However, I have played their new single several times now, because I have become ensnared in the online multimedia object that accompanies it. (I am not sure what the correct term is, but I am sure that “video” is the wrong term.) And, yes, I am starting to like the single that accompanies it. Perhaps I should check out the album…

The song is called We Used To Wait and the site is www.thewildernessdowntown.com. The title and the narrative make sense once you have heard the song.

When you arrive, you are instructed to enter the address where you grew up. If the address can be found in Google Maps and Google Streetview, then the presentation continues. Otherwise you are invited to enter another address.

The presentation only works in Google Chrome, because it is built entirely in HTML5, using help from the people at Google Labs. It is a stunning example of what can be achieved by mashing up different repositories, and by using the detail in the data.

It took me several viewings, with different addresses, to recognise how the visuals adapt to the different streets. The runner follows the path of the camera in Streetview, to navigate the roads where you lived. The point where the content in three different windows spins in time is impressive viscerally, and the end where the trees appear in the streetview, without ruining the 3D is impressive technically AND viscerally.

During the presentation you are invited to write a postcard to your younger self, and this can be uploaded to a database which will be used to generate the backdrop on Arcade Fire’s US tour. You can also share your personalised presentation by email, by Twitter or on Facebook.

Here is my personal more-interactive-than-a-video multimedia thingy, from the street where I grew up in Birkenhead.

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The Issue

Arcada currently uses version 8 of Blackboard as its learning management system. This is coming to the end of its life. There are three alternative courses that Arcada might pursue.

1. It could decide to upgrade to Blackboard 9.0. This is a major upgrade and would require a lot of staff retraining.

2. It could decide to switch to Moodle 2.0. This is also a major change and would require the staff to be retrained.

3. It could decide not to use a learning management system, and instead to encourage the students to develop their own personal learning environments.

If it decided on the third possibility Arcada might either use software like Fronter, or it might simply develop a strategy for encouraging students to bundle together applications and widgets freely available on the web.

The Task

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to familiarise yourself with what would be involved with each of these alternatives; to develop a set of presentations that explain the advantages and disadvantages of each approach; and to advise a group of key staff as to which course ARcada should adopt.

Note: the diagram above is borrowed from a post in Tim’s Blog de Blog where he discusses virtual learning environments and offers some opinions and pointers.

Initial URLS

The links below should provide you with a set of starting points for your initial research. Once you have read these and followed the links contained within the documents you should have an deeper understanding of the task, and the territory that you will need to cross to reach your goal.

What is an LMS?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system

What is a PLE?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Learning_Environment

A range of LMS compared:
http://www.capterra.com/learning-management-system-software?gclid=CMa7z5uF46MCFQQE3godTyYoAA

Blackboard:
http://www.blackboard.com/

Moodle:
http://moodle.org/

Using Moodle (second edition), the ebook:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Using_Moodle_book

Fronter:
http://com.fronter.info/index.shtml

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This does not replace the official documentation on the Arcada web site. It is simply a place where you can find whatever essays, references, suggested reading, and so on, that I talk about during the course.

You can add references and comments of your own in the Comments section at the end of each entry, if you want.

Why are these notes here?

Every year for the past four years we have experimented with ways of delivering course notes; sharing material; and encouraging feedback. In previous years, we have used Zoho Docs; Airset; and a Moodle installation. This year we are working with WordPress.

And here I am doing it…

There are several reasons for this, including the fact that all new students will be given space to make a personal online presence using a WordPress framework. In addition, in Periods 1 and 2, the Advanced Web Apps course will be comparing learning management systems and personal learning environments.

I am beginning the year by placing my notes on my own site, where I will be able to link to other material that is already there, and attempt to demonstrate what I mean by “a personal web presence”. As the year goes on I may export or copy the material onto one or more other sites, in order to demonstrate different methods of publishing and interacting.

Whatever happens, this year’s courses will continue to be accessible from this page. And you are free to leave comments on any of them.

How do I use the notes

You can get to the Course Notes in one click from almost anywhere in this site. At the top of the right-hand sidebar there is a section labelled Fast Forward. A link to the Course Notes is one of the entries there. Click and go!

The notes are all part of a series, and there is a bar at the top of each page telling you this. Clicking on the name of the series will take you to a page that lists the contents in the correct order, with a short excerpt indicating what the content of each page contains.

