When I got an interview with Opera a year ago, I switched from Firefox 2 to Opera 9.5. Initially I thought that the “extensions withdrawal” was going to be hard but after a few days I realized that CoLT was the only one I really missed . Copy Link Text (CoLT) copies any text you select plus the URL where its located. This is great for blogging, saving links for research and answering emails that require a lot of links¹.

Update: Welcome KFG Links and Minimal Mac Podcast visitors, glad you find the bookmarklets useful.

In case you’re also using Quix, you can add the group below to your Command File for improved versions of all the bookmarklets.

You can also grab my whole Command File, which incidentally I made following Merlin’s post.

Now, back to reruns.

Enter the Bookmarklets:

One of the reasons I didn’t miss extensions that much was because most services I was using where already bookmarkets (or had one). Bookmarkelts are basically bookmarks that perform an action with the content in your browser window.

Famous ones include: Share on Facebook, Tumblr and Bookmark on Delicious. My personal favorites are Read Later, Post with Tweetie and Readability.

In any case, after some head-scratching I modified some existing bookmarklets to make them work for me:

• Text Select: It grabs the text selected, the page URL and the page title and pop’s up a dialog box with the content you can easily copy. If no text is selected, you will get just the URL and the title.

If you select this very special text on a website and click on the bookmarklet you would get:

Page Title
http://website.com/address
this very special text

Markdown

I made a couple that format everything in markdown since I use it to blog and write most of my documents.

• Markdown Text: page title link and selected text as quote.

  [Page Title](http://website.com/address)
  
  >this very special text
  

• Markdown Link: selected text as link.

  [this very special text](http://website.com/address)
  

• Markdown Title: you guessed it.

  [Page Title](http://website.com/address)
  

All you have to do to save these bookmarklets is grab the underlined name and drop it in you bookmark bar. You can also right click and select save link to bookmarks in some browsers. In Opera, I assign shortcut to each one and just type tc on the URL bar to use it.

I hope somebody find these useful. They are a lifesaver for me.

ll the recent talk about the different new eReaders misses one crucial point: it is not about the devices, it is about the future of books.

Consider for a second that books haven’t basically changed in the last few hundred years. Even things we take for granted online, like hyperlinks or recommendations do not remotely exist on books today. We use this concepts up until we purchase a book, but as soon as we open it, it’s back to the the 19th century. No wonder millennials don’t read as many books as their parents.

Of course the literary purist in me believes that incorporating technology into books affects the essence of reading. The ability to think, imagine, and contemplate in silence a story, a phrase and, most important of all: an idea. Nevertheless we need to recognize that clinging to the “good old way” is the easiest route to drive that “way” to obsolesce. If you don’t believe me, ask Polaroid and Kodak how the film business is doing.

The new direction digital books will be able to take the reader should be as exciting and unpredictable as the Web browsing ride over the past 15 years. Imagine margin notes that are easily shared with twitter or Facebook, allowing you to experience a book in a social way. All the insights of a book club without the inconveniences. Or maybe being able to jump from the fictional book you’re reading to references of that historical era, or the character’s inspiration or just facts about the author during the the period the book was being written.

Do you think DVD extras are great? Now imagine what authors could package-in with the books. From commentaries to deleted chapters chapters, giving them (and their publishers) the ability to complement a book with whatever they feel will make the content more value, is likely to result in more good than bad.

If you don’t feel compelled to buy any of the current eBook readers, don’t worry. The device that will make your bookshelf look like a vinyl record collection in the eyes of your children is not out yet. The Kindle is not the iPod of ebook readers. It’s the Rio.

The device that is going to bring digital books to the masses is not the one that better recreates the analog experience. It will be the one that remixes sequential printed pages into something made of bits and pixels and gives authors more tools to tell a story.

One Friday, when I was about 12, I attempted to escape from my school by jumping over a fence. My school had recently changed the rules for picking students up, and I couldn’t just walk outside to wait for my parents. This meant that they would have to endure a 45 minute car-queue to pick me up. Which meant that picking up my little sister at her school would take even longer. All of this snowballed into a situation where our monthly trip to the beach had absolutely no margin for error with regards to time. This was unacceptable to my Mom.

