Tech Socio Tech

Windows 8: Hardware That Will Physically Hurt

2012-10-13T23:14:00.001+01:00

Much 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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, here's the thing: when travelling or when at work, this has been my computing set-up:

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.

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. (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.) From a minority use-case this mode of interacting is becoming a blessed paradigm.

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.

The Other Digital Thing IKEA Did With The Catalog

2012-08-27T22:08:00.000+01:00

The 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 Wall Street Journal, 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. Now that I consider real news.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sony, Dearest, You Gotta Do Better Than This

2012-06-09T22:38:00.003+01:00

I 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".

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.

What is this important notice? It's a warning:

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 made my phone, you should know this, 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.

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.

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.

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 contact tech support. I wouldn't even know what that would look like or what they could possibly say to help.

I Think The Kindle Might Be Keeping Us From Finding New Dates

2012-01-28T23:43:00.000Z

As 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 Millenium series 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.

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 Sky Mall.

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.

We are social animals and we do 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 customise their mobile phone. 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.

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 Monocle.

I raise Monocle for a specific reason here. The following three paragraphs appeared in an article about the magazine and its editor in the NYT:

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.

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.)

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.

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, especially if displaying angular yellow branding like Monocle's. I'd say that as long as that branding is on every page, on an iPad everyone 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.

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?

Siri Will Need To Do More

2011-10-23T16:37:00.000+01:00

Apple 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 where you are, who you are, and how you will pay for it, 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.

(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.)

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.

Nokia N9 Press Shot

Just check Helen Keegan's writings on The Trouble With Apps 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:

My, that's gorgeous.
How the hell am I going to get what I want done with all those little icons?

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?

(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.)

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.

So now that all technology is evolving to emulate the expectations set by Star Trek, a couple of predictions:

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.
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.

Facebook Killed Loyalty To Itself As Side-Effect Of Its Succesful Design

2011-08-04T22:03:00.004+01:00

Image via CrunchBaseSo I am looking at Google+ 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.

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 LiveJournal when people announced they would now use Dreamwidth, or Wordpress or Blogger, I was struck by the thought that facebook's main strength is also why people have an easy time to leave it: facebook teaches you not to care about what you put on facebook.

Facebook is very strong in getting people to create content and share it because its User Interface 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.

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.

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 double-edged sword 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.

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.

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.

I am not holding my breath, but I am easily amused.

Google+ and Circles, A First Critique Along Google's Own Research on Social

2011-07-03T21:33:00.006+01:00

Shouting to people at large with a bullhorn is actually not what we in the User Experience 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 Internet trolls or drama magnets.

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 Social Network".

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams

The gist basically is that:

We have multiple social spheres in our lives, and we keep them separate.

Within those spheres we have a few people that are close to us. We share information about our other spheres more with them.

The result is that we end up having multiple identities.

Meanwhile, our current social media tools say that we either must say everything publicly, and really have only one identifier that is 'us'. Twitter 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. LinkedIn 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.

Google 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 'HIV+' 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.

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.

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.

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 access controls, 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.

I still would like a couple of changes, though:

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.

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.

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. LiveJournal 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.

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.

Other than that, this effort pushes the features of social media further. Let's see how it plays out.

You Know, Backing Up Texts In The iCloud Still Is A Horrible Idea

2011-06-12T20:40:00.003+01:00

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.

And every file you made. Every picture you ever too with your phone, even those 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.

Over here in Britain, a tabloid called News of The World either spoofed Caller ID or tried easy passwords or the default system password to get to the voice mail of celebrities and politcal figures. The exact extent of the scandal is not known; 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 your voice mails were not accessed you have cause to fire your publicist for not getting you on the D-list.

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 other people leave on your phone, not things you make. How could anyone get to all your data?

Well, if you have an iPhone, Apple will store it for you. Check this page where it describes its new product, iCloud. 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: Google strenuously defends its data until it gets a legal request that has the full strength of the law, and the telecom operators basically allowed the NSA to wiretap their networks with full co-operation 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 love 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..

No, seriously, look around you. Think of all your friends with iPhones. 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 when Skydeck came along, but this issue of your most private conversations stored forever in the cloud just got a lot bigger.

Who knew Sony didn't know how to store passwords? They have had breach after breach after breach of their networked systems, and it turns out on many, if not all of them, they were storing user passwords, and other data like addresses and credit card numbers, unencrypted, 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. Same with the Gawker network. In fact, those two breaches allowed for a little cross-site analysis, and it turns out that two thirds of the people who had an account on both systems re-used their passwords. 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.