Clicking on a page title will take you to that page. Clicking on the name of the series will take you back. Alternatively, you can get straight to the Series Content Page by clicking right here right now.

Where are they really?

The course notes are categorised as part of the DIY section, in a sub-category called – surprise, surprise – Course Notes.

If you go to the DIY section of the site by clicking on tha tab at the top, you will see that a set of menu options appear. This include Archives (where you can see everything in this section listed), and Course Notes!

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What follows is a set of preliminary reflections based on reading, thinking, practical work in Second Life with Catharina Gröndahl, and a series of long conversations with Lindy McKeown and Steve Bronack.

Introduction

In Autumn 2005 Camie and I started the Marinetta Marinetta Ombro project in Second Life. The project was intended to explore the social aspects of virtuality and to develop techniques for learning that took advantage of those. We created a virtual culture, established Rosario, and explored ways to approach the residents of Second Life as a learning resource.

In many ways the project climaxed in May 2007 with the Semano Semano festival, held to coincide with the Eurovision Song Contest finals in Helsinki, and it was declared finished in December 2008. Since then we have explored ideas of spatiality and geography in Second Life, which included tearing the nine-sim island down and rebuilding it from scratch.

Some of this is documented in Catharina Gröndahl’s thesis Updating Rosario. The rest of it will be documented in a book to be published in 2011. (Note: I will post urls to both of these soon.)

The last twelve months have also served as preliminary research for the programme for 2010-2011. This was conceived as a one year project to produce a simple open-source kit for using Second Life as an alternative to video-conferencing.

We had approached Second Life for an immersionist point of view. Now we wanted to adopt the role of augmentists. We wanted to see if we could produce a simple alternative to Venuegen or Teleplace: an alternative that was free or very cheap to use, and which could be used by small businesses, clubs and families in the Nordic countries.

Because of these plans I have been looking again at various different aspects of the Second Life ecosystem, including Second Life itself, the various official and unofficial alternatives, and the various viewers used to access both. The current position is both more complex and less predictable than I had expected.

Linden Labs: the last three years

Linden Labs was started by Philip Rosendale and launched Second Life in 1999. At the end of 2007 the company went through convulsions that resulted in Cory Ondrejka, the chief technical officer and co-driving force, leaving. He had been the fourth person to join the company, and his departure ushered in a new era, that resulted in Philip Rosendale himself resigning barely three months later

Since then Linden Labs have imported new management and adopted more obviously commercial strategies.

They have downplayed the role of education, which resulted in the disappearance of John Lester (Pathfinder Linden) from the ranks. They have moved the “adult content” into a ghetto continent of its own, and made increasingly strenuous attempts to impose content labelling. They have launched Second Life Grid, aimed at big businesses who want to run their own private virtual world on their own servers. They have attempted to embrace social media by buying a series of web services to create an online marketplace for virtual goods and a social networking site for avatars.

They have developed and launched Viewer2, which was designed to reduce the learning curve for new users by providing a simpler and more intuitive user interface. It was also intended to boost dramatically the ability of content creators to display media in-world by providing an in-world browser, and by making shared media a workable proposition.

Linden Labs: the current state

According to the current CEO, Mark Kingdon, this strategy has broadly been successful, and is continuing to become more successful. Outside commentators have been more sceptical.

When companies introduce an innovative new product, and that product becomes successful, the company almost always shouts about it, as Apple has been shouting recently about the demand for iPads. That is not just because it is good publicity, its because news that something has become popular and trendy is likely to generate an enormous second wave of sales as the mass market follows the early adapters.

From this perspective the fact that Linden Labs have said next to nothing about the success of the world-in-a-box that is Second Life Grid tends to suggest that there has been no success to talk about. Something similar could be said about Viewer2. If it had resulted in millions of new, happy customers then we would not be able to dodge the press coverage.

What press coverage, you ask. Exactly.

To add to all this, on June 9th Linden Labs fired one third of their staff, a move that Mark Kingdon tried to imply was an outgrowth of success. He said

We’ve emerged from a two-year investment period during which, among other things, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time improving reliability and the overall user experience. Today’s announcement about our reorganization will help us make Second Life® even simpler, more enjoyable, relevant and engaging for consumers starting with their first experience.

