Yesterday I received the best compliment in a while. I helped a company focus.

Recently I was asking for an XML API, preferably something simple like REST. This company is the electronic equivalent of a printing house and they have the contract for some of the best reference content available.

But the services delivered HTML. It was easily digested as whole content of course, everyone and -thing can do HTML rendering. But it was hard to process. HTML mixes presentation and data, as they say. That complicates processes which are interested in the data only.

All of those nouns go together.

Today Apple released the "God" tablet, I mean iPad, and it is indeed good. After all the hype there will surely be quick and harsh critics. AT&T and it's 'generous deal' (or whatever Jobs said) of wifi will probably be seen as apology for lousy 3G service and overburdened networks. There's no camera for web conferencing (relax, it's probably saved for next year's model and there'll be peripherals).

I've recently been an observer on two strikingly similar projects, massive programs really, that have had two strikingly different outcomes. In the first week of this year I received memos from the heads of each program, and they couldn't have been more different.

One memo invited me to a demonstration of the project output. The other warned me that project delays would trigger cascading time constraints across several, previously unrelated products.

The year I succeeded at moving firmly into the cloud. I hesitated-- like Star Wars, would a corporate Emperor arrive in my cloud city to tax my data at an arbitrary and unpleasant price? I use online services, but I don't like common trends in terms of service, with Facebook perhaps having the worst.

This video exemplifies what I am talking about when I say media = features + content.

A breakdown:

• 0:15 The cover: Yeah! It can play video, so let's do that! But, it doesn't start with video, you have to launch it. Because if you started with video, then every time you go to read what the top heads are, you'd first have to wait for the %#^&! animation to end.
  
  
  

Lost in all the talk of Free, failing newspapers, piracy, e-readers, e-learning is the aspect of media and features. But when leather bound books are romanticized and the daily crossword is praised, features are being discussed. Aggregation is one new media feature that has gotten much discussion relevant to newspapers.

There's too much focus on "content". Content is important, journalists are needed to produce stories, musicians to create music. But content isn't published without features that allow access to the content, and ignoring them is limiting.

In the race to provide news worthy of the "new", Twitter beat the New York Times again. Sure, "again". What's noteworthy in this story is that the event in question literally happened outside the Times' window. (My own tweetpic, from around 9am: http://twitpic.com/ip30w)

Been enjoying Flex Builder lately. Built on Eclipse, it is therefore a great environment: Wysiwyg window builder, good code management, useful new document templates, SVN integration... We've quickly prototyped an AIR app for remote learning object access and the environment allows a design that adheres to sane coding practices.

The funny thing about software projects: Even the most off the cuff ones seem to live forever. Want to tell whether a piece of software has any merits? Come back in 5 years, if it's not in use it was better never done. It's true even for seemingly single purpose scripts-- this post is prompted by a recent trip through my archives to dig up a string parser from the late '90s. That script was for the very particular purpose of matching a Taiwan Mandarin wordlist against a mainland one, but it wound up being a useful basis for some XML-ery I had to do over the weekend.