Friday, May 30, 2008
Broke my computer
My work macbook has perished. Not worth going into details, but the drive failed. I have decent backup, so most files will be saved, but I am guessing not all my prefs are saved, so I may no longer have your IM name, and so on.
Feel free to bug me if you already have my work email or IM address, so I can capture yours.
If I wasn't so frustrated with the actual work of getting this back I'd complain about:
- How hard apple makes it to get warranty service
- How hard it is to back up easily
- Why SMART is not included with OSs
- Why Adium punishes you for network problems
And I had this thought the other day about drivers. Why do I need to have drivers for my USB aircard? Why not build it as a bridge? So it looks like a USB modem, or ethernet network, and once configured (get to it thru a file or web page) it just connects. Works on anything then. Too easy, I suppose.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Form and style, when driving
Most of the time, when I am driving behind a vehicle with a large overhang – lumber sticking out, a crane, or today the backhoe end of a construction tractor, I find it hard to keep a safe distance.
It feels better to tighten up the space, so the inter-character counter-form is a clean, consumable shape, instead of this gaping void. Someday, this will presumably kill me.
It feels better to tighten up the space, so the inter-character counter-form is a clean, consumable shape, instead of this gaping void. Someday, this will presumably kill me.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Thinking through signage & labelling
When you don't think it through, you get terrible design like this:
This is out at the Olathe Medical Center. You can see the building from over a mile away. And since the roads are... odd... its nice to be able to navigate by just making your way to the building. However, these ("The Doctors Building") are not really labeled. Huge letters, but cleverly arranged not just behind trees, but behind a corner (the main approach is right of center in this image). And then, to make sure its awful, give the right margin, oh.... ZERO gutter. I wonder how many ems that is?
Simply putting this up a floor, not to mention left 40 feet, would have made it a much more useful sign, for the several thousand it surely cost.
On the other hand, there is this:
It's a Shred-It truck. These come to your office, the guy wheels bins of paper (usually locked bins, with a slot to put paper in) to the truck, and shreds them on site (so you don't have to worry about movie spies stealing the truck and looking at your papers, I guess). They usually have a little window in the side of the storage area so you can see that indeed, its full of shredded paper. If it comes in the morning, you can watch it fill up.
So, clearly, they have thought through the experience. And for the newer fleet, with the side doors, someone thought "most of the time the truck is in front of the office, it will have the door open." And they put their branding on the inside of the door, so the truck looks the same whether open or closed.
That is experience design.
This is out at the Olathe Medical Center. You can see the building from over a mile away. And since the roads are... odd... its nice to be able to navigate by just making your way to the building. However, these ("The Doctors Building") are not really labeled. Huge letters, but cleverly arranged not just behind trees, but behind a corner (the main approach is right of center in this image). And then, to make sure its awful, give the right margin, oh.... ZERO gutter. I wonder how many ems that is?
Simply putting this up a floor, not to mention left 40 feet, would have made it a much more useful sign, for the several thousand it surely cost.
On the other hand, there is this:
It's a Shred-It truck. These come to your office, the guy wheels bins of paper (usually locked bins, with a slot to put paper in) to the truck, and shreds them on site (so you don't have to worry about movie spies stealing the truck and looking at your papers, I guess). They usually have a little window in the side of the storage area so you can see that indeed, its full of shredded paper. If it comes in the morning, you can watch it fill up.
So, clearly, they have thought through the experience. And for the newer fleet, with the side doors, someone thought "most of the time the truck is in front of the office, it will have the door open." And they put their branding on the inside of the door, so the truck looks the same whether open or closed.
That is experience design.
Skipping, Time-Shifting and the Status Quo
My semi-casual observations of opinions on usage of PVRs/DVRs sets them into three camps:
1) Industry analysts who group all PVRs together
2) Pundits and bloggers who insist that PVR=TiVo
3) Those who like to look at these devices by interface class
The last one seems to be shared by maybe a dozen folks in the world. I am the only one who writes about it I know of (tell me different and I'll link and subscribe to them).