Interestingly he also said something that I at least had never heard before:

It will also enable us to invest in bringing 3D to the web

This snippet seems to me to be more important than it might seem, because if Linden Labs are really planning to move Second Life to the web, then that raises a lot of interesting questions about where we might best place our limited resources.

Second Life: the alternatives

One of the things that happened during the last turbulent three years was that Linden Labs decided to open source the code for the Second Life viewer and (eventually) the code for the server too. Why they did this is a matter of speculation.

There were two important results of this. The first was that a number of different groups produced viewers with different strengths. This included the Second Life development team who, under Philip Rosendale, created the SnowGlobe project to develop a better open source viewer. There is now a list of officially approved unofficial viewers available on the Second Life site.

The second result was the creation of OpenSim, which is a complete (and almost completely compatible) open source clone of the entire Second Life code base. This originated as a programmers’ hobby but has rapidly developed into something stable and usable by the non-technical.

In part this is because OpenSim has itself developed an ecosystem, and now ReactionGrid have turned up with the aim of becoming the Red Hat of OpenSim. They offer commercial services and hosted worlds that are much cheaper than the Second Life equivalents.

Because OpenSim is open source anyone can download the code and run it on their own server. Lindy knows a number of people who have done this. However, they all say that, at the moment, this is not a trivial undertaking and hosting an OpenSim grid is definitely not as simple as installing WordPress or Drupal on your own server.

So what does ReactionGrid offer that makes them interesting?

The first thing is that, in terms of privacy, their worlds work the other way from from Second Life. In Second Life there is one big world and it is all connected. If you want to build a wall round it then you have problems that you need to sort out. In ReactionGrid every world is separate from every other world, and if you want to link worlds then you do so by a process of federating, using an extra piece of software they refer to as Hypergrid. This enables avatars to move from one separate world to another taking their clothes and inventory with them. The worlds they can move between, however, are limited to the worlds that the Hypergrid is programmed to recognise.

The second thing that ReactionGrid offer is Jibe, which is a newly launched web based virtual worlds system, using the Unity 3D engine. This, they say,

allows us to deliver virtual worlds with the easiest of logins & navigation in browsers, Iphone, Ipad, Ipod Touch, Wii Console, Mac, PC & soon more.

The third thing they offer, for both products, is full import and export facilities. In both you can build models in Blender, 3D Max, Maya, and other software, and save models in the world in formats that these programs will read. This makes the process of building much easier to teach, learn and manage; and it means that historical snapshots of a sim can be saved and backed up in their entirety.

Conclusion

The project we are beginning in August was conceived as a way of utilising Second Life for something different from what we had been doing previously. However it was also conceived as a way of creating a product or set of tools that other people might find useful.

At the time that we proposed the idea it seemed obvious that Second Life would form the backbone of the structure. Now I am not so sure.

Jibe offers a cross-platform approach that makes a lot of sense. Both Jibe and ReactionGrid offer the possibility of creating complex models outside the world itself.

In addition to this Unity 3D is a development platform in its own right, with a basic version that is free. At this momet I have no idea what the advantages of Jibe are over a self-hosted Unity 3D installation.

Erm, guess what I will be doing this summer?

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I stayed at the Euro Lodge, a budget hotel on Clapham Common South Side. It was my second stay there. Actually, I lie: it was my first. My previous stay had been at the companion Euro Hotel, which is about 100 metres along the road and is billed as the better of the two. This was not my experience.

At the Hotel itself, earlier this year, I was given a tiny room that the free wifi didn’t reach. This also had the distinguishing feature of a red-hot water-heated radiator that ran along one side of the narrow bed, and burned my legs every night. At the Lodge I got a large double room (number 304 fact fans), for the price of a single. This did have free wifi, and a large shower room. I was happy.

Both of the hotels are cheap and basic, but they are clean and they are in Clapham, right opposite the common, and a few hundred yards from Clapham South tube station. That suits me just fine. Almost everyone I know in London can be found in South London, and Clapham is in any case an interesting area to hang around.

I met Luke and Jack, as well as James and Elvina, and in both cases started out at the Windmill on the Common, which has been renovated to look older than it used to. Luke, Jack and I then repeated our visit to Bodeans in Clapham High Street, where we all pigged out on the special Pig Out offer.

