A Whopping 33Mb!

It looks as though Lex’s Comment, might be right! It turns out that Touchstone might soon completely evaporate. Thanks to Google and a few Windows API websites I have discovered a nifty little way to address the memory consumption concerns that many of our alpha tester’s have raised.

As the above screenshot shows, I cut the memory footprint by a little over 90%. That’s right 90%!

I know this seems like an otherwise pointless blog entry, but my ulterior motive is to demonstrate our dedication to active response to feedback given to us by our testers. In case your not already aware, emailing chris@touchstonegadget.com is what you need to do if you want to play with the alpha, now 90% fat free! Well…next update anyway.

RSS is not just about News Reading

One of the principals under which we are developing Touchstone is that RSS is not just about news. This is why 'RSS News Readers', while a necessary and powerful way of using RSS to digest news, only represent a part of the overall RSS solution.

We are developing Touchstone with the understanding that sometimes RSS is about notifications. Notifications are more immediate, more compact and require a client-side alerts mechanism into which they can render.

Rich Zaide at Basement.org has worked this out and has posted his: Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part One. I can't wait for part two!

We envisage a world whereby there isn't just 1 RSS icon on a page, but multiple RSS tags that let you subscribe via various levels of 'priority'. Maybe they don't even mention the word RSS. Do web pages mention HTML?

Imagine a forum, on each thread is a 'Subscribe with importance 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5'. You can now be alerted of new posts with a given importance bias that Touchstone can use to determine the right level of alert.

Update: Here's an example - of course the real version would be powered by JavaScript so as you rolled over the numbers they light up. Clicking would activate Touchstone and add the feed in with the appropriate iAM rank.

RSS is not just about news.

Show Me Yours & I'll Show You Mine

In the past few days we have had a number of VIP’s get their hands on the Limited Alpha. One of these people reported that importing his OPML file failed!

We were a little agasp at this because we have imported basicaly every OPML file we could get our hands on – and they all worked fine (well, except for the one Chris broke - but he breaks everything).

I decided the only way I was going to be able to determine what caused the bug is by checking out the contents of the offending OPML file. Which means, asking for it!

At this point, I was a desperate man. And to be honest we (both) were pretty uncomfortable asking someone for their OPML file/s. In my eyes, it’s kind of like asking someone how much money they earn. It’s just not cricket!

But knowing there was no alternative we had to bite the bullet... and ask. Lucky for us, the person in question kindly obliged. And as yet, hasn’t ram raided our houses - which is a good sign. ;)

The whole experience has got me thinking about the Syndication Security Concerns. After all, if OPML becomes what we all feel it should then a person’s OPML file/s are sacred. It’s important for developers, publishers and especially marketing people to respect the sanctity of a user’s OPML. People found a way to bastardise email (spam anyone?) and it’s important to keep this in the focus while the “Syndication Revolution” gathers speed.

I’m not trying to sully the innocence of RSS before it becomes a mainstream communication technology, nor do I even offer any constructive suggestions. I only offer the thought that I think it’s a perfect opportunity for us (as ‘sort-of-early’ adopters) try to keep our eyes on security for the user - to come up with measures to safe-guard people and their ‘lord –of-the-rings-precious’ Attention data.

iAM on my way!

Up until now Chris and I have been in the nuts-and-bolts part of the project. As a consequence the app “seems” stable (/me touches wood) and we are now free to do more interesting things. So far we have been doing LOADS (and I mean LOADS!) of planning and design behind what I consider to be at the very heart TouchStone - The Attention Engine.

Now we can begin focusing on the 'Visible Innovation' part. Breaking down the things you care about into a single and intrinsic number. The iAM Rating.

But ranking items based on stuff I like isn’t enough! Because, for most people, just subscribing to a feed is an indication of interest. So, we have to consider other factors.

To be honest, programmatically, I have been a little frightened of the iAM binary. It’s so important to nail it! So far our plans are pretty ambitious and the basic core of iAM (processing items as they are injected into the Attention Engine based on source and keywords defined within an XML file) is functioning already – what’s been lacking has been the interface and the more advanced bias calculations. This lack of any interface has worked extremely well for me, because while there is no way to configure the XML file, I don’t have to code it!

