Just a brief post here to unashamedly promote the work of some friends. As the title hints, Dopplr – the little startup that could – is now out of beta and releasing on time. It’s a great site – a product that exists not to make you travel more, or travel less, but to make that travel more pleasurable, by fostering coincidensity.

Now, I don’t travel a great amount, so I put “smaller” trips than most people in. Somebody once laughed that I put trips to visit my parents in. But that’s where other useful functionality of Dopplr comes in handy: it lets my trusted friends know when I’m not around. Sometimes, I’m telling you I’m away, not that I’ll be there.

And it’s super-handy if you don’t travel much, but you have foreign friends – it’s already engineered several “oh, you’re passing through London?” meet-ups for me, that otherwise I’d never have had.

So, Dopplr: if you’ve not been playing with it in the beta, take a look. It’s wonderfully put together, with lots of tiny touches that make all the difference. And if you’re not sure that it’s quite for you… think again; it might come in handy. The only thing you need to get your head around: it’s not about your friendsters. It’s about your friends. Proper, real-life friends. You need the people you know on it – but once they are, it makes the business of global friendship so much easier…

Matt addresses the issue of the philosophers of Lagado, with regards to Don Norman’s take on the “simplicity” of Google:

“it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on”

I refer to it as the “map of the world the size of the world” problem, but I forget where I obtained that concept – it might have been Gulliver, too. The most perfect map of anything is a 1:1 representation of it – you end up making a copy. The trade-off in any navigation aid – menu, sitemap, chart – is accuracy of representation versus accuracy of content (I think). You need a perfect representation – an outline – but you don’t need a perfect rendering of content, because you’ll get that at the destination.

I face this problem a lot in design and IA; you come up with a solution that will work with the current content – and then “current content” grows. And for a while, things scale, but then they stop scaling, and you end up cramming it all in at the top because, well, all the content is competing with one another. And so you end up with a map of the world the size of the world.

The next step is to stop, refactor, and start again – if you have that luxury. Google, by contrast, never let things grow: it’s still practically the same homepage they started with. They avoided the feature-bloat by never letting it happen, and instead, launched their other product by and large, seperately. They may have occasionally integrated them into the results screen, but never the home page. So then usability comes down to intuition (and why shouldn’t it? Even Norman argues that objects should be intuitively usable). mail.google.com – what do you know, it works. maps.google.com – it works. And in making people guess the subdomains, you’re creating better users – users who work out what they’re really looking for quicker. That makes them more adept at your product – because Google’s product is find, after all – and more adept consumers of the internet.

The map-of-the-world problem stems from that horrid, oh-so-web-1.0 site archetype: the portal. We tread a fine line now – at one extreme, a single search box as a gateway to content; at the other, comprehensive indexes and subindexes, homepages of horrendous complexity. I don’t think the “single search box” approach is valid for many, but people are moving that way, and it’s good – away from horrendous taxonomies and indexes and subpages and sitemaps and towards a more organic, find-orientated paradigm.

Don Norman doesn’t believe in find. He likes devices to be “their own instruction manual”, remember – you shouldn’t need to read the book, it should just be obvious. This leads to his crazy telephones with millions of discrete buttons for each function. He’s kind-of right, but he doesn’t like a middle-ground of adaptability, multi-purpose interfaces. Google riles him not because it’s the middle ground in his way of thinking, but the polar opposite.

With any new, popular, funky web-based service, there’s always going to be a digital divide. You know; those who have your_name@hotmail.com as opposed to yournameX46@hotmail.com; six-digit ICQ numbers as opposed to nine-digit; Flickr sign-in as opposed to Yahoo! sign-in.

And now, it’s happening again. @gmail.com versus @googlemail.com. Not the end of the world, I guess, but gmail is so much more succinct (and trips off the fingers easier).

This time, for once, I’ve got the mark of the early adopter.

Gosh, I’ve been busy. Still, in between evenings out and work, I’ve been starting work on a fairly large personal project, which (unless I encounter a colossal brick wall) be written in Ruby, with the Rails framework playing a large part. So far, despite some hiccups, it’s been very pleasant; a fair amount of headscratching (in part down to my unfamiliarity with the langauge and its at-times-bonkers syntax, and in part down to working out just what I wanted to do), but every breakthrough has been delightful. A bit of trial-and-error, and then, suddenly, boom: I’ve got a whole new piece of functionality working with minimal code. I’m enjoying the langauge a lot – it’s reminding me of what I’d learned of Python a fair bit, but with some interesting twists. Particularly a fan of the idea that it’s a language that’s very understandable when spoken aloud, to the point of suggesting that methods with boolean outcomes should end in a questionmark, and that destructive methods should end with an exclamation mark. That’s fun.

More on this mystery project later, perhaps; I’m hoping it could be moderately big.

So much for the success with Ruby on Rails detailed in the last post. Everything was going fine until I tried to create a scaffold. At which point I get a nasty little MySQL error:

Access denied for user ''@'localhost' (using password: NO)

So basically, even though I’ve defined all the database settings correctly in the database.yml file for the application, it’s trying to connect without a username or password. And as such, quite rightly, is failing. I’ve reinstalled the mysql gem, I’ve tried configuring the database.yml file to connect as root; none of it works. Bit frustrated – I can’t see that I’ve done anything wrong, but it’s just not working. I’ve also tried users with both old and new password hashes, and that hasn’t helped either. Anyone got any ideas? Anyone? Lazyweb?

Well, there’s a thing. I managed (with relatively no hassle) to get a local install of Ruby on Rails up and running on my 10.4.0 Powerbook. Quite surprised – given the scattered documentation – that it went so well. For reference, I used these instructions, which worked exactly as specified. I did already have an install of MySQL, but that was dead easy when I did it a few months ago, too.

Update: of course, then I ran into problems. What I discovered is that those instructions are for an install of Tiger with XCode 2.0, which still only has gcc 3.3. I upgraded to XCode 2.1, and gcc upgraded to 4.0 – and there my troubles began. Of course, then I solved them.

Now to get to work in it. I have an application in mind that it would be ideally suitable for; whether or not I can get my head around the language (especially without making my forget the other ones I know) is another matter. If I was a real programmer, I’m sure this wouldn’t be a problem, but alas, I’m not. Ah well.