I also looked around the West End where I realised that the devastation that is Tottenham Court Road will one day become a new CrossRail terminal. I have no idea what it will look like but since the building site covers a large part of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, then it will presumably be the size of a small airport.

This morning, as I walked from the Lodge to Clapham South tube station (where I was to discover that all service had been suspended for the weekend for vital engineering works) an old Routemaster bus passed me by. It had been suitably refurbished and was waiting to be hired for some advertising event or the like.

Now I am using a 3G dongle at Terminal 3 at Heathrow, after playing with an iPad and being suitably impressed.

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Initially we thought that he had just got fed up with the cat trying to get at him, although he had previously been apparently unconcerned. He used to sit up on his back legs watching while the cat was sitting on the cage trying to bat him.

Yesterday we noticed that he almost fell down the ladder from his house, and could hardly manage to suck water from his water bottle. Today Naa tried to pick him up and he jumped in the way that animals and people jump when they get a sudden pain. So, this evening we took him to the vet.

She said that he almost certainly had a tumour; that hamsters are very likely to get tumours; and that hamsters have small and rudimentary physical systems that make operating an impossibility. She also said that, at about twenty two months, he was past the average hamster lifespan.

A week ago he did this trick he had invented for the last time, as far as we knew. He swung across the roof of his cage using his front paws. It was clear from looking at him that he was never going to do that again.

The vet injected him and he died. We took him home, buried him in the back left-hand corner of the garden and planted a flower over him. In an odd way, despoite the fact that he never did very much really, the house felt emptier without him.

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This one is for Old Spice which, for those of you who don’t know, is an aftershave.

You can see it here on YouTube.

Like the Tango ad, this is an apparently continuous single take, although obviously created digitally. However, this time the humour largely resides in the script and the actor’s delivery.

I know that I could embed it here to save you the trouble of going to YouTube, but the fact is that I wanted to put an image of the Old Spice site here instead, because one day it will be a valuable historical resource.

Or not.

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Since then things have gone through several changes, which appeared to finally end when I started running Thunderbird with the Lightning calendar and task list extension installed.

Then circumstances changed again, and I realised that this arrangement was now cramped, inefficient, and pointless.

Let me explain.

The fundamental goal

In the eighties and nineties I had a paper Filofax system that had the advantages of being compact, organised and portable. It also had several disadvantages. These included the ability (on more than one occasion) to get irretrievably lost. On a day to day basis, a more serious disadvantage was the way that rearranging an appointment more than once rendered pages less and less legible, until they were a mess of scribble and Tippex.

In 2003, at a conference in Honolulu, I discovered the Sony Clie and bought an SL10. Apart from the fact that the screen size was considerably smaller than the pages of my Filofax, it seemed to solve all of these problems without adding any of its own.

The goal of all of this was to find a way of organising myself that was easy to maintain, available to me wherever I was and (as far as humanly impossible) impossible to lose. A digital system, combining a portable device that synced easily and painlessly to a hub that provided a bigger screen view of the data and acted as a back up service, seemed perfect.

For a time at least I had reached my goal.

From PDA to netbook

I was convinced by the Clie, and a year or so later when I got a Clie TH55, and installed DateBk5, I thought I had found a near-perfect solution. The task list could have been more powerful, and the system could have benefited from tying into my email, but what was there worked well.

I was happy with this until Sony abandoned the Clie, and syncing started to become an issue as the software failed to keep up with changes in Windows. Then Palm’s OS itself failed to keep abreast of developments in Windows, and finally failed to keep abreast of developments anywhere.

About this time the first netbooks appeared and I decided to experiment with one of these. They were small enough to carry around and might, I thought, serve as a more powerful pda. (This turned out not to be true because, in real life, instant-on turns out to be very important for brief and urgent actions like checking whether you are free at midday on Friday.)

I therefore looked for another way of storing and displaying my information, and backing it up with little or no effort. I spent a year or more experimenting with various set-ups from SaaS solutions like Airset and Google Calendar to online/offline solutions from Chandler to Zimbra.

For a time I used a combination of Google Calendar, Gmail and Remember The Milk. There were many things about this system that I liked, including the fact that I could turn an email into a task in one click; and I could display the tasks inside the calendar and mail windows.

Everything fitted together nicely, and everything was available from any computer – provided that that computer had an internet connection. The first summer I spent offline in the finnish countryside showed me the flaws in this system. Google Gears ever only sort of worked, and after a month offline I realised that this was causing increasing problems that I suspected were simply not necessary.

