Re: One Box to Rule Them All

Tom Raynor’s blog post on cable boxes and the many inefficiencies they add to the TV viewing experience caught my attention because it jives with my own personal experience with these devices. My interaction with these boxes has not been all bad, however. In my experience, the interfaces on set-top boxes by cable companies have notoriously bad interfaces and subpar hardware under the hood. Comcast is particularly bad in the user interface department. Starting with the remote control, it feels like some short-sighted engineer oversaw the design of the system from start to finish. Lesson one: More buttons does not a better remote control make. Using only the necessary buttons and placing them in intuitive positions simplifies the user experience and makes navigating the on-screen interface more intuitive. Lesson two: On-screen menus should be responsive and well organized. Comcast has the luxury of a full-speed bi-directional data backend for its boxes. There’s no reason for loading information into a simple text-based interface should take more than a second. Also, relying on a dedicated, poorly placed remote control button for returning to higher lever menus is frustrating for new users. Lesson three: If a TV tuner can tune a channel faster than your cable box can, you’re doing something wrong. With one exception. The reason many cable boxes take so long to change channels is that they are buffering the video for DVR functionality.

I agree with Tom that the cable box is a redundant piece of technology, but if the features it provides extend beyond those the TV itself could provide, this isn’t necessarily a problem. Two solutions to the redundancy and performance issues I would be willing to accept are either a mass migration to CableCard technology or better performing, more featureful set-top boxes. The CableCard solution has the cable provider giving the consumer a decoder card for their service that they can use in any compatible TV to cut the extra cable box hardware out of the loop entirely. This removes extra video conversion steps from the playback pipeline and improves video quality in the event that the TV has better tuning and processing hardware than the cable box would have had. The improved cable box solution would bring the hardware components up to speed with the latest computing components and video processing technology. They would also have extra features such as internet connectivity and whole house media sharing. These improvements would make the cable box a tolerable, and maybe even desireable, A/V accessory.

Source: http://alexdasgrosse96.blogspot.com/2009/09/one-box-to-rule-them-all.html

NVidia Reality Server

The day has come. Our desire for photorealistic interactive graphics has outpaced the capability of a workstation-class computer. Coming to the rescue is NVidia with their RealityServer solution, essentially the graphics equivalent of a storage area network. Now,  a website can serve up real-time photorealistic 3D graphics to users without the user needing any 3D acceleration in their own computers.

This technology is crucial for scientists and engineers who want to be able to visualize complex data in three-dimensions in real-time, but it also has important implications for the consumer market as well. Technology like this makes it possible for the same quality image data to be available on all platforms, including low power ones like netbooks and smartphones.

3D technology and representations will become more and more important as our interfaces with computers become increasingly organic. Our world is three dimensional. The ultimate in intuitive computing will be too.

Source: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2355677,00.asp

My thoughts on the Droid

On Friday, I purchased a Droid from Verizon Wireless. The Droid is a new smartphone from Motorola that runs version 2.0 of the Android operating system from Google. To make a long story short: This is, in fact, the Droid you are looking for.

I realized exactly what I was missing from my days without a smartphone today when it became clear to me that the ease of my day today was facilitated by the Droid. I had to stay in contact with someone via email and communicate with someone else via instant messaging because they were in a building on campus with no cell phone signal, all while being, myself, in situations where staring at my computer screen wasn’t an option. The Droid handled this with ease. Vibration notifications and an ingenious on-screen notification area make this a very powerful communications device. The notification area is a drawer you can pull down from the top of the screen that lists all of your most recent notifications from email, SMS, phone, calendar, IM, and other apps in a way that allows a quick glance at the pertinent information, or, if you choose, gives you the option to switch to the app in question with one touch of the notification in question.

The Droid’s hardware back button makes it easy to return to what you were doing before reading your message. On-screen views are represented in a global stack, with separate views within an application potentially separated by views from different applications. This way, you don’t have to quit the app you were using to pop into a communication app to view one message. You click the message in the notification drawer and it switches to the messaging application you need. Switching back is as easy as pressing the back button until you’re back to the activity you were performing before you viewed the message. The back button “pops” views off the global stack until you see what you want. This is very intuitive and very efficient.

I am very happy with my Droid and am impressed by the great work done by Google and Motorola on this device.

Contact “Synergy”

With the flood of new smartphones on the market running Android, Windows Mobile, and Palm’s WebOS operating systems comes an interesting set of new functionality that merges the traditional contacts list with other online identity information in the palm of a user’s hand. With so many people utilizing one or more means of online communication, be it social networking, email, instant messaging, or microblogging, it’s not hard to see the many uses for this technology. But are these features a necessity for everyday productivity, or are they a distraction that will cause unnecessary user frustration?

