Oh, dear god -- another one?

One of the joys of working for myself is that, for the time being, I don't have any VCs breathing down my neck, demanding that I patent every idea I have. This allows me to be open about Querki, and get the community deeply involved in it, which is delightful. But in an odd twist, now seems to be when all my previous sins are getting granted.

I just got a notification (from somebody trying to sell me nice plaques, of course) that Patent 8,370,432 has just been granted. I'm flabbergasted. I mean, I expect the patents we wrote at Memento to continue through the process: that company is successful, and has been bought by a giant multinational. But those patents are fairly specialized -- useful, but very precisely oriented towards particular kinds of data visualization, so they aren't going to cause *too* much damage. (And the patent I wrote at Trenza got firmly squashed by me when the company went under.)

But this one was one of my main patents at Convoq. It's a little thing, but potentially disruptive -- it's a patent on embedding a link in an email that opens up a video chat. Nowadays that sounds fairly ordinary, but we built it back in 2004, when this stuff was all squishy and new, so the patent's probably valid. ASAP was the first serious web-conferencing system built on top of Flash, a couple of years before even Adobe figured out how to do it, and it was innovative as all get out. And in this particular case, I can't even brush it off as me having been a minor contributor to the idea (as I was at Memento, where Greg had all the big UI ideas and I just implemented them) -- this one was largely my work, IIRC.

Gah. I'd lost track of the Convoq patents -- the company went under five years ago, so I had let myself believe they'd been lost in the shuffle. But they seem to have been bought up by something called Devereux Research -- they also own the all-important ASAP Patent, which was our one big idea that nobody else has played with yet. I'm not finding much information (googling them with "patent troll" fortunately doesn't turn much up), but I confess I'd be happier if I had some clue who these people were...

Oh...

I'm currently boxing up the books I didn't sell, and still making finds.

Today I'm boxing the remaining children's books -- mostly the ones I remember fondly from my childhood, or which were clearly favorites of Jane's. And I came across the two slim blank books. I had clearly glanced at them at the time of the book sale, and put them back because they had Jane's handwriting in them. This time, I actually took a better look.

They're Jane's high school diaries, circa 1977.

I confess, I find myself weirdly torn. On the one hand, there's a lot of cultural baggage that you never read someone's diary. OTOH, I know my wife: she would have wanted to be remembered, as completely as possible, rather than simply put on an over-simplified pedestal. I'm pretty sure that, this many years on, she'd rather they be fondly read, to flesh out memories of her and better understand who she was and where she came from.

Not today, though. They'll get brought home and put on the shelves, not boxed up, but I suspect that this is going to be a slow process of discovery...

Skrollr

Aaron just pointed me to Every Last Drop, a beautiful little site that emphasizes how much water we use in modern life. It's a lovely educational piece -- you just keep scrolling down, and the site animates to teach. For the layman it's quite nice, but for the old Web hands like me, it's a completely jaw-dropping "How the hell did they *do* that?"

Turns out (after poring over the code for a while) that it leverages a brilliant little library that I hadn't come across before, called Skrollr. Every Last Drop is the most elegant use of it that I've found in digging around, but Skrollr itself is a thing of technical beauty. The GitHub site has a lot of examples, many of them just requiring a few HTML tweaks. The README goes into the full details, but suffice it to say, it's a keyframe-based animation system that applies a tiny bit of Javascript to HTML declarations -- you declare that a CSS property starts with value A here, and transforms to value B there, and Skrollr interpolates the values between them. Get the declarations right and voila: your site animates simply by scrolling down.

It's kind of a one-trick pony, but wow -- that's one heck of a trick, and they wrap it in a lovely, intuitive, powerful API. If you're doing hardcore web design, and want a way to elegantly let users navigate through an animated presentation, you could do a lot worse than this technique...