Then, when I returned to work, I was told that I was no longer permitted to let work email pass through Google’s systems, and so I started searching again.

From Google to Thunderbird

After another trawl through the current offerings, I finally settled on using the new Thunderbird 3 with the Lightning extension. This successfully kept my email in the PIM system, and enabled me to make tasks out of mail, and events out of tasks.

There were many things that I preferred about Google, not least the fact that the heavy duty functions like searching through every mail happened on their servers and were therefore not affected by the relatively puny hardware in my netbook. Thunderbird, on the other hand, did all this locally – and the difference between doing it on a desktop computer and a netbook was very noticeable.

There was nothing much I could do about that, and nothing much the Mozilla programmers could do either. There were, however, two important aspects of the new system that I felt could be improved. (I am leaving aside the many quibbles I have about the interfaces.)

The first was the task list and the second was back-up and synchronisation.

The task list in Lightning is simply nothing like as powerful as Remember The Milk. It is not even as powerful as the task list I had on my TH55. I have been implementing a version of GTD for the last few years and the Lightning task list is simply not capable of sustaining this. I found myself falling back to making plans in Evernote and then copying them line by line into Lightning as tasks. This did not make me very happy.

Synchronisation was a different matter, and I did manage to solve this in a way that worked for me. I subscribed to Dropbox and synchronised every computer I used. I then replaced Thunderbird with a Portable Apps version, and installed the Portable Apps folder inside my Dropbox folder.

The result of this is that any change to an event or task on one computer is automatically backed up and then synchronised to every other computer. The only disadvantage is that you have to remember to close Thunderbird on this computer before you open it on that computer. If you don’t, you start to build up an army of conflicting files which (as I discovered once) can cause strange problems at a later date.

In itself this system seemed to work fine. However, the netbook turned out to be a less than adequate replacement for the pda because, even if I hibernated it rather than shut it down, it still took 40 seconds or so to start.

In most circumstances this would not be a problem. It is, though, when you attempt to open the netbook in a corridor when someone you meet asks you “Can we move the meeting next Tuesday from 14:30 to 15:45?”.

Someone with a pda or a calendar on their mobile phone can answer the question as fast as someone with a Filofax. Someone like me, with a netbook ,can answer it in about two minutes, if the other person is willing to wait that long. Usually they took my fumbling as a yes, and had walked off before I realised that I was now double-booked.

I began to feel like Dilbert.

The PDA that dare not speak its name

Last Autumn we began to look at e-books and e-readers as part of a research project, and I got access to a Sony Reader and an Apple iPod Touch. I much preferred the iPod and so began to experiment with Stanza and epub files on it.

I had never bothered with one before because I use an iPod Classic to store all my music, and the Touch seemed to offer nothing other than an extra eye candy. When I started using it I began exploring the iTunes App Store for e-reading software, which meant I began exploring the App Store in general.

I soon realised that the iPod Touch was actually a pda, although Steve Jobs had very carefully avoided letting anyone describe it in that way. It did everything the old TH55 used to do, only it did everything better and with more style. The iPod Touch was a pda in a media player’s clothing.

I installed Pocket Informant which supercharged the iPod’s ability to deal with events and tasks in a similar way to DateBk6 on the TH55. I now, in effect, had a pda again – and I could rearrange meetings as fast as anyone else in the building. The problem now was: how do I sync this, or back it up; and how do I get to see the information on a bigger screen?

Pocket Informant syncs its events with Google Calendar and its tasks with Toodledo, about which I knew nothing. I got a free account and after a couple of hours of experimentation I decided that it was, in many ways, preferable to Remember The Milk. So preferable, in fact, that once I was certain that the synchronisation was going to work, I got a Pro membership.

The questions that remained concerned Thunderbird.

Thunderbird and Pocket Informant

Pocket Informant does not do anything with email and, as I noted above, I am no longer allowed to base my email around Gmail. So Thunderbird, or something like it, remained essential. Desktop-based views also remained important because I want to be able to turn mail into tasks to process them in a GTD-approved manner!

I hunted for different ways to make the new system work The only obvious option involved switching everything on the desktop to Microsoft Outlook. I went as far as installing it and experimenting for a day before I remembered why I had thrown it away in 2001. (I had replaced it with Palm Desktop at that point, so I was already a Palm Desktop user before I got my first pda.)

