Monday, September 12, 2011

Wordle Miscellany

Now that the school year has begun, my trickle of Wordle-related incoming emails has once again intensified into a steady stream. Many people write to thank me, and just as many write to thank me and to let me know that they're having trouble with the site or that there's something they wish Wordle did differently. There are also a few angry people who hate me, the horse I rode in on, and everyone in that horse's family. But that's neither here nor there. I wanted to address all of the troubles and feature requests en masse, while I have a moment of wakefulness between making the kids' lunches and collapsing for the night.

I created Wordle in the summer of 2008, when kid #1 was 5 years old, and kid #2 wasn't even an idea yet. It was a time of extraordinary energy and focus for me, probably as a result of getting regular sleep and having the odd 3-4 hour block of time for thinking. Now, kid #2 is just about 2 years old, and I have been more or less a distracted heap of parts since he came along. Between being a devoted family guy, and caring very much about my job, I have so little time and energy left that substantive changes to Wordle are out of the question. Also fallen by the wayside is my ability to help folks troubleshoot when things go wrong.

Most of the problems people encounter with Wordle are due to its dependence on the Java Runtime Environment, or just "Java" for short. Java is both a programming language and an enormous piece of software that lets you run programs written in that language. At the time I made Wordle, Java was already kind of disreputable as a good platform for software that works in the browser, as Wordle does. But I stuck with Java because it was the only game in town at the time, with respect to the graphical effects I had in mind. One excellent thing about Java is that it provides guarantees to the person running a Java program (an "applet", as they're called) in a web browser, guarantees about stuff an applet cannot do to you. It can't read or write files on your disk; it can't talk to servers on the internet other than the one from which it was loaded (which you presumably trust enough to have visited); it can't even use your printer without your explicit permission to do so.

Unfortunately, despite these security guarantees, both Microsoft (on the Windows side) and Apple (on the OS X side) have done their best to spread uncertainty and doubt about the safety of Java applets. Internet Explorer is especially pernicious, in that Microsoft implies, through their obtrusive pop-ups and slide-down warnings, and flashing X's and shield icons, that an "unsigned" Java applet (such as Wordle) is somehow a threat. (Signing an applet, for what it's worth, means applying a cryptographic signature that some trusted third party has sold me, so that you know, when you run it, that it came from me. But that should only be necessary when my applet requests permission to perform extraordinary actions outside of an applet's usual safety "sandbox"--something that Wordle does not do.) I have heard from many users, some of whom are technically fluent, that they simply could not find the magical combination of settings and permissions that would make Wordle work for them in Internet Explorer. Apple has pulled Java from OS X "Lion" entirely, making would-be Wordle users search for the installer on Apple's support site.

In an effort to do the most good in the fewest words, I have this general piece of advice: if you're using Internet Explorer, download Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome and use one of those instead. I prefer Chrome for its speed and for various technical reasons, but either is an enormous improvement over IE. Many of the aggravating and seemingly intractable problems people have with Wordle are solved by such a switch. Good news: Chrome also works on OS X, although, as far as I know, Safari works fine. But in any case, OS X Lion users will need to install the Java Runtime Environment, which I understand can be done by navigating to "Applications > Utilities > Java Preferences".

For general help and advice on using Wordle, there's the Wordle Users Google group, which can be used either over email or via a web interface. Over the years, a couple of different people (whom I don't know) have been very generous with their time and expertise in helping new users to untangle Wordle's sometimes confusing behaviors.

Finally, and with all the respect due to teachers, whom I revere and consider to be the underpaid champions of our future: I wish you wouldn't assign Wordle as homework. It results in angry emails to me from kids and (especially) their parents, who are understandably frustrated when they can't get it to work, and feel under the gun to do so.

Many words to say few things! If only there were some way to distill such a long text.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Հայաստան!

For whatever reason, a spate of requests have recently come in for Armenian language support. I'm happy to report that I've deployed a new build of Wordle with Mark Williamson's MPH 2B Damase font built-in. It's a very high-quality font, with support for many Unicode scripts. It's not particularly stylish or fanciful, but at least Armenian-literate folk can now enjoy the use of Wordle.

I hope that my Armenian-literate users will let me know if anything doesn't work as expected.

Oh, and there's now support for カタカナ and ひらがな, through the Chrysanthi Unicode font.

Monday, May 30, 2011

WordFoto

A couple of Swedish developers have released an iPhone/iPod/iPad app called WordFoto, which takes any image as input and spits out that image, but composed of words. Having dabbled with such an algorithm myself, I'm very impressed with the fact that theirs works essentially instantaneously. People are starting to add it to their personal toolkit of image-creation techniques. Go play with it.

* Full disclosure: they gave me a free copy of of their $1.99 app. I believe that this blog post is worth somewhat less than that, so I probably still owe them some cheese and crackers, or maybe a bag of taffy or something.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Somewhere out there, a mother is angry.

I still get a lot of email about Wordle every week. Some of it is questions I can deflect to the FAQ or to the forum, some of it is feature requests which I always decline, some of it is praise, and some is criticism. But I think this is a new one: RAGE!
Subject: wordle - you've got to be kidding!
My daughters school had us TRY to use wordle, what a joke! I can't get it to work, clicked on your not working link and just about choked, do you really think the average parent has the time to try and figure out what is wrong - really upgrading Java possibly, firewall issues, we are not programmers. Any tool that can not be easily used won't be used. I'm not wasting any more time trying to figure out why my computer won't let me run your program, again just an average user here, and I've NEVER had a problem before this trying to get something to run.
This is precisely why I wish teachers wouldn't assign Wordle as homework. Well, it's one of two reasons. The other is that I really intended Wordle to be something fun, and my own experience of homework those many decades ago has soured me on the concept. Although, perhaps the writer of that note would have benefited from some essay-writing.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

WordCram: An open-source Wordle-like library

If you're a programmer, and you want to create Wordle-like effects in your own software, then you couldn't do much better than to start with WordCram. WordCram is an excellent new open-source project, designed to work as an extension library for the Processing programming environment. I like the way it's designed. I like how simple it is to use. I love that the source is freely available, so that you can study it, learn from it, and improve it. Please go check it out, and give the author some love.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Wordle as "Beautiful Visualization"

O'Reilly has a nifty series of books on "beauty" in technology. Editor Julie Steele asked me to contribute a chapter about Wordle to the book on Beautiful Visualization. If you're a visualization fanatic, then you may want to go buy a copy (for which all royalties go to Architecture for Humanity). However, if you're merely curious about how Wordle came to be, or how it works, you might enjoy this PDF of Beautiful Visualization, Chapter 3: Wordle.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Berylium is Back

Due to popular demand, I've put Berylium back. Who knew it had such a following?