tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28883918902504553772024-02-19T07:20:13.827+00:00Tech Socio TechIt's not just about technology.<br> It's about how we deal with it.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comBlogger397125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-70353306372775859712018-12-06T22:43:00.003+00:002018-12-06T22:43:53.708+00:00Next SocialCurrent social is just breaking down.<br />
<br />
We need to have multiple identities to explore ourselves.<br />
We need to make niche communities.<br />
We need to share.<br />
We need to be safe. From mobs. From censorship. From convention. From intrusion. From lies.<br />
We need to stop being made to believe absurdities lest we commit atrocities.<br />
<br />
The next social app must<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Run on the phone and serve the content off it--it's where we make all the stuff we want to share</li>
<li>Allow users to cleanly decide who sees what, as if they are holding the phone up or speaking personally to someone or small groups of people. No accidental broadcasting.</li>
<li>Not have a central server. No central authority. All peer-to-peer</li>
<li>Have an extensive plug-in architecture</li>
<li>Be able to authenticate you, but not make you identify yourself. Our naked selfies and our work impressions have to be seem to come from separate people and stay in different spheres</li>
<li>Fuck off with passwords and tokens. It's too difficult. Passwords don't work anymore</li>
<li>Allow commerce and small stores, but not store credit cards on some server. No central servers</li>
<li>Making a connection should probably proximity based. The depth of the connection should probably be based on amount of interaction. The kind of content shared will need a pro-active AI assistant to stop you from sending nudes to work contacts and cat gifs to your family group</li>
<li>Will show us various activity streams, and allows resharing, curating, remixing, adding, threading, blocking, filtering, shadow-banning, keyword-muting, not public by default, and strong user-controls over what kind of people's content you get to see</li>
<li>Nobody gets to publicly @ you without an invitation. It's just been a nightmare of abuse and overwhelming on Twitter. I'm starting to think there should be no public free-for-all stream</li>
</ul>
<div>
It's basically some form of WeChat / WhatsApp on <a href="https://solid.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Solid</a> combined with with some ontology of relationships overlayed and thus millions of groups and stores.</div>
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And yeah, I don't know what to do about content factories and nazis yet. We know WhatsApp has been misused to ferment social unrest, but that sword cuts both ways to allow democratic movements and violent racism. I have not seen anything decentralised work for that.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-11141115100479279002018-04-08T18:46:00.001+01:002018-04-08T22:15:06.862+01:00Good Digital Design Is, Above All, Transparent<h3>A request for design critics</h3>A few weeks ago I attended the IXDA meet-up in Berlin where <a href="https://vimeo.com/255015333" target="_blank">Vinod Khan's repeated his talk delivered at IXDA 2018 in Lyon</a>. It takes only 18 minutes to watch<br />
<br />
According to Khan, there's a backlash against digital experiences like social networking and addictive mobile technology. Most of the undesirable consequences of these systems stem from poor design choices, and if we do not change how we make these choices as new technologies come online, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes. We make poor design choices because we are focussed on execution and implementation; asking Does it work? instead of Is it good? Is it good for the users? Is it good for the community? Is it good for the world?<br />
<div>He thinks we do not ask the right question because of the poor state of design criticism; there's nobody trying to elevate the field of digital design by discussing it the way movie and architecture critics do in their own fields in newspapers and magazines.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This last part does not hold water for me as a remedy to the ills digital has brought; I find it hard to argue that Siskel and Ebert and everyone before or after them have altered the course of cinema for the much better when <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgnO5fO46pE" target="_blank">TRANSFORMERS 5</a> exist, and exists for as much money as it actually cost to make, or that architecture criticism has truly made a difference in a country that has <a href="http://mcmansionhell.com/" target="_blank">McMansions</a> coast to coast until they hit cities with needle-like glass towers contorting themselves <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/realestate/the-great-race-for-manhattan-air-rights.html" target="_blank">for of air rights</a>. We live in a capitalist world: money wins. Having our own Alonso Duralde for digital design is not going to change that, it will only warn us earlier about bad stuff. And in the one area of digital design where there is a robust culture of reviewing and critique, gaming, has it really advanced the field, elevated it? Or did it all come from a desire of the gaming community to be entertained even more spectacularly, including in storytelling, to get to the level of movies?</div><div><br />
</div><div>Even if a culture of digital critiquing would amount to more change than what current bloggers and ratings and reviews on app stores have already achieved, it is quite facile to just ask for it and then wait for others to create and pay for this new employment category. Where is Vinod's own employer, Adobe, successful maker of design tools? They could easily sponsor and independent chair at Stanford to do just that. So does every other large design corporation wishing to advance the field beyond how to use their tools to get to market even faster and better. Don't ask the NYT to do it, they are strapped enough. Ask where the money is.<br />
<br />
</div><h3>Good is either a business or an externality</h3><div>In order to make our field of Design to get our space at the table, we focussed on how design enables beneficial outcomes outcomes, but the outcomes capitalism wants are outcomes in terms of business. Therefore our language of what is good is very often about business: 'Good' is equivalent 'Works'.</div><br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">There's only 5 things execs care about:<br />
<br />
• Increasing revenues<br />
• Decreasing costs<br />
• Increasing new business/marketshare<br />
• Increasing revenue from existing customers<br />
• Increasing shareholder value<br />
<br />
Design leaders know to frame their team’s efforts as helping these priorities. <a href="https://t.co/BR55Etarq1">pic.twitter.com/BR55Etarq1</a></div>— Jared Spool (@jmspool) <a href="https://twitter.com/jmspool/status/961804803440562176?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 9, 2018</a></blockquote><br />
But considering we are in a planetary extinction and everyone hates each other in our societies, it is not enough anymore.<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">I prefer to think of design leaders as people who *challenge* such harmful 20th century priorities, not people who enable and perpetuate them. <a href="https://t.co/7wq7rPZtb8">https://t.co/7wq7rPZtb8</a></div>— Faruk Ateş (@KuraFire) <a href="https://twitter.com/KuraFire/status/962277398053052416?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 10, 2018</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<div>There's a name for the effects on society and the planet that capitalism drops off from view: externalities. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality" target="_blank">These are costs or benefits incurred by parties that did not choose to incur them,</a> very often not even being part of the transaction. Pollution is an externality, bad labor practices are externalities, the healthcare system buckling under the result of food having been manipulated to be so delicious people can't stop consuming it to death is an externality, and I'd argue having your political opinion manipulated by lies your online photo sharing website shows you to make money is an externality.<br />
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Much of government regulation of capitalist markets is about pushing these externalities the markets shoved out of view back into view, either by letting consumers know the product has these externalities (calorie counts on menus, energy consumption ratings) or making the producers or consumers incur these costs and benefits so that market forces start working on them--the only alternative being appeals to altruism, and we have already found that altruism is a sub-standard motivator compared to being able to buy more stuff. Being able to pay for good nutrition, environmental consciousness, social justice, are all the privilege only of the people with money to spare for it, and currently those are the ones fully embedded and profiting from the capitalism that equates good to various forms of efficiently making more (or spending less) money.<br />
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</div><div><h3>When Good is an externality, Good is a post-capitalist metric</h3><div>Does It Work? in digital design always asks whether the design makes people interact in a way that keeps the lights on in some fashion, whether it is through results like payment, capturing attention for delivery to advertisers, or otherwise hits stakeholder metrics. Considering 'Is it Good?' as separate from Work means Good in this case is not about making money and removes it from capitalism, if not economics alltogether, making it a post-capitalist, if not an anti-capitalist, question.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But what is Good? Money is at least easily measurable as a metric, a reason for it having such primacy. A ton has been written about what is Good in design, but most of it veers eventually to 'Does It Work' or ends up highly subject to the time and mores it was written. For example, taking Dieter Ram's eternal <a href="https://www.vitsoe.com/gb/about/good-design" target="_blank">10 good rules of design</a>, every one can be undermined and is thus not eternal. Good design is innovative? Does that means a design stops being Good as soon as its changes have been mainstreamed? Good design makes a product understandable? What about when the idea is to surprise? Rococo would like to have a word about Good design being as little design as possible. And so on. </div><div><br />
</div><div>These rules are actually some of the finest examples of removing Good from the realm of efficiency and metrics, aka Work, and yet they fall apart in digital. Digital design is theatre, layers and layers of simulations put atop electric sand that only thinks in on and off. I find it impossible to talk about design being honest or long lasting in this environment, and once we move from products to services with multiple touch-points, the time-tested rules that do not leave humans crazy frustrated actually come <a href="http://coolerinsights.com/2012/05/mickeys-10-commandments-for-theme-parks/" target="_blank">from theme-park design, and there's no 'honest' and minimalism there at all</a>: it is all show.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But why are these sets of rules considered Good? In a society that highly valued constant surprise and distraction and ornamentation, Rams would be a niche taste, <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/67509-why-does-chinese-web-design-look-so-busy-part-two" target="_blank">as digital experiences along those rules would leave most people unsatisfied</a>. Sklar's theme park rules work because they maximise human happiness, but individualists feel highly manipulated by Disney theme parks. Minimalism only makes people happy who like minimalism. Low touch or high touch only makes people happy who like either. Good is what we as individuals like, what aligns to our values.</div><br />
<div>That's just considering whether an individual finds the design Good. Our current problems are social, and planetary like never before. So back to Is This Design Good for society? Is It Good for the world? We <i>know</i> these are post-capitalist questions: if they actually fit in the framework of capitalism, all products in the market by default would be taking a clear stand in their relationship to global warming and equal rights; currently they only do so as part of a marketing: a capitalist strategy of trying to increase market share through increasing demand which is completely optional.<br />
<br />
</div><h3>Good is empty. And then paternalistic</h3></div><div>As argued, there are no objective criteria for Good. Good is always defined by those wielding it, and they wield according to the values instilled in their culture. Good usually barely measurable; this is why it has been so easy for Work to co-opt Good so often in digital design--capitalism needs measuring to work.</div><div><br />
To imbue Good with meaning when we judge digital on a societal or planetary scale we have to define what the societal or planetary values are that we want to collectively promote. China proves this kind of agreement can be imposed top-down, but in societies like in the Americas, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, all based on maximising personal freedom and expression, those attempts are highly suspect. Creating a consensus of values bottom-up there a) takes forever and b) leaves money or power on the table for those who can monetise iconoclasm or would lose out in the consensus about sustainability or what is a political truth--and capitalism hates leaving money on the table and geo-politics demands power. In 'The West' we like to live by our own personal values and hope we are collectively smart enough to chase good social or planetary outcomes. (Plot twist: It looks like we are not. But we won't switch to a collectivist model until it is too late, because we think they have lousy track records.)<br />
<br />
</div><div>My number one argument here is that we can not come to collective decisions through applying our individual values if we are being lied to. Whatever it is we individually deem Good, for ourselves, society, or the planet, we can not collectively get it right if we are being deceived, manipulated, or lied to, even by omission. We may, in our individualistic societies, still end up being divided and rendered ineffectual by our digital experiences so badly that we end up pushing the current extinction cataclysm to include our species, or tear our current societies apart into fiefdoms and dictatorships controlled by other countries, but we are certainly not going to avoid those bad outcomes if digital continues to hide truths about how it works and what it is doing in the service of capitalist means.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Therefore, the main thing digital design has to be now to even approach Good, is Transparent, and radically so.</span><br />
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Digital needs to tell us what the effects of our choices are when engaging with it. For our societies. For our planet. We can't tell if we like what you are doing if you are lying to us about what you are doing. But the main and most destructive reason to lie in digital these days is to make money by creating some illusion users are getting value instead of providing it to the companies with massive unforeseen circumstances.<br />
<br />
(And if "lying" is too strong a word then fine, call it "having certain trade secrets" or "omission" or "burying shit pages deep in a financial disclosure or user agreement with the toughest language.")<br />
<br />
Some initial questions I can think of to create that transparency are:</div><br />
<b>Who is paying for what we see?</b><br />
For every item in my view, I should be able to quickly explore by drilling down:<br />
<br />
<ul><li>Who benefits from me seeing it, </li>
<li>Who paid for it, </li>
<li>Who that organisation actually <i>is</i>, not stopping at some generic name like "People For Puppies and Kittens Inc."</li>
</ul><br />
(I still can't get over that Facebook, who clung to their Real Names policy so hard it became <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/29/facebook-real-name-trans-drag-queen-dottie-lux" target="_blank">a club to use against trans and other vulnerable people</a>, actually had no problem allowing malicious content farms disguise themselves and <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/333fe6bc-c1ea-11e6-81c2-f57d90f6741a" target="_blank">shovel wholesale lies to Facebook users by the bucketful</a>.)<br />
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<b>How are the lights being kept on? </b><br />
What is the actual business model of this site or app? This should be a simple document that is easily findable on the site, or that App Stores will insist to have on file and can be found by just long-pressing the app icon. Lying on it should be criminal.<br />
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<b>Who is getting paid from our taps and our attention? Per tap or click?</b><br />
We don't need to know how much, but if I am going to use a digital experience and I want it to align with my personal or collective values of what I want to promote and who I want to support, I need to know who it is supporting and promoting. No more "Like" to a cute-puppies content farm to support their fascist-garbage divisions.<br />
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<b>Where is our data going to go? Who owns it? What is being done with it?</b><br />
I am actually pretty OK with sites collecting data from me, as long as they use them for my benefit and I am informed or even retain control over who else benefits from it. I totally want Netflix to give me better recommendations. I totally want GMail to show me fewer garbage ads and more of what I may want. But I need to know who they are going to give my data to, aggregate or not. I want to know I am supporting a company with my time or money that won't undermine me or my family or what I consider to be my rights or my ecosystem.<br />
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<b>How much resources are you going to take from me?</b><br />
Next time you interact with any service that wants your email, look for a message of how many emails you will get. The kind, order, and volume of emails has to be created specifically by every service, and there's nothing automatic about it. Yet it is very seldom a system will tell us how much they are going to clutter our lives and generate noise when they ask for our email, and certainly not in big letters right next to the field in the form. Same for notifications or badges. Systems that charge more money than advertised will be slapped down by government and banking in no time, but our other resource, attention, we never get a warning about.<br />