There seemed to be no other way of synchronising any calendar software on the iPod except using Google Calendar. I therefore started looking at ways in which it could be used as a conduit to link the information on Pocket Informant with the information in Lightning.

The short answer was that it couldn’t.

I installed an addon called Provider for Google that synced the calendar with varying degrees of success. (Actually with no degrees of success at all, except at the technical level.) The addon syncs exactly ONE Google Calendar with Thunderbird, which would work perfectly if Google implemented tags or categories in the way that the Lightning team have. But they haven’t, so it doesn’t.

Pocket Informant successfully syncs all my Google Calendars, and even though I think using a single calendar with tags would be more logical, this set-up works – both visually and as a method of organisation.

If syncing the events was marginally successful at best, then syncing the tasks was a non-starter. I could see no way of getting Lightning to recognise the tasks from Toodledo at all.

The perfect pointlessness of Lightning

At this point I went back to re-examine my original goals. I want to be able to take my PIM information with me. I want to have it available everywhere, including in expanded desktop views. I want the PIM information to include my mail, since that is how much of my input reaches me. I want to have it backed up as easily and painlessly as possible.

Looking at this it became clear that the iPod Touch is completely portable and the data there is both readable and writeable – and whenever I am near wifi it can be backed up and synced with Google and Toodledo. The benefits of netbook, laptop and desktop access, then, are concerned solely with tying email into the system, and with having larger views of the data. (On the iPod the “natural” view of the calendar is daily. On the netbook and any bigger screen the “natural” view, for me, is weekly.)

If I am not online then, QED, I will not receive email.

The conclusion from this is that Thunderbird is important to my information flow when I am online and not when I am not. Both Google Calendar and Toodledo are online services. Why then do I need to try to take the extra step of synchronising them locally on my desktop, as I am doing when I use Provider for Google to synchronise Lightning with the online calendar?

The answer, of course, is that I don’t. When I am looking at Thunderbird it is because I am online. When I am looking at Thunderbird, then, I need to be able to view the calendar and task data that already exist online, not download them and view the local versions.

Realising this, I found two addons for Thunderbird that did exactly what I needed.

Google Calendar Tab does exactly what the name suggests. It creates a tab in Thunderbird 3′s tabbed interface that shows a view of a Google Calendar account. It has worked flawlessly so far. It opens in a calendar tab. When Thunderbird is closed and reopened that tab is remembered and reappears automatically.

This tab has all the functionality of the Lightning Calendar without the extra step of syncing Lightning and Google. Changes made on the iPod Touch are almost instantly updated in the tab.

Thundertabs opens any web page as a tab in Thunderbird. It brings up a dialog box into which you type or paste a URL. I use this to open a Toodledo tab, which is also remembered when Thunderbird is closed and reopened.

The only disadvantage of this system is that turning mails into tasks is a manual process, involving copying and pasting, but this is a minor quibble next to the functionality gained by wrapping three powerful applications in one package.

In my mind, Lightning is built for a world that is rapidly ceasing to exist: one where people work offline and then sync a little data where necessary. In that world I own one shared Google Calendar that I sync with work colleagues, while guarding my many private calendars locally. In that world private task lists are used only for shopping, returning library books, and other simple jobs. Shared tasks are created and maintained on proprietary software inside company firewalls.

Increasingly, though, everything that I, and people I know, create is stored and accessed in multiple places and on multiple devices and is almost always available for sharing. The fundamental design assumptions behind Lightning make it perfectly useless for this. It is very good at what it does, and getting better all the time, but what it does is not longer what I want.

This is not a criticism as much as an observation to do with the changing nature of the digital terrain and the ways that change  can move good projects to the side of the road-map.

Sunbird lives

There is a final irony in all this.

The Mozilla development team has decided to abandon development on Sunbird, the stand-alone version of Lightning, in order to concentrate efforts on integrating the calendar and task list into Thunderbird. They have done this because they do not believe that there will be a continuing need for a stand-alone calendar application.

In the view I have outlined above Sunbird continues to play a vital role, even though Lightning has now been uninstalled from my copy of Thunderbird. The reason for this is simply archiving.