That day, as the final bell rang, I followed some older kids on their escape/smoking route. As we arrived behind the gym it became obvious that the final hurdle was a 3 meter fence. I should mention that my sport of preference is swimming, mainly because the only athletics required is a jump into the water. Hence, my climbing was painfully slow. The other kids must have never heard about the “leave no man behind” doctrine, because a minute later I was alone. That’s when Brother Ignacio uttered -“Mr. Mateu?”- from below. I was sure my mortal life was going to be over soon. Not only was my Mom going to kill me over being late, but she was going to do it again when she found out I was expelled.

Surprisingly, Brother Ignacio just told me to get down and wrote my name down on a pad. He then turned and walked briskly away. It seemed that the new rule had driven most of the high schoolers to exploit all the known escape routes, and a massive “prison-break” was taking place.

Let me assure you that Brother Ignacio didn’t have any issues with me spending the rest of the afternoon on detention. Yet, the total chaos taking place in different parts of the schoolyard made it impossible for him to concentrate on any one case. He was simply trying to monitor the situation as best he could.

Censuring the internet is similar. It’s very hard to do. You have to block keywords, URLs, IP addresses and do hackie things to pollute DNS server connections. In a way, it’s much more difficult to censure half-way than to completely lock it down.

The upcoming chain-link fence of Venezuela

Over the past two weeks I’ve being trying to write a post about tools that get around an Iran-style Web lockdown of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and news sites. The recent #FreemediaVe circus on Twitter and its response by the government only reinforced my belief that some sort of Web censorship is on the horizon. However, the more I researched about the technical aspects of blocking traffic on the Web, the more I began to appreciate the political implications it would have internally and externally.

Lets be clear, the Venezuelan government has the technical capability¹ to establish a fairly competent internet censorship model². Be it a complete-control model like Saudi Arabia, a more flexible version like China, or a simple site filtering system like Norway. The state controls close to 90% of all broadband traffic through the re-nationalized telecommunications company. This is helpful if they are monitoring quietly at the moment, but making other internet providers and mobile operators comply with some sort of centralized system would not be a surprise to anyone.

The tough decision the government needs to take is what type of censorship it would go forward with. However, this is a political decision and its implications are considerable on the lives of urban Venezuelans³.

NoticieroDigital and Aporrea together, on Youtube

The current media control scheme in Venezuela is incompatible with internet censorship because the “enemies of the revolution” are not as clear to pinpoint. Unlike TV signals and cable channels, you don’t eliminate NoticieroDigital’s presence online by just blocking their URL. Most of their videos are hosted on Youtube for example. But if you block Youtube, about a thousand Aporrea videos disappear too.

The democratization of media on the internet means that completely opposite political views coexist on the same services. This happens every day, on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Blogger, Wordpress, etc. The same tools that pro-chavéz individuals prefer to use online to express their views would likely fall under the censorship wall.

This a consequence of the Cute Cat Theory:

Web 2.0 was created so that people could publish cute photos of their cats. But this same cat dissemination technology has proved extremely helpful for activists, who’ve turned these tools to their own purposes.

Barbara Streisand and Cute Cats to the rescue

All this time I have being imagining the problems activist on both sides would face with some sort of online censorship. Yet, if the political views of Venezuela’s internet users are at all similar to the real-world, then 40% of them are Ni-Ni’s. They are apolitical and don’t really care too much one way or the other. Unless you mess with how they share party pictures, funny videos, use of social networking sites, etc.

Once you start censuring, everybody is affected. Anti-Chavéz, Pro-Chavéz, Anti-Anti, Pro-Anti, Mets fans that read NYtimes, European football followers that read the BBC; there are so many permutations of non-political content that coexists with political content on the same services, that you end up affecting a lot of people. As a result, everyone tries to find a way around it.

The Streisand effect defines this situation as:

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

Once you find a way to post your cute cats pics, you can do the same to post a picture of a National Guard shooting at crowds. By blocking something online, the government is going to push most internet users towards exploiting the system downfalls. That’s why China’s censorship model puts so much effort into trying to make foreign services comply with their censorship rules and also encourage local services.

