The other day, Jenny stumbled on a good example of the principle of not
exposing the underlying nature of system to the user while she was using
iPhoto.
She tried to name an ablum "Eufio 2/18/04" or something like that.
Perfectly reasonable.
Except.
iPhoto stores its albums as directories on the file system. And "/" is not
allowed. So iPhoto beeped at her and switched the "/" to a ":", which is a
legal character (Amusingly ":" is the path separator in Mac OS 9 and
before).
She didn't get it, and she should've had to. What's the best fix? I'm not
sure. If there isn't a good one, it just goes to showcase a major weakness
of our computer systems today.
Some of the Dean campaign's tech people have put together a consulting
company called
Blue State Digital.
Biggest surprise: the bat was automatically updated. It was so cheesy, I
was sure it was manually created. Questions remain -- why was Nicco always
said to be working late, updating the bat? And why was it only updated
ever hour if it was automatic? I'd do it every five minutes, at least!
Honestly, I was not that impressed with most of the tech stuff the Dean
campaign did. They had a first mover advantage, but the Clark campaign's
tools were much more elegant. Fortunately, the architect for that is
now working for
Kerry.