Shiny happy redevelopment

The malls in Cupertino and Sunnyvale have been in the dumps for a decade, with promises of redevelopment come and loseWeight Exercises Vallco – 2003″ href=”http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2003/06/09/daily55.html”>gone, over and over. But things are finally moving. The owners of Vallco Fashion Park in Cupertino have recently started a major renovation and expansion project, including a new movie theater. (Maybe we can finally get a decent bookstore…) It will look a lot more like a traditional commercial district. There is also a new mixed-use development being built near the city hall and new library, and there are plans for a new downtown at the Crossroads, the old center of town.

Meanwhile, the owners of Sunnyvale Town Center will start demolition of the old parking garage next week, and of the mall itself next year. In fact, the mall, which replaced the old downtown, is being replaced with a new downtown, complete with a replica of the old city hall. (Take a look at the nifty video.) It will also include a new movie theater — how many more can this area take?

Now if only Santa Clara can finish a plan to replace the downtown that it tore down for a mall that never came… By the way, the only reason Mountain View still has its downtown along Castro Street is because it ran out of money to mess with it back in the 1970s.

A few books I’ve been reading

Nothing deep here, just some stuff that interests me:

Easy-to-use phone from Motorola?

Motorola announced a new cell phone, the E895, to be available in the last quarter of this year. It uses a combination of Java and Linux called JUIX, which Motorola claims is easier to use than other smartphone OSes. But Motorola doesn’t have a good history of easy-to-use phones — one of my friends said his RAZR had “wonderful hardware, horrible user interface.” And there are no screenshots of JUIX yet, so the jury’s out.

Tour de France

This is the first year I watching the last two weeks of the Tour every day. On the west coast it’s perfect timing: wake up at 7, watch the last hour of the stage on OLN, then get to work by my usual time. And I got totally sucked in — even when it was clear that Lance Armstrong would win his 7th, Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen did a good job of keeping each individual stage interesting, and it gave them a chance to talk about riders besides Lance.

Diehard cycling fans foam at the mouth over OLN’s coverage (see the discussion boards at VeloNews). But I’m not diehard (otherwise I would have been waking up at 4:30), so I enjoyed it. So I’m set for next year’s tour, since the field will be wide open, and now I know the names of cyclists to look out for.

No bookstores in Cupertino???

When I moved to Cupertino in 1989, it had several general bookstores: A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in the Oaks, a B. Dalton in Cupertino Crossroads, a Waldenbooks in Vallco Mall, and a Crown Books in the Marketplace (across from Vallco). Stacey’s later opened a branch near Vallco. For the geeks, there was Computer Literacy Bookshops. Things stayed the same for about 5 years.

Then, both A Clean Well-Lighted Place and Stacey’s have retreated back to their home bases in San Francisco. Crown Books went bankrupt. The B. Dalton became a bank. The Waldenbooks closed when Vallco went downhill. Computer Literacy Bookshops was bought out and the Cupertino store was closed. (It then became Fatbrain.com and was bought by Barnes & Noble, and the remaining physical stores were also closed.)

So now, in an affluent, highly educated, highly literate city of more than 50,000 people, the nearest bookstores are miles away in Sunnyvale and San Jose. What the *&*#$ is wrong here? How can I keep my tax dollars in my hometown? I only hope that when Vallco is renovated, a Borders or Barnes & Noble comes in.

(Granted, I’m not counting the tiny bookstores that do exist in Cupertino: those that sell spiritual/religious books, Asian language books, or spiritual/religious books written in Asian languages.)

Web development: Ruby on Rails and Django

A constant theme in HCI and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is how hard it is to get a group of people to adopt and support new technology — being technically superior is not nearly enough. One good example, interestingly enough, is in the area of web application frameworks.

For example, in my favorite language Python, there are a bajillion web frameworks but no clear leader. Meanwhile, one open source web application framework written in Ruby has been getting a lot of buzz lately. The users of Ruby on Rails rave about its ease of use and simplicity. This is causing some consternation in the Python community, to the point that some are creating a clone of Rails in Python called Subway.

But simply copying the framework itself won’t generate the same excitement. There are other reasons Ruby on Rails is getting so much attention. The creators of RoR have evangelized it very effectively and have created good documentation so that others can jump in. Also, the library was extracted from an existing application, so the creators had a real sense for what was useful and what wasn’t. It reminds me of Papier-Mâché, a toolkit for creating tangible user interfaces by Scott Klemmer, who designed and implemented two tangible UI apps before designing the toolkit.

However, all is not lost in Pythonland. Thanks to Robert Scoble I just found out about a Python web framework that seems to hold great promise. Django was also extracted from an existing application, and its creators seem to understand the importance of good marketing and documentation. I’m hoping it succeeds.