Is this thing on?

At least until tonight when we, if in Prague, will find out. Opera's Håkon Wium Lie (nice interview), will count down to its doom.

This Thursday May 8, was a local holiday, the liberation day for the end of World War II. Liberation day used to be the 9th of May, but perspectives change. It also led me out into the Prague suburbs as the latest, and last for a while, extension of the Prague Metro was opening. In the 18 years since I first visited Prague, the metro system has doubled in length, with 19 new stations (Oslo in the same period added 3 new stations). It is a fairly young system, it opened in 1974, and is efficient, convenient and pleasant to use.

While I am an early adopter in the sense that I quickly visited the new stations, I actually never have bothered to be there at the opening (not the official opening, but when it opened its service for the public a couple hours later). With the next station opening in 2013 at earliest I took the trip to the suburbs where the three new stations, Střížkov-Prosek-Letňany, were located, or at least two of them. The terminus, Letňany, is placed in the middle of an empty field. There's an small planes airport nearby and it is just between two large suburbs (Letňany and Kbely). Supposedly the location could come handy if Prague won its 2016 Olympic bid, which is not going to happen. The station is integrated with a nice new bus terminal, as well as a new Park and Ride, so the communications in this part of town still have improved.

What's more the station itself is pretty in blue-tinted glass and highly reflective chrome (at least for now). The most noticeable station of the three is still Střížkov. This dome looks like how the future could be imagined in the 1930s, or progressive architecture concepts from the 1970s. Open, light, and practical. Absent at the opening was commerce, no shops and no pubs or bistros. I can only assume that they will come later, one picture series indicates we can at least expect a hair dresser soon.

More pictures can be found in my album. Skyscrapercity has a relevant thread, and then there is the metro site if you can read Czech or just like to look at the pictures.

It seems to be science week at the Debates & Discussions forum, and of course I couldn't resist butting in, be it peer-reviewed sinful science, or the study of armageddon.

By the end of last year one long-standing competitor to Opera ceased to develop its browsing engine. No, I am not thinking of Netscape, that browser was dead when it was bought by AOL, but an old Opera favourite, iCab. From now on iCab will use WebKit as the engine, in effect turning it into a WebKit skin, like OmniWeb before it. This is more sad and nostalgic, OmniWeb was always about the UI anyway, while iCab showed that two skilled and dedicated programmers could compete in making a browser that (some) people actually wanted to use.

This is not to say that it wasn't a sensible, rational, and reasonable business decision. iCab can prosper more easily now that as tiny team can focus on the one thing closest to their users, and leave site compatibility to the much larger group of WebKit developers and evangelists. My next will be on them. However, this leaves the choice on the Mac platform to three, WebKit (Safari, OmniWeb, and now iCab), Gecko (primarily Firefox, but also Camino and others), and Presto (Opera). In general the trend on any operating system is less choice, not more, and this trend is likely to continue. There is unlikely to be a radical new browsing engine in 2008 or in 2009, the choice is instead going to be among the existing ones.

I wonder how cities will change in the 21st century, and believe that it will generally be for the better. That is a good thing given that most people will be city dwellers. One problem which I expect to be solved is traffic as an environmental problem. As travel becomes relatively cheaper and more convenient (which I think it will in the long run) people will travel longer and more often, so the time spent travelling won't decrease even though the injury caused by it hopefully will.

Assuming that the car will retreat from ever-larger parts of our cities, that gives us an interesting problem, what shall we do with the spaces thus liberated? If you go to a city like Copenhagen many central streets seem curiously overdimensioned when the cars are largely gone. Of course there were streets long before there were cars, but in the middle part of last century the city plans were often designed for the car. What can best be done with streets like this when vacated by cars? The traffic and pollution might be gone, but the street is still not an integrated part of the city, and cities abhor empty spaces.

That makes some rationale for a design competion.

The value of human-scaled carfree areas is increasingly appreciated, both among urbanists and the general public. Yet how can we transform existing areas to create lively people-oriented spaces free of traffic?

Through our 2nd Annual Street Conversion Design Contest, we are challenging architects, artists and ordinary citizens from around the world to design carfree spaces from formerly car-oriented spaces. And where possible, we're also encouraging people to realise the designs on the ground. Update: Thanks to a grant from Artists' Project Earth, we are able to do further global outreach to announce this year's contest more widely. Therefore the deadline has been extended to November 15, 2007. The grant has also allowed us to offer cash prizes of €100-200.

