolute or canonical, or that there are no other areas that I should also be investigating. All I'll argue is that these four areas are core to the movements that we're currently seeing and that they are each likely to play themselves out in the product designs, interface designs and business models of the near future.

Of course what comes after that remains to be seen...

Tomorrow: The New Musical Functionality, Portability and access...

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Mac GEMS: Further Functionality

Mac GEMS: Further Functionality 06/28/2004 11:49 AM
By Dan Frakes, Macworld (via MyAppleMenu)

Gain SSL functionality in JDK 1.3

Gain SSL functionality in JDK 1.3 01/15/2003 02:43 AM
CNET Jan 15 2003 1:48AM ET

The New Muscial Functionality

The New Muscial Functionality 07/28/2004 02:53 PM

Clay raps it out - some more.....

Tom Coates has the first of what looks like a fantastic series of posts on title=http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2004/07/the_new_musical_funct ionality.shtml
href="http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2004/07/the_new_musical_funct ionality.shtml">the
new musical functionality, an extended musing on the distribution of
production, reproduction, and filtering of music, covering especially the newly
social context.

Among the social apps that I think relate to his thesis but which he doesn’t
(yet) mention are:

* href="http://www.songbuddy.com/lc/soaf">songBuddy
* title=http://www.musicplasma.com/
href="http://www.musicplasma.com/">MusicPlasma
* title=http://www.musicmobs.com/
href="http://www.musicmobs.com/">MusicMobs
* href="http://webjay.org">Webjay

And, as an added flavor bonus, here’s a City of Sound post I’ve been meaning
to blog on title="City of sound http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2004/05/socialising_mp3.html"
href="City of sound http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2004/05/socialising_mp3.html">socialis ing
listening habits, tied mostly to the features of title=http://www.audioscrobbler.com/
href="http://www.audioscrobbler.com/">audioscrobbler, which Coates also
regards as essential.

[Clay Shirky]

Functionality is dead

Functionality is dead 12/22/2004 01:26 AM
Computer Weekly Dec 21 2004 8:32AM GMT

Design First, Functionality Later

Design First, Functionality Later 09/01/2004 05:07 PM
Unfortunately, this may be taken by some as an Apple bashing post, but it's surprising to find out that the fancy new iMacs everyone is talking about don't include built-in WiFi, but are simply WiFi "ready." Apple has been such a big proponent of WiFi with their Airport offerings that it just seems strange that this offering wouldn't also include WiFi -- especially as it would cut down on one more design-unfriendly wire sticking out of the machine. The article also complains about Apple's failure to include a TV-tuner card with TiVo like qualities. While that would have been nice, and could have been a major selling point, it doesn't seem as egregious as forgetting the WiFi.

FTP functionality in VB apps

FTP functionality in VB apps 07/11/2002 12:57 AM
CNET Jul 11 2002 0:04AM ET

oai-pear

oai-pear 04/26/2004 07:40 AM
PEAR::OAI 0.4.1 Released

The Choice Between Design and
Functionality

The Choice Between Design and
Functionality 01/13/2003 08:55 AM
Webmasters continue to look for the common ground between design and page roi production.

Add preview functionality to Blosxom

Add preview functionality to Blosxom 05/28/2004 11:14 AM
A fair number of people use Blosxom, Rael Dornfest's weblog software, for its simplicity and power, and given Movable Type's recent change to its pricing structure, even more people may do so soon. The major drawback, IMHO, ...

Peribit Expands WAN Functionality

Peribit Expands WAN Functionality 06/30/2004 11:28 AM
The company's new WAN optimization products offer support for greater WAN speeds and new disks for data mirroring.

Exchange Functionality for Linux

Exchange Functionality for Linux 03/19/2003 10:25 PM
Bynari InsightServer is here already, and Kroupware is coming up.

New Exit Installation Functionality

New Exit Installation Functionality 06/04/2004 08:17 PM

Java package functionality

Java package functionality 09/03/2002 11:37 AM
CNET Sep 1 2002 10:09PM ET

10.3: Take advantage of built-in UPS
functionality

10.3: Take advantage of built-in UPS
functionality 02/10/2004 12:01 PM
I've just bought a new APC UPS for my PowerMac G4. It ships with PowerChute software, but versiontracker.com comments suggest it is not yet Panther compatible. It seems, however that Apple has included UPS software in Mac O...

