Launchpad, Reminders, Notes and the Dock in Mountain Lion

/

By now I'm used to new versions of OS X inserting the latest and greatest into the Dock. This time, the first boot of Mountain Lion populated my Dock (which is pinned to the side in its 2D glory, as it should be) with icons for Launchpad, Notes, and Reminders. As a result, there are more shiny objects, making the Dock objects I use for launching or switching apps even tinier and smaller to hit. So I tried dragging Launchpad out of the Dock, expecting it to vanish in a puff of virtual smoke. (I should note that this is an expectation that Mac OS X has taught me.) But no go. The Launchpad icon just rubber-banded back to the Dock. Same with Notes and Reminders.

Are we stuck with Dock spam? Well, no.

You can still click-and-hold (or right-click) on these Dock icons, navigate Options->Remove from Dock and there you go.

But... why is this the case? Why is Apple breaking behaviors they taught us? Is this a subtle signal that Launchpad will be the way of the future, and Apple is training us to rely on Launchpad? Is this another hint for iOS-ification conspiracy theorists?

What I Did Last Weekend (Datafest Late Edition)

/

Award winner at Stanford Datafest! Is the influx of millions of dollars to Wisconsin both for and against Scott Walker an aberration, or have state political races always been powered by "outside" influences? Our project collates and visualizes the amount and proportion of out-of-state money contributed to gubernatorial races in all 50 states and tracks from where this money came (which states, largest individual donors).

Our raw data was scraped from the Sunlight Foundation's and other sources, and cleaned so that it could serve to power our interactive heat map (more to come on how that was made). Original investigative reporting on some of the top donors was added to illustrate how our tool can serve as a springboard for deep, data-driven journalism.

Team Members: Gershon Bialer, Jake Bialer, Vamshidar Reddy Boda,Beth Morrissey, Laura Rena Murray, Bill Tang, Dan Turner

(Note: Yes, the map needs to be resized, and the popups need to be cleaned.)

Live version: http://twoangstroms.com/datafest2/

insideout.png


Lion Hates Me

/

I saw some apps not responding, so I tried to sample the processes (so I could hand the data off to a more savvy friend). Note that in neither of these screen shots was the cursor over the highlighted Time Machine Menu Bar item; I'd clicked on it in an attempt to suspend backing up, in hopes that that would lessen the load on the poor laptop, but that just made things worse. The whole thing started when iTunes wouldn't launch, so after a few minutes of the icon bouncing in the Dock, I used Activity Monitor to get it to quit. The next dozen times I tried to relaunch it, there was that lovely error message.

The computer sat like this, with eventually the Finder being unresponsive, for 10-12 minutes before I forced a reboot.

[gallery]

What I Did Last Weekend (WSJ Data Transparency Edition)

/

I was lucky enough to attend the Wall Street Journal Data Transparency Weekend hosted at NYU and work with a fantastic team led by Prof. Ed Felten of Princeton (and the FTC). The project was very data-driven, so the UX work came at the very beginning and the very end: If our concern was surfacing privacy and surveillance issues to users, how can we build the needed database and then present the relevant information? Could we assign a letter grade to sites based on our desired criteria of third-party cookie use, adherence to Do Not Track requests, and allowing users to opt out? Looking at the user needs, we didn't want to provide a site or app that users had to visit separately, load a URL, see the results, and then decide whether to continue or not their everyday browsing and interactions. We realized we could build this as a browser extension; this would be unobtrusive but persistent, and could be hidden or exposed (we later added automated presentation of the site's "grade" in the extension icon, so users could immediately see the site's letter grade). This, we hypothesized, would more powerfully link the experience of visiting a site with knowledge of the site's privacy attitude. It was our hope that this would more likely spur user action based on a state of information, making our extension an effective sousveillance tool.

We crawled the top 500 Alexa sites on 4/14/12 and we logged all cookie downloads that resulted from those crawls. We performed three different crawls:

* first, with a clean-sate browser without any opt-out cookies or do not track requests * second, with the BeefTaco extension active (which downloads most opt-out cookies) * third, with the "Do Not Track" request option selected in the browser

We performed these different crawls to analyze if the sites honored opt out cookies and/or “Do Not Track” requests from the headers. Based on these crawls, we graded the top 500 Alexa sites and relevant third-party networks. Raw data from the crawls will be located at trackingcookie.info in the future for reference.

The resulting privacy grade (from A to F) for sites is based on what they do with their users' data. These grades reflect how well or how poorly that sites utilize their users' data.   We give stellar grades to first-party sites that: • do not allow a large amount of third-party networks to be called on their site (and do not let a lot of third-party networks to download tracking cookies on the visitor's browser) • honor both “opt-out” cookies and “do not track” requests

We give poor grades to first-party sites that: • call a lot of third-party networks and then those third-party networks download multiple tracking cookies on the user's browser • call third-party networks which have poor quality scores themselves (because the third parties do not allow for cookie opt out or do not honor "Do Not Track" requests) • continue to track users online behavior even after the users opt-out of online tracking through the use of “opt-out” cookies • continue to track users online behavior if the user turns on the “Do Not Track” option in their browsers

The current iteration of the extension presents this data in a three-pane column view. The left column shows the first-party site name, favicon, Yes/No to the presence of third-party cookies, and a graphic summing up the grade for the first-party site. The center column lists the names and companies of the third-parties (if any): even if users aren't interested in seeing details, a quick glance gives visual indication whether there are any, a few, or many. More advances users can click on any name listed in the center column to progressively reveal more data about each third-party, including details how it scored on our grading criteria. And, as said above, non-technical users can still see, even with the extension hidden, the letter grade as highlighted in the extension icon in the browser's status bar.

TRC_current.png


More information and the download link for the current extension are available here and here.

We also sketched out future direction. We'd like to incorporate a subset of the Mozilla Collusion plug-in to replace the center column with a graphical representation of the discovered third parties that shows their scope and relationships. Users would still be able to progressively disclose or ignore details in the third column.

extension_in_use.png



Worst Product Placement?

/

Vodka-brand vodka and tinned "Steak". In the same bin in, I assume, the freezer. Why would one put tins of meat in the freezer? Funny thing that negatively affected my enjoyment of "Fringe" in general -- for all the dialog notes that the world was falling apart, and things like water, clean air, and pens (?) were rare, almost every interior or exterior shot showed a world full of well-dressed and shod people in lovely houses. Apparently these hellish dystopias have higher living standards than 99% of our own world, which I don't think is all that bad.

(This is how I spent part of my injury recovery -- started watching before I remembered this was another *spitsonground*J.J. Abrams*spitsonground* show.)

vodka_and_steak.png


From the Season 3 finale of "Fringe"

I'm Not Super Happy with the Lion Upgrade

/

In the two years I've had this Macbook Pro (basic model), I've had to restart maybe a half-dozen times total, with only two force restarts. That is, until I upgraded to Lion. Problems with the new Mail UI aside (the old Mail with WideMail could show half again as many items in the Inbox at once), I've seen serious RAM usage and have had to force restart twice in the last week. Any suggestions? I've booted from the install DVD I made according to Apple's own instructions and run Disk Utility and tried to make sure I have current versions of all apps.

activity.png


Note that only three apps are running, and over half my installed RAM is Active. One more app and the OS starts going to my hard drive for memory.

gray_screen.jpg


I tried logging out to clear the RAM use. This is what it looked like for 10 minutes. I had to force restart.