The principle is that street space was once used for both transport and human interaction. But with the arrival of the automobile, street space has become monopolised by cars and other vehicles, resulting in a loss of community and livability. This competition aims to reintroduce a level of humanity to the streetscape, both on paper and by encouraging lasting on-the-ground initiatives.

We are asking participants to design carfree spaces from formerly car-oriented spaces, in three categories

The better TV points to an entry I came across, Wii trumps Apple TV

This is the first time users can easily browse, find and watch YouTube videos right from their living room couch.

Alexis Gentry heard this statement yesterday when Apple CEO Steve Jobs formally announced the Apple TV product, which would allow users to find their favorite YouTube videos, pay a tiny fee, and stream them to watch on their television. She then thought something to the effect of, “Having I been doing that already?”

Back in December, Opera launched the trial version of their internet browser for the Wii. Since then, Wii owners have been casually watching YouTube videos from their couches - and for free.

Gloating aside, there's an article I'd recommend if you are interested in how your web site will work with Wii, Making Wii-friendly pages. From working with phones and similar devices it is interesting how the Wii, much more powerful than any phone, shares some of the characteristics of a phone, some of the characteristics of a PC, and some unique characteristics of its own. And I'm not just talking about the Wii wand.

As you may have noticed by now Opera for Wii is out.

I bought a Wii of my own a month or so back, my very first game console. I don't mind playing games, but I've rarely got time for it. I tried a PS2 a few years ago and it was fine but really not too exciting. The gaming industry is far too focussed on graphics, which is much like special effects in movies: the experience may be more immersive but without a good story not worth much, and the gameplay seemed firmly stuck in the early 1990s.

Wii is fun, fast, and friendly, cute Mii avatars and all. That it is less powerful in technical terms than its competitors is actually part of the appeal.

The UI revolutions

Of course what it is really about is the Wii wand (or Wiimote as it unofficially is called) you wield. It is the center-piece in the user interface Revolution, as the device was code-named. The appealing Wii games are the ones where no buttons are pushed, but the wand is an extension of your body.

More ambitious phones all have UI inventions, not all successful. Siemens incorporated the phone camera in an augmented reality game setting, Apple iPhone will bring some improvements in tactile interfaces, a long-standing interest of theirs, other phones have included accelerometers before the Wiimote. Speech interfaces and handwriting recognition have been around for a while. Our mouse gestures had predecessors among computer games such as Black&White. In general games and mobile devices are good places for innovations.

Nintendo has done good work in not just making this a gimmick, but a fairly consistent environment. Some jar a little, the Wiimote is joined by the tail to the nunchuck game console interface (joystick and all), and their mental model are very different. The Wiimote is immersive, it gives you the illusion that your body is part of the game, while the nunchuck unit is manipulative.

Demoused

But most notable the Wii system is mouse-free. The Wiimote doubles as a true pointing device, you use it to point at the screen, and the infrared lights and Wiimote receptor triangulate to decide what part of the screen it is pointing at. The accelerometers sense motion and rotation, with "rumble" vibration and the speaker giving feedback to the user. There are some oddities. If you point the Wiimote qua pointer outside the screen area you get no indicator other than that the cursor disappears. This can be desirable when you've parked the Wiimote, but new, and sometimes experienced, Wiimote operators wonder where the pointer went. An indicator which direction it is pointing to when outside the screen would have been helpful, as would possibly be locking it into the visible area.

We are trained to think that the mouse is a natural user interface. It is not, as anyone witnessing someone learning to use a mouse for the first time can attest to. Outside the workstation the mouse is outside its element. It needs a flat surface and a designated working area where you interact with the application. But this interaction is continuously interrupted when you access the menus, the toolbars, or the scrollbar, and then you have move the pointer back to the starting position again. The one major advance in the fourty year history of the mouse is thus the scroll wheel, though the trackball inverted mouse also deserves mention for foregoing the flat surface and working area. The number of buttons may vary, but the mouse has hardly changed. While it has served the personal computer well, it is less than certain that the mouse has any future as an input mechanism for future devices.

Wiiboard

Speaking of buttons, a very common wish for Opera on the Wii is to get a keyboard to actually be able to create more text in reasonable time than most would be able to do on the virtual keyboard. I have no idea whether a wiiboard is in the works or not, though indications are that it is, but many have noted that it could use the Wii USB ports.

I for one hope not. It would be out of character, the user shouldn't be bondage to the machine like it was some PC. With the Wii Bluetooth capabilities the keyboard should be in the hands of the user where he is, and a Wii player would throw any attempt to tie him down with a wire out the window.

