The Blog That Goes Ping

A while back I happened across this article on programming.reddit.com — “Moving the ‘C’ in ‘MVC’” — about web applications whose logic is implemented primarily on the client-side, in javascript, as opposed to the server-side. Interesting stuff, the sort of thing that’d bubbled around my head at one time or another.

That article mentioned clipperz.com and their concept of a “zero knowledge web app.” The idea here is to implement client-side cryptography in javascript and store nothing on the serverside except wads of encrypted data. Data that is encrypted on the client, that is. So it never passes over the wire in the clear, and it’s never decrypted on the other side of the wire.

That’s pretty cool. In fact, clipperz.com hosts their own best shot at a zero-knowledge web app, a password manager. A web-based password manager seems insanely insecure, but not so if you implement it as a zero-knowledge web app. It’s basically like keeping a local HTML with all your passwords and javascript which allows you to click on those passwords and have it launch the appropriate page and log in to the service in question (Google, Facebook, whatever) — except that instead of keeping it locally you’re keeping an encrypted version of it on clipperz.com’s servers.

As far as usage goes, it’s pretty simple, but unusual. In a normal web app, you log in once, after which you are recognized by cookies until some timeout period. That’s because you’re logging in to an app running on the server, and cookies help maintain the illusion of a persistent connection. In clipperz, the app is running in your browser. So if you close the page and come back to it, you have to log in again. But you can leave that page open forever and it never times out, because there’s a real connection between you and the app (an open browser window) so there’s no need for the whole cookie deal.

Adding logins to the app is an unusual process but easy once you get used to it. When you’re on the login page to the service in question (myspace, yahoo, whatever) with your username and password typed in the blanks, you can click on a bookmarklet you’ve previously saved from clipperz, and it will extract a chunk of JSON data from the page you’re on, representing the login form, your username, and password. You cut and paste that into your running clipperz session in another tab or window, and it takes that JSON chunk and adds that to its data store, and now you have a clickable link on your clipperz page which will log you in to that service.

Knowing I’ve got an instant one-click login to a service makes it easier for me to make a habit of logging out of a service when I’m not using it.

It’s also easy to maintain more than one login to the same service using clipperz. Each is just one click away.

Clipperz has a sometimes-friendly, sometimes not-so-friendly competitor named “PassPack,” whose authors consider Clipperz.com’s zero-knowledge thing “fallacious” in some way, though reading through it I’m still not sure exactly what they think is wrong with Clipperz’s way of doing things. I guess the idea is that any privacy and security that Clipperz provides for you that PassPack doesn’t is just silly and you shouldn’t worry your pretty little head about it, for such worrying is a “fallacy.” I don’t know. It sounds like PassPack might be easier to use, and harder to understand what they’re doing. With clipperz you just have a username and passphrase; with PassPack you have a username and password and an additional crypto key. (UPDATE: see comments below, from Tara from PassPack for clarification of what they were getting at.)

In any case, PassPack and Clipperz have each posted a list of the pros and cons with their respective services. Overall I have to say that having actually used Clipperz for a while I don’t see anything about PassPack that encourages me to explore it as an alternative.

Anyway, my review of Clipperz after a couple weeks of use — thumbs up! It’s unusual but worth getting to know.

I like to download videos from youtube using the magically delicious DownloadHelper. Especially music videos. The only sad thing is that the video quality tends to be poor, and it can only get worse if you convert it to a less crappy format than the standard flv — such as mp4 for example.

But Youtube is being kind to us. Many, many videos on youtube, if not all, are available in a higher quality format — in fact, mp4, the format that is standard for things like iPods. The magic you do to get the higher quality is take the youtube url and add “&fmt=18″ to it. That’s all. Just add that to the address in the address bar and reload and you will get a higher quality video, which you can then download with downloadhelper. You might need to change the .flv extension to .mp4 to play it back with Quicktime.

There’s also a thing in Youtube’s account preferences you can set to get higher quality stuff by default, but I don’t think it’s the same — I think (not sure) it gives you the fmt=6 version. (there are at least two different higher quality settings, &fmt=6 and &fmt=18 — I think the &fmt=6 is better than the default but not mp4-encoded like &fmt=18.)

There’s a greasemonkey userscript to do the fmt=18 for you.

UPDATE: if you see something in the downloadhelper.net menu called Video.mp4 that’s guaranteed to be the good stuff. I think it also shows up under other names sometimes too — downloadhelper sometimes offers several links to the same video so it’s confusing.

UPDATE: it ain’t just video. The audio is *noticeably* better in the higher quality downloads. Much crisper, makes the old kind sound muddy in comparision.

I’ve discovered three really outstanding, and really reasonably priced, shareware drawing applications for OS X. If you’ve blown your budget on a Wacom pad and suddenly realize you can’t afford something huge and crazy like Painter or Photoshop — and you discover that the Gimp for OS X isn’t hip to pressure-sensitive tablets — check these out.