The first phone to provide this new way of managing contacts was the Palm Pre. With it’s Synergy feature, WebOS offers users the option of automatically connecting their phone’s contacts with Facebook in addition to multiple email services. This provides updates from Facebook in addition to email and text messages from this contact.

Android has similar functions in two incarnations, one in the form of third-party widgets added to devices made by Motorola and HTC, and the other in the latest version of the core OS (SDK 2.0) that has the functionality built into the core contact applications. This allows the same connectivity as Palm, but does so in an extensible fashion wherein a developer can write a sync plugin for any service they would like. This allows users to sync with any service for which a plugin has been written rather than with just the services Palm has approved. Android’s implementation also allows the user to choose either to automatically sync ALL contacts with names that match those of contacts that user has on their various social networks, or to choose manually the people they would like to sync.

Palm was visionary in its introduction of Synergy to the Pre, but I question whether an all or nothing approach to syncing contacts with all possible services is the right one. I can imagine situations in which I may not want to have the Facebook status of ALL of the people I have in my phonebook synced to my phone. The lack of extensibility is also a concern. The technology is a fantastic idea and will serve the needs of many quite well. It definitely makes the Inbox concept more universal and easier for the average user to understand.

Apple’s “Magic” Mouse

In my last post, I discussed a slew of concept devices out of Microsoft Research that bring multitouch interfaces to the desktop. These mouse-like devices seemed to be years and many revisions away from production, but just a few days ago, Apple brought a device to market that’s very much like what Microsoft had proposed. CNet reviewer Justin Yu looked at the Apple “Magic” Mouse and declares that while it is a beautifully designed device, the multitouch surface does little to add functionality to the classic mouse concept in this incarnation of the technology.

Highlights from Yu’s review include criticisms about gestures and the complete lack of physical buttons. Gestures, the magic behind Apple’s newest trackpads, are limited in number and difficult to perform on this device. Using more than one finger to perform gestures on a surface that’s in the palm of your hand seems very unintuitive when your fingers are placed so conveniently for simply pushing down on a button that lies beneath them. Yu also criticizes the height of the device. It’s slim form factor adds to the aesthetic appeal, but cuts down on the ergonomics of the device.

I appreciate the feedback provided by an old-fashioned button and have a hard time seeing the use for a device like this. The use of multitouch on the desktop will likely require a complete rethink of the way we interact with our computers, perhaps in the line of thought of the 10/GUI concept that has come to light recently, but not in the way that first Microsoft, and now Apple, have suggested.

Source: CNet

New touch interface devices

Microsoft recently revealed prototype devices to allow users to interact with PCs via touch/multitouch. These concepts range from camera-based devices using technology similar to that employed on the Surface to capacitive devices like the multitouch trackpad currently available on Apple laptops. With the increasing interest in touch interfaces, this seems like a prudent thing to do, but the devices do not seem to fit the needs of current interfaces.

In order for touch devices like these to make sense, there will also need to be a shift in the design of corresponding visual interface elements. Current so-called touch friendly interfaces depend on the user’s ability to make contact with the visual element with which they would like to interact through a device that combines the screen and touch sensor into a single device like a touch screen. Without the user being able to place a finger or object on a visual element, it seems like there will need to be some other kind of feedback, perhaps haptic, to allow the user to make the connection between the place where they’ve placed their finger and the on-screen element to which that place corresponds. So far, video game companies are the parties most interested in this tech because it is yet to be seen how this tech will make businesses more productive. Business applications are the holy grail of touch technology.

Source: CNet

New touch keyboard concept from Microsoft

In a recent patent filing, Microsoft details a new keyboard concept for use in large-screen multitouch devices. The design described uses the position of the home row on a QWERTY keyboard relative to the user’s palms resting on the screen to layout keys in a position that is intuitive for use from any angle. It seems likely that they intend for this to be introduced into a Surface-like offering given the need for the entire hand to be on the touch surface.

It seems like this design will be a step forward for large-screen devices that include touch as the sole method of input, but it’s yet to be seen whether or not it can equal the performance of a hardware keyboard. While the lack of tactile feedback and ability for the user to feel the keys under their fingers are potential obstacles for ease of use and ergonomics, the positioning of keys relative to each hand separately is a huge improvement over a static representation of a hardware keyboard placed onto a touch screen. This would be a great addition to future large-format multitouch devices.