See, TiVo &mdash and all of the Dish PVRs &mdash have a commercial skip feature. In general, they are pretty much immediately reactive, and make sense. Lots, and lots and lots of others (like most given away by CableCos) are not. They are sorta terrible, slow to react, and provide a jumpy fast-forward feature, at best. These are more like using a VCR than anything.
The results of this study seem possiby skewed by this misunderstanding. Or maybe because the study organizers have never seen a PVR (having worked with researchers, not that big a stretch). They claim that most users don't skip commercials (except older folks). This bears out other studies where PVRs aren't scary (to ad-revenue based broadcast businesses) because commercials are still watched.
But I see usage, in my anecdotal experiences, as almost entirely divided along device functionality (or interface class) lines. People with terrible DVRs watch TV like always (static). They periodically watch like they have a VCR (turn on a recorded show and watch it without much pausing or fast-forwarding). People with good PVRs watch TV with almost complete time-shifting, skip intros and title sequences unless they are very engaging, and watch very few commercials (but go back to watch good ones on purpose).
As an aside, I think this is a typical trend of a certain kind of research:
Male, female, age. Demographics can only serve so much. This is where marketing and usability/UX diverge.
1) Industry analysts who group all PVRs together
2) Pundits and bloggers who insist that PVR=TiVo
3) Those who like to look at these devices by interface class
The last one seems to be shared by maybe a dozen folks in the world. I am the only one who writes about it I know of (tell me different and I'll link and subscribe to them).
See, TiVo &mdash and all of the Dish PVRs &mdash have a commercial skip feature. In general, they are pretty much immediately reactive, and make sense. Lots, and lots and lots of others (like most given away by CableCos) are not. They are sorta terrible, slow to react, and provide a jumpy fast-forward feature, at best. These are more like using a VCR than anything.
The results of this study seem possiby skewed by this misunderstanding. Or maybe because the study organizers have never seen a PVR (having worked with researchers, not that big a stretch). They claim that most users don't skip commercials (except older folks). This bears out other studies where PVRs aren't scary (to ad-revenue based broadcast businesses) because commercials are still watched.
But I see usage, in my anecdotal experiences, as almost entirely divided along device functionality (or interface class) lines. People with terrible DVRs watch TV like always (static). They periodically watch like they have a VCR (turn on a recorded show and watch it without much pausing or fast-forwarding). People with good PVRs watch TV with almost complete time-shifting, skip intros and title sequences unless they are very engaging, and watch very few commercials (but go back to watch good ones on purpose).
As an aside, I think this is a typical trend of a certain kind of research:
Male, female, age. Demographics can only serve so much. This is where marketing and usability/UX diverge.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Cyclone?
Has anyone else been wondering what hit Myanmar/Burma lately? Personally, I am not at all sure what a "Cyclone" is. Typically, every explanation is vague, or so detailed as to be useless.
But I finally found one. Its a hurricane. All the names are regional, but they are the same sort of storm:
- "hurricane" (the North Atlantic Ocean, the Northeast Pacific Ocean east of the dateline, or the South Pacific Ocean east of 160E)
- "typhoon" (the Northwest Pacific Ocean west of the dateline)
- "severe tropical cyclone" (the Southwest Pacific Ocean west of 160E or Southeast Indian Ocean east of 90E)
- "severe cyclonic storm" (the North Indian Ocean)
- "tropical cyclone" (the Southwest Indian Ocean)
Friday, May 2, 2008
Here's another reason broadcast TV is stupid
We don't want much programming, at all, from the big 3-4 networks. Mostly A&E, Discovery, Bravo and the like. And lots of Netflix. But there are a few shows
But last night there were lots of storms. So when we go to watch our guilty-pleasure show tonight, we don't have it. We have, instead, a solid hour of bright graphics and talking heads. And being a major network show, they will not re-run it for 6 months.
Instead, what if these guys just stuck to the warning crawler, and maybe there could be some sort of "weather channel."
An entirely other issue, so far beyond this, is how I do not care in the slightest about breaking news or weather /days later/. The PVR makes the whole sense of every bit of data as a single raster image with attached audio signal stupid. Wouldn't data overlays be smarter, and by default anything that expired is removed? Too bad no one thought ahead that far when making up HDTV standards, or anything.
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