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<b>How much resources does this use from my society or ecosystem?</b><br />
I have no idea how to operationalise this. I think I would want to know if using ride-shares are clogging the streets more, or becoming popular as a service creates more greenhouse gasses. Currently this data is never surfaced unless it is by clever journalists and statisticians, or if a company is particularly proud of one aspect but then hides the rest. However, it is a question that digital design must surface if we have to answer Is This Good For The Planet? but may also be unanswerable because of how digital design is layers and layers of providers and subsystems on top of each other all the way down--with Amazon Web Systems somewhere near the bottom.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I want Good Digital Design to mean that the externalities of the product or service, all </span><span style="font-size: large;">these effects on our society and our planet the product has beyond what it offers to users,</span><span style="font-size: large;"> have been made visible so that users can make choices along their personal values. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I want the current systems that hide these effects to explicitly be called Bad, no matter how unobtrusive or timeless they are.</span><br />
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ls transparency going to give away the secret business model, and stop somebody from making a buck? So what, our planet is about to kill us, and we are having a tough time getting along in our own cities and countries, thanks to precious business models whose secrecy allows a very select few to manipulate us all for their own gain. As a species we can't let this continue any more than we could let soft-drinks contain deadly amounts of calories and not tell us. We need to be able to make decisions, individually and collectively.<br />
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I am aware that there's a paradox about writing that in order to evaluate designs for being fit along lines that turn out to be non-capitalist we have to examine how designs relate to capitalist. That stems from the fact that that the needs of capitalism and global power grabs just underpin everything we do right now, and the havoc digital brands are wreaking is from how they try to hide their processes. Is It Good for our society and our planet has to be answered by looking at the things are shit for our societies and our longevity on this planet as a species, and those things may be externalities, but they are the result of unfettered capitalism not considering them its problem.<br />
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<h3>Examples of Critiques</h3>An example of a critique is this article examining <a href="https://uxdesign.cc/scarcity-in-ux-the-psychological-bias-that-became-the-norm-3e666b749a9a" target="_blank">ways that scarcity is shown on product pages to prompt people to hand over money</a>. Some of these methods rely on creating the idea of scarcity, some of them rely on things actually indeed running out to pressure you to buy, and some show just the state of affairs. It is all really subtle and opinions will differ, but the big question is what are transparent ways to communicate that a product is running out without being sleazy?<br />
<br />
Another example of a critique is this article about <a href="https://hackernoon.com/attention-hacking-is-the-epidemic-of-our-generation-e212e111c675" target="_blank">the mechanics of the attention economy</a>. It's strength doesn't just lay out these mechanics that grab and keep our attention, but is willing to take a stand on whether this is actually beneficial or not, with examples of what goes over the line and what not, based on non-capitalist assumptions of What Is Good. Many articles out there explain these mechanics too, but this one is comprehensive and, in contrast to most other ones I read, is not neutral or even praising the attention economy.<br />
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I have been playing with this tool that <a href="https://www.fastcodesign.com/90160963/this-data-viz-tool-explains-privacy-policies-youre-too-lazy-to-read" target="_blank">visualizes privacy policies</a>, and it is really good at showing just how wishy-washy they are, how very much most policies of the big companies do not disclose what they actually do but just hide behind words like "analytics" and trusted third parties. I am personally thrilled the new European GDPR regulations are poised to put a stop to these blanket checkbox policies and will make sites have to be more explicit. It may end up as empty as the cookie notices are in the end, but I am hoping the EU learned from how the Cookie Directives, meant to give European users direct information over how their data was being used, ended up being subverted to be meaningless, and have crafted better rules. The work I have done crafting new T&Cs for a client certainly seems to indicate so.<br />
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I have no simple closing paragraph here, with a pithy slogan and a great direction to go on. As a digital designer I know how beholden I am to employers and clients for food and shelter, and sometimes I tire from the battle to make something Good along the lines I wrote about here considering I still have to fight simpler fights like not having too many menu entries and not making everything configurable because that is easier than making design decisions. I need help to Do The Right Thing at work, and I am hoping the GDPR regulations will help, and louder voices critiquing along non-capitalist lines will help. As much responsibility digital designers have, we actually do not get to make many significant decisions about this ourselves--we end up designing not the digital world we want, but that makes money, even though we know we have to stop doing so.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-2463332902485964332017-11-06T22:32:00.002+00:002017-11-14T13:26:01.226+00:00There's More to Sound Than Speech<i>Update: I got some beautiful comments on this, and I worked in some of the insights so I am not immediately out of date.</i><br />
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The combination of Big Data and an enormous user base is creating so much serendipity that <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2017/10/31/facebook-ads-microphone/#6710d2e6534d">Facebook has had to deny they are listening in to user's conversations</a> to explain some spooky content appearing in user's News Feeds. Of course, what would literally have been a paranoid delusion up until five years ago--I have a copy of a friend's drug-fuelled diary of how a consortium of Disney and the CIA were bugging their home--is now reality: I have another friend who recently found out that they were the victim of a recurring home invasion by noticing new entries on the online log of queries to their Amazon Echo, that were made while they were not at home with the device.<br />
I have interesting friends.<br />
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Our devices are now listening to us in order to serve us better and deliver us to more targeted advertisers and products, but I find it interesting how <i>little</i> they listen to: up to recently it has been only some magic word and then whatever the user says next. That's not real service, that's being dumb and robotic. Real service is about depth and anticipation, so if the next generation of listening robots is going to delight us, they should be able to deal with queries like:<br />
<ul>
<li>What kind of bird was that?</li>
<li>Are foxes mating or is someone being killed outside?</li>
<li>Was that my car starting?</li>
<li>Holy crap, is that noise coming from the basement? (This may require having two or more listening devices in the home to do triangulation, but that is a) already true when people have a phone as well and <a href="https://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/boomerang/">b) technically a solved problem</a>)<br />Is it an emergency? Do you know well-rated emergency plumbers?</li>
<li>How many emergency vehicles did just come by the house?</li>
<li>Was that test of the Emergency Broadcast System scheduled?</li>
<li>Should the washing machine ever sound like that?</li>
</ul>
<div>
Especially for travellers who are new to the fauna, the city, and the AirBnB with its appliances and basements, these are the kinds of questions that need answers at 3 AM. </div>
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Technologically, this requires acquiring and storing a huge library of data, something that FaceGoogAmApple excel at, and really good pattern matching, which is a goal they are mercilessly chasing as well. Is there a business model? Well, the easiest way to solve most problems these days is throwing money at them, and every one of these companies is trying to seek rent from enabling successful and efficient Money-throwing At Problems.</div>
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Evolution has run the experiment for a couple of hundred million years and has quite a definitive conclusion: sound is so superior as a warning system compared to sight that sensing vibrations is more ubiquitous than sensing light, <i>and</i> we don't get to switch sensing vibrations off the way we can close our eyes. Yet all the news coming from machine-learning pattern matching doesn't just make the community look like a collection of Family Guy cut scenes--Muffin or Chihuahua? Is my face gay? Behold my latest art nightmare--but it is also all visual. We're ignoring the best warning systems.</div>
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A decade ago I was exploring a service using mobile devices to keep children safe: upon encountering danger the mobile phone would go into recording and broadcast mode, notifying parents of location and danger. In order to switch to that mode the user would have to enter a specific key chord, but the necessity for that action was based on where technology was ten years ago. These days it shouldn't require touching the device at all, maybe just a keyword. But why even a keyword? A sudden spike in sound like a car crash or a raised voice of any kind or a gunshot, a sudden increase in heartbeat as recorded by the smart watch, sudden acceleration outside of habits like running or falling, all that should immediately trigger recording through all sensors, and broadcasting to trusted contacts or emergency services if shit gets serious (prolonged screaming or crying, a keyword uttered by the user, maybe even complete silence after an event?) Something that audio-recognisers can be trained on. </div>
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It's not just the gunshot or the crash that is relevant, the moments leading up to them are as much as well. So shouldn't our mobile devices--battery allowing--be recording anyway to have a record after they keep us safe, and if necessary upload and notify? When something bad happens, when a car has hit you on your bike, pulling the phone out to record is hard enough, if even possible. It should be recording everything already. Which is basically what helmet cams are about, but they are missing the safekeeping aspect of uploading and are not always with you.</div>
<div>
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Our batteries and networks can't sustain these perma-vigilance models yet, not to mention the video will be mostly of the inside of pockets, but often audio is enough: I can't count the amount of times I wish could have just tapped my phone inside my pocket in some specific way, maybe hard with four fingers, or just said something like "Phone, keep!" to maintain the hysterical dialogue that had just happened between me and my friends. I also don't always have time to pull out a phone and Shazam, I'd rather tap hard or speak to keep the audio moment and ask the phone to identify the audio later, and not just for music. Google has noticed this need and released <a href="https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/enable-now-playing-your-pixel-2-pixel-2-xl-0180641/" target="_blank">Now Playing</a> on its Pixel 2 phones: the phone now hows on the home screen what music it hears, all the time.</div>
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<div>
Being recorded is not by itself a negative. It only get negative if you lose control of the recordings and they get used against you. Yet recordings can also keep you safe or exonerate you. The only time I did jury duty, the CCTV from the cameras pointed at the street contradicted the testimony of multiple police officers who swore they were telling the truth. It is also in the public record that the suspects were, after deliberations, found guilty by the jury of lesser charges than were supported by the police testimony alone. It proved to me that if you make mistakes, sometimes being recorded accurately is better than not being recorded at all and having to rely on human testimony. Being recorded is no guarantee for redress, as we see in the US where video of police officers killing or brutalising People of Color does not lead to convictions, but it is better than only having falsified police reports painting the worst picture of the victim. The existence of these videos creates a better chance of progress than not having been recorded at all.</div>
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<div>
We've always lived in a 'he said, she said' world (in any combination of genders), with certain he's and she's always having more power and being more believed than other she's and he's, until enough powerless voices show up with #metoo. Continuous recording should really be able to bring some equalisation to this state of affairs. If I am giving care and feeding to a recording device that is permanently on my body, I really want in return for it to actually have an answer to the up-till-now mostly rhetorical question <i>"They did not really say that, did they?" </i>without me having to ruin the moment by having to actually pull things out of pockets and find the right app and enter the right mode.<br />
<br />
A huge hurdle to this is that, in many locations of the US at least, this would run afoul of wiretap laws. These laws, in short, come down to that <a href="https://www.quora.com/In-California-is-it-illegal-to-record-a-private-conversation-if-you-are-one-of-the-participants-in-the-conversation" target="_blank">you can't really record people without their permission</a>, even often in public. Now Playing made pretty sure to stay on the right side of the law by loading 10000 song fingerprints on your phone instead of sending what it hears to Google for identification, so this is pretty serious. I personally expect that the legal boundaries of 'expectation of privacy' are going to change and we are just going to get used on being recorded in public, but we are definitely not there yet for this. Maybe our phones for now will get to listen, but not record.<br />
<br />
The biggest hurdle here is not going to be technology, but legal and social. Which makes total sense, there's some real privacy issues here. Reality is that we are giving up on that privacy anyway for utility as Siri and Alexa know, and I can see more unexplored utility I would like. Because I really wanted to know if the washing machine in my AirBnb should ever have made that sound.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-74482944531895837082016-06-22T22:18:00.001+01:002016-06-22T22:50:35.604+01:00Sugar, Fat, You, Your Bacteria, And Measuring It AllFrom a User Experience point of view, the problem with dieting is that the delay between cause and effect. If being hungry for a little while immediately showed an effect in fat stores, we'd all be sporting six-packs as we be able to regulate losing fat effectively. It also would be very likely that being lean would not be so desirable for being too easy to attain.<br />
<br />
Right now the diet pendulum has swung back from fat being the enemy, and the new diets are focussing on sugar. While touting different benefits and restrictions, the basic thinking behind the low-sugar diets is that consuming certain simple carbohydrates create insulin spikes, and those are what wreak havoc with the body, from shunting energy directly into fat cells to contributing to metabolic syndrome. <br />
<br />
But what food create these insulin spikes? As far as we know, the amount of sugar, or simple carbohydrates, in relationship to things like fiber, protein, or fat in every food changes how the body responds. This is expressed in a crude scale for every individual food called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index">the Glycemic Index</a>, tested by giving some under controlled circumstances to <a href="http://www.glycemicindex.com/testing_research.php" target="_blank">a group of people and measuring their blood glucose</a>--and then repeat for every food.<br />
<br />
A few problems with that:<br />
<ol><li>The GIs are all tested in isolation from each-other, while we usually eat a bunch of foods together, so we can't really predict the actual spike from the ingredients in a meal.</li>
<li>The glucose spike actually does not fully correlate with the insulin spike, which is what we actually want to lower.</li>
<li>And worst: turns out glucose <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119143445.htm">spikes are highly individual</a>, as the same meals create very different spikes in different people.</li>
</ol><div>Number 3 is what everyone who has family members of very different body composition always suspected: some people really <i>can</i> eat the same foods as others and not get fat. Thoughts are that our gut flora (part of the microbiome) plays a role, but there's not enough real data on that.<br />
<br />
That scientific study on individual spikes was done with a technology called Continuous Glucose Monitoring, developed specifically for diabetics. It consists of sticking a long, thin needle through your skin (you <i>may</i> not want to do a Google image search) and leaving it there for days on end connected to a little box stuck to your skin that displays the body glucose data. The more recent version don't connect to a display but beam the data to a display. CGMs help diabetics significantly to regulate their blood sugar, as the continuous readings give a lot better insight into their bodies which allows them to dose and time their insulin better.</div><div><br />
