#tantekmy old BB is finally dying (keyboard/buttons appear to be flakey/nonfunctional), and it's been a struggle to get the data off of it
#tantekessentially you have to use BB software to "sync" the BB info onto *specialized* applications on your Mac (not into files)
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#Loqibenwerd: tantek left you a message on 10/30 at 3:31pm: - and the other questions? when did you start publishing rel="syndication" markup? and does idno look for (consume) rel-syndication links when you're posting a reply?
#tantekoh interesting. and then maybe I showed you the markup on mine and then you added it? that sounds vaguely familiar
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#tantekcontinuing on that BB sync thread: contacts -> Apple Address Book, notes -> Apple Mail Notes (forcing you to add an account there if you didn't already set it up), photos,videos -> iPhoto. Do you see the problem here?
#tantekwe need a term for the local-machine equivalent of silos - there has to be a pre-existing term for this but I can't think of it.
#tanteksilo-apps: apps which store your data in some proprietary/hidden/non-obvious place in the system (i.e. not easily discoverable in the file system)
#tanteksince you can't find the actual file(s) that represent your data items in your desktop filesystem and "double-click" them to open them
#tantekKevinMarks - is there a term for such silo-apps that violate the desktop file/document metaphor?
#tantekI feel like this is part of the #ownyourdata problem
#tantek(and mobile apps are even worse - ALL the data in those is hidden in the apps - since mobile has "lost" the desktop metaphor)
#tantekthis is something we lost as users when OS/device manufacturers (e.g. Apple, MS) transitioned from "desktop" systems to "mobile" systems. by removing the desktop metaphor, they've forced us to keep our data in silo-apps (once created, the data is stuck there)
#tantekwhereas on a desktop, we could easily drag & drop and move our data anywhere
#tantekthis seems like a big WTF. how did as users give up on this?
#benwerdPeople are actively avoiding 8 because of the removal of that desktop metaphor, even if they're not quite sure why. It turns out people *do* want that more open model
#tantekbenwerd - the desktop metaphor was supposed to about usability - it was what users valued
#benwerdre: desktop metaphor, it probably depends on context. Where desktops are used - work - there is still a need for that freedom. On the move, maybe it's less relevant to the use case?
#tantekall functionality is thru apps. home to apps. install apps. launch apps.
#tantekwe know we've lost something, because as a reaction to this app-siloization of our data, there's clumsy workarounds like "share" where you push some of that data through a straw to some other destination
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#benwerdMinesweeper - Minesweeper!! - has to be run in a separate full-screen window out of context with the rest of everything else
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#tantekI don't want to have to "share" or "move" the data. I just want to point a different app at it to operate on it live. not on a static export.
#benwerdWe run into this all the time at work, actually. People, eg, want to record audio with one app and then send it with ours. And on iOS, you CAN'T.
#tantekhow is minesweeper not just minesweeper.js now?
#benwerdIt's why I like Android. You can just pass data from one app to the other. Still not perfect, but much, much better.
#tantekbenwerd - no - that's the aforementioned straw
#tantekand it's a *copy* of the data that gets passed
#tantekit's not shared/common access to the same *data*
#benwerdRight, agreed - but even that, which I agree is a clumsy workaround, is better (imo) than the iOS situation
#benwerdwhich is "let's make a deal to make our two apps work together in any way"
#tantekbenwerd - this tells me that there's an opportunity for some-one to develop a *content*-centric mobile UI/experience that returns control of data to the user
#benwerdor better yet, "here is where this kind of data is stored for everyone"
#tantekwas exactly this kind of user-centric multi-app model (multi-apps in the same document for different parts of it)
#tantekproblems were: 1. it was too hard to develop for (harder than a normal single document app), and 2. incentive models were not figured out for app developers
#tantekturns out if you fix 1 (as the web did), 2 figures itself out in a distributed fashion
#tantekanother reason I like "app-silo" (do we need the hyphen? for emphasis?) is we can use it in conversations like, "that's not an app, that's an app-silo"
#tantekand obviously there's "synergy" (sorry) between app-silos and web-silos
#aaronpktantek: re: http://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2013-11-01/line/1383331268 agreed. The exception which is getting more popular is for mobile apps to use your own Dropbox account as a backend. I've used a few apps like that, Drafts, for example for note taking syncing to dropbox, and "Dropvox" for audio recordings.