Going wireless adds a battery requirement though. The keyboard could be wired to the Wiimote, depleting the batteries even faster, but you are using rechargeable batteries by now anyway. It might also remove the need for a Bluetooth controller, as the Wiimote supports the Bluetooth HID profile. That would prevent other devices to attach to the Wiimote though. You could almost wish having the devices daisy-chained, with the Wiimote on one side and for instance the Nunchuck on the other. That would come handy for the nose typists among us.

While the mouse could be replaced there aren't really any current alternative for text input to the keyboard that wouldn't require even more training to use efficiently, so something QUERTY should be taken as a given. With that as a requirement there are several options. It would be nice to use a foldable compact keyboard, so you could have the same keyboard for your Wii as you would for your phone. But the overlap between heavy phone users (with Opera Mini or Mobile of course) and Wii users is probably not that great.

It would make more sense to consider the Wiiboard a gaming/entertainment controller. Why shouldn't the keyboard have accelerometers just like the Wiimote and the Nunchuck? While I'm not quite sure I would go for a Wiiboard cum frisbee controller, some Wiiboard gestures could be useful for text handling, user/system actions, and in particular gaming. Even without accelerometers it shouldn't have to underperform the Classic controller. Some dedicated or user-defined keys could make it quicker to do rote tasks (and rote and Wii shouldn't belong together). Many channels could benefit from that beyond the Internet channel, like for instance the Photo or Weather channel.

Just published my first SVG article on Dev Opera.

1995 was the year Mobile SVG arrived, and 1996 was the year Mobile SVG got lost. Before 2005 SVG was used in a few niches, "semantic graphics" like map applications with a limited number of users but really nothing to talk about. In 2005 on the other hand the phone world showed interest in SVG, and while other SVG events happened like the first public alpha implementation of SVG in Opera and Firefox, and pre-alpha in Safari, the Canvas spec, and ominously the Merger of Macromedia and Adobe, everything newsworthy was related to phones.

Not so 1996. The phones were set to mute, and SVG hit the Web. Behind the scenes in 1995 and much more publicly in 1996 there were cultural and technical conflicts with other Web formats, particularly CSS and the new Canvas, with Adobe Flash and Microsoft in the background. This year Opera started to matter in the SVG world as the first useful integrated SVG browser with the release of Opera 9, with the promise of Firefox and Safari. The SVG 1.2 specification reached Candidate Recommendation, being both too early and too late.

The bomb, though expected by the people in the know, was Adobe's discontinuation of its SVG viewer plug-in, the dominant SVG viewer. It was the way to show SVG in any browser (which for most users means the Internet Explorer browser), and though as Adobe had paid good money to buy Flash, the terms struck everyone as stunningly harsh, if not directly hostile to SVG: By the first announcement the plug-in would be gone and unavailable by the end of this year. Later Adobe relented giving the plug-in a longer lease of life, you can download the unsupported plus-in next year too. This was obviously taken as bad news, but personally I think this is advantageous in the long run, much like when AOL Netscape ceased ownership of Mozilla. This was commonly seen as the end of Mozilla, but I thought it was more likely to be the beginning and was proven right. Sugar daddies are only advantageous to a point. Worse than the loss of ASV is that authoring products like Illustrator are unlikely to provide useful SVG support.

Symbolic, but still, the year ended with good news for SVG. By Christmas the first game console, and a hugely popular at that, supporting SVG was released through the Opera beta for Nintendo Wii. I have been sceptical about how useful SVG really is for phones, game consoles seems a better match.

What about this year? I expect 2007 to be a fairly quiet year. Browser support will improve incrementally, the work with finding a replacement for Adobe SVG Viewer will continue. An unknown is whether Microsoft will provide SVG support one way or another, but I don't expect they will. We have begun adding SVG articles on our developer site, and fundamentally developer support is the make or break for SVG. But that is more a challenge for 2008 than for 2007.

I got a well-appreciated birthday gift from myself a few days ago, the Rome series 1 DVDs. The second, and probably last season, will air in a few days. The time slice covered by this TV series will thus (assumedly) be from the fall of Gaul to the preeminence of the first Roman Emperor. A small gripe is why does it always have to be Caesar and Augustus, and not for instance the republic a couple centuries earlier.

While the backdrop story is one often told and retold, the historical characters are not the stars in the series, but the city of Rome itself. This fictional account of the end of the Republic, and history is always fictional, is the best one I've seen so far. Given the high cost and usually moderate income from historical soaps, dramas, and documentaries, it is likely to remain so for some time to come. The creators have said that current Calcutta, err Kolkata, has been an inspiration for the recreation of the Rome as was, and the city is as believable as the story is enjoyable.