One interesting thing: the text and still images are represented fairly well in the printed form, but the attached videos have become static thumbnails (I think—I can’t see the poster too well from Mexico). I don’t think there have been many instances of audio attachments on the thread, but they would be even more invisibly represented than video. In fact, just to make a point, I’m attaching some audio from the Golden Record, traveling on the Voyager space probes in near-interstellar space. As you may know, they made the effort to provide playback instructions for whoever may happen to discover it.
Looking at the attachment here in OS X Mail, all I see is a player bar, as if to say “there’s no video, so I can’t really show you anything.” It’s disappointing when you think about it. Why aren’t, at a minimum, audio waveforms shown to represent audio? Arguably, because it would be confusing to casual users because waveforms aren’t that meaningful (until you press play and link up the visualization to the sound). A spectrum view? Only marginally better. The Mac OS X Finder isn’t any better, just showing an icon with two barred eighth notes (and most of my audio files aren’t even music). But most NLEs aren’t any better, just showing black or a giant speaker icon in the player windows. One could argue that this is correct—audio has no actual visual component. But given that these systems are supposed to provide tools for manipulating media, visualization seems like the first thing to tackle. Yes, we have waveforms in the Timeline, where things are allowed to be abstract, but the viewer seems to be sacred and abstraction/visualization free.
I don’t know much about the backend of the Dynamic Receipt Printer, but it occurs to me that perhaps there should be some smarts about interpreting dynamic media (by which I mean the old kind of dynamic media: video and audio). Thumbnail grids for video? Spectrum views for audio? Or is the answer that the media needs to be playable directly from the poster or binder, using some work-in-progress camera/projector box invention?
On Apr 30, 2015, at 10:10 PM, Bret Victor wrote:
I printed out our emails again. This time as a 300-page binder.
(I foolishly forgot that paper has two sides, so there's twice as much paper as there should be. Will be fixed on next print.)
I placed the binder on a podium within the Email Chamber, and am enjoying the thought of applying RMO's Active Binder technology to this space.
I find myself thinking again of
Craig Mod's essay about turning a software development project into a book.
“What does that weigh?”
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