The Boiling Blackberry

If the China system is sustainable on the long term, why then can’t Venezuela apply a similar model? I see three main reasons:

• Internet users and censorship grew up hand-in-hand in China. I’m always amazed about how Chinese individuals are mostly unaware that any censorship exists at all. It’s a typical case of the boiling frog, you only notice if it’s very sudden. They sometimes mention that some inappropriate Web sites are not allowed, but to them it doesn’t seem to be censorship, just protection.
• Although there was some important growth in local web services early on the decade, Venezuela currently lacks any real local alternatives to the basic Web2.0 services: photo sharing, blogs, social networking.
• Blackberry: The growth of Blackberry devices in Venezuela has been phenomenal⁴. It’s used by the cool kids, the opposition political parties, the local government and all journalist. By design, nobody (not even RIM in Canada) can see what goes on within the Blackberry Mail and Messenger walled garden. Any real attempt to censure communications in Venezuela needs to start by shutting down all local Blackberry Services providers.

Everything is going to be alright. Not really

Is everything is fine then? We have nothing to worry about, right? Yes we do. Remember what I said above: the government can, and probably will, establish some sort of online censorship. It will not work as expected for the reasons already mentioned. Nevertheless, they will be able to monitor a lot of traffic. And if things someday really heat up, they can disrupt most important Web sites for a considerable period of time. Next week I’ll point to some services to keep handy if Iran-style blockade happens and you want to post to Twitter, your blog, etc. But remember, just follow the cats.

Just to finish my escape-from-school story, I eventually got outside and told my parents what had happened. Without knowing what to say my mom just stammered -“Well, uh, next time …”-, and my always proper Dad just added -“don’t get caught”-. I believe that recommendation is still valid.

Over the past few months developer frustration over the App Store has increased considerably. Not because things are getting worse, but because they aren’t changing, at all. The main the problem seems to be lack of clear rules with regards to why, what, how and when iPhone applications get published in the store.

Update: (01/08/09): The FCC sent letters to Apple, AT&T and Google inquiring about Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice app. This is going get interesting.

My big concern is that the App Store is such a money-maker, that most developers will just look the other way. The whole situation gives me the feeling of businessmen during right-wing dictatorships¹: It’s business as usual (99¢ fart apps) as long as you stay out of the way of the dictator (Apple). Problem is your most creative and important developers don’t tolerate this environment. The see themselves as: The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.²

Don’t doubt for a second that these developers would put ideology over numbers and stop developing for the iPhone. That’s exactly the reason why many of them moved to the Mac from Windows in the first place.

Here’s a sampling of some of the developer comments and situations going around today:

stevenf.com » I’m furious with Apple and AT&T right now, with regard to the iPhone

There’s been no indication that Apple want to do anything to resolve the problems with app store policies that have been laid bare a hundred times over. There’s no indication of anything, as a matter of fact. Nothing. After a year. It’s a black hole yawning back at us.

One Bad Apple » Newsweek.com

With iPhone, Apple decides which independent applications will be allowed, and it can pull the plug on any application at any time, without explanation—as happened in July to several developers of iPhone apps. “I spent four weeks trying to get through to Apple via e-mail and phone calls, and they wouldn’t return my messages,” says Cyrus Najmabadi, developer of an iPhone application called Now Playing, an online movie-theater guide that Apple yanked in July after receiving a complaint about the program.

From The Top » The Emperor’s New Clothes

As with many other serious iPhone developers recently, we’ve made the hard decision to kill all but one project in progress, and stop investing any resources in creating new applications. We’ll continue to sell and fully support our existing iPhone offerings, however we’re already moving to platforms which show signs of real viability.

Where do I sign up? » by Justin Williams

More important than the money is my enjoyment as a developer. I no longer enjoy building software for the iPhone because of the bureaucracy and infrastructure that surrounds it. I can build great software for the Mac without the headaches and bullshit of dealing directly with Cupertino and their AppStore.