HandyAid - New functionality for your
Palm PDA

HandyAid - New functionality for your
Palm PDA 11/14/2003 05:46 AM

Shocker: DVR Users Use DVR Functionality

Shocker: DVR Users Use DVR Functionality 06/17/2004 08:53 PM
It turns out, believe it or not, that people who have DVR devices like TiVo actually (gasp!) dare to use them to watch TV when they want to. The writer of this article about a study on DVR usage sounds surprised that people who own them don't tend to watch TV programs when they air, but prefer to wait, even if just to be able to skip commercials. Of course, while TiVo users may see more ads as they fast forward through them, it does sound like plenty of users do still end up watching ads. It's just that they're more picky about them. 38% of users do say they fast forward through all the ads they see, but that still leaves plenty who don't. However, it seems pretty clear that the ads need to at least get their attention. People are no longer passive consumers of media. That doesn't mean that video-based ads are dead, but just that they need to get more creative.

Changes to Functionality in Microsoft
Windows XP SP2 v2.0

Changes to Functionality in Microsoft
Windows XP SP2 v2.0 05/05/2004 03:35 PM

SimpleNote v3.0 Dispatching New
Functionality

SimpleNote v3.0 Dispatching New
Functionality 07/19/2004 03:07 AM
The Data Corporation announces the release of SimpleNote v3.0, a software application for managing targeted digital communications. [PRWEB Jul 19, 2004]

Release of HandyAid v1.7.2 - New
functionality for your PDA.

Release of HandyAid v1.7.2 - New
functionality for your PDA. 04/13/2004 02:27 PM

DSI Announces Unicode Functionality

DSI Announces Unicode Functionality 04/06/2005 04:38 AM
ZDNet India Apr 6 2005 8:56AM GMT

Mac OS X and Virtual Desktop
Functionality?

Mac OS X and Virtual Desktop
Functionality? 11/04/2003 02:36 PM
Appleinsider claims that Apple will be building in Virtual Desktop support into Mac OS X by 2004. Appleinsider points to an Exposé hack that shrink...

PEAR Out of Beta!

PEAR Out of Beta! 01/11/2003 09:10 AM
The PEAR development team is proud to announce that PEAR is finally out of its long beta period. As of PHP 4.3, the PEAR installer is installed by default. Unix support is considered stable, while Windows and Darwin are still of beta-quality.

Without a pear, I improvise.

Without a pear, I improvise. 10/28/2003 11:06 PM
Many application developers shy away from database abstraction tools, in part because of the overhead and new APIs they have to learn, but also because it's difficult for those tools to port complex instructions and queries to each different RDBMS....

Introduction to PEAR

Introduction to PEAR 10/29/2003 02:21 AM
An introduction to PEAR with examples of using the Benchmark package.

PEAR grows up: MDB

PEAR grows up: MDB 01/12/2003 01:36 PM
We met with the author of Metabase at the International PHP Conference 2001 and we talked about the benefits of having something like Metabase as part of the PEAR project. Shortly afterwards a discussion began once more in the PEAR mailing list about the potential benefits of a merge of PEAR DB and Metabase. After much discussion at my company we decided to take up this task. After several months of hard work we now have the first stable release of MDB. - Lukas Smith Lukas Smith has done a fine job with MDB and finally PEAR has a decent db abstraction library. Congrats! "zeldman.bardot2"

PEAR::PHPUnit 1.0.2 (PHP 4)

PEAR::PHPUnit 1.0.2 (PHP 4) 09/21/2004 09:06 AM
A regression testing framework for PHP 5.

PEAR::PHPUnit 2-2.0.3

PEAR::PHPUnit 2-2.0.3 09/27/2004 03:25 AM
A regression testing framework for PHP 5.

PEAR::PHPUnit 2-2.0.0

PEAR::PHPUnit 2-2.0.0 07/14/2004 01:51 AM
A regression testing framework for PHP 5.

Comprehensive PHP PEAR::DB

Comprehensive PHP PEAR::DB 02/10/2004 02:46 AM
Overall, this is maybe a good and very helpful book if you are using, or plan to use, the PEAR::DB package. Although it does not cover the features that the PEAR::MDB package adds over PEAR::DB, the book may also be helpful if you are interested in PEAR::MDB as this package provides a compatible superset of the PEAR::DB features.