</div><div>CGMs have been unwieldy, expensive, and unpleasant; sticking a long needle in your abdomen is not fun, even for diabetics who understand the benefits. The NHS here in the UK will not pay for it, or only make it available for two weeks or so at a time, as the cost-benefit ratio was not quite there. But technology doesn't stop, and CGMs just got a whole lot cheaper and easier to use.<br />
<br />
Recently I met someone <a href="http://www.freestylelibre.co.uk/" target="_blank">who is using a new system</a> that makes inserting the sensor easy and far less invasive, and makes doing the read-outs much easier: you just hold a reader the size of a phone to the sensor and you get the last few hours of continuous data that you can then view in charts and graphs. It looks like the data is locked inside that reader, but the techs I was with already found out it uses NFC to communicate, so I doubt it will take long before other NFC-enabled computers like phones will be able to read body sensor out and then allow users to slice, dice and upload the data. Most importantly, the system is a lot more affordable than what was previously on the market, and seems at most 10% less accurate than the gold standard. Running costs seem to be under £60 per sensor that can last up to two weeks. That's not cheap, but a lot cheaper than previous systems.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.freestylelibre.co.uk/freestyle-libre-starter-pack-english.html" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.freestylelibre.co.uk/media/wysiwyg/icons-sensors.png" /></a></div><br />
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At this level of cost, measuring your glucose actually becomes cost effective for fitness-oriented people who are serious about quantifying something about themselves that is far more fundamental for body composition than steps and runs, even if you did it for only a month. Combine the readings with photographs of everything that you eat, and you can make an individual analysis of how you react to foods. In a month you can do plenty of experiments with your standard diet, low-carb days, low-fat days, weekends and holiday eating, favourite restaurants, or individual foods and dishes to get more insight into how your body responds. This kind of insight would make the effects of food real and measurable for an individual, but also not have to overly restrict themselves as current diets that block out whole food groups do. It is easy to see how a trainer or nutritionist could set themselves up with a reader and offer two weeks or a month of exploratory monitoring as a service to multiple clients.<br />
<br />
The next step would be to then for a lot of people to upload that data and look for patterns, possibly exploding a lot of food myths or creating whole new ways of categorizing people into the different ways they metabolize food (and guaranteed finding out some of those classic GI measurements were plain wrong, or not holding up for large populations). A company could offer itself as a GI testing service for new foods, sending its test panel a new product and asking them to upload their glucose data for a period before, during, and after consumption, to possibly create a new seal of approval. We'll also then find out everything is really Not That Simple, and that many other factors, like our gut bacteria, make nutrition quite hard to grasp on an individual level--and then companies will try to <a href="http://ubiome.com/" target="_blank">make that quantifiable too.</a><br />
<br />
As with every measurement, humans will try to game them for their own ends, either to make their food products seem 'healthier', or cheat on their own diets that they should stick to, or many other ways. But for many motivated people there now is a new tool to create a more direct feedback loop and get more insight into how what they eat makes them achieve, look, and feel.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-52375794134609285922016-02-22T23:33:00.000+00:002016-02-22T23:33:21.070+00:00Software SucksI bought a Nexus 7 Tablet 2 years ago. It runs Android. Google kept pushing updates to it to make it better and more secure, going through versions like Kitkat and Lollipop and maybe Marshmallow as well, I don't know, and I don't really care. What I care about was how it suddenly slowed down. Like totally slowed down; it would take a full minute for an email to open after I tapped the notification. It would take so long for apps to switch out that Android would ask me if Android should shut them down. It became unusable.<br />
<br />
I found the tools to flash (which means replace) new Operating Systems on it, like older versions of Android, and other ones based on Google's work. It requires things called unlocking, reflashing bootloaders, flashing onto SD cards, booting into recovery mode.<br />
<br />
I tried clean and fresh Android, pure stock version. Stayed unusable. I finally got <a href="http://www.cyanogenmod.org/" target="_blank">Cyanogen</a> on it, version 12 to be exact, as the latest version, 13, was unusable in the same way as stock. Version 12 seems to work, and I have my tablet back to do some Twitter and Facebook and watch a video.<br />
<br />
I am not a hacker or maker of any kind, really, I just know my way around google and a Terminal and flashing tools. I used my experience I had built up getting a degree in Software Engineering and being a coder for a living for a decade. And all I could think was, here's a product that I paid good money for, and within three years it was unusable. Because of the manufacturer. Who what, didn't care? Didn't notice?<br />
<br />
Yes I fixed it, but how are average consumers supposed to?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-53470824449179439822016-02-11T14:16:00.003+00:002016-02-11T15:17:37.882+00:00Everything Is Crap So Why Not Driverless Cars?Tuesday I attended a fabulous unconference <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/959678374068078">What Are We Going To Do About Artificial Intelligence?</a> where we split into smaller groups and discussed AI from different angles. It was attended by technologists, futurologists, designers, product managers, and other disciplines. In the discussions, which I flitted between some, these damn driverless cars kept coming up.<br />
<br />
Yes, shared autonomous cars would revolutionise everything about how we live. And we did see a future where people would be penalized for wanting to drive themselves, and I figured rental companies would be the ones to insist on going full driverless first to reduce their liability. We spoke how networked autonomous cars could manage their flow so fast speed limits would become meaningless, but also how it could mean you could be hijacked easily, like by the police.<br />
<br />
A really good representation of driverless cars, and their government hijacking (well, except for some ridiculous wall-crawling and lack of respect for physics when you jump between them) can be seen in the Spielberg film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/">Minority Report</a>.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0TfOms4uz7Q" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
This speed and distribution only works if <i>all</i> cars are in the network, so the transition will be interesting. When there's few or a moderate amount of autonomous cars, because <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/11992795/Police-pull-over-Googles-driverless-car-for-driving-too-slowly.html" target="_blank">they will follow the rules</a>, including speed limits (even if Google now says they will let the cars drive 10 km/h over), and will stop first, a lot of people will outrun and outmaneuver the autonomous cars, making them a secondary choice. Yes, a lot of drivers are dicks, just look at how many people will drive in the wake of an emergency vehicle to get a leg up the fine drivers who did cede the road. But once there are enough autonomous cars that are networked, human-driven cars will simply not be able to keep up with the efficiency gains, and they will be rapidly removed from the flow, either by commerce or legislation.<br />
<br />
Another set of ideas about autonomous cars is described in the quite prescient <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394986.Nature_s_End">Nature's End</a>, where humans could authorise their autonomous vehicle to break speed limits and run through traffic lights by authorising the payment of the fine on the spot. It is not a far jump from that to see a revenue opportunity in our real world for municipalities or toll roads to let people willing to pay go faster or first through a light. It will stratify the car experience beyond just what you drive, now including also how well you get there.<br />
<br />
If it all works, of course. And there's my problem with all these scenarios.<br />
<br />
I will totally believe that a bunch of autonomous cars surrounded by Google engineers or Tesla engineers work perfectly fine right now. I will totally believe that a $60.000 car will switch lanes under certain conditions if you tell it to when it still has that new smell. But right now I have a 3 year old tablet that can no longer switch from one application to another, or have an acceptable battery life, thanks to Google. I had a two-year old iPod that stuttered playing music sometimes, failing at arguably its primary function. My friend Mike tells me how his car mid-traffic-jam suddenly decided the car doors were open and then closed and spun into a locking / unlocking cycle trying to control it. I have a laptop running one of the longest worked-on Operating System codebases known to man and it will spontaneously freeze and reboot when playing a video.<br />
<br />
Getting 1 item right is hard. Getting the next 100 right is easier. Getting 1000 right is a breeze if you have manufacturing down. But getting millions of software/hardware combos out, and working reliably for a decade? Good frickin' luck. Think of your smartphone, your smart TV, your set-top box, your cable box, your games console, for a moment: have they been smooth and easy to operate? Have they stopped working while you were using them? Did you ever switch them on to do something and then be stopped because of a "Mandatory Update" that required 20 minutes?<br />
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Software cars won't be any different. Enjoy.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-83333096038683335892015-02-23T22:52:00.002+00:002015-02-23T23:09:20.754+00:00To Charge Luxury Prices, You Need To Make A Luxury ItemIt's not my ambition to have this become a Daring Fireball reaction blog, but <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2015/02/apple_watch_pricing" target="_blank">an article did catch my attention</a>, in which the price point of the forthcoming Apple Watch is discussed. The key paragraph is:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I now think Edition models will start around $10,000 — and, if my hunch is right about bands and bracelets, the upper range could go to $20,000. I was off by a factor of two, and my friend Vincent, I think, nailed it back on the day Apple Watch was introduced.</blockquote>
The Edition models being the upper end, the 18K gold ones. Then we get umpteen paragraphs justifying this price point by comparing the bill of goods to that of luxury watches in that space. A price point of $20K may seem absurd to many for a watch, but undeniably a whole industry exists around that kind of product at that kind of price, and not because the watches at that price point are scarce: limited edition luxury watches can sell for more. The market exists. In general, the Chinese customer will spend more of their income, percentage wise, on luxury items, than Western consumers will, and there are an awful lot of Chinese Apple fans out there. It seems plausible.<br />
<br />
So Apple might indeed decide to price their latest and smallest computer higher than any other computer they have ever sold, I have no opinion whether they will or won't. There’s just one issue if they will, that I have not seen addressed: luxury good or not, at some point you have to deliver the basic goods completely, and I am not sure the Apple Watch will. Watches at that price point <i>always</i> deliver the goods: they aways show the time, automatically, wonderfully, visibly. They do not show not a black shiny dead rectangle on your wrist<sup>1</sup>. Everyone who glances at your luxury watch sees a gorgeous but functional object doing what it should. Nobody with a $20K watch is currently tapping it to make the watch work, double tapping because they got the first tap wrong, looking quizzical at an unexpected event, furiously working the crown. If they are and are seen by their status-conscious buddies doing so, that watch will be traded in by the end of the day.<br />
<br />
The reality is that no matter what the band and casing, that Apple thing on your wrist is a computer, not a single-minded mechanic evolved from 500 years of designing reliability. Everyone knows it is a computer, and as such it will come with expectations a computer has: smaller every year, faster every year, cheaper every year, buggier every year.<br />
<br />
For this item to succeed as a 5-figure luxury item, the people who currently drop $20K on <a href="http://www.patek.com/contents/default/en/home.html" target="_blank">Patek Philippe</a> have to see the people buying this highest-end Apple Watch as equally wearing $20K. And one down battery, one frantically pushing of the crown for nothing, one stutter of a screen, one having to take it off to reset, and the <a href="http://www.iwc.com/en-uk/" target="_blank">IWC Schaffhausen</a> wearers know you strapped on the equivalent of an 18 Karat gold-plated Swatch: it has a profit margin of 10000%, but the same place in the heart as a piece of plastic. If they are being kind today, they won't smirk at you as you look at your dead or resetting screen again. They won't have to smirk, though, for the person who dropped 5 figures on a temperamental tiny computer to know they have lost some status.<br />
<br />
And this is not even considering that at that price point, the statement you are making with your $20.000 Apple watch is that you are tethered to your $150-with-contract phone.<br />
<br />
Luxury items are about doing one thing spectacularly well: telegraphing that you are rich because of the brand or materials, and then performing their one single function without detracting from that first goal. Prada shoes don't have insane 7 layer gel cushioning. Birkin bags don't have meticulous purse organisers built in. Burberry raincoats actually still let your hair get wet in the rain. None of those items are $20.000, and when they are, they still don't have a ton of extra functionality. But they will never embarrass you by forgetting how to protect your foot, hold an item, or wrap around you.<br />
<br />
A dark watch face is ok on a $100 watch. Maybe even a $500 one if you are comfortable telegraphing you are a techno adept. At $20K, that gold case had better adorn a beautiful, always-on watch face 24/7. And what I am reading about the battery life will not support that.<br />
<br />
<sup>1</sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">Yes, I am aware of luxury watches that cover their face, but they cover the face with something equally lustrous. Work with me here. I can even conceive of a minimalist luxury all-black watch that doesn't even show a face unless the wearer does something. It may exist, but that is not what the Apple Watch is shooting for.</span><br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-87256707099614660682014-11-02T17:48:00.000+00:002014-11-02T17:48:13.148+00:00When I Think About Age Discrimination In Tech......I think about people around me whose benefits are about to run out because recruiters don't want to put them forward for work they have twenty years of experience, because it involves a language or framework that isn't directly on the CV for years. Or isn't management because surely at their age they should be in management. Or the employing team, all 15 years younger, doesn't think they would be a fit.<br />
<br />
People lose their homes this way.<br />
<br />
Turns out I should have been worried about teens not getting enough free tickets for conferences, <a href="http://nothingrandom.com/thinks/sorry-not-old-enough" target="_blank">just because they like to show up.</a> "Events have many sponsors, fact." Yeah.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-33468627022254538882014-08-31T18:42:00.000+01:002014-08-31T18:42:09.047+01:00Xiaomi Mi3 The technology narrative in the Western press about industrial design on 'foreign' shores used to be how non-Western countries start off by making cheap copies of great American technology, then achieve quality parity, then start making beautiful designs, but never to the specialised ultra-chic European level.<br />
<br />
Well, China is not having it. A number of manufacturers want to make beautiful and thoughtful design their trademark as much as Apple does, and I have had the pleasure of briefly carrying one of these devices, the <a href="http://www.mi.com/en/mi3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Xiaomi Mi3</a>. It is a highly specced mobile, beautifully manufactured with a gorgeous HD screen and a lovely camera, at a very affordable price. There is a hunger for design and beautiful experiences through all levels of the market; this device sold out in mere hours when a production run was imported to India, with the same story in other countries that are usually sales wastelands for $600 devices like iPhones and Nexuses.<br />
<br />
I have been planning to wax rhapsodically over how carefully it seemed to have been put together, how lovely its cover fit the device down to the millimetre to compliment its curved shape and how well it folded into a pretty stand, how odd and humorous it was to use a device that was Chinese at its core and would still throw up the odd dialog box or voice-recognition prompt in Chinese characters, impenetrable to me, even after I had set the whole device to English. I wanted to carefully describe how Xiaomi had used the Chinese mobile properties and its own store to create an ecosystem to rival iTunes for all kinds of media, and how it allowed something the iPhone most definitely did not, full re-skinning, in ways beyond just switching out some icons and background wallpaper, and nod to the controversy that the device used to upload your whole phonebook as part of becoming part of this ecosystem, even your Google phonebook.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://inavitnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/XiaoMi-Mi3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://inavitnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/XiaoMi-Mi3.jpg" height="435" width="640" /></a></div>