Chris recently upset this delicate balance by actually developing the iAM interface mockups for the release of the Limited Alpha!

'iAM' is so exciting though, because it isn’t JUST a keyword scanner and ranking system. It’s a whole system to scrutinize the items based on:

• Content (keywords and source)
  
• Source (where it came from)
  
• Author (who generated the item)
  
• History of past items that got your attention (by scanning items for similarities to items marked as read in the cache file)
  
• Buzz value (how popular is the item on the internet and to other people)
  
• The publishers recommended importance (so publishers and bloggers could distinguish the variable importance of items they generate)
  
• ..and more.

All this is very exciting, but it’s STILL not enough. TouchStone is also about allowing the user to configure the DELIVERY of items based on the iAM determined value. So we will work on those "visualization widgets" as well.

It’s great to see all these things finally start to come together. While we are quite proud of our ticker, it’s time to move forward and finally uncomment the code that fires off the other alerts. Soon guys and gals – soon we shall be firing off SysTray, Cursor, Centre Screen Modal, and (my personal favorite) Compact SysTray alerts based on things you deem important.

Enjoy the Limited Alpha (those that have it) and those that don’t – email chris@touchstonegadget.com already!

Limited Alpha is here!

Today we released the first version of Touchstone that will be sent to both our closed community of testers and special members of the blog/press/development/publishing community. We call it the 'Limited Alpha'. This release is designed to start some people talking about our little project even before we are ready to release it to the public!

Here is the email that was sent to the testers mailing list:

Good afternoon everyone,

Chris and Ash here – AKA: “The Touchstone Development Team” (we have uniforms and everything).

We would like to announce the very first Limited Alpha of Touchstone. We have quite a few new people on this mailing so I’d like to extend you all a warm welcome.

Instructions for downloading and installing the build are on the website listed below. Please read these carefully – this is only an Alpha so it’s not as easy to install as we’d like.

You can get your copy at: [secret website address here]

We appreciate your involvement - we hope that, with your help, feedback and support, Touchstone can begin empowering people to keep informed while they work.

To refresh your memory:

Touchstone is a gadget that persists on your desktop displaying news and nformation that you subscribe to. Initially this will be based on RSS and eventually it could include all types of alerts/information from various programs (through 3rd party adapters),

In this release, Touchstone looks like a news ticker (like the one you see at the bottom of news shows/stations on TV). Eventually there will be a way for the user to set rules about what’s important to them and configure additional ‘visualizations’ such as a ‘sidebar’ version, and various ‘alerts’ that popup when important information comes in.

These features are hinted at in a couple of mockup screens (that don’t work!) in the setup screen in this build

Kind regards,

Chris Saad & Ashley Angell
Touchstone - Are You Paying Attention?

Great Posts about RSS & Attention

There are a couple of great posts about Attention Management Tools online right now that I thought I might post for everyone to read:

MTRaven over at Omniorthogonal talks about the Attention Deficit Problem and how we could conceivably develop cognitive enhancement technology which would create an interface between mind and the technosphere.

Over at MarketingStudies.net Rok Hrastnik talks about making RSS more useful by using Artificial Intelligence to cull all our information sources and help us focus our attention.

This all sounds very familiar!

Nothing matters anymore!

Ash and I are sitting here trying to make these 'important' decisions about various features and we just came to a realization.... nothing matters any more...

Why?

Because we have Auto Update! Now we know how Microsoft feels haha. We can always fix and improve things later. We are closer to a 37 Signals world where they can just release stuff and improve it later (because everything they do is web-based).

It's a great feeling and it frees us to focus on what matters.

[Goes back to creating a program to automatically update the blog for Ashley]

Automatic Update - Yeah!

I got the auto update library and executable working tonight for the (currently somewhat unstable) "experimental" build of Touchstone. It’s well overdue because our little application is getting quite complex now and laying in new features can be a tricky process. Now we have a mechanism to automatically and non-invasively update users with new versions - making adoption and user updates quick, seamless and easy.

Now perhaps Chris won’t kick my ass so hard when a Private Alpha release starts throwing those ugly “object not set to reference of an object” exceptions.

Now all I need to write is a program which automatically updates the blog for me, and I’ll be right!

Continuing Sillyness

In continuation of the silliness of the previous post, I would like to submit this Blonde Joke I found linked from Scobleizer - it is the best joke I have ever seen!