PHP's PEAR on Mac OS X

PHP's PEAR on Mac OS X 01/21/2003 10:06 PM
The PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) is an online repository of high-quality, peer-reviewed PHP classes that conform to a rigorous coding standard. In this article, Jason Perry shows you how to install, configure and use the PEAR Package Manager on Mac OS X 10.2

The New Musical Functionality:
Portability and access

The New Musical Functionality:
Portability and access 07/26/2004 05:41 PM

The other day I started this run of posts on the New Musical Functionality by arguing that the behaviour of an until-recently small group of digital music fans seemed to be now spreading into the mainstream. I also listed four areas that seemed to me to be where the most significant changes in consumption patterns were occurring - areas to which I believe that anyone building sites, services or hardware around music should be paying close attention. These four areas were (1) portability and access, (2) navigation, (3) self-presentation/social uses and (4) data use and privacy. Today I'm going to concentrate briefly on the trends towards portability and access.

This may seem like an obvious place to start, but I think it's an important thing to get out in the open: the core difference between an iPod and a CD Walkman isn't audio quality. That's not to say that there isn't a differences in the audio quality between the MP3/AAC file and CD 'originals' because - of course - there is and it is a significant one. However, in defiance of the normal path of technological achievements, the newer technology does not have the advantage in reproductive fidelity. In the future this may change (Apple's lossless compression and increasingly cheap storage space are just two of the reasons why), but at the moment MP3s and AACs use lossy forms of compression and for this reason simply do not sound as good as their CD originals. It would probably be pushing it to say that this is the first significant change of popular audio format that actually made the sound quality worse (vinyl fans have been criticising the CD for that for years), but it does at least seem to be one of the first where claims of improved sound haven't been a major selling point.

So why are these new formats and players starting to occupy the mainstream so effectively? What is it that means people want iPods so desperately even though they're effectively purchasing a technology that will result in a decrease in audio quality? Again the answer is so obvious that it hardly bears repeating - particularly given that it's on every single bloody advert that Apple produce. The reason that people are buying iPods is because they want 10,000 songs in their pockets. They want access to music wherever they are in the world. More still - they want access to all their music everywhere. Every last bit. Every last place.

As I've said, this sounds obvious but it is important. It's important because once we understand the need that a product is filling, we can attempt to find other/better ways of filling it. The iPod's current success has demonstrated that the need exists - and how - but I would argue that in the longer term it is by no means obvious that the need would be best served by small portable hard discs embedded in MP3 players.

It doesn't take a lot of foresight to see the scope for development in this area. In the short-term, the trend seems fairly clear - storage capacity looks set to increase and/or devices look set to get smaller. This has been the trend of almost all computing technology over the last few decades (cf. Moore's Law for the near-parallel phenomenon happening in processor speed). Given these fundamental developments, there aren't an enormous numbers of directions that these devices can go.

The first two options for future product directions around this stuff are (1) larger capacities and (2) smaller form factors. We have already seen movements in both of these directions (iPod Mini / 60Gb iPod coming). However, there's only so far that either of these trends can develop.

Increased capacity ceases to be interesting at the point where there is more capacity than data to fill it - hence the problem with saying that newer iPods can hold 10,000 songs. There are very few people in the world who would be capable, let alone interested, in sourcing that much music. After listening to my music exclusively through a computer for the last two or three years, I've still only got 8,000 MP3s. And I'm hardly representative. If we're talking about significant subsequent increases in capacity then there are some pretty clear limits in place. 10,000 songs is about a month of solid listening. 100,000 songs would be getting on for a year. 1,000,000 songs a lifetime. Somewhere between a month and lifetime, the marginal utility of another song being on your iPod reaches zero (even assuming that physics lets you get to that size in the first place).

Of course when we talk about capacity in terms of songs we're kind of missing the point. From this point on, advances in capacity are more likely to allow us to listen to higher quality audio than they are to increase the number of songs that people want to listen to. A tenfold increase in portable storage would mean that a future iPod could carry the same number of songs as a current iPod except in Apple Lossless formats that have all the sound quality of a CD. A parallel increase in bandwidth speeds could mean that the last few decades of work on compression could become fundamentally redundant - much like the techniques that meant programmers had to write whole applications to run with 8k of RAM are now pretty much irrelevant. So this is clearly a direction things are likely to move over the next few years. But even this has its limits. Once you've escalated disc size ten times there's nowhere to go in terms of audio quality - or at least, nowhere that will make the slightest difference to most individual consumers. So again any subsequent growth in capacity will have to be sold in terms of an increased number of songs that could be held - and as such the gradual diminishing marginal utility problem comes in again. Increased capacity, therefore, has only so much of a shelf life - can only go so far before it collapses under its own weight.