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Alas, I can't. Coming back from the US to London, swapping my US SIM out for my UK SIM somehow rendered the SIM card reader inoperable, a known design flaw in these devices only a minority of users will encounter. But when it comes to hardware, I am one of those blessed users testers love so much: I always run into the edge cases. Xiaomi does not have a presence in the UK, I got this device through an importer who, after first being slow at answering my emails, requested me to send the device back to China on my dime for exchange with Xiaomi.<br />
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And this is again an area where Apple has transformed consumer expectation: repairs. Yes, the Genius Bar doesn't always give joy, but at least there is a place to go to get your Apple kit looked at and diagnosed, often in your own metropolitan area, by the actual brand itself. Compare this to most other brands where you are still supposed to pack your electronics up and send them to a national service centre, or find a repair shop, hopefully authorised and hopefully not too stuffy, dusty, down-market, or otherwise dread-inducing.<br />
<br />
So off it has gone, by airmail. I hope it arrives and we can then do something. Yes, I sent it untracked--tracking a package to China was expensive and I do not want to sink more costs into this device. The Mi3 has been out for a while now, and competitors are nipping at its heels, and I'd rather save money up than sink it into something that went from a joy to use to no longer fit for primary purpose within a minute of performing a normal operation.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-20018088906314252152013-12-22T16:20:00.002+00:002013-12-22T16:20:51.479+00:00A World Managed By Apps Is Closed For Those Without A SmartphoneIt's hard to blog about the broader ramifications of tech when you see all these trends in your workplace that you can't talk about, as they all hook into each other and some are covered by your Confidentiality Agreements. But one I can discuss is another digital divide coming. Like the previous ones, which were first about who could get online and reap the benefits of digital at all, and the second of whether they could get broadband fast enough, I am seeing another one happen: the World Remote Control divide, specifically for the Internet of Things.<br />
<br />
Between <a href="https://nest.com/">thermostats</a>, <a href="https://lockitron.com/">door locks</a>, <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/paybyphone-parking/id448474183?mt=8">parking meters</a>, airline check-ins, scanners, <a href="http://assets.epson-europe.com/gb/en/connect/index.html?WT.z_an=881&WT.z_ac=1&WT.z_ap=2#connect_overview">printers</a>, <a href="https://hailocab.com/london">cab hailing</a>, and all kinds of other services and devices becoming appified, technology as a culture is marching into a very specific direction: instead of the sci-fi vision of computing being diffused and ambient to all--us talking to doors to open and to walls to play music--computing is instead being controlled from our handheld devices by those who own them. The future is here but unevenly distributed, and the pockets in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Singapore, Tokyo, London, etc that have the future first are all manipulating it from apps, and not through a ubiquitous low-power low-computing global protocol like SMS.<br />
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It's nobody's fault, nobody is to blame; it just really is easier when you make a digital door lock to use the smartphone as a control device instead of having to build in voice recognition or have to distribute hardware tokens like keys. But as it is more and more assumed people have smart handheld devices with big screens and fast CPUs, the people without them get left behind. The mobile web world was already insufferable enough when many of its developers would say behind closed doors that they coded for the Webkit / iPhone only since that was the only device with enough numbers to justify the mobile investment, but when every digital device maker just assumes everyone relevant has a smartphone so they can drop hardware buttons, remote controls, some people are seriously going to become strangers in their own world. <br />
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It's not hard to envision a world where having an iPhone is a necessary token for entry the same way now it is really impractical to get benefits or advice without a computer and an internet connection and having to rely instead on multiple trips to job-centers and post offices and government offices just to get all paperwork done. The people who are economically disadvantaged enough that acquiring a new or replacing a broken smart handheld is just fricking hard, will find themselves burdened always having only secondary access to the world: always having to type 20 digit numbers though hostile phone menu trees to finish topping up, having to go to a specific location to find the right form and find it is out of stock this week and wasting a trip, carry little top-up cards and keys they may lose, not being able to remotely check on their homes or work, not reaping the benefits of a world going digital. And you can say "hey, they can't do those magical things now anyway so they do not lose anything," but in reality, as the world gets easier to manage for those with these handheld devices and they gain more time and money, the ones without slip relatively behind by virtue of not advancing, or advancing way slower. The poor get poorer, and the well-off will turn more and more of their world into appified services because it is already working so well.<br />
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But now that tablets are becoming <a href="http://www.mobilephones.com/news/aldi-launches-80-pound-tablet/">available for a meagre £80</a> and soon for less, will the World Remote Control divide really exist? Well, yeah, if you know the context of device usage in poor areas. It is brutal. <a href="http://seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com/390067.html">This classic post</a> by Seanan McGuire, who has been there, describes how "Print is Dead" is a nightmare in a world where any e-reader would instantly be stolen or broken by the people around you. When not only print but also coin slots on parking meters are dead, this group will slowly watch the world get harder and harder to navigate. Ok, so you got one cheap device—how large is your family? Can they share it? Are there profiles? Can you afford the WiFi or 3G signal? Can you afford to charge it? <br />
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Every time you make a service or device that can only be managed from an app, you are basically adding to a systematic poor tax. You make it easier for those comfortable, with great smartphones in their hand, to get shit done, while not spreading that benefit to those without the magic box. You deepen economic entrenchment.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-57291365102471238482012-10-13T23:14:00.001+01:002012-10-14T04:27:45.051+01:00Windows 8: Hardware That Will Physically HurtMuch has been written about Windows 8 already, and most reviews I am seeing are negative. Windows 8 is an Operating System and User environment that tries to work the same on tablets and desktops, strongly visually tied to Windows 8 phones as well. Most reviewers hate it because it is such a break from how 25 or so years of desktop worked; in migrating their mobile OS ideas to desktops, and laptops, Microsoft is forcing a new paradigm that is just uncomfortable. So uncomfortable they had to make commercials to show people how to use it.<br />
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No multiple windows in the main view, no easy visible way to switch applications—you have to know a specific set of gestures—and no easy way to start new applications in the compatibility environment that suddenly lost a start button. In short, a set of gestures that are really easy on a tablet end up making life hard when needed to be done with a mouse and keyboard. The gestures are not obvious in either case, but we forgive that on tablets because of the lack of real estate; on desktops with 28" monitors, not having start buttons and task switching widgets is kind of, well, mean, really.<br />
<br />
Apart from all that, I may, may, have found another issue with it, which is pretty serious: Windows 8 could be physically painful to use over time.<br />
<br />
Every laptop I have seen introduced for Windows 8 has a touch-sensitive display, just like a tablet, which makes total sense if you are going to make a machine to run what is basically a tablet OS with a desktop afterthought. The convertibles take the idea even further: these are tablets to which you can easily attach a rigid keyboard and then have a laptop-like device but that then doesn't have a touchpad or nipple mouse, it's all touch driven. So on portable computing, all Windows 8 machines with a keyboard are touch for moving around with. Desktop machines for Windows 8 are also equipped with touch screens, enabling users to make the gestures that make Windows 8 work.<br />
<br />
Well, here's the thing: when travelling or when at work, this has been my computing set-up:<br />
<img alt="iPad standing up with a bluetooth keyboard" src="http://pbs.twimg.com/media/A3UtiDdCcAAsHeA.jpg:large" /> <br />
<br />
I have been using this for months now, and in the last few weeks I have noticed a knot under my shoulder-blade, a tenseness that is just getting worse and worse in one small spot on my back. It's just not going away. It is making me realise just how many times I am moving that right arm up to press the home button to switch programs, or gesture on the touch screen to make something happen. That movement is constant, lifting my hand from the keyboard, not to a mouse or touchpad that will support my hand and thus my arm, but up to touch something in front of me, making me hold my arm up in the air unsupported, and requiring me to then exert fine motor-control. It's not just a simple once, but all the time while I am behind the set-up. I resent doing so, I keep wishing CMD+Tab worked on the iPad like it does on my macbook to switch programs, and a touch-pad would work so I didn't constantly have to lift my arm and touch the screen and bezel, over and over. And today it hit me: that's why the muscles that hold my arm up when extended are hurting. Over-use.<br />
<br />
Using an iPad with a keyboard is a minority use-case, as we say in the User Experience business: there aren't that many people doing it because it is not a compelling scenario. People with serious typing to do use proper laptops and desktops with proper big keyboards and mice. But Microsoft and its hardware partners are about to unleash a tidal wave of machines that really do have touch+gesture as their main paradigm: convertible tablets, touch-enabled desktops. Microsoft itself is explicitly making a keyboard cover for their tablet, almost built-in, meant to be used like the set-up in the picture. <b>(Edit: Note the Surface keyboard case does have a trackpad. But, also keep your eyes open for reviewers saying getting to the hidden controls is cumbersome with the mouse or trackpad.)</b> From a minority use-case this mode of interacting is becoming a blessed paradigm.<br />
<br />
This is going to hurt a lot of people. Seriously, if you are buying a new Windows 8 device and are not using it in tablet mode on your lap, or cradled in your arm for most of the time, if the screen stands mainly upright and is not flat on the desk like a book so you are pointing down when you gesture on it, get a pointing device that rests on the desk, like a mouse or track-pad. Insist on it. Otherwise you may be in a world of chronic hurt.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-30263978622149828072012-08-27T22:08:00.000+01:002012-08-27T22:08:10.841+01:00The Other Digital Thing IKEA Did With The CatalogThe story of how around 12% of the latest IKEA catalog was not photographed but digitally rendered has made the rounds all the way to the <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444508504577595414031195148.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us" target="_blank">Wall Street Journal</a>, but oddly I haven't seen mentions of the other digital feature of the IKEA catalog: the paper catalog unlocks content on a mobile application. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Now that I consider real news. </span><br />
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Frankly, I am surprised IKEA is so late to the digital-rendering party,. Indeed considering the geographical color and sizing variations they have to deal with; it would seem a lot easier to digitally retouch a kitchen to a darker shade and adjust the fridge to be free-standing instead of built-in (a strong difference in kitchen design between the US and Europe) than to have to build a new kitchen in the studio, but I guess shooting rendered furniture to the quality the catalog demands really was quite the challenge.<br />
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But in the catalog that landed on my doorstep, many pages have a small icon with the text 'Scan to unlock extra content.' Page two of the catalog explains what that means: you can download an app on a smartphone--I found one for Apple mobile devices and Android--and if you scan the page, more content will be downloaded over, preferably for a speedier experience, your WiFi connection So I made a video to show you what that looks like.<br />
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<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/m99pnKVfvRo?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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I have to apologize here for the quality. Usually when I watch vlogs of unboxings and rants and tutorials I always shake my head and scream at YouTube that the videographers should have bought a tripod already, and learned how to switch on the macro setting, and rehearse once or twice! Alas, when it comes time to make my tech video debut, I am far away from my home with my toys, in a rented flat with some random portable tech, no tripod, bad lighting, and no better place to do this than a table. I apologize and promise not to yell at videographers anymore through the screen.<br />
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<object width="320" height="266" class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="http://i.ytimg.com/vi/f6qH_6w1f7g/0.jpg"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/f6qH_6w1f7g?version=3&f=user_uploads&c=google-webdrive-0&app=youtube_gdata" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/f6qH_6w1f7g?version=3&f=user_uploads&c=google-webdrive-0&app=youtube_gdata" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object></div>
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The app is a little slow to start up and to start scanning, but it works well on my New iPad and iPod and the shots look gorgeous on the Retina displays. The 3D models look cheap and ugly, though. It drastically failed to show anything useful on my small Sony Xperia Mini Pro, and I quickly stopped trying. The scanning of a page is not too difficult to get videos and photos, but trying to see a 3D model from more than the top is difficult; turn the phone too much to examine the front and sides and the model disappears.<br />
<br />
It is a fun little game for about 30 minutes, if you can stop yourself from simply going to the website and seeing the same content. Some videos are really not that interesting; watching how a set is perfectly dressed up by professionals to look like a too-beautiful-to-be-true bohemian chic dinner party only made me feel like they were cheating--if I was a pro stylist my parties would look awesome too--and two of the four 3D models I found showed something useful: how the doors fold open on the TV bench and how table leaves were stored in an extendable table.<br />
<br />
I think that is my main negative with this system: for a company that makes such functional products, they seem to have invested a lot of money in something that isn't quite there in functionality. Well, isn't right now: as a way to showcase more content and details about a room set-up that simply could not fit in the catalog it is pretty darn good already. But once this platform works, I would consider it mandatory for every piece of convertible furniture in the catalog to have an associated video to show the transformation. Scanning might be as easy for an able-bodied person as typing the name of the sleeper sofa or extendable table in the catalog app to find the video, but if you have to have the app open anyway to see it, scanning is far more fun. Equally useful would be walk-throughs through the small spaces IKEA is so good at making live-able with a lot of little tricks, tricks that are hard to show in a catalog but easy in a well-produced video or 3D model.<br />
<br />
So, like learning how to credibly render interiors without having to physically build them, learning how to tie in digital content with catalog content is a good idea too. IKEA now has a platform to deliver more useful inspirational and far more useful content next year, now that they can see what works and what doesn't.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-83086366698845568832012-06-09T22:38:00.003+01:002012-06-09T22:38:54.130+01:00Sony, Dearest, You Gotta Do Better Than ThisI have an Android phone, by Sony. I have an iPod. When Apple releases new firmware for the iPod, it gets installed when I attach it to iTunes. There's a bit of a terms & conditions, a click-through license, it gets downloaded, it works. When Google releases a new version of Android, I have to hope my hardware vendor adapts it to my hardware. Sony usually does—which is why I bought Sony—and indeed, I can now updates my Sony Xperia Mini Pro, to Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich".<br />
<br />
Perhaps. On my Mac. But the whole nonsense starts out with a warning. The phone management program on my Mac, akin to iTunes but made by Sony to run my Sony phone, shows a screen saying that before you can upgrade you need to read some messages. Only after you click on the hyperlink that opens a page in the browser, can you go to the next screen. Why that warning had to open up a whole new browser instead of stay in the management program, well, I can take a guess how stupid fiefdowms and deadlines and managers made that happen, but I won't here.<br />
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What is this important notice? It's a warning:<br />