#aaronpkI like that approach a lot because the app becomes an input interface to my dropbox account, which is really just a filesystem
#barnabywaltersaaronpk: kinda like unhosted — apps don’t have to worry about storing documents, only editing
#tantekaaronpk, sorta. Dropbox itself is partway between a silo and a hosting provider.
#benwerdI think we all agree. So, uh, do we need to go build ourselves an indie operating system?
#tantekaaronpk - I'd believe that if such mobile apps could *trivially* move your documents between Dropbox and S3 for example.
#aaronpkdropbox is kind of a silo, but I prefer to think of it as a sync tool
#tantekright! Evernote smelled very evil when I looked into how it worked.
#barnabywaltersevernote would be so great if it just used HTML
#benwerdI seriously dislike Dropbox as a provider baked into iOS apps though. Really need to be able to select my own provider and not depend on that biz dev link.
#aaronpktantek: just tested on my phone btw. the app I meant is called Notesy, and yes it has a local cache of the files, you can create and edit files offline and they sync when you open the app with network access.
#tantekok so here's my "dumb" MacOS question. In my "home" directory there's Movies, Music, Pictures, so where's the Notes folder?
#XgFtantek: Anyway, neighbour discovery on TCP/IP has been a solved problem for, what, a decade? Only issue is that there are two camps: the camp Apple, Linux, and the sane people are in (multicast DNS) and the camp Microsoft and friends are in (UPNP, which uses crazy HTTP over *UDP* shit)
#tantekreally curious now where these iTunes sync'd "Notes" will go...
#benwerdthat is super weird. It created a folder in Gmail
#tantekI don't use mail.app either. but I had to create a local mail.app account just to launch it to the point where it could get notes sync'd from my old BlackBerry
#benwerdAnd it's saving notes as messages over IMAP, I guess
#tantekthen I had to drag those files to the file system from mail.app's notes view *one at a time*
#aaronpkthe fact that you have two wifi devices means you often connect them to the same wifi provider. that doesn't happen for most other people because one of their devices has a cell network connection.
#tantekI have device with a cell network connection too.
#tantekisn't this what WebDAV was supposed to solve?
#barnabywalterstantek: the stupid thing is that you can with reminders, calendar and contacts. those apple apps have really good support for hosting your own data
#aaronpkbut I did hack up a neat "login trick" with my latest gps tracker app i just built
#tantekXgF - "solution" != personal server that you setup. It's why so many people use gmail now.
#XgFtantek: Sure, but from ~2005 Apple's perspective "Nobody has a website. Most of them have some form of E-Mail system..."
#aaronpkI run my own mail server (been running it since about 2004 and has required little maintenance) but all it does is forward emails from my various domains to my gmail account and I read it there
#barnabywaltersthat’s excellent prior art for injecting content into URLs
#tantekso this is the problem. we've moved from a user model of, I have a document, I can open and edit it with any application that supports that type, to, I have an application, and I have to send (copy/share/email) any documents directly to other apps to edit with them, and then send back when done.
#barnabywaltersto be fair, an app-centric, no-filesystem approach does make things more accessible for a lot of people
#tantekit's like the new model is just a reinforcement of brand-loyalty behavior in other industries
#barnabywaltersuntil you need to move things around, at which point it becomes extremely complicated — creating copies of things which erode as you pass them between apps
#tantekbarnabywalters - I disagree that it is simpler (or must be)
#tantekwhen you go to the grocery store, you don't think app-first, you think content-first
#tantekthen you look on the shelf at what brands (apps) are available for each type of content you need and it's a late-binding decision
#barnabywaltersbut you always go to the grocery store for groceries
#tantekthat's like saying, you open your computer to do digital documents
#aaronpkthat happened to me on windows... too many apps dumped their settings and stuff in "My Documents" that I eventually had to make my own Documents folder where I actually knew what was in there
#tantekdid the user create a *thing* (like a document) and *name* it?