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5368149/microsoft-getting-cleverer-and-cleverer-with-new-multitouch-screen-keyboard

Has ‘touch’ arrived on the desktop PC?

In a recent article for CNet.com, Ina Fried delves into the details of Microsoft’s decision to include multitouch as a feature of Windows 7. In the article, Fried explores the idea that the desktop is not quite ready for touch. The argument is based on the lack of hardware support in current PCs and the lack of software designed for touch. In addition, I would argue that touch is not necessary in today’s PCs.

Touch is a fantastic feature for mobile devices where use of a device like a mouse is not possible. It’s an intuitive way for users to interact with the device to perform fairly simplistic tasks, but it does not seem to me to be the best way to engage productivity apps on the desktop or to navigate a large collection of files of widely varying content types. Touch interfaces for such navigation depend on the files being homogeneous in the respect that they are all of a type that can be categorized by many layers of metadata. The touch metaphor breaks down quickly when very long lists of files must be navigated. Productivity applications often require precise control of a bounding box or brush stroke and this precision is difficult without the use of additional tools like stylii. This seems like an acceptable alternative to me, but the public in general has the attitude that touch screens should require nothing more than your finger to operate.  Hopefully in the near future, applications will appear that obviate the need for touch and stimulate the development of better technologies and more intuitive interfaces.

Time better spent

It can be frustrating dealing with a poorly designed interface. Frequently performed tasks can require many clicks or key presses, making you wish the application could recognize those actions you do often and make them easier to access. Modern applications, especially operating systems, have taken steps in this direction with “Recently Used” menus and “breadcrumb” trails, but many programs still leave users wanting.

I think the answer to the question of whether development time is better spent on improving an application’s interface or increasing its ability to learn and anticipate the user’s actions depends in large part on what the application is designed to do. An integrated development environment might benefit from additional anticipation features and auto-completions more so than a flashier or more streamlined toolbar. On the other hand, a word processor, which has a user base which is larger and on average less technical, would probably benefit from a clearer interface.

The single most cumbersome task I perform on my computer on a daily basis is managing my filesystem. As nice as modern file browsers are, at the end of the day, I must decide where to place my files so that I can find them again. Rather than designing a file browser with even more bells and whistles to help me choose a potentially arbitrary location for my homework assignment, I would like to see operating system developers come up with a way of storing files that keeps them organized logically without my help. No matter how many tabs, shortcuts, and previews my file browser offers, if my filesystem is in a state of disarray, I can’t find my files.

Click here for a comparison of Finder and Explorer

Is the classic desktop dead?

In the age of smartphones with screens no larger than a pack of cards and netbooks that fit into the average handbag, it’s becoming clear that the classic desktop metaphor has outlived its usefulness. The vast majority of the desktop as we know it serves first and foremost as a shelf for random files to which we want quick access (read: almost everything) and secondly as a backdrop for running applications. The most important part of the current desktop, the menu from which applications are launched, is hidden beneath a button that’s shoved away in a corner of our cavernous workspace. Performing a simple task like checking the weather or finding a friend’s phone number can require navigation of menus nested multiple levels deep and waiting for single-purpose applications to load.

The article found here highlights the efforts of one open-source project to address the needs of the modern desktop OS user. Gnome 3, the third major release of one of two popular desktop environments for the Linux operating system, will attempt to make better use of the desktop space in a few key ways. First, the launcher menu will be at the forefront of the new desktop, providing access to commonly used applications from the word “go”. Second, the interface provides recently used documents on a per-application basis, allowing the user to launch an application with the document or project on which they want to work already loaded. Finally, Gnome 3 does away with “task bar” clutter, keeping only necessary items like network status, volume, and time on the bar and relegating everything else to the new and improved launcher.

Also on the Linux front, Gnome’s primary contender KDE has recently undergone a major redesign to address many of the same issues to be tackled in Gnome 3. The KDE approach utilizes the widget concept used in Mac OS X’s Dashboard and Windows Vista’s sidebar. Commonly performed tasks can be completed from widgets users place on either their desktop or dock. The difference in KDE is that every element of the desktop is a widget whereas in Windows and Mac OS X, widgets are somewhat of an afterthought and not part of the core GUI. The desktop comes with a default configuration that will work for most users, but allows for absolutely every visual component to be removed, replaced, or modified to suit each individual’s taste. It is refreshing that developers realize our need for a modernized desktop and it will be exciting to see what the future holds.