3 posts tagged “rant”

It's not a good time to be a fan of modernist architecture in London. The last two years have seen a number of 1960s and 1970s buildings being demolished, notably Drapers Gardens (which I really should write a eulogy for) and Mondial House. Meanwhile, two pieces of brutalist architecture, Milton Court and Pimlico School, are facing demolition (in fact, Milton Court's already wrapped up for the process to start. 122 Leadenhall Street and 20 Fenchurch Street continue the casualty list.

I could rant about what's replacing these (invariably, tedious glass and steel boxes), but instead I'd like to concentrate on another development at risk, Robin Hood Gardens. Currently, English Heritage are considering whether or not to list the estate, which Tower Hamlets would rather redevelop. The minister responsible for acting on their recommendation, Margaret Hodge, has been reported as saying

"Decisions on listing modern architecture should be left to people who can be booted out if they get it wrong. And when some concrete monstrosity - sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece - fails to make the cut, despite having expert opinion behind it, let's find a third way: a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever."

This is a horrific statement. If Hodge is prejudging applications based on opinions like that, she's in no position to be making them. Imagine the fuss if she'd said "Gothic monstrosity" and "Victorian masterpiece" - the reaction would be overwhelming. (Just look at how much attention has been paid to St Pancras as it reopens housing the Eurostar terminal.) However, as the BBC's Magazine notes today,

"In the 1960s, 'Victorian' and 'monstrosity' were two words that seemed to be inextricably linked," says architect Robert Adam.

This brings me to the second point: Hodge argues that the decision should be made be "people who can be booted out if they get it wrong". But who does she think is making that judgement? Voters? Well, perhaps that's one way to do it, but we're really talking about preserving buildings for the future here. We won't really know if Hodge and English Heritage were right or wrong for decades, perhaps even centuries. Just because she won't be able to answer to them doesn't mean she should be catering to the prejudices of today's constituency.

Finally, her "third way", a "perfect digital image", seems like a joke. I linked to photos of Mondial House above, and while I know they're far from comprehensive, and they do give a sense of the building, they can't really convey what it was like to stand between it and the Thames, to see it from London Bridge at sunset or Guy's at night. If demolition has to happen, then I'd welcome better archiving of buildings than we have (try finding an image of Euston's old ticket hall, or even the arch), but it's hardly a replacement for the building itself.

Building Design is currently running a petition to save the Gardens, but I fear what's really needed is the same cultural change that makes casually bashing modernist buildings as unacceptable as denigrating Victorian buildings is now.

or, why I won't be migrating to Google Mashup Editor

Last winter I wrote a small web application called groupr which let you look at photos from your Flickr groups in one place. I did that partly because I thought it would be useful (it is, a bit) but also because I wanted to play with the platform the company I'd once worked for had released. That platform was called Zimki, and it was, in hindsight, a pretty ambitious thing for a small company to attempt.

Zimki is a hosted server-side Javascript application framework, complete with a data storage model and a templating engine (actually two). It makes it easy to quickly knock up a small web application, or at least it does once you wrap your head around it and get hold of tools to save you using the (frankly awful) web pages provided for editing your app. It's the closest I've seen to what Marc Andreessen has called level 3 platforms:

A Level 3 platform's apps run inside the platform itself -- the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app's code runs.

Indeed, this is exactly how Zimki works. Unfortunately, it's also closing by Christmas.

There's a big company out there who also have something that looks a bit like a level 3 platform. Google Mashup Editor also lets you run code in a hosted environment, build multi-page sites, and read and store data from the web. Unfortunately, there's no way I can port groupr to it.

Firstly, there's a very limited set of server-side computations allowed. If there's not a module or control for something, you can't do it. This is the first thing I ran across. groupr has a local config file with my Flickr API key and secret, and it uses MD5 to calculate the required parameter for the authentication step. It turns out that's impossible with GME.

Secondly, there seems to be no way to pass data in to the application other than by user interaction or feeds. Notably, you can't inspect HTTP query strings, the mainstay of web programming since 1994. Since Flickr's frob is returned in an HTTP parameter, this means it's impossible to ever use GME for a Flickr application that requires authentication. Well, actually, you could do everything on the client side, but then why use a hosted environment at all? I doubt I'd get enough use out of its templating language to justify the effort.

As with my complaints about Skitch, this is almost certainly a case of me wanting a product to be what it's not, but I can't help feeling that if Google aren't prepared to build a real Level 3 platform, nobody is. In the meantime, I suppose revert to writing my own apps with web frameworks that use SQL and which need work to scale, just like everyone else does.

I'm more of a sucker for private betas than I like to admit; I was a beta tester here, for one thing. So when the invites for Plasq's Skitch started rolling around, I thought I'd sign up. I poked a little bit, but the UI repelled me so much I didn't even copy it out of the disk image. This evening, though, I had some ranting go get off my chest, and it seemed best expressed through the medium of boxes drawn over screenshots.

These were some of the things that either I didn't understand, or it didn't do right, when I came to use it.

• There's no Capture Window command. Instead, most of the modes do actually capture a window, but there has to be a window to tell you how.
• Ellipses don't draw from the centre, but from the edge. You can toggle this with Option, but I didn't realise this until far later, after having deleted and started over with about six different shapes.
• Typing automatically moves you to text mode, which is nice, but:
  
• Text captions don't start near your last drawing, but randomly.
• Text isn't submitted with Return (I can understand that) or Enter (I can't; it's underused)
• There's no keyboard shortcut to return to a mode after typing, so you have to mouse
• If you swap colours before you swap tools, you'll set the colour of the current item, not the next one. In fact, I managed to get some blue text, then have it set back to red - the previous colour - for a new ellipse. Baffling.
• Uploading is to MySkitch by default, and:
  
• There's no obvious progress bar (it's actually hiding at the bottom corner of the funky window).
• To get a URL to paste in to IRC, I had to visit the page, then copy out of a text box.
  
• I had a crash while entering my SFTP details
• ... and another when changing the filename and file type
• ... which weren't at all obvious to find (they're in a strange tab at the bottom of the window.
  
• Preferences are on the back of the main application window, in a stupid Sun Java Desktop style.
• The Share button didn't put the URL to the image into the clipboard, so I had to construct it myself.
• After clicking Share, the button reverts to Webload. Five copies of one image? Ta!
• File > Save As... only saves .skitch format.
• There's no File > Export. Instead, you have to do Acorn-style direct file manipulation
• ...and it doesn't even have the decency to use a standard proxy icon
• ...so you're waving around a huge semi-transparent version of your picture.
  

Deep breath.

Looking at this more sensibly, a lot of the complaints are probably unfamiliarity. The thing is, Mac software is meant to be consistent, usable, and somewhat familiar. If there hadn't been so many stupid interface geegaws and instead some more pedestrian UI choices, rather than going for some "cute chrome" - things like a progress bar, and a standard preferences window, for example - then I'd probably have embraced Skitch the same way all the blogging pundits seem to. As it is, though, it's destined to go back into its disk image, get ejected, and used once in a while, no doubt accompanied by gnashing of teeth.