It’s about killer apps. Not just number of apps.

The effect of developers moving to other platforms takes a long time to register. But it does happens very fast once it starts. I love my iPhone, but if Instapaper, Tweetie, 1Password and Comiczeal were to move to Android, that would be reason enough for me to switch.

Apple should know better than anybody that it’s not about how many apps you have available in your platform, it’s about how great they are. I’m pretty sure they understand this, and soon we will have another Steve Letter addressing the problems with AppStore and the planned improvements.

I love articles that show the design process for a website, UI or icon. Since I recently updated my twitter avatar and website favicon with a new design I thought it might be cool to show the different stages.

Design process:

For creating most of my graphics I actually use Keynote. I think it’s because CorelDraw 7 was the program in which I learned. As a result, I’m a vector kind of guy.

I usually start with a rough idea and duplicate the slide when I reach a design I like but want to keep experimenting with. Otherwise I make another blank page and move from there. If I need to do something that requires image editing I copy it to Acorn, and then copy back. That’s how I removed the small piece from the m.

A simple update:

To be fair, I’ve been using the concept of combining my initials in one letter for a while. So it was on the back of my mind at all times. For some reason, I keep ending there. I just like a lot how both letters fit together, and I’m not the only one.

Looking ahead I want to add a little color to it. Maybe find a way for it to work better with my pic, since I believe that personal twitter accounts look better that way.

I have the same problem with my Web sites as I have with my Moleskines. Whenever I get a new one I spend hours setting it up. Making sure everything fits perfectly and looks great. But then, I open it, and draw a blank. Nothing I write is up to standards for the site. So then, I procrastinate the next blog post, get frustrated and eventually leave it at that.

Acquired taste for writing

If it doesn’t come naturally, and I’m not that good at it, why do it?

I have a confession to make: I didn’t particularly like Radiohead’s OK Computer the first time I heard it. It has since become my favorite CD. But when I first heard it, it was too complex. I knew this was because I was too used to commercial rhythms. Before that I had rebelled against my classmates love for Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Guns and Roses by becoming a reggae fan¹ (I know, I know). Point is, I understood that there was something beyond the 4/4 time and basic chords. So I listened to it again. And again. By the end of the week, I liked it. By the end of the month, loved it. A year later, I was enjoying my dad’s Pink Floyd’s CD’s.

I need to believe that good writing is the same way. It’s complex and not easy initially. But if you stick to it for a while it will grow on you. Because it’s what you want to happen.

Are you talking to me?

After listening to Merlin Mann and John Gruber podcast about blogging, it became very obvious that I also didn’t have an ideal reader in mind. Most of the time I just try to write something that mimics what some of the bloggers I look up to have already written. Which very quickly leads to disappointment because they have already done it (written about it, commented, etc) in a much more elegant way.

The format

The easiest and most fun way to blog for me is the tumblelog. Where you either link or quote, and then comment. But it’s difficult to consider it writing. It also is arguable how useful these links are, especially with sites that make it easy for popular stuff to float to the front-page like Techmeme, Reddit and Digg. Most likely I won’t be able to contain myself and post links regularly. But I won’t consider this writing.

This time it’s personal

I’m going to keep the focus on tech and tools. It is what I’m passionate about, and either way, I’m still thinking about it all the time. What I’m going to change, is my idea of the target reader. I’m going to concentrate in thinking about people I know (@federicoa, @carlosmherrera, @navjotpawera). Hopefully this will help keep my feet on the ground regarding topics, depth and insights that are expected.

The tool

If there is something about the new site that I’m happy with, it’s the new engine behind it. I’m using Jekyll (Update: the blog is now hosted on tumblr, feel free to laugh at me). For the reader, the only difference is that the site should now load super fast. That’s because it’s a static web site with a bunch of html files². The site is generated on my Macs³ with a command line tool and I then rsync it to my server. The whole process is geeky, straight forward, and once setup: completely uninstrusive for concentrating on content. I’m writing this post on TextMate using Markdown, the date-stamp and the link come from the name I give the file.

Well, let’s see how it works out this time around. Fourth time is the charm, they say.