#tantekXgF one level of app folder containment by default helps Documents from becoming a complete random mess
#tantekI see chat logs as an efficient storing of what otherwise would be one file per statement I typed
#tantekthey're grouped accordingly into files by channel and date
#XgFI'd like the Documents folder to be *my* private domain. The home directory is unused on most OSes (except *nix where it substitutes for a proper documents directory)
#XgFIMO application directories I might want to peek in should go there
#tantekaaronpk - so it's an aggregation of that rule of, did the user create it and name it
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#tantekXgF - "where it substitutes for a proper documents directory" which is why Apple created an explicit "Documents" directory in the home directory
#XgFYes. Chat logs should probably go in home (IMO)
#XgFword processors (and similar) should default to documents
#snarfedhuh, benwerd's events have accepted a couple of my rsvps, but not the one for dinner tonight
#tommorrishadleybeeman: not referring to data. I'm referring to if I want to quote a passage from, oh, Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting", and wish to do so in an academically respectable way
#tommorrishadleybeeman: PDFs solve that problem by giving me actual page numbers from original print publications. those matter. fragment identifiers get some of the way there, but the cultural assumptions of academia still have a lot of play
#tantektommorris - nah, that's why we have dt-accessed (as modeled on WP citations)
#barnabywaltersand reply-contexts — citation-contexts are a natural progression
#tanteksnarfed - you shouldn't need the data element
#tommorrisAnd for a lot of academic works, they may be on the web (or on the paywall-web) but the print version is considered canonical even if nobody ever reads it
#tantekbtw - you should feel free to contribute that kind of research to the microformats wiki directly too
#tantekI mean - what you're basically proposing could be useful as an extension to h-card for venues
#tantekand assuming we make some progress with it in #microformats, then we can take it upstream to IETF to a vCard extension
#tommorristantek: having all the research is useful because of debates on mailing lists when people come up with absurd questions and I can just point and say "here's twenty examples"
#tantekyou lost me at "debates on mailing lists when people come up with absurd questions"
#tommorristantek: the OSM process combines anarchy and formality.
#tantekhadleybeeman re: "template page for documenting this background research" - could you be more specific, do you mean something like this? http://microformats.org/wiki/examples
#benwerdsnarfed: not unimportant at all. Want to figure it out!
#tommorrisanarchy in that any user can use any tag they like. formality in that there's a whole complex process laid out that's got all the bureaucratic bits that don't matter but doesn't actually have the critically important reasoning bits
#tantekmikeal - such tools evolved because people were already frustrated.
#hadleybeemanYes, tantek: that does actually help. Thanks!
#snarfedgot it. thanks for investigating. lmk if i can help.
#tommorrishas read OWL specs too. Usually I need Red Bull before starting.
#KevinMarksAlso because the specs were generated from the javadoc that made the code
#hadleybeemantommorris: You have the spec-patience of a saint.
#tommorrishadleybeeman: no, it's usually because I need to answer a difficult question
#hadleybeemanI know. I've seen you do it. :) But your determination is... formidable.
#tantekhadleybeeman - in all fairness, that "examples" page could be improved to be more approachable/readable to answer the use-case you enquired about (templates)
#tantekhasn't edited that page substantially since 2006
#hadleybeemanI realise not everyone organises their work the same way I do. But having questions to answer (or headings in a template) can really focus the work. (Or thought process. Or group discussion.)
#tantekthe only thing I put above that was how to scope the examples, because it's the next thing people get wrong (the first being the absence of research)
#hadleybeemanit is, tantek — seems significantly clearer.
#hadleybeemanAnyway, something about "Broader context" or "Why we need examples"? You might need a transition sentence at the top of that section to say something like "Matching microformats to the way people use the web now keeps them useful and relevant. This is important because:"
#tantekhmm - ok, my guess is you haven't made that many edits yet and are still an "unconfirmed" user - I've opened it up to any registered user
#hadleybeemanAnd on that note, I need to pack and get to bed.