Archive for the ‘The Institute Log’ Category

Our Website Redesign Enters Live Public Beta!

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

It gives us great pleasure to report that with the start of Summer we are going live with a Public Beta of our latest website redesign. We have done some serious retooling of our infrastructure to simplify things and provide better hooks for future enhancements, like the versioning system that permits major revisions of our site to be accessed simultaneously as well the hooks we have in place to track version changes at the page level.

Our old site featured a lot of animated eye candy that was more a demonstration of our scripting prowess than a truly useful navigational affordance. The redesign, Code Name: Placid, features a more traditional three column layout that should be easier to integrate with dynamic PHP-based subsystems like this blog, which will eventually merge much more tightly with our website proper. Our markup is also much lighter this time around as we were able to replace a lot of structural hooks and CSS2 code with more direct CSS3 declarations. The actual layout itself is based on the Faux Absolute Positioning technique. We also make minimal use of javascript to play a brief audio greeting the first time someone arrives on our site regardless of which page they land on. Finally, we are using Google’s Web Fonts to enhance the overall legibility of our copy.

Our Brief Blogging Hiatus

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

As you may have noticed, we are entering a brief hiatus in blogging while we deal with a couple of time-sensitive maters that require our full attention, foremost of which is a book chapter that our Executive Director is writing.

Once deadlines are past, we will resume daily postings!

Technological Outlook for 2010 / Part I — Tablets & Readers

Monday, January 4th, 2010

2009 saw the announcement of a number of new devices and 2010 should be a banner year for Nook and potentially an Apple Tablet if the legion of rumors dating back to the untimely demise of the Newton Message Pad 2100 are finally to be believed. Much is owed to Microsoft’s Tablet PC support, the Kindle & Sony Readers, and the multi-touch innovations of the iPhone & iPod Touch in making this space viable.

The big question for End Users is what kind of a reader / tablet to embrace. Platforms like the Sony Reader actively encourage users to bring their own content whereas Apple’s offerings are clearly aimed at dissuading the user from doing so by trying to tie all sales to their online market, effectively placing an Apple Transaction Tax on every purchase.

Whether we will see such practices successfully challenged in the courts on antitrust grounds remains to be seen as does the outcome of potential litigation to prevent the practice of jailbreaking Apple devices to permit End Users to load their own 3rd party apps.

Jailbreaking will become an even bigger issue in 2010 if large numbers of Nook users take advantage of its Android foundation to subvert the Nook’s free wireless internet connectivity which is intended to provide a dedicated conduit to the Barnes & Nobel e-book market for general web browsing.

While a dedicated reader is very appealing, particularly for those of us normally accustomed to printing out countless academic papers and such equally critical is note-taking and reference management functionality which is unlikely to be well supported in a purely recreational device.

The Newton Messagepad still sets a very high bar for user interface functionality that has yet to be surpassed.

In any case, End Users should demand the freedom to install or buy digital content and apps from multiple sources. Given the ability to safely “sandbox” applications and restrict their resource usage if needed (as clearly demonstrated by Google’s brilliant Chrome browser), the claims of vendors like Apple that they need to control what you can run on your device to insure that it behaves sanely in a networked environment are of exceedingly dubious merit.

If End Users refuse to tolerate such practices and vote with their wallets for open ended platforms, 2010 could mark a real turning point for the better.

The Year Ahead

Friday, January 1st, 2010

A lot has been going on behind the scenes here at the IEUC and we look forward to many exciting developments in 2010.

The next couple of weeks will be taken up with a writing project while we wait for any trailing 2009 donations to reach us so we can fully assess our financial position from the year past. Then as soon as the IRS release the 2009 990-EZ Form & Instructions we will be processing that paperwork and transferring the information in it to our next Annual Report. We are also actively looking to expand our Board of Directors, so if you’d like to be considered, do get in touch.

As time permits between all of these administrative tasks we will roll out our next major website update as soon as possible so we can begin to expand the site again. We need volunteer to help in this work too!

Research-wise, we are primarily focused on parsing quasi natural language for End User Programming and we are also looking at some Public Policy Issues related to Virtual Worlds.

We have a few other plans in the works, but don’t want to prematurely make any announcements at this time.

Overall, 2010 is shaping up to be a great year!

Our 2007 – 2009 Cumulative Annual Report is ready for download.

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

If you would like to review our 2007 – 2009 Cumulative Annual report, please grab a copy of it at: http://www.ieuc.org/pdf-files/ieuc-2007-2009-cumulative-annual-report.pdf