Bloggers Lie!

With the work we're doing on Touchstone, we're assuming that the content that people want to read will have a level of integrity and relevance that will increase the very quality of our lives. Information that helps us connect to each other, understand and respect our differences and grow as a civilization.

But this shocking report reveals that most bloggers lie! They LIE!

It has dampened my faith in the human race.

In other news, I recently stopped running Touchstone because our experimental build was so experimental it didn't run. I usually only ever run the experimental build so when that stopped working, my Touchstone experience was put on hold. Recently I decided that I could go on no longer and ran the more stable Private Alpha 5 release. I can't believe how much I missed my ongoing Touchstone dosage. It's like I am back in touch with the world. Thank you Touchstone... thank you for saving Christmas.

[end of silliness]

A review of Touchstone

Over the past couple of months we have really been working hard to polish the "TouchStone User Experience". We have received many bug reports (oh my! the duplicates!). But one, deserved special mention. It reads more like a review - and we love reviews:

So I grab a copy of the alpha.

And I have to tell you, this looks good.

First, a disclaimer: I'm not a heavy rss user. I don't use blogs (often), I do use rss feeds but not an unmanageable amount. My Google homepage can quite happily manage all the data I need to see. The downside of this is that I have to click to home to view my feeds. Obviously, I could use a third party solution, but none of them ever really 'worked' for me (too intrusive, too limiting, too much). Of course, using tabbed browsing means a self-refreshing google homepage can be left in the background at any rate (everyone uses Firefox or Opera, right? RIGHT?).

So let's say I'm a 'casual' rss user, and not one of these people who has millions of blogs to manage. I'm probably not the best person to stress-test something like this.

Nonetheless, I have plenty to say about this gadget.

The Touchstone ticker looks 'right'. It looks like a slick bit of software; it loads quickly and is immediately functional. You know someone's spent a bit of time working on the look - and it slips into a docking position at the top of my second monitor like it was meant to be there. I have all my 'internet' stuff on one monitor, which means that clicking a touchstone link invariably just means looking below the bar to see what I wanted to see. If anything else, this is probably an advertisement for having two monitors, but I digress. The mouseover effect to view extended information is excellent, if a little slow at times: obviously grabbing header data for a whole bunch of feeds can be a little time consuming - I wondered here if there was any caching facility for these feeds, so that information once grabbed doesn't need to be grabbed again. Not being a developer, I am most likely barking up the wrong tree :)

The second major bit of cool is the setup dialog. It's mostly icons; and I'm in two minds about this. The icons themselves are extremely pretty and once understood, very obvious. Once you've got the 'lingo' (does Touchstone use common feed/blog parlance? I wouldn't know, to be honest) you can see exactly how this thing works. However: I am a huge fan of threaded lists, and while the icon-based system is entirely worthy, I can't help wondering how much easier it could be for the casual user if you had all your options in front of you, ready to be selected from a thread. Again, I'm no usability expert, but it's something I noticed.

Also, a minimize button for the main dialog would probably not go astray. People get used to windows functioning in certain ways (I, for instance, like that many programs now offer the option to minimize direct to system tray - as with as touchstone - rather than the taskbar,), and getting rid of the minimize button, while making the dialog a whole lot 'prettier', does limit usability.

Here be my creative criticism. The software looks fantastic; highly scalable and thouroughly well programmed. I wish you guys the best of luck with it: keep sending me the alphas! I'm looking forward to system tray and mouse alerts - and the content ranking system should be awesome, if the work done so far is any indication.

Good luck again!

Anthony.

Auto Update?

Recently we have been toying with the idea of building in Auto-update into Touchstone. Along with 'Anon Usage Stats' these two features have given us some concern as to possible miss-trust of our intentions.

This little note at 'Abandon the web' which links to Tim Bray's post about his IM software eases my mind a little about the Auto-update feature at the very least. Here is the quote they used.

Tim Bray: "There are two kinds of software: the kind that offers to update itself when appropriate, and the kind that's broken." Ideally, once users select a trade-off between features and code maturity (the range is from "bleeding edge beta" to "proven and stable"), the software is then updated automatically. An option to easily revert to a previous version should be provided if feasible.