It’s not a secret that I’m somewhat obsessed with paper, barcodes, and digital shadows.
I’m a designer, rather than a programmer, and so I’ve often felt frustrated with my inability to actually produce some of the things I’ve waved my hands and blogged about. (The project linked above is one example of something I’d really dearly love to implement, if only I could really see a way.)
Thus, quite often, I’ll have an idea, and develop it in sketches and notes. And then, when it’s time to start Sketching in Hardware, I’m faced with this huge learning curve before anything can get done… and then the lunatic squirrel that lives in my brain sees something shiny, and I’m off on another tangent. Quite often, I come back to these ideas, and do some more work on them… and then get distracted again. It’s a bitter cycle.
And then I find out that someone else has had the same idea, which always causes some mixed emotions:
It was a good idea, and someone did it! Hooray!
I could have done that, if only I wasn’t such a pathetic wanker! Argh!
This is not to claim credit for the idea, or to claim that it was “stolen” from me. It’s frustration at a lost opportunity to have done something cool, mostly. And a bit of immature whininess, which I’ll own up to.
It was in much the same spirit that I found that Stan Wiechers had implemented something very cool in Semanote, which is a simple way to stick barcodes in places, with messages encoded in them, readable with the semacode reader software, or by the Nokia Barcode Reader Software, which is included in all new Series 60 Nokia phones.
The idea is concisely summarized in the following picture story (stolen from the Semanote website), after the cut:
Following is a sketch from my moleskine, where I was trying to summarize the same story (I left a few bits out):
A very real difference between my sketch and Semanote is that someone actually put the work in to implement Semanote, which is, well… everything. There are some other differences that might not be immediately obvious, as well:
Printing to Index Cards.
Yes, I’m obsessed with index cards, but this isn’t (only) because of the vast paper empire I’ve built out of bits of paper and binder clips. Rather, I looked at bulletin boards around town, and saw postcards and business cards pinned to them (spatial annotation).
A printed index card would fit nicely in its surroundings, allows for a large enough barcode for lower-resolution cameras to get a fix, and can be mixed with other index cards to make a nice informational package or a collection of notes and sketches.
(And that’s a topic for a later blog post.)
Printing to Avery Labels
As envisioned, you’d be able to select an Avery label size, and get a certain number of labels as a printable image. No cutting or tape needed. This is part of a design philosophy of reducing friction in user interaction, and could be easily done with Semanote.
Print now, geocode later
Also from the design philosophy of reducing friction, you would print a set of labels, each with a different “signature” that would allow you to (later) “lock” it to a geographic location with software on your phone. (Exactly how that would technically work was hazy; One idea was for software on the phone that would read the geo data from the cellular provider (fat chance!), read the barcode, do a sort of authentication mojo, and squirt geodata to a geotagging host that would then forevermore associate that barcode with a location.)
The scenario here is that you’d print a set of stickers or cards, and, at a bulletin board, post up the card, and whip out your phone, take a location fix, and then lock the card’s semacode to your location. The interaction model is actually not all that different from Geotagthings, really.
Barcodes as linkable nodes
In Semanote, the message is hard-coded in the barcode. The sketched concept was that anyone could attach a note to the barcode, making it essetially a social node.
How the “comments” or posts would be handled (would you get a random one on your phone? would you have to scroll? Would it overwrite? Is it like a wiki, where you get to edit and view the history?) is something I haven’t yet explored in detail. It’s an issue of handheld usability, which is a big can of ugly worms.
One idea for fixing that issue was to make it a social network, where the primary post is always there, but you can leave “private” messages for friends. Which would require a dedicated client on the phone, or something else that I can’t think of because I’m not a real geek.
The primary purpose of the sketched design was to harness the motivated behavior of self-interested geeks, in order to create value for less-motivated individuals (i.e., by providing linkable geonodes).
While that’s an interesting link, it’s not really very useful to hash over the differences; not only did Stan come up with and implement Semanote, he did so without any interaction from me, because I sat on the idea.
This has less to do with laziness than secrecy, and there’s the big issue that I’m fighting. It’s hard not to feel like, by posting ideas on the web, I’m giving them away.
But then, if I don’t, then nothing happens. Something might have happened with the geotagging project, but the curve for it was too steep. And the idea was there to be had.
It’s a question of letting go. And that’s hard. I’m not sure if I’m really ready to let go of control. But I do have to admit that the projects which I’ve posted the “edges” of (see my Nabokov photoset for an example of what I mean) have progressed much further than things I’ve just sat on.
I just wonder what the liabilities are of working (relatively) openly.
Don’t know if I’m ready to let go. But I have to admit that I’m sick of not being a part of the conversation about developing things.
More to think about, on this.
Anyway, go play with Semanote, because it is nifty.