ArtRage from Ambient Design

My homeboy Adam Black pointed me at this one, I think. It’s cross-platform. It’s kind of like Corel Painter in that it’s oriented towards simulating natural media — chalks, oil paints, pencils, watercolors, crazy things like that. Development is ongoing; it’s been updated a couple times since I bought it. There’s a reasonably functional free version as well.

What’s Awesome: It is really, really, REALLY good at simulating natural media. You can seriously create things that look exactly like chalk drawings on textured paper, or oil paints on canvas, or whatever. It takes a while to learn to control the media, but their forums are really helpful. It has layers, “stencils,” “reference images,” all kinds of crazy things. There is an immense amount of power in Artrage.

What’s Less Awesome: Ironically, it’s kind of hard to make drawings that don’t yell “NATURAL MEDIA!!!!” at the top of their lungs. Getting smooth paper and a simple black line is actually a bit of a hassle. The interface, while really original and cool, seems not to have been originally designed for macs, and if you go fullscreen it kind of fights with the Dock. (So I don’t.)

TabletDraw from mooSoftware

This is seriously minimalist. It is aimed at doing one thing very well: drawing with a tablet.

What’s Awesome: They claim to have an outstanding algorithm/whatever for accurately recording quick, subtle strokes, and my experience bears that claim out. You can sign your name quickly on the tablet and it will look just right on the screen. You can create really nice line drawings with it; you can tweak the “pens” along several axes (size, how much they grow/shrink depending on pressure, transparency, color, and whether they allow darker lines underneath them to show through, which is called “ink mode”). It’s easy to build up a palette of useful brushes. You can do interesting things with it once you learn to work with its minimalism. Essentially everything you do with it is “pen drawing” — but you can have “pens” with any color ink, any transparency, any size, the ability to layer over darker ink, etc.

What’s Less Awesome: The minimalism is extreme. They have no layers, for example. A recent feature is that you can load a reference drawing up in the background, and draw on “onionskin” above it, which is a large fraction of what you’d want to do with layers, but that is unwieldy — you have to save an image and then reload it as a reference. The resizing behavior of canvas vs. window is weird too until you learn how to work with it. These are not dealbreakers by any means, but TabletDraw is something that you have to learn your way around. It’s not always what you expect it to be, and it’s not everything to everybody.

Scribbles from Atebits Software

I’ve only just discovered this one. Scribbles is so slick it looks like it was created for Steve Jobs to demo at a keynote address. It uses the latest Mac imaging technology (so you need OS X 10.4 or better to use it), and it’s — wow.

I haven’t had long to explore it but here are first impressions:

What’s Awesome: Incredibly slick, easy to use interface. All the controls and tools are giant and easy to select. The layers control shows animated layers in perspective and how they’re related to each other. Responsiveness to tablet pressure and movement is good. There are a good number of basic tools (pens with varying degrees of fuzziness, erasers, some wacky coloring tools).

No, Really, What’s Awesome: Resolution-independent infinite canvas. You are drawing on an infinte sheet of paper and can zoom in or out all you want, for an arbitrary level of detail or expansiveness. It’s kind of like Rita (also worth checking out, and free) in that way, but I’m finding it a bit easier to use than Rita. In the other programs I’ve used, I usually create a very large canvas to start with so I don’t have to worry about pixellation… I don’t have to do that here.

More Awesome: “tracing paper” mode, where the *entire application* turns semitransparent, so you can trace, say, an image in your web browser.

What’s Not So Awesome: Haven’t discovered that yet but I’m sure I will. Nobody’s perfect. I guess you can’t use it to do simulated natural media like in ArtRage at all, and I don’t know whether its tablet movement responsiveness is as exquisitely awesome as TabletDraw’s. It doesn’t seem to have the ability to really customize your pen tips to be just what you want, like in TabletDraw, so if you want to do exquisite penwork TabletDraw is probably still the winner. But man. It’s tres slick.

Any one of these is easily worth your money. Check ‘em out if you’re in the market.

Jack OS X - a Jack implementation for Mac OS X: — just updated to work with Leopard. Or rather, the updates which make it work with Leopard are just now out of beta and on the front page. I took it for a spin this morning and routed a streaming story from NPR’s Flash player into Audacity, so I could make an MP3 of it. Spiffo! You gotta read the documentation though, it’s not super intuitive.
Jack is awesome. Jack is Free Software, originally developed for Linux. Yet when I actually use Linux, I never even try to use Jack, because Linux sound is so fragile in the first place that adding another possible point of failure to the mix seems downright foolhardy.

I gave the Firefox 3.0 beta a try, and it was really nice — very fast, smooth, responsive. I need my extensions though, so until extension writers start upgrading I’m on Firefox 2.0.whatever. In the meantime here’s a way to make it pretty on Leopard.