I have converted all my Palm calendar files into iCal files, so that they are in an allegedly future-proofed open and interchangeable format. I have calendars going back to 2001. I do not use these every day, or even every month – but I definitely do use them.

Two weeks ago, for example, I searched to find the year that a long-running project started. Was it 2005 or 2006?

It makes no sense to me to place all these old calendars into Google Calendar, and it would slow down Pocket Informant dramatically to store them there. Both of these applications are concerned with the future and the present. And the very recent past insofar as that concerns the future and the present.

I have all my calendar archives stored as annual calendars (2003.ics, 2004.ics, and so on) that use categories or tags to colour the entries. I export my calendar files from Google once a month and save them as iCal files, and will combine them at the end of each year into a single iCal file for that year, using Sunbird to turn imported calendars into categories.

In this scenario, Sunbird has become an important archiving tool that maintains my personal history in same the way that a shelf on a bookcase might hold my old hand-written diaries. I know of no other application that can do this as easily or as flexibly.

In the always-on, available-everywhere, online world, archiving is going to be increasingly important, and archiving is something that I do want available offline. I do not, and cannot, know whether I will be using Google Calendar or Toodledo in five or ten years time, and I do not want my archives locked into their systems. I want to be able to extract them and store them myself. I want to take steps now to avoid being locked in at sometime in the future.

In the modern world, where the use of Lightning becomes less and necessary (at least for me), Sunbird has a new and important role: a role that requires it continued maintenance.

Sunbird continues to rock!

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It wasn’t that it was too expensive – an annual subscription was only $25.00 or thereabouts. It was simply that it wasn’t absolutely essential, in the way that Dropbox and Evernote have so far proved to be. I say so far because there was a time – two years actually – when Remember The Milk was essential, until a rearrangement of my calendaring and note-taking meant that it suddenly wasn’t. I went from Pro User to non-user overnight.

So what is Aviary, that is interesting but not that interesting? It is a set of online editing tools that allow you to edit images, vector graphics, and sounds. The tools include a Firefox plugin that allows you to screen-grab directly into your Aviary library.

This week they have quietly announced that they are dropping their paid plans in favour of universal freedom. From now on all their tools will be free to use for everyone. No more paid accounts. And so on. The reasons they give for this are oddly opaque. They say:

As of today, we have decided to make using Aviary’s suite of editing tools FREE for everyone.

At Aviary, we believe that everyone in the world should have access to powerful creation tools. We therefore chose our company mission to be We make creation accessible to everyone. Our powerful set of tools helps fulfill this mission by enabling small businesses, students, artists & creators across different genres.

As a business, we did need to bring in revenues to cover our costs and development and to accomplish this we created a tiered pricing plan for certain types of uses. Although this was financially successful for us, the side effect of this was that our tools and their features (in their full capacity), were not truly accessible to everyone.

We have long felt that to better serve our core mission our complete feature set needed to be in the hands of everyone – not just those who could afford it. Fortunately, our recent round of funding (by Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions & others) enables us to finally achieve this goal as we shift revenues to other areas that don’t limit individuals in any way. We are excited at the opportunity to stay true to our mission. Not many companies are so fortunate.

What does this mean? They are going to “shift revenues to other areas that don’t limit individuals in any way”, by …..Advertising? Selling white label versions of the tools to Yahoo or similar?

I am genuinely interested to find out what this does mean, especially as they go on to hint that new tools are arriving soon, which seems to indicate that this is not just a carefully managed retrenchment. I will subscribe to their blog and watch with interest.

And in the meantime their full toolset is now free and, if I have to edit online, my previous look suggests that I would far rather use Aviary than Photoshop.com or anything else.

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However James wasn’t just linking to the blog in general. He was linking to a post about Jesse Schell’s talk at DICE 2010 called Design Outside The Box.

Mister Fox calls this “mindblowing”. He says that

Jesse Schell’s talk about the future of game design as it invades the real world is just astounding. If you do experience design of any kind it’ll be the most valuable (and entertaining) 20 minutes you’ll spend all week.

and he is not altogether wrong. The talk is extremely well delivered by someone who obviously loves performing in public (no bad thing in my opinion), and it is most definitely worth watching.

It is not entirely clear what his point of view is but this, I think, is part of the point.

I am almost as enthusiastic about this as Mister Fox, and I urge you all to watch it. Now.

And thank you James.

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