The interface itself is pretty – and seemingly powerful and simple. Reminiscent of Microsoft’s Visual Basic or Apple’s Automator. But in the end, Pipes is chartjunk – or as Dave Winer said, “[a] visually appealing but information sparse IDE”.

If the goal of Pipes was to simplify the process of mashing up and filtering feeds – they left all the hard parts in; the geeky terms (“Base”, “Position”, “Query Parameters”, “Debug”, “Truncate”, “For Each”) and the URLs themselves.

Seems to me, the same functionality could be achieved with any number of the other feed aggregators out there (My.Yahoo.com comes to mind).

If you’ve been able to do something cool and useful with Pipes – let me know. I’d like to be proven wrong here (and move this post from ‘useless’ to ‘useful’).

ELSEWHERE:
Alex Iskold says Pipes has turned the web into a big database…I think we already had that with XML-RPC, RSS, SOAP, and REST.

Eric Rice asks if Pipes is a competitor to Gliffy.com

“This site neither supports or endorses Hampsterdance.com. In fact just typing HampsterDance.com, in this authors viewpoint, should automatically have a person banned from internet usage for a year. How can that song even be in my head when I haven’t even heard it in a decade?” – Bill Bradbury

Like MySpace, and Friendster before it, I don’t know what to use it for. I already have a blog (several in fact – you’re reading one now). I’m already comfortable with the weblog tools I use.

Why would someone with an existing blog start another one at PeopleAggregator?

They don’t want people to know who they actually are. That’s why someone would set up multiple accounts on multiple weblog, er ‘social networking’ sites with multiple ‘collections’ of ‘friends’. So they can maintain separate identities. Defeating the need to easily migrate between sites that Mike Arrington cites and a benefit to PA.

It’s true because, I couldn’t point any of my existing blogs at PA, or point it to existing URLs of photos of me – it wanted me to upload the photo (though ‘enter a url’ exists for Images). I had to got through the entire, annoying sign-up process, describing who I “am”…again. Why can’t I just point it to a URL that describes me (like I talk about on another blog). This is actually an incentive to to lie about your identity – it’s sure a lot more fun than re-entered that same damn info.

Once inside, the interface as a whole is as clumbsy and heavy-handed as MySpace. People that grok that will probably have no problem with PA. Me, I’m baffled. Why can’t it look like WordPress?

In fact – the current PA interface looks like a made-for-TV version of Slashdot.org or MyYahoo circa 1997. Lots of collapsable sections all with very strong header bars and very techie-looking color scheme. Every single form field has a border around it – and there are piles of them on every screen. A setting for this, for that – and nothing with a smart default. Argh.

Oh, look – place holders for Google AdSense and other ad banners and no RSS feeds. Hasn’t anyone at PeopleAggregator gotten the memo that the pageview model is dead?

Perhaps it could be useful as a download-able rather than hosted ‘social network’?
That’s one of the great things about weblog tools, there’s one that’ll work on almost any server environment – PHP, Perl, Ruby, ASP, Java. If you’d rather not muck around with your own install – there’s hosted systems like Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress.com. If PA was written in something other than PHP – say with Marc Canter’s Macromedia history – ColdFusion. Then I could see a market for a downloadable PA. But, there’s Drupal – so um.

After poking around for a while, I found 2 big things PeopleAggregator left out:

1. A reason to use it.
2. A ‘Delete Account’ button.

So, our 4 year old gets to inherit the ol’ PC laptop so he can play his Tonka Trucks Firefighter game (which, BTW, is only $3 at Menards!). No problem, we’ll just copy over the Quicken data and plop in into the Mac version.

Hmm…doesn’t seem to work.

OH! Of course! Intuit decided not allow people do transfer data between the platforms. Apparently, my operating system has something to do with the data structure of their data! Who would’ve thought that in 2005 and the age of the web, a gigantic software corporation couldn’t figure out how to translate data between computers?

Oddly, Apple has a web page about KVM switches that offers a link to Intuit where Intuit supposedly explains how to transfer the files. But this link redirects to Microsoft.

Addendum: So, after more googling, it’s now apparent to me that people are pretty much unanimous in agreeing that Quicken for Mac simply sucks. It has half the features, is incompatible with the PC version, and is missing a ton of automation that the PC version had. In otherwords, it’s a pointless product to use.

A recent discussion on the Webdesign-l list brought this up and the debate ensued as to whether or not it was a good idea. To me, it’s just annoying, so I thought I’d go and fix it.

In the past, I’d write a quick Greasemonkey script. Alas, Greasemonkey is having some growing pains. The current version just isn’t working. So, for now, here’s a bookmarklet for anyone that wants to use it. Just drag it to your toolbar and whenever you are reading an article at ALAP, just click on it to have the content fit your browser. (note that I only tested this in Firefox).

ALAP Liquid <– drag to your bookmarks bar

While researching some software for my 4 year old (btw, recommendations welcomed) I came across Kid-Pix which is oft-recommended. I found it a bit odd that one of their bullet-point features was that it is Politically Correct. Huh. I wonder what that could mean? No peach-colors labeled ‘skin tone’? No politically biased clip art? Well, apparently, it means that in the past, when you wanted to erase your art, the screen exploded. Which sounds cool. But, I guess parents began thinking terrorist were outside their window everytime a child started a new drawing, so now we have the more PC firehose eraser.

I went through a long list, and finally went with XStandard. It is by far the best option out there if you are concerned about creating HTML that is valid, accessible, and semantically rich. It does suffer from one major drawback, though: it’s an activeX control. They decided to go this route (rightfully so, IMHO) to get around the inconsistencies between IE’s and Moz’s built in abilities to edit text in a textarea. Most (all?) of the javascript based systems depend on the these built in abilities, which leaves you with inconsistent markup depending on which browser you are using.

So, it was a bummer, but we’re IE-based here anyways, so we went with it. Fortunately, this seems ot be a very progressive company, and within a few months, they had a working Firefox version ready as well. And now, the big news: An OSX version is on its way…hopefully ready for beta by Summer.

This is the classic glass half empty or half full problem. Either:

1. the world sucks, everyone makes bad decisions and we’re all going to hell in a handcart or
2. people are good, everything has positive points, and things are getting better.

Taking this from a ‘glass is half-full’ perspective, here’s the rational I would use to nix the screen:

1. Only the songs you put on the shuffle will be on the shuffle, i.e. you’re familiar with all your songs.
2. A very popular game show (Name That Tune) was developed based on our ability to identify songs by the first few notes.
3. There’s a ‘next track’ button if you’re not happy with the one playing. (I’d even take this one step further and remove the ‘previous track’ button).
4. It’s very difficult to be active (workout, run, change your car’s oil) and read the iPod’s screen (I’ve tried).
5. A screen would send the price over $100.

From that perspective, the iPod shuffle is a brilliant product. A digital music player stripped down to it’s barest essentials; play, stop, next track, previous track, louder, quieter, iTunes integration.

(via Web-Graphics.com)