Wow, this is pretty cool

Looking for that companion tool for blogging on your iPhone? ShoZu is for you.

What does ShoZu bring to the table? Well, this really universal tool allows you quickly and easily access your WordPress account and just as easily snap a new picture or grab one from your iPhone library and quickly make a new post.

When I say universal, I mean this tool will talk to just about every community photo and blogging service on the planet. The set up was really quick and adding a new photo post to your site is even faster.

Then using the WordPress iPhone application, you can access that new post, add your copy and communicate at the speed of light from your iPhone. This is the kid of stuff that those old skool, right wing, news suppressing major corporation media outlets fear! 

Man, life doesn’t get better then this! And who is that cute kid?

One note though. The pictures you are uploading is not being uploaded to your blog, but being uploaded to the ShoZu service and the a link to that image is what gets posted. Not sure if that is of a concern, but I thought that I would put that out there.

Why Apple should release a touch-screen Mac

Don Reisinger from cnet.com has recently posted an article on the subject of why he feels Apple needs to release a touch-screen computer.

His initial statement that Apple has ’stopped’ with the iPhone is laughable. History has shown very clear that when Apple introduces a new idea to the market, they need to give that product as much attention as possible to ensure it’s success, but that does not mean that they have stopped there. If that were true, they would still be trying to sell us the Newton. After all, the iPhone is really the Newton v2.0. But we will leave that kind of product development to the other guys.

I agree with his next statement that a multi-touch touchpad on a laptop is not revolutionary. But what I feel Apple is doing there is trying to bring a new UX to the laptop but not trying to force an experience into a UI environment that it was not built for. Why duplicate the mistakes of the tablet PC?

Really, the thing that makes the iPhone compelling and all other ’smart’ phones lame is the User Interface was clearly designed to match the User Experience. Apple did what no other company could do before, but created a fluid user experience that would resonate with users. They just didn’t replace the mouse click with a finger tap, they re-engineered the whole experience of human user interaction.

Clearly, the failure of the tablet PC and smart phones was the assumption that they could simply replace the mouse with a metal stick. Not very innovative. The UI is no different from a mouse interactive application. There is even a little pointer that follows the metal stick! Wow, revolutionary! NOT!

With the iPhone, Apple killed the mouse. In a handheld device, this is easier to pull off as the experience is more focused. A users tasks are more centralized. One window or application at a time. All actions are performed sequentially and independent. This is great for an iPhone, but not for a laptop.

One thing I feel that was lost with the iPhone UX is that it is Device Centric, versus User Centric. This always forces a user to circle back to a single start point to move forward versus always being able to move forward. I can’t tell you how many times I have read an email, clicked a link to go to Safari, but when I am done with that web page, I have to click the home button to tap the Email icon to get back to where I was before. Then my issues with email, the fact that when I am in an email folder and want to move to another, god forbid another account, I have to tap back-back-back, then forward-forward-forward.

I do consider the iPhone the first Beta application of what is to come. And I think that there are great things to come. Things that may even address my petty issues.

In order to really perfect a product, you need to get it out in the market. You need to allow the market to speak clearly about what is good and bad. But of course Apple’s Betas are so wonderful that most people consider this the final product. But I don’t think so. Apple has used the iPhone as a spring board to bring innovations to the market what few have thought about or have the vision to achieve.

But for a whole computer to adopt a real touch user experience, this is an exceptional challenge and one that requires careful thought and planning. Where MS failed is where Apple needs to succeed. And simply introducing a laptop what tries to replace the mouse with a finger and not develop the experience to go with that would be as much of a failure as the Moto ROKR. A clear example where Apple took the short road to the market. Bad apple, bad . . . .

What do I think that the TouchBook will look like?
I see a device that flips open like a macbook, but the entire space is touch. No standard keyboard, no track pad, etc . .  See, where this experience needs to succeed is that the interaction of the human and the machine needs to be as natural as possible. That means allowing the UX to be fluid, three dimensional, spacial and relational. You will be able to push things in the background (far away) and be able to bring things forward. As you choose one action, related actions are brought up to the front.

Really, to make this a reality, Apple not only needs to reinvent the OS, but there will need to be significant investment from software developers. This would be the first revolutionary UX advancement since the invention of a window and a mouse click.

Do I think that Microsoft has an opportunity to gain ground?
Hell no! The fact that people consider MS gaining ground with the big ass table is laughable. Their execution is along the same lines as what HP did with their new touch desktop. All they are giving is a simple software application that sits on top of the same old crappy Windows that we have had for decades. Yes, decades.

What is so revolutionary about that? Nothing I say. Until you unlock the potential of the whole OS to a touch world, simply putting ‘touch’ applications on top is nothing to claim victory over.

I imagine that when Apple releases the TouchBook, this will be a revolutionary device where the human interaction is unparalleled. Or at least I hope.

You drove me to do this . . . .

It is a great thing when your blog gets read by a growing audience, but not when that audience is nothing but a bunch of scummy spammers!

Yup, the hallowed pages of Contingency Design has been attacked and has been subject to a growing fan base of spammers. Most of which seem to be coming from Russia. Come on, I am all about foreign relations and I am all about forgive and forget about the cold war, but this ain’t helpin brother!

But at least these guys have a sense of humor.  It really struck me weird when I got this post to my blog from mail.ru,

Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!

The body of the message is almost benign in nature, but weird. But then I looked at the link from the name and this is where these guys get talented. If course I will not expose their entry as that would give some free spam time. 

But since I got this first hit only 10 days ago, it is like a team of war ships have zeroed in on me. The amount of spam hits have been almost amazing. Do these guys really have nothing better to do? I say, round up all the spammers and we will find that hole in Sparta and throw them all in.

You WordPress set up comes with Akismet for spam filtering. But it is only a program, and people continue to write programs that are smarter then the computer. Until we find a cure from Spammers, we need to maintain a process of human intervention. 

So I have broken down and installed reCAPTCHA. If you are not familiar, reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.

. . .

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

. . .

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

. . .

I myself am not really a fan of CAPTCHAs, especially Google’s!  Man, could they make that any freaking harder to read that crap? So, instead of installing the standard CAPTCHA service, I installed a great WordPress plug in Simple Spam Filter by TanTanNoodles. Simple Spam Filter has existed for a little while now as a basic spam filter, but they have recently updated it to make use of CAPTCHA security via reCAPTCHA.

So there it is. The gates have been locked. This service leverages the power of spam pattern recognition, so if you are leaving legitimate comments, you are safe from reCAPTCHA. But if you are a spammer, well, prove that you are human. 

Well, lets see how it goes. I am hoping that this will work and I don’t have to initiate registration and up from CAPTCHA. 

Happy blogging everyone!  Oh yeah, GO OBAMA!