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What the hell, people? A coded warning this may kill how well my phone works, as the first bullet, without even outright saying it? WTF? You are giving me the most fundamental piece of software without even having the balls to tell me how good or bad it will be? You <i>made my phone</i>, you <i>should know this</i>, Sony. And only have released this upgrade for my device when you were sure it made my device better. Not 'may'. The rest of the buller points are kind of dumb too, but I will not get into that.</div>
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Look, making things difficult and clunky may be acceptable for cheap devices; everyone knows one trades money for convenience. But the Xperia line is not some bargain-basement device. This is contempt for the user, this is laziness, this is outmoded behavior. Apple has changed the baseline of what acceptable is, and this throwback to twentieth century 'let the consumer struggle' is just not cutting it any more.</div>
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Every time Sony posts another disastrous quarter we get a thought spreading that Apple should buy Sony. But why would they? Sony seems to be filled with people who think not caring about how the product, once bought, continues to work for their consumers is acceptable.<br /><br />Needless to say, once I click through this and Continue, of course the update never happens. I get the message that some Update Manager—is that a process on my computer? My phone? The Internet?—isn't working and I should <i>contact tech support.</i> I wouldn't even <i>know</i> what that would look like or what they could possibly say to help.</div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-61036685686478564812012-01-28T23:43:00.000+00:002012-01-28T23:43:01.363+00:00I Think The Kindle Might Be Keeping Us From Finding New DatesAs I am noticing more and more Kindles on the Tube, I am also noticing I can't tell what people in general are reading any more. A few years ago when I first came to London I could tell you that The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_series">Millenium series</a> was really quite popular, and not just the first Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but the whole thing. These days I can tell you beige or burgundy faux leather covers are very popular during the morning commute, but not whether we are getting collectively stupider or smarter or more hung up on vampires, child magicians, or gruesome murders, a genre publishers seem to particularly want to push here if the poster ads are an indicator.<br />
<br />
So to explain my title, this also means that in cultures where people might strike up a conversation with a stranger in public (not London), the opener "Oh you're reading that? How is it?" is now gone, as is the signal that you may want to know this person in the first place. I remember, early in the millenium living in Boston, being snobbishly appalled at someone in the T who was dressed as an office worker practically spelling out 'Who Moved My Cheese' in enough rapture to miss their stop, as proclaimed just before the mad dash out at the next one. And feeling the same years later when suddenly 'The Secret' was the book of choice for my fellow travellers. If you live in a polarised culture it is useful to be able to quickly filter out people just by seeing they are reading something by either Glenn Beck or Dan Savage as an example, instead of just seeing their e-book reader. An opposing view is that we are not challenging or communicating across culture lines anyway and thus this new lack of broadcasting your stand is positive because it will make people talk who previously would not have. I would say nobody wants that kind of challenging conversation with the person you end up next to in an airplane for the next six hours; show me what you are reading and I will know how absorbed I need to seem to be in <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/26">Sky Mall</a>.<br />
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This disappearance of a communication channel is an actual hurdle in converting bibliophiles to e-book readers. Numerous times I have had the conversation where I was told some form of "Sure I could carry my ten thousand books with me in a tiny package, but I could not live in my house without my full shelves. In a way, these are my friends" while surrounded by book cases groaning with written media. It's very specific to books; I have never heard anyone complain about missing their VHS tapes, or pining for their CDs when switching to hard-disk or cloud equivalents (although vinyl does get that kind of reaction). In fact, I remember being told by a UX researcher who had done an ethnographic study that had brought him into dozens and dozens of living rooms of older people to ask them how they watched things on TV, that once they have on-demand video, standing up and putting a DVD in the player and switching the inputs is seen as too much work compared to fiddling with the remote to just watch anything remotely pleasant on cable. He saw stacks and stack of DVDs, many un-opened, of truly beloved films, gathering dust in a corner. Indeed, no cinephile has ever told me about how much they enjoyed the smell of a freshly opened DVD package, something book-lovers will extol about new books. At most they tell me they like what the DVD box sets communicates to visitors, but know film posters and action figurines say just as much.<br />
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We <i>are</i> social animals and we <i>do</i> want to broadcast who we are and what tribes we belong to, in almost everything we wear or carry. Nokia became huge allowing people to <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nokia+5110+cover&tbm=isch">customise their mobile phone</a>. The aftermarket of specialty cases is huge, but that aftermarket barely signals anything about our tastes and attitudes beyond color. Why is that? The most we will let our personal devices say about what we read or watch or play is Hello Kitty stickers, I never see any iPhones in the wild decked out equivalent to wearing an obscure band T-shirt.<br />
<br />
Is there a market opportunity for here for e-book readers and mobile phones and game machines—often the same device—that playfully show what media is being consumed or game is being played, or will that seem too flashy and constructed? I can't say, I am on record after all as the tech blogger who thought nobody would want to be seen with a Bluetooth bug in their ear, so I should stay away from saying what outward fashion will actually become popular. I can easily imagine that the people who wear loud brands and labels really would want to broadcast what amazing new leaked track they are listening to right now that you are not, what specialised closed social network tribe they are checking out, and their supreme taste in making this playlist. And just as easy I can imagine that the group dressed in minimalist German anthracite clothes actually discretely wants to do exactly the same broadcasting with their 16th century music and vintage copy of <a href="http://www.monocle.com/">Monocle</a>.<br />
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I raise Monocle for a specific reason here. The following three paragraphs appeared in an article about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/fashion/tyler-brule-mr-zeitgeist.html">the magazine and its editor</a> in the NYT:<br />
<blockquote>
<a href="http://magazinearchive.co/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/monocle-spread.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="259" src="http://magazinearchive.co/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/monocle-spread.jpg" width="320" /></a>More than a throwaway periodical, Monocle is a status symbol, a prop poking out of a Jack Spade carry-on, announcing to the saps in the back of the plane that you’re a member of the international aesthete class. Trendy stores like J. Crew Liquor Store and Freemans Sporting Club display it as a chic accessory. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Indeed, new inductees sometimes order the whole back catalog to show off on bookshelves, Mr. Brûlé said, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica for cool kids. (Never mind that few people ever seem to read an issue cover to cover.) </blockquote>
<blockquote>
This is one reason Mr. Brûlé has no plans for a Monocle magazine app yet: on an iPad, no one can see you reading Monocle. </blockquote>
It's not just me here then that notices a problem with this loss of broadcasting your tastes. I do think Mr Brulé, in this one very specific instance, is wrong, though. While indeed the back of a tablet will not broadcast what you are reading the way an opened magazine, even folded, does, of all mobile technology it is tablets like the iPad that broadcast what it is you are consuming the most. Tablets are still so heavy that people rest them on their laps, thus enabling shouldersurfing by bystanders. That visible front screen surface is far larger than any mobile phone, and brighter than any e-ink reader. That backlit rich color can't help but draw the gaze of everyone who can see it, <a href="http://macknik.neuralcorrelate.com/pdf/articles/troncoso_et_al_Art_and_Perception_chapter.pdf">especially if displaying angular yellow branding</a> like Monocle's. I'd say that as long as that branding is on every page, on an iPad <i>everyone</i> will see you reading Monocle. And Monocle is a print and web property already, with every web page having the bright yellow accents, so going iPad should really be not a big deal. Tablets broadcast, phones and e-ink readers don't.<br />
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We tell our friends on Facebook what we are listening to on Spotify, but that's people we already know, don't we want to tell people about our obscure band on our headphone right now in a nicer way than the annoying sound leaking out? Wouldn't checking in be more fun if everyone around you could see you just became mayor and won a prize, not just your friends on Twitter miles away? Hey, you're playing Infinity Blade too, what do you think of it? You like it a lot? Wanna grab some coffee so I can show you this secret move I found?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-42926559103371213712011-10-23T16:37:00.000+01:002011-10-23T16:38:32.635+01:00Siri Will Need To Do MoreApple releases Siri for their latest iPhone, which lets you order your phone around better than any previous voice recognitions system by having an amazing understanding of context. Of course, mobile phones are utter context machines, knowing so much about <a href="http://www.techsociotech.com/2008/11/decade-of-finding-context.html">where you are</a>, who you are, and <a href="http://www.techsociotech.com/2008/09/platform-is-there.html">how you will pay for it</a>, but Siri has an inkling of also knowing about your intent, the context of what you want to do, from one command to the next. <br />
<br />
(Incidentally, I'd really like an AIer to write a comparison of Siri, formerly a DARPA project to create a voice personal assistance by creating understanding of the world, and Cyc, a god knows what it is now project to give computer programs smarts by creating understanding of the world.)<br />
<br />
Right now the reports from the field are that, when Siri has a connection and can properly use big computers on the Internet to decode your voice, users feel like they have a whole new relationship to their iPhones, feeling empowered and in control in a whole new way, dictating messages and asking questions like they have been using computers this way all their lives. One field report actually casually used the word "hate" to describe working with the phone without Siri. But Siri is constrained, it will only work with the basic functions of an iPhone: make a call, set reminders, write a text, look things up. And we ask our phones to do so much more these days.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.nokia.com/is/image/nokia/Nokia_N9-00_cyan_Front_400x400.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://images.nokia.com/is/image/nokia/Nokia_N9-00_cyan_Front_400x400.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nokia N9 Press Shot</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Just check Helen Keegan's writings on <a href="http://technokitten.blogspot.com/2011/08/trouble-with-apps.html">The Trouble With Apps</a> to see how all the things we can do with our smartphones is breaking using them down. Or another example: I remember seeing this first press shot of the Nokia N9 and thinking, in rapid succession:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>My, that's gorgeous.</li>
<li>How the hell am I going to get what I want done with all those little icons?</li>
</ol>
Basically, we can't find how out to do what we want to do, and this is getting a worse problem on every smartphone. The apps revolution is now at the point where the current model is broken with too much choice: which app does exactly what we want instead of the other 7 that kind of do it, where do I get it, how do I find it back, how does it work?<br />
<br />
(As an aside: this is now true for almost every area of connected computing: from eBay to Amazon, it has become impossible to find what we really want, instead of just an approximation of features, unless brands or word of mouth or professional mediators help us. News requires aggregator sites of a political slant like blogs and newspapers to manage, who then get aggregated in meta-publications. Netflix spends tons of resources trying to make a better recommendation engine which ends up being tweaks on two other recommendation algorithms combined. We need better ways to let the systems know what we want and like so they can find it for us, even things we did not consider.)<br />
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Will Siri help iPhone users? It would require opening apps on an intention level, making apps be able to declare to the phone "I can do this" like "I can play Words With Friends", "I can edit a document", "I can can make a restaurant reservation", which actually requires a lot of careful thought from an app maker and can become a nuclear war between apps when they try to game the system by declaring they can do something they can only do half way. There are some really awfully unethical app makers out there. But it pretty much has to be somehow done, Siri is too much of an advantage to limit it.<br />
<br />
So now that all technology is evolving to emulate the expectations set by Star Trek, a couple of predictions:<br />
<br />
<ul><a href="http://dailyiphoneblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/apple-ipod-nano.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="121" src="http://dailyiphoneblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/apple-ipod-nano.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
<li>We need Comm Badges so we do not even need to take Siri out of our pocket to make a hands-free call. I am thinking something in the current iPod Nano form factor you just touch and hold and give a Siri command, which it then forwards over Bluetooth. People in public places are about to become a whole lot more irritating.<br /></li>
<li>If Apple makes a TV, it will have a webcam built in, and we will be able to tell our iPhones to move the faceTime video call from our iPhones to "On screen". The deeper the voice you say it with, the faster it happens, and suddenly grandma can see the whole family who were watching something, while their show is properly paused.</li>
</ul>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-51646331173554646052011-08-04T22:03:00.004+01:002011-10-23T14:51:46.004+01:00Facebook Killed Loyalty To Itself As Side-Effect Of Its Succesful Design<span class="zemanta-img separator" style="clear: right;"><a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; display: block; float: right; clear: right;"><img src="http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/resized/0000/4561/4561v1-max-450x450.png" alt="Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru..." style="font-size: 0.8em; border: medium none;" height="100" width="245" /></a><span class="zemanta-img-attribution" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; clear: both; float: right; width: 245px;">Image via <a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/">CrunchBase</a></span></span>So I am looking at <a class="zem_slink" href="http://google.com/" title="Google" rel="homepage">Google</a>+ surprisingly fast adoption rate, 25 Million or so users in the first month, which, by the way, is more people than a mid-size European country. Out of nothing. Try to picture 25 million people and you get an idea why you keep being put in circles by people you have never ever heard of.<br /><br />Of course, many of these users are early adopters so they also must have been on facebook, or are on facebook; looking at my own circles I would say there is a tremendous overlap. But I am not seeing intense angsty posts about abandoning platforms and what to use, posts I am used to seeing in blogging communities when people felt or feel they needed to switch platforms. Somehow I am not seeing a deep seated attachment to facebook, no sense of partisanship or loyalty, just people comparing merits and deciding to maintain a presence on both sites or walking away from facebook or googlepoz. Contrasting this with the heartbreak I used to see on <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.livejournal.com/" title="LiveJournal" rel="homepage">LiveJournal</a> when people announced they would now use <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.dreamwidth.org/" title="Dreamwidth" rel="homepage">Dreamwidth</a>, or <a class="zem_slink" href="http://wordpress.org/" title="WordPress" rel="homepage">Wordpress</a> or <a class="zem_slink" href="http://blogger.com/" title="Blogger" rel="homepage">Blogger</a>, I was struck by the thought that facebook's main strength is also why people have an easy time to leave it: <span style="font-style: italic;">facebook teaches you not to care about what you put on facebook.</span><br /><br /><a class="zem_slink" href="http://facebook.com/" title="Facebook" rel="homepage">Facebook</a> is very strong in getting people to create content and share it because its <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface" title="User interface" rel="wikipedia">User Interface</a> communicates to people that content should be and is fun, simple, and nothing to worry about. The entry box is small to make you stick to short quips, a lot of the content is auto-generated from the things you do, formatting is completely out of your hands and standardized so there is no sense of pride to be had there either—it's really not the computer equivalent of scrapbooking.