The other potential obvious future direction - as I've said above - is to make the appliances themselves smaller. Here again there are limits to utility. There would seem to be a size under which a device ceases to be practical - that size being directly related to the size of interface elements, screens and buttons, which in turn relate directly to the size of fingers and thumbs and the limits of human vision. Now again, you can merge this in as a direction with the increased capacities and find a bottomed-out form factor and gradually increase the capacity on it - and no doubt this is the main approach that people like Apple will take over the next few years. At least that is until physics steps in or human interest (in having unlistenable amounts of music) begins to wane - both of which are probably a way off, but remain definite limits to future development in these directions.

Of course, there are certain conditions where an appliance may usefully shrink below the size of its interface, and that's when it shares that interface with a number of other pieces of technology. This is the approach that the mobile phone manufacturers have taken - as the phones became almost unmanageably small, people's attention moved instead to enhancing functionality and adding in cameras, PDAs, web-browsers, comms equipment, bluetooth and the like. This had the effect of keeping the form factors at manageable sizes while still allowing competition and product development to occur. There's absolutely no doubt that this kind of hybridisation will be / is already a core part of the development of portable digital music players. Much of this hybridisation results in useful connections and possible new products emerging from music devices that are permanently network-enabled.

All of this previous stuff has been relatively uncontroversial - it's no more than the immediate development along a couple of pre-existing axes of the products we have in our stores today. The incorporation of network-enabled devices has the capacity to change things a lot though. This is where alternative models for fulfilling a design for universal access and portability are likely to start emerging more strongly. We currently seem to be moving towards a world with greater and greater connectivity and one in which some kind of flat-rate, always-on broad-ish band internet access is likely to be integrated into pretty much all portable devices. This opens up other possibilities for having access to all of your music wherever you might be - and without actually carrying any of the files around with you. We could be looking towards a near future in which all of your media (and perhaps applications and information) can be held 'in the sky' and streamed/downloaded down to whatever appliance you like as and when required. Where this repository would live (with an ISP, with your home server, on your TV's set top-box, on Apple's iTunes Music store) is not immediately clear. But it's conceivable that - given enough bandwidth and centralisation - massively redundant models like we have at the moment where everyone has their own copy of a music file could be replaced completely by centralised music-on-demand services. Personally, I'm not much convinced that particular extreme is likely - people still seem to like to own music and still think of it as an object rather than as a service - but that's not particularly relevant. The important aspect is simply that the same user need can be met in different ways.

So will we move towards larger portable hard discs or towards connected repositories explorable through massive bandwidth? Probably the direction that we take here will depend on nothing more elegant and interesting than financial cost. If enormous storage options were to become enormously cheap and small, then carrying a significant hard disc is likely to remain the preference of individual music fans. On the other hand, if bandwidth became cheap, then we'll probably find ourselves in a more service-driven and centralised streaming-based world. The model that's most likely to dominate is likely to lie somewhere in between the two - in hybridised technologies that use hard disks as local copies of stashes of music held in more centralised locations - using the network to syncas and when appropriate (see note) as well as a mediator for various forms of engagement, navigation and data-mining around and in-between individual listeners. But more around that stuff in the next part of this sprawling rant around the New Musical Functionality: On trends in navigation.... (Coming Soon)

Note: Syncing becomes very important in a world with innumerable devices and limited connectivity. On a slight tangent - there are innumerable hybrid models where increases in portable data collide with the ability to access data at a distance. At the desktop level you can imagine computers running off the wired internet creating the impression of your 'home' computer wherever you sit, and on the portable level with large local storage being kept up-to-date perpetually via slower trickle-fed syncing protocols.

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Comcast to roll DVR functionality into
set-top boxes

Comcast to roll DVR functionality into
set-top boxes 12/04/2003 01:08 PM
Comcast plans to compete with TiVo by offering set-top cable boxes with built-in DVRs

Changes to Functionality in Windows XP
Service Pack 2

Changes to Functionality in Windows XP
Service Pack 2 12/13/2003 10:28 AM

Basic Firewall functionality Explained

Basic Firewall functionality Explained 02/01/2005 08:34 PM

PocketMac Pro 3.3: Software Supplies Mac
Functionality To Your PDA

PocketMac Pro 3.3: Software Supplies Mac
Functionality To Your PDA 08/03/2004 09:29 PM
PocketMac Pro 3.3 is not the only way to get a PocketPC working with OS X, but its e-mail and Web features (as well as its support for PIMs other than Address Book and iCal) give it the edge. By Andy Ihnatko, Macworld (via MyAppleMenu)
Grok Description matches for PEAR::LiveUser: Architecture & Functionality
GrokA matches for PEAR::LiveUser: Architecture & Functionality

PEAR::LiveUser: Architecture & Functionality

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: