The personal ramblings and adventures of Mike Altman

Sir / Madam
Park your bike so it doesn’t take up 1/2 the bike rack

Sir, Done and Done

You Rock

With the weather getting better, I have seen new bikes popping up at the bike rack in the office building where I work. One day, one such bikes was locked up horizontally, blocking the bike rack so that no one could park there. Upon seeing this note on your bike after a long day of work it would be easy to be angry, frustrated, violent, or profane. Someone decided to be nice. Problem solved. Who said bikers were inconsiderate?

This past father’s day weekend my mom and I participated in the Quechee Hot Air Balloon Festival. When my mom called me up a few weeks ago to see if I would go up in a hot air balloon with her (because my dad opted out), I decided that I had to do it. Not because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but more as a pre-emptive bucket list crossing off. It’s defiantly one of those things that I could see myself adding to my “do in my lifetime list.” Since it hadn’t occurred to me, I figured I could cross it off before I got that internal hunger later in life… and why not! I mean it was clearly on my mom’s list. Who’s to say I can’t inherit the desire to fly over the earth in a wicker basket tied to a giant blowtorch and balloon?

We took off, and cheering fair goers cheered. In a blink of an eye we were flying high over Quechee, VT and the famous gorge. Our pilot/captain/basket-master? was a short Richard Dreyfuss like guy. Apparently he drives all over the country with his balloon like a gypsy following balloon festival all summer long. Am I the only one who thinks that’s kind of odd? I guess he’s found a way to make a living doing what he loves, but who grows up thinking of that a viable option for a career and lifestyle? Apparently there is a whole sub culture of hot air balloon fanatics out there walking among us.

We flew over houses and roads. people came out of their homes and cars to look and wave at us. Dogs barked and cows mooed at the weird basket of people tied to a balloon floating in the wind overhead. There is something peculiar about looking down into back yards to see people looking up in wonder and waving. It’s like we just walked through their yards said hi and just walked away. [See all of the photos]

We landed with the aid of the flight crew in some guy’s back yard, as his wife stared in awe from the window as we floated in gently next to her flower patch. Random cars with families stopped and helped us pack up the balloon… and like that we were gone. Like we just played some practical joke on the world. I’m still not sure what the punchline was.

It’s rare for me to get this excited about software. Even rarer for it to be a Microsoft product. In this case, I think they’ve done something absolutely brilliant. Microsoft Pivot is kind of interesting, as a proof of concept of Silverlight’s capabilities and the traversing of complex sudo-database driven taxonomy. Yeah, yeah, that’s all cool and fun to play with, but what stands out is the innovation of an often overlooked universal user interface element: the scrollbar.

When was the last time we saw a change to the scroll bar outside of the mouse wheel? Pivot’s approach may be a solution the age old problem of the scanning of huge amounts of data, and the scrolling of mobile web content all in one fell swoop (even if they don’t realize it.)

The vertical scrollbar appears just like any other. Upon click-dragging the bar towards the content area of the screen, the content zooms out proportionality. You can then move up and down as you normally would to scroll the zoomed out content. A box moves over the content on the screen to identify which part of the screen you will see when letting go of the mouse button.

This  serves a secondary purpose, as a controlled speed scroll. Try it with your current browser. Click and drag the scroll bar from the top to the bottom of a long page of content (try it with Boing Boing.) The mixed content flashes by without giving anything a chance to catch your eye. With Pivot’s scroll bar, you can see what is ahead and what is behind of the page focus. This gives you a unique ability to scan, even peripherally for something of interest without sacrificing scroll times.

Sure, one could argue that they would never use this. Well…then don’t. The option to use it in the browser would be just another tool like the ‘search page’ functionality; not everyone will want to use it. The beauty is that the function is so subtle that it hides in plain sight. If you want it, it’s there. If not, it wont effect the way you browse the web.

This type of modest functionality is exactly what we need. Perfect for both large content pages and small display interfaces such as mobile devices. The simple interaction necessary to access this zoomed scroll is so intuitive and simple, that I feel embarrassed that I never thought of it. I guess that feeling is a cue to its effective simplicity and its genius.