<br /><br />Then the facebook page tells you your content has no lasting value: it just simply scrolls off the page, and there is no facility to get a historical overview of yourself. Every blogging system allows you to read your content like a book, able to pick times and events and reminisce, read back, remember, and feel you have created an archive of you. Facebook allows no such thing: you can barely go back to what you did last week, never mind take a look at how things were two years ago. Remember when you broke your leg? Your announcement of your child? When you flipped the engagement menu switch? You'd better remember it yourself, because facebook will barely, if at all, let you find it back. Even the photos, the content facebook archives for you, is put into albums that are actually not easy to manage if they get too big. Facebook basically tells you not to be too deep or thoughtful, not to get attached to what you write, and that what you upload will not be kept all that well.<br /><br />Facebook is fun and simple because your content doesn't need to be sweated over and considered and thought about as if it was meant to last, but that also makes it really easy to walk away from and abandon it once the other thing to like about facebook, your friends, have migrated too. And there's another thing: the facebook friends are a <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword" title="Sword" rel="wikipedia">double-edged sword</a> as well. Light facebook users don't have that many friends to care about and complain they get too many status notifications as it is since they are not invested in facebook anyway, while heavy facebook users, in my opinion, have a really ambiguous relationship towards their list of facebook friends: too many hangers on and I-met-you-once people have been accumulated, it's too hard to manage who sees what of what you post, and the more social you are, the more trouble it becomes to keep up. I am seeing a lot of entries about people needing to do culls. Having to spend time to manage friends is only a turn-off, and the alternative is to post less so as to not say too much to people you barely know. Therefore it can be actually very liberating to walk away and start over, better, especially in a new place populated by hardcore early-adopters like you, that makes it simple to assign people to groups, even if the assignment system is flawed on some level as I discussed in my previous post.<br /><br />I was reminded today that I once said that every social network is basically a party, and all parties end. Nobody wants a non-stop party. Facebook stayed a party, a hey hi how are you doing look at the flyer for the party next week no way she said that let me tell you another story kind of place, and never evolved into something else. It's unknown if the Circle system will let Googlepoz become something else than a wanna-be-facebook party, but I would recommend to Google, since it has the short-form content system down, now work on making Google+ a great archive as well to create that loyalty to your own content.<br /><br />Meanwhile, facebook is said to be, again, 'in lockdown', which is a self-imposed period of intense coding to create new functionality. Which means the features will not be properly user-researched and -tested, but will just be what a bunch of now slightly older twenty-somethings think will keep their website relevant while not being able to predict how heavy users of social media, of which very many are one, two, all the way up to four or five decades older than these engineers, actually really want. You know, the same process that gave us version after version of fucked up privacy controls, and the huge game changer that was facebook Places, which, oh wait, was not a game changer because nobody uses it, and was designed so badly I managed to create an abortion clinic inside my place of work and check a friend into it publicly—a feat I would now link to if facebook had made it all easy to find things back.<br /><br />I am not holding my breath, but I am easily amused.<br /><div class="zemanta-related"><h6 class="zemanta-related-title" style="font-size: 1em; margin: 1em 0pt 0pt;">Related articles</h6><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.techsociotech.com/2011/07/google-and-circles-first-critique-along.html">Google+ and Circles, A First Critique Along Google's Own Research on Social</a> (techsociotech.com)</li><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://computerbeast.wordpress.com/2011/08/04/google-%25e2%2580%2598fastest-growing%25e2%2580%2599-ever/">Google+ 'fastest-growing' ever</a> (computerbeast.wordpress.com)</li></ul></div> <div style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;" class="zemanta-pixie"><img style="border: medium none; float: right;" class="zemanta-pixie-img" alt="" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=8aa55bc5-ce1d-45c3-96f4-13e1b7a6fd7b" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-59106594266031659452011-07-03T21:33:00.006+01:002011-07-03T23:09:18.017+01:00Google+ and Circles, A First Critique Along Google's Own Research on SocialShouting to people at large with a bullhorn is actually not what we in the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience" title="User experience" rel="wikipedia">User Experience</a> community call a Humane experience; an experience that follows established comfortable human values. It is loud and intrusive and most people do not know how to actually make telling everyone everything be interesting or engaging or reflect well on them. Yet this is the main model our current social media has, and this model is why charismatic smart people end up working social media so well while most others get stuck in minutiae or end up taking all feedback as positive and thus become <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29" title="Troll (Internet)" rel="wikipedia">Internet trolls</a> or drama magnets.<br /><br />For me, the definitive text on the difference between how we as humans are comfortable structuring our social lives and what current social media imposes on us is explained in this slide set by Paul Adams about "The Real <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network" title="Social network" rel="wikipedia">Social Network</a>".<br /><br /><div style="width: 477px;" id="__ss_4656436"> <strong style="display: block; margin: 12px 0pt 4px;"><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2" title="The Real Life Social Network v2" target="_blank">The Real Life Social Network v2</a></strong> <iframe src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/4656436" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" height="510" scrolling="no" width="477"></iframe> <div style="padding: 5px 0pt 12px;"> View more <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/" target="_blank">documents</a> from <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/padday" target="_blank">Paul Adams</a> </div> </div><br /><br />The gist basically is that:<br /><ul><ol>We have multiple social spheres in our lives, and we keep them separate.</ol><br /><ol>Within those spheres we have a few people that are close to us. We share information about our other spheres more with them.</ol><br /></ul><br />The result is that we end up having multiple identities.<br /><br />Meanwhile, our current social media tools say that we either must say everything publicly, and really have only one identifier that is 'us'. <a class="zem_slink" href="http://twitter.com/" title="Twitter" rel="homepage">Twitter</a> keeps it simple with one access level: you are open or hidden except to your subscribers. Facebook allows pretty fine grained control over who can see what you share, but makes it opaque to fine tune and hard to use the filters. <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.linkedin.com/" title="LinkedIn" rel="homepage">LinkedIn</a> says they know best what about your career should be accessible to whom. Pretty much all dating sites say everything is for everyone except maybe the pictures of your genitals or face that you can unlock for the people you like. Because there is very little access control or it is hidden, legion are thus the stories of sharing the wrong things with the world.<br /><br /><a class="zem_slink" href="http://google.com/" title="Google" rel="homepage">Google</a> has just unveiled not only a lovely visual re-design, but their social layer on all their properties, Google+ (which one of my gay male friends immediately christened 'googlepoz' since it looks so much like the term '<a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV" title="HIV" rel="wikipedia">HIV+</a>' that in those circles gets abbreviated verbally to 'poz', and now I feel like I just explained a joke). Google+ tries to take the slideset above to heart and make a social newsfeed that respects the spheres of influence. Google calls those 'Circles' and they are basically groups of people. Google+ also exposes these circles right as you create status updates and posts and post media, thus making sending the right update to the right people a primary feature. No longer will your school pupils see your pictures of your male stripper nights -- or at least you can prevent this pretty easy if you assign your followers to the right groups well.<br /><br />However, Googlepoz does ignore the second dimension from the slideset: even within your spheres you are closer to some people than others. If you just order your friends and followers into groups that go along the spheres of your life, you are still treating everyone inside those equally. It's like shouting at just your school instead of the world. Google+ default Circles does suggest that you should order your Circles by how close they are to you -- Family, Friends, Acquaintances -- but that still makes all Friends the same. You could split up your Circles, and make, for example, a Circle for Work and for Work Friends and for Close Work Friends, but this gets really difficult to keep track of after a while.<br /><br />The third dimension Google+ ignores is that you actually have different identities to different people down to names and avatars. You can set which Circles can see which parts of your profile, but if you really have a public persona (I am a politician / captain of industry / social worker) that you like to keep separate from a more select group (I am in poly-amorous relationships / a needle-sharing counselor / a nudist) you really have to go the old route of having multiple accounts.<br /><br />Still, in social media the User Interface is everything: people in general will not hunt deep for options, what is surfaced and visible is what will gets used. If you have a very sophisticated system of <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_control" title="Access control" rel="wikipedia">access controls</a>, but bury it one layer deep, you might as well not have it. The masses, and we talk about social websites we are indeed talking massive amounts of people, simply have no time for options and deep controls. With Circles so front and center in this experience, Google has taken a compelling step to making a social media work more like humans do.<br /><br />I still would like a couple of changes, though:<br /><ul><li>It needs a re-design to use less space. My Circles are filling up fast with a mixture of my Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Usenet (!) and everything else contacts, so the news stream and comments is getting big. Right now it simply is not using the page economically.</li><br /><br /><li>I should be able to designate which Circles are more important to me, and their updates should be more prominent. Perhaps by default an update should only show it's first 140 characters -- that has proven to work really well -- and in a dark gray font color. If it is an update from someone in a Circle I deem important, the update should show more of itself, and perhaps in a font color closer to black to be more prominent.</li><br /><br /><li>There is a problem with Circles being two-way: by putting someone in a Circle you are both allowing them access as well as subscribing to their news. <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.livejournal.com/" title="LiveJournal" rel="homepage">LiveJournal</a> has years of showing this is not an optimal model: just because someone asked to read something non-public of yours doesn't mean you want to see their updates. Still, splitting those things up in 'followers' and 'who you follow' like Dreamwidth does is a pain.</li><br /><br /><li>I would like to see Google allowing websites to use the Places and Circles as ways to enable whole separate social media networks complete with branding and colors and controls, sort of like Ning but more sophisitcated, allowing users and network creators control over how much of their new social network spills back into the general Googlepoz experience. Basically, let us use your networks to make our clubhouses of varying degrees of exclusivity.</li><br /></ul><br />Other than that, this effort pushes the features of social media further. Let's see how it plays out. <div style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;" class="zemanta-pixie"><img style="border: medium none; float: right;" class="zemanta-pixie-img" alt="" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=ab654fb0-7add-4f1d-a69b-e256ad726340" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-15155632361656531842011-06-12T20:40:00.003+01:002011-06-13T08:43:45.822+01:00You Know, Backing Up Texts In The iCloud Still Is A Horrible Idea<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://exonome.com/tst/pics/icloud_backs_up_your.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 378px; height: 538px;" src="http://exonome.com/tst/pics/icloud_backs_up_your.png" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><p>Go through your Inbox on your mobile phone. The one where all your texts are stored. Yes, go ahead, seriously, look at what is stored there. Now picture someone going through it, seeing your work texts, your mishandled manhandled and deftly handled friendships, relationships, work and personal. Imagine them being read by a journalist, a spook in an agency. Oh, you think, they wouldn't care? Fine, imagine your colleague reading them all, gripped by curiosity, or your spouse who typed in the password because surely there wouldn't be anything there but a hint of what you wanted for your birthday, your eldest child bored at home, your manager doing a little background check of course, your professional enemy, your lover, or your lover who didn't know about the lover and the wife.</p><p>And every file you made. Every picture you ever too with your phone, even <em>those</em> bored-on-the-couch-alone ones, if you didn't immedaitely delete them. Our personal devices are, well, enormously personal, we play with them idly, we experiment, we compose and send absentmindedly or in the heat in the moment, we keep and discard -- except we do not discard that well. Seriously, go through your phone, your camera, your inbox. See what is in there.</p><p>Over here in Britain, a tabloid called News of The World either spoofed <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID" title="Caller ID" rel="wikipedia">Caller ID</a> or tried easy passwords or the default system password <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/may/20/phone-hacking-investigation-practice">to get to the voice mail</a> of celebrities and politcal figures. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jun/08/phone-hacking-kate-middleton-tony-blair?INTCMP=SRCH">The exact extent of the scandal is not known</a>; NotW has never really come clean and the official investigation for some reason or another never seems to really get to the bottom of anything, but it seems to be reaching so far that if <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/07/phone-hacking-news-of-the-world-sienna-miller?intcmp=239">your voice mails were not accessed</a> you have cause to fire your publicist for not getting you on the D-list.</p><p>But that's celebrities. That's not you. Or is it? If it was so extraordinarily easy, it shouldn't be so hard to get to your voice mails too, Caller ID is actually not that hard to spoof and you probably never actually set a password. But voice mails are actually not that interesting, after all, those are things <em>other</em> people leave on your phone, not things you make. How could anyone get to all your data?</p><p>Well, if you have an iPhone, <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.apple.com/" title="Apple" rel="homepage">Apple</a> will store it for you. Check <a href="http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/apps-books-documents-backup.html">this page where it describes its new product, iCloud</a>. It will back up your apps, your books, your documents, and oh yeah, pretty much your camera roll and Inbox on your iPhone, so it can be restored in case of accident. Apple has not disclosed anything about what level of encryption will be used on their servers, whether you can opt out of having certain forms of data backed up or whether it is all or nothing, how long this data will be stored, and under what jurisdiction your personal data on your phone and iPad and laptop will be located, and what it would take for law enforcement from which country to be given access to it. And remember, US companies have different track records about standing up to searches: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/technology/20google.html">Google strenuously defends its data</a> until it gets a legal request that has the full strength of the law, and the telecom operators basically allowed the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency" title="National Security Agency" rel="wikipedia">NSA</a> to <a href="http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying">wiretap their networks with full co-operation</a> even though that was blatantly against the law until Congress retro-actively gave them immunity once it all got found out. What side will Apple fall on? I do not know but if I was the NSA I would <em>love</em> to have a back door into that repository of everyone's personal information, especially if Apple's US servers is where all iPhone data from everywhere resides..<br /></p><p>No, seriously, look around you. Think of all your friends with <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.apple.com/iphone" title="iPhone" rel="homepage">iPhones</a>. How many do you know? What kind of jobs do they have, what kinds of friends and apps, what do they text about? Their data is going to be offloaded to the cloud. Google is already doing that with Android, although I am unsure whether the Inbox currently is being stored too, but if it isn't, it will, and all other smartphone ecosystems will feel compelled to follow suit and start storing everything, each with their own terms and conditions and locations and security practices. I have written about this before <a href="http://www.techsociotech.com/2009/03/your-texts-could-be-out-there.html">when Skydeck came along</a>, but this issue of your most private conversations stored forever in the cloud just got a lot bigger.<br /></p><p>Who knew Sony didn't know how to store passwords? They have had <a href="http://hassonybeenhackedthisweek.com/">breach after breach after breach of their networked systems</a>, and it turns out on many, if not all of them, they were <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/03/sony-network-hackers-lulzec">storing user passwords, and other data like addresses and credit card numbers, unencrypted</a>, ready to be copied and distributed and examined by everyone. I am sure if three months ago you had asked how they stored their data they would have answered it was stored so securely they couldn't tell you how. Turns out it was basically stored as clear as possible. <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20025558-245.html">Same with the Gawker network</a>. In fact, those two breaches allowed for a little cross-site analysis, and it turns out that <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/08/password_re_use_survey/"> two thirds of the people who had an account on both systems re-used their passwords.</a> Which means they probably re-used it on many, many more every systems, if not every. Someone should try to use those shared login and password credentials to see if they also give access to Apple accounts.</p><p>Because that is how the data from your iPhone, or Android phone, or other smartphones soon, ends up accessed once it is 'safely' being stored on the Internet. No matter how it is stored and encrypted on those servers in the data centers, all it will take is the account ID, which is usually an email address, and the password. And because <a href="http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/gawker-end-passwords.html">we all have so many places to log in, we re-use passwords</a>, so often the system is basically broken. We write passwords down on notes our colleagues can see when the walk by, we share them over the phone when we need help from a friend to check something, we type them into websites for a prize that could be being run by god knows who, or as shown, hacked by other people. Apple could have perfect secrecy, but you re-use your Apple password on one other site that gets hacked and suddenly everyone can get to the data from your phone stored on the server.<br /></p><p>The <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_ID" title="Apple ID" rel="wikipedia">Apple ID</a> used to just allow access to someone's purchase history, a stored credit card to buy a song or two with, transaction easily reversed if done maliciously. Information breeches cannot be reversed, and the moment iCloud starts backing up that phone, that Apple ID is access to your personal life. Very personal life. Credit cards can be cancelled, transactions reversed, but your boss wanting to fire you entering your password you use for the department web-server into Apple's webservers to see your texts, hackers running the haul from one database breach through iCloud's servers to distribute all the stored photos on Usenet, no, that cannot be cancelled, not be undone. And there are some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Fortuny">mean people out there who love to expose private lives </a>for the <a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lulz">lulz</a>.<br /></p><p>The <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Hiptop" title="Danger Hiptop" rel="wikipedia">Danger Hiptop</a> phones in the US also stored everything in the cloud before it was called that, and some celebrities had their hacked. Not such a big deal, unless you were <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/21/paris_hacked/">that humiliated celebrity</a> or actually hadn't asked your publicist to make that happen for a little more publicity, but we already know this is how stuff happens. Now this is being switched on by a company that owns the phone for a lot of interesting people. A single breach of your data by someone who finds your password is bad for you, but a huge breach a la Sony would be disastrous for Apple, and finding out in a few years Apple gave access to all their data to a security agency would be at the same time almost unimaginable and actually, well, have a precedent in the telecoms world. So all I can say is what Genius Mike already said about this</p><br /><!-- http://twitter.com/#!/jpnw/status/78969490758582272 --> <style type="text/css">.bbpBox78969490758582272 {background:url(http://a0.twimg.com/images/themes/theme1/bg.png) #C0DEED;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}</style> <div class="bbpBox78969490758582272"><p class="bbpTweet">Quote me on this: Apple has cut themselves a length of rope sufficient to kill a trillion-$ company. A total iCloud compromise ends them.<span class="timestamp"><a title="Thu Jun 09 23:39:28 +0000 2011" href="http://twitter.com/#%21/jpnw/status/78969490758582272">less than a minute ago</a> via <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/twitter/id409789998?mt=12" rel="nofollow">Twitter for Mac</a> <a href="http://twitter.com/intent/favorite?tweet_id=78969490758582272"><img src="http://si0.twimg.com/images/dev/cms/intents/icons/favorite.png" /> Favorite</a> <a href="http://twitter.com/intent/retweet?tweet_id=78969490758582272"><img src="http://si0.twimg.com/images/dev/cms/intents/icons/retweet.png" /> Retweet</a> <a href="http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?in_reply_to=78969490758582272"><img src="http://si0.twimg.com/images/dev/cms/intents/icons/reply.png" /> Reply</a></span><span class="metadata"><span class="author"><a href="http://twitter.com/jpnw"><img src="http://a0.twimg.com/sticky/default_profile_images/default_profile_1_normal.png" /></a><strong><a href="http://twitter.com/jpnw">Jay Parser</a></strong><br />jpnw</span></span></p></div> <!-- end of tweet --><br /><br /><div style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;" class="zemanta-pixie"><img style="border: medium none; float: right;" class="zemanta-pixie-img" alt="" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=073d5786-22e2-4da5-bffe-267d6da678ce" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-80083353763791135042011-05-02T15:44:00.008+01:002011-05-02T16:56:04.582+01:00Revisiting 300 DPI<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://exonome.com/tst/pics/300dpi_on_iPod.medium.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 480px; height: 640px;" src="http://exonome.com/tst/pics/300dpi_on_iPod.medium.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />In 2008, I wrote about how 300 dpi and higher displays <a href="http://www.techsociotech.com/2008/11/300-dpi.html">would enable new forms of reporting data by approaching the fidelity of ink on paper</a> -- well, inkjet ink sprayed badly on paper. I even made a test paper design of medical data in some older and newer formats.<br /><br />Well, we did get our mass-market handheld device of even more than 300 dpi, the iPhone and iPod Touch 4G. So I thought it was time to revisit the question. I used the same PDF file and displayed it on my iPod Touch to see how it felt, and compared it to my computer screen.<br /><br />As I wrote before, the biggest advantage is being able to simple hold the device closer to the eye than is comfortable with a big laptop or desktop. But besides that, the graphs are comfortable to read. I'd want to tweak them graphically a bit more to make the data more prominent than the grids it is in, but what I am getting is that it becomes easier than ever to create overviews of larger volumes of data than has been usual on computer screens, while still allowing drilling down or showing in different formats, which paper does not.<br /><div style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;" class="zemanta-pixie"><img style="border: medium none; float: right;" class="zemanta-pixie-img" alt="" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=5a47f18c-a36c-4358-a828-88fe60f7d23d" /><span class="zem-script more-related pretty-attribution"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.zemanta.com/readside/loader.js" defer="defer"></script></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-87681546130101452842011-02-21T21:07:00.003+00:002011-02-21T21:29:44.830+00:00Save What?From my twitter feed:<br /><br /><!-- http://twitter.com/fj/status/39783655127646208 --> <style type="text/css">.bbpBox39783655127646210 {background:url(http://a3.twimg.com/a/1297446951/images/themes/theme1/bg.png) #FFFFFF;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}</style> <div class="bbpBox39783655127646210"><p class="bbpTweet">2011 and <a class="zem_slink" href="http://code.google.com/android/" title="Android" rel="homepage">Android Honeycomb</a> is using a <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk" title="Floppy disk" rel="wikipedia">FLOPPY DISK</a> as an icon. <a href="http://bit.ly/gPF6IM" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/gPF6IM</a> Like anyone knows what they are. (thx @<a class="tweet-url username" href="http://twitter.com/jpnw" rel="nofollow">jpnw</a>)<span class="timestamp"><a title="Mon Feb 21 20:28:57 +0000 2011" href="http://twitter.com/fj/status/39783655127646208">less than a minute ago</a> via <a href="http://twitter.com/" rel="nofollow">Tweetie for Mac</a></span><span class="metadata"><span class="author"><a href="http://twitter.com/fj"><img src="http://a3.twimg.com/profile_images/1197069376/IMG_3517_normal.jpg" /></a><strong><a href="http://twitter.com/fj">FJ!! van Wingerde</a></strong><br />fj</span></span></p></div> <!-- end of tweet --><br /><br />The image? An action bar that appears at the top of Honeycomb, the latest version of Android for tablets:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/Google/Honeycomb/actionbar.png"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 513px; height: 37px;" src="http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/Google/Honeycomb/actionbar.png" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />No, seriously, first of all this mobile device seems to still have the concept of saving -- a concept that continues to trip up so many people in the course of using their computers -- and then visualizes it with the stylized version of an object that nobody uses anymore.<br /><br />This is just simply embarrassing. These devices are hugely successful with large segments of the population that traditionally do not spend a lot of money on technology exactly because they are very much not like classic computers, and do not have classic computer concepts and constructs that require a lot of learning and thought. (What is memory? What is a <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive" title="Hard disk drive" rel="wikipedia">hard disk</a>? What is the difference? Why do we even have to care?) These concepts need to stay away, and certainly not be brought back with icons from yesteryear.<br /><br />Google is sending a clear message: our tablets are still for computer <strike>geeks</strike>afficionados. We will not do the hard work of competing with the simplicity of <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.apple.com/" title="Apple" rel="homepage">Apple's</a> <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/" title="iPad" rel="homepage">iPad</a>.<br /><br />This was brought to my attention by Genius Mike, who pointed out all other kinds of constructs that seemed overly complicated or just wasteful, but I am leaving it at this. This floppy tells me all I need to know about the internal process of making Honeycomb.<br /><br /><br /><br /> <div style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;" class="zemanta-pixie"><img style="border: medium none; float: right;" class="zemanta-pixie-img" alt="" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=0025252f-7943-4a86-b3e7-10627bead812" /><span class="zem-script more-related pretty-attribution"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.zemanta.com/readside/loader.js" defer="defer"></script></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-53382422550804293452011-02-09T19:01:00.004+00:002011-02-09T20:22:09.098+00:00HP Slams It Out Of The Park<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/2079i313B69B859666C31/image-size/original?v=mpbl-1&px=-1"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 349px; height: 310px;" src="http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/2079i313B69B859666C31/image-size/original?v=mpbl-1&px=-1" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />For my current gig at Vodafone, at one point I had 5 or so smartphones on my desk: an <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.apple.com/iphone" title="iPhone" rel="homepage">iPhone</a>, an <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.htc.com/" title="HTC" rel="homepage">HTC</a> running Android, a <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N8" title="Nokia N8" rel="wikipedia">Nokia N8</a> with Symbian, a Vodafone H1 (for reals), and a <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Pre" title="Palm Pre" rel="wikipedia">Palm Pre</a> with <a class="zem_slink" href="http://developer.palm.com/" title="WebOS" rel="homepage">WebOS</a>. Of all devices I tested, the most beautiful experience software-wise was the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/index.html" title="Palm Pre" rel="homepage">Palm</a> with WebOS. Every pixel was crafted to create this really smooth and lush experience. The standard system felt as visually polished and smooth as the best-in-class <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.apple.com/" title="Apple" rel="homepage">iPad</a> apps. Pity the hardware felt so cheap.<br /><br />I was researching synchronization and back-up from a mobile experience perspective, especially contacts, and what I saw was that synchronizing and importing contacts and calendar entries from the cloud to the device, maybe even including contacts from social networks, seemed really difficult. All systems would double contacts, poison them with categorized or outdated information during the round-trip to the web, and sometimes completely get lost when including contacts from social networks like Facebook or Twitter, and leaving the user in the dark what came from where, and how to fix an issue.<br /><br />Except for one address book. The Synergy system on the PalmPre. It used very simple cues to show you a contact came from multiple locations, and made it simple to undo a merger or delete broken information. It understood not every Twitter contact was as important as the entries in your original phonebook with full information. It was beautiful to look at and use. But Palm couldn't make the phone a hit, running it on a slow processor, doing terrible advertising for it, and not being able to get it cheaply enough in carrier's hands to sell at a good price point.<br /><br />Palm got bought by <a class="zem_slink" href="http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.413579,-122.14508&spn=0.01,0.01&q=37.413579,-122.14508%20%28Hewlett-Packard%29&t=h" title="Hewlett-Packard" rel="geolocation">HP</a>, and HP saw a lot of potential. First results of the collaboration are being shown off today, and they are delicious. A mini smartphone with a keyboard that gives you all this beauty with portability. An updated Palm Pre with serious horsepower and global cell technologies. And a beautiful tablet that actually integrates with your phone creating a connected ecology: if you get a text message on your phone while working on your pad, you can read and answer it right on the big screen. When you pull up a web page on the big screen, you can transfer it for viewing on your small phone by just tapping the phone to the pad. First they got synchronization right, now they get connection right too.<br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tCAxhoZzdZM?rel=0" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" width="640"></iframe><br /><br />Qualcomm is providing the chipset and promising long battery life, and the system is handling gaming and complex websites just fine. HP is launching with music and magazine content providers, including an Amazon Kindle client ready to go to buy and read books from their store.<br /><br />I want one now.<div class="zemanta-related"><h6 class="zemanta-related-title" style="font-size: 1em; margin: 1em 0pt 0pt;">Related articles</h6><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/09/hp-palm-webos-tablet/">HP's new WebOS hardware leaked: Veer, Pre 3, TouchPad tablet</a> (venturebeat.com)</li><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/02/webos-hp-palm-developers/">Why WebOS Hasn't Lived Up to Its Potential - Yet</a> (wired.com)</li></ul></div> <div style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;" class="zemanta-pixie"><img style="border: medium none; float: right;" class="zemanta-pixie-img" alt="" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=f3937ee7-c364-435f-94e4-b2742a9b63b4" /><span class="zem-script more-related pretty-attribution"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.zemanta.com/readside/loader.js" defer="defer"></script></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-72457510862037923442010-12-28T08:27:00.008+00:002010-12-30T23:47:20.513+00:00Start The New YearNew Year's Eve is upon us and with it comes renewal. After years and years of social media on the Internet, we all have accounts on many spaces, and I am getting the vibe that getting rid of that cruft is part of renewal too. People are telling me about "friends" they want to chuck off their facebook page for only contributing white noise, blogs they want to close, accounts and services they want out of their lives.<br /><br />Especially the diarists seem to be quitting. Not the people with blogs about a specific subject that have created a following over time, but the ones chronicling their lives, the regular family newsletters, that often live in extensive blog networks like <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.livejournal.com/" title="LiveJournal" rel="homepage">LiveJournal</a>. Turns out <a class="zem_slink" href="http://facebook.com/" title="Facebook" rel="homepage">Facebook</a> with its short blips and easy upload of multi-media content is filling the gap just fine, and less censorship due to Harry Potter fanfic or sales to shady Russian outfits. It's just easier to commit a short update to a one-line text box than to face the large entry field crying for a multi-line piece of writing most blogs use.<br /><br />I myself have the rule that for every new account I must close an old one, and coming up is last.fm. After years of connecting it with almost every way I listen to music (iTunes, <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.spotify.com/" title="Spotify" rel="homepage">Spotify</a>, my iPods) and thus having built up years of recommendations and a taste profile on that site, it still doesn't give me any useful recommendations except a bucket load of "similar artists" to the last 5 I listened to. Except I do not select my music primarily on artist, because 80% of everything is garbage, including the catalog of most groups, conceived as they were as album fillers to go with the two hit singles. So telling me I need to explore 80% based on liking 20% just doesn't work. And why just focus on similar artists since every modern product is a combination of artist, composer, producer, and remixer? I vastly prefer Pandora that tries to recommend by finding similar songs, not artists or groups. Alas you can't get that in the UK.<br /><br />So with last.fm simply not giving me use, it has to go. I need the mental space for whatever will replace facebook. Because since every Web property lives and dies, we can be sure something will.<br /><br />You closing out anything?<br /><div style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;" class="zemanta-pixie"><img style="border: medium none; float: right;" class="zemanta-pixie-img" alt="" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=2e66252c-5542-4a5a-a177-5b3052b0e97a" /><span class="zem-script more-related pretty-attribution"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.zemanta.com/readside/loader.js" defer="defer"></script></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-11508687865070766052010-12-13T21:24:00.004+00:002010-12-13T22:34:54.818+00:00Convergence Diverging: A Micro Trend<span class="zemanta-img separator" style="clear: right;"><a href="http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nokia_N95_8GB.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; display: block; float: right; clear: right;"><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Nokia_N95_8GB.JPG/300px-Nokia_N95_8GB.JPG" alt="Nokia N95 8GB" style="font-size: 0.8em; border: medium none;" height="225" width="300" /></a><span class="zemanta-img-attribution" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; clear: both; float: right; width: 300px;">Nokia 95. Image via <a href="http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nokia_N95_8GB.JPG">Wikipedia</a><br /></span></span>I have now heard it often enough I am considering it a trend, albeit a minor one: technologists, mobilists, smartphone carrying aficionados who proudly showed off and used their devices for making and publishing media, playing music, browsing the web, and now using a ton of applications, saying they just want a small cheap no-frills phone. The biggest Apple fan I know at work -- seriously, every morning when gets at his desk he unpacks about £2700 of Apple gear -- recently asked me where in the UK to get a phone that was so simple it didn't even have a color screen but made fabulous calls. Or these people want to go back to a generation behind the current smartphones, or stay there if they still have the old device. Especially the Nokia N95 has staying power.<br /><br />The camera and the phone were really the first to merge, and they did pretty good, albeit with very low expectations of what the pictures would be like. The music player was not the most popular merge for quite some time, until the iPhone with its large touchscreen somehow made it happen. And then the apps revolution came and every manufacturer jumps into the market with a slab, usually as big as possible, sometimes with a qwerty slide-out keyboard, to get that mini-computer feel.<br /><br />Just one problem with it: as more got added, the phone part got really, well, crappy. Dialing becomes an exercise of pressing fingers on unforgiving glass if you can even find the dialer amidst all the icons, the ear speaker hole is nowhere to be found because the bezel has to be small, I can't find the microphone on most of them, taking a call requires slipping and sliding over the screen while already juggling pulling the device out of a pocket or purse, hanging up is not satisfying -- especially since the batteries happily too often end the call for us by having talk times measured in too few hours and stand-by times measured in a single day, instead of the days and weeks we were used to. Making a call is just not a nice experience any more on these slabs, and us tech adopters have now had these smartphones with us long enough we are tired of mishandling calls at work for the sake of being able to pass time launching birds at pigs living in terribly dysfunctional architecture.<br /><div style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;" class="zemanta-pixie"><img style="border: medium none; float: right;" class="zemanta-pixie-img" alt="" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=5673044c-edae-4870-8198-56bc48e39d67" /><span class="zem-script more-related pretty-attribution"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.zemanta.com/readside/loader.js" defer="defer"></script></span></div>Nope, I am using a dedicated point-and-shoot Leica as a camera now, after years of shoot-and-upload camphone experiments of which the resulkts just always seemed so drab once they were on the web. And others are, as said, decoupling their phones from their application pads, or music players from their phones. Because in the end, some of us really need to make good calls, not just texts and leave voicemail.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-57565972830386732662010-11-02T20:00:00.006+00:002010-11-02T20:52:58.718+00:00The iPad Is Killing IE6 YAY!<span class="zemanta-img separator" style="clear: right;"><a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/product/ipad" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; display: block; float: right; clear: right;"><img src="http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/resized/0007/4404/74404v30-max-250x250.png" alt="Image representing iPad as depicted in CrunchBase" style="font-size: 0.8em; border: medium none;" height="154" width="250" /></a><span class="zemanta-img-attribution" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; clear: both; float: right; width: 250px;">Image via <a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/">CrunchBase</a></span></span>Over on <a href="http://minimsft.blogspot.com/">the Mini-Microsoft blog</a>, a blog that looks at <a class="zem_slink" href="http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=47.6395972222,-122.12845&spn=1.0,1.0&q=47.6395972222,-122.12845%20%28Microsoft%29&t=h" title="Microsoft" rel="geolocation">Microsoft</a> from a critical insider's perspective, a lively debate sprung up about the position of <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/" title="iPad" rel="homepage">the iPad</a> in business computing. All signs point to the iPad tablet having achieved a wholly unique position in the mass-market computer experience: a computing device that is not seen as a computer and doesn't have all the baggage associated with computers. Consequently, the mass-market is flocking to it, feeling supremely comfortable using it. The comment discussion wondered whether the iPad has or is making inroads in the enterprise or not. Is the iPad just a home toy? Can it be used for serious business? And how will it change business if it does make inroads?<br /><br />There's an <a href="http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2010/10/microsoft-fy11q1-results.html?showComment=1288420027368#c131328838108891143">anonymous comment there</a> about this subject, brought to my attention by Genius Mike, that I would like to highlight:<br /><blockquote>Ex-Microsoft now drone in Corporate America here.<br /><br />My team is doing mobile computing planning for our mid-sized org. The users from GM levels to line worker levels are saying things like:<br /><br />1. We want ipad because labor's very competitive in this town and if we give them a tool to use that they won't like they'll just go to another company. It's not the 80's or early 90's any longer.<br /><br />2. We want snazzy visuals on the screens. (Uh oh, now we need design geeks on staff in addition to database coders.)<br /><br />3. We want the app to be pick-list driven as much as possible, scroll through the options the way you scroll on an ipod Touch. Using the keyboard or writing anything is last resort for many users toward the very top (dashboards, summary views, zoom in for detail) or very bottom (the guy in the warehouse pressing a button to send an email to a distributor that an item is in stock) of the org chart. It's the middle managers who want and need full laptops with keyboards.<br /><br />4. We want fast graphics because it annoys our users to wait. They're used to ipod and iphone graphics speeds now, and won't accept less. See point 1 as to why we care about pleasing our users.<br /><br />5. We don't want something that takes 5 minutes to boot. They think of iphones and ipods as computers, and know that the ipad is pretty much on from the word go, and see anything less as also-ran technology.<br /><br />And maybe most interesting:<br /><br />6. Why are we still term serving into old client/server apps when we're using them remotely? If our supplier isn't keeping up with the times (translation: supplying a web version with all functionality of the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_client" title="Fat client" rel="wikipedia">fat client</a> version, so that RDP is no longer required), maybe we need to evaluate alternatives.<br /><br />The ipad UI seems to be yanking managers who didn't care about ancient business app UI's designed around Win95, into the 21st century. Suddenly nasty old VB Access form type UI's, with non-intuitive click sequence behavior in places due to poor programming by low-level drones or toolkit bugs, that are found all over corporate America are being seen as a problem, at least at our organization.<br /><br />And what they're saying is that a modern UI is a feature, and that if their supplier can't meet their UI bar, it's time to at least look at other suppliers to see if they can.<br /><br />This could put pressure on vertical market MS partners to consider UI rewrites, and perhaps the rewrite would have the goal of targeting multiple web devices rather than just Windows fat clients.</blockquote>My first reaction was "Yay! Death of SAP!" -- and if you have ever had to use SAP inside of a large enterprise you'd agree with me -- but I am hearing SAP is actually making tools to access their back-ends through web-pages as well. I bet those pages will still emulate the usability flows from hell SAP is so famous for, so all we get out of this is now being able to have the famous SAP rage be delivered by iPad as well. (I guess allowing corporate users to use SAP systems on iPads might be huge liability, because in contrast to a desktop computer, the bar to flinging an iPad across the room in utter frustration that you are wasting your life away voluntarily becoming hostage to people who are forcing you to use this mess, really is way lower.)<br /><br />But seriously, iPads gaining this kind of enterprise traction could be great news for remote-desktop companies like <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.citrix.com/" title="Citrix Systems" rel="homepage">Citrix</a> who would let users access the Windows fat clients on iPads, but Citrix should be warned that there is a time-limit on this method, as the users mentioned above will want eventually to use these fat clients, whether dashboards for the upper echelons or ordering and manufacturing control systems for the shop-floor, with pages and applications that work natively on the iPad. One brilliant thing about using a Citrix remote viewer, though, is that no information is stored on the iPad, so losing the iPad isn't half the nightmare losing a laptop is.<br /><br />But there is a wonderful implication to these business applications being re-engineered. Yes, the Win95 VisualBasic apps being tossed is already long overdue, but the first wave of web-based systems needs to be tossed too. Desperately. These web systems were made during the heyday of Microsoft owning the web, at home and at work, and the developers of these early web systems were often seduced into using Microsoft-only web technologies like <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActiveX" title="ActiveX" rel="wikipedia">ActiveX</a>. These were tied to <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/default.mspx" title="Internet Explorer 6" rel="homepage">Internet Explorer 6</a>, and this led to IE6 being mandatory on corporate desktops, and staying that way. Even as the Internet moved on and realized that IE6 was incredibly buggy in how it showed the web and so badly coded it was terribly insecure and allowed all kinds of viruses and trojans to be delivered to the user's computer, it had to remain on many corporate desktop because whole internal infrastructures were built on it.<br /><br />Not anymore. If the iPad is so compelling the directors want to use it for business, and systems made for it are so reliable or error-proof it makes sense to invest in them to deploy on the workfloor, all these old internal systems will be fazed out, slowly, but surely. And finally I can stop wondering on projects whether I should test on IE6 for that one group of users stuck inside an enormous company still chugging away on IE6...<div class="zemanta-related"><h6 class="zemanta-related-title" style="font-size: 1em; margin: 1em 0pt 0pt;">Related articles</h6><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20101006005666/en/Citrix-Receiver-Release-%25E2%2580%259CPower-Yes%25E2%2580%259D-Millions-Devices">New Citrix Receiver Release Gives IT the "Power to Say Yes" to Millions of New Devices - and a New Generation of Apps</a> (eon.businesswire.com)</li></ul></div> <div style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;" class="zemanta-pixie"><img style="border: medium none; float: right;" class="zemanta-pixie-img" alt="" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=f27333e1-2517-402a-b444-2196dd24bbf7" /><span class="zem-script more-related pretty-attribution"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.zemanta.com/readside/loader.js" defer="defer"></script></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2888391890250455377.post-59099956021161461642010-09-16T09:59:00.005+01:002010-09-16T11:09:38.965+01:00No, Series 40 Actually Really Is The FutureSo many other things I wanted to post, but I just wanted to react to John Gruber's article on <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/nokia_next">What Is Next For Nokia</a>, now that they have a new pure-software CEO. In it, Mr Gruber outlines why <a class="zem_slink" href="http://nokia.com/" title="Nokia" rel="homepage">Nokia</a>'s current phone <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system" title="Operating system" rel="wikipedia">operating systems</a> will not do, and what the alternatives are.<br /><br />He forgot one OS, though. One that works really well and Nokia has been engineering for a long time: <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40" title="Series 40" rel="wikipedia">Series 40</a>, the bread & butter "low end" Nokia phone environment, that has amazing stand-by and talk time and uses its resources conservatively.<br /><br />But wait, weren't we talking about <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone" title="Smartphone" rel="wikipedia">smartphones</a> here? Yes we were, but you can innovate simple systems <span style="font-style: italic;">up</span> to be very powerful, and Nokia does keep innovating Series 40. Yes it started as a two-softkeys-and-a-rocker shell for black & white phones, but it just keeps going and going. You can make applications for it using J2ME and sell them with the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovi_%28Nokia%29" title="Ovi (Nokia)" rel="wikipedia">Ovi</a> store. It has a fine browser for simple sites, that can be expanded and made better. Nokia has shown all kinds of features that talk to the hardware can be added to it, like FM radio. And recently, Nokia pushed it even further: it added a <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen" title="Touchscreen" rel="wikipedia">touch screen</a> and called it Touch & Type.<br /><br />And<a href="http://events.nokia.com/touchandtype/home.htm"> it just works</a>. And is ridiculously cheap compared to an <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.iphone.com/" title="iPhone" rel="homepage">iPhone</a>.<br /><br /><object height="385" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wM_5ayq3124?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wM_5ayq3124?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="640"></embed></object><br /><br />Notice something about this beauty? It has <span style="font-style: italic;">fewer</span> keys than a standard mobile "dumbphone". Touch & Type manages to actually <span style="font-style: italic;">simplify</span> a standard <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone" title="Mobile phone" rel="wikipedia">mobile phone</a> by adding the most natural gesture of bypassing softkeys and rockers and just hitting the screen. And word from my sources at Nokia World is that of all the new devices, this one was just simply pleasant. This is a smartphone for people who are comfortable with phones, whose love is for phones, not computers, and will recoil from <a class="zem_slink" href="http://code.google.com/android/" title="Android" rel="homepage">Android</a> screaming about what kind of geekery this shit is.<br /><br />Nokia can innovate from the bottom up. Smartphones are about taking computers and smashing them into a handheld form factor as best we can, but Nokia's strength is making phones. Nokia started losing its way when it though it had to make "pocket multi-media computers", but it has the promise to come back using its core strength and make amazing phones that end up smarter and nicer and simpler and and cheaper and having longer staying power and thus a larger global footprint than anything else.<br /><br />In my last post I wrote about that using somewhat dismissive language of retreat, but after looking at Nokia's options and at what Series 40 can do, I am actually thinking it could be a triumph of re-focusing.<br /><div style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;" class="zemanta-pixie"><img style="border: medium none; float: right;" class="zemanta-pixie-img" alt="" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=7a34edc7-dc84-4d82-b4bc-5ea59e652fd5" /><span class="zem-script more-related pretty-attribution"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.zemanta.com/readside/loader.js" defer="defer"></script></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13755107029184110061noreply@blogger.com