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 we all have so many places to log in, we re-use passwords, 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.

The Apple ID 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 mean people out there who love to expose private lives for the lulz.

The Danger Hiptop 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 that humiliated celebrity 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

Quote me on this: Apple has cut themselves a length of rope sufficient to kill a trillion-$ company. A total iCloud compromise ends them.less than a minute ago via Twitter for Mac Favorite Retweet ReplyJay Parser
jpnw

Revisiting 300 DPI

2011-05-02T15:44:00.008+01:00

In 2008, I wrote about how 300 dpi and higher displays would enable new forms of reporting data by approaching the fidelity of ink on paper -- well, inkjet ink sprayed badly on paper. I even made a test paper design of medical data in some older and newer formats.

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.

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.

Save What?

2011-02-21T21:07:00.003Z

From my twitter feed:

2011 and Android Honeycomb is using a FLOPPY DISK as an icon. http://bit.ly/gPF6IM Like anyone knows what they are. (thx @jpnw)less than a minute ago via Tweetie for MacFJ!! van Wingerde
fj

The image? An action bar that appears at the top of Honeycomb, the latest version of Android for tablets:

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.

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 hard disk? 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.

Google is sending a clear message: our tablets are still for computer ~~geeks~~afficionados. We will not do the hard work of competing with the simplicity of Apple's iPad.

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.

HP Slams It Out Of The Park

2011-02-09T19:01:00.004Z

For my current gig at Vodafone, at one point I had 5 or so smartphones on my desk: an iPhone, an HTC running Android, a Nokia N8 with Symbian, a Vodafone H1 (for reals), and a Palm Pre with WebOS. Of all devices I tested, the most beautiful experience software-wise was the Palm 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 iPad apps. Pity the hardware felt so cheap.

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.

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.

Palm got bought by HP, 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.

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.

I want one now.

Start The New Year

2010-12-28T08:27:00.008Z

New 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.

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 LiveJournal. Turns out Facebook 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.

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, Spotify, 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.

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.

You closing out anything?

Convergence Diverging: A Micro Trend

2010-12-13T21:24:00.004Z

Nokia 95. Image via Wikipedia
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.

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.

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.

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.

The iPad Is Killing IE6 YAY!

2010-11-02T20:00:00.006Z

Image via CrunchBaseOver on the Mini-Microsoft blog, a blog that looks at Microsoft from a critical insider's perspective, a lively debate sprung up about the position of the iPad 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?

There's an anonymous comment there about this subject, brought to my attention by Genius Mike, that I would like to highlight:

Ex-Microsoft now drone in Corporate America here.

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:

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.

2. We want snazzy visuals on the screens. (Uh oh, now we need design geeks on staff in addition to database coders.)

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.

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.

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.

And maybe most interesting:

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 fat client version, so that RDP is no longer required), maybe we need to evaluate alternatives.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

But seriously, iPads gaining this kind of enterprise traction could be great news for remote-desktop companies like Citrix 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.

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 ActiveX. These were tied to Internet Explorer 6, 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.

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...

No, Series 40 Actually Really Is The Future

2010-09-16T09:59:00.005+01:00

So many other things I wanted to post, but I just wanted to react to John Gruber's article on What Is Next For Nokia, now that they have a new pure-software CEO. In it, Mr Gruber outlines why Nokia's current phone operating systems will not do, and what the alternatives are.

He forgot one OS, though. One that works really well and Nokia has been engineering for a long time: Series 40, the bread & butter "low end" Nokia phone environment, that has amazing stand-by and talk time and uses its resources conservatively.

But wait, weren't we talking about smartphones here? Yes we were, but you can innovate simple systems up 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 Ovi 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 touch screen and called it Touch & Type.

And it just works. And is ridiculously cheap compared to an iPhone.

Notice something about this beauty? It has fewer keys than a standard mobile "dumbphone". Touch & Type manages to actually simplify a standard mobile phone 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 Android screaming about what kind of geekery this shit is.

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.

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.

Don't Pay Attention, I Am Just Venting About Nokia Smartphones

2010-07-15T23:24:00.014+01:00

If you believe the analysis of the market share growth numbers, Nokia and RIM -- they make the BlackBerry devices -- are growing globally in smartphones, and Apple is flat. Yet all your friends either carry or want an iPhone, so what gives? Well, if you are wondering too and are reading this, what gives is that you are either in a specific minority of technology adepts, or in the US, and, knowing my readership, you are probably both. And you like iPhones so you have them and you read about them and it seems everyone has an iPhone, so how can anyone say Apple's marketshare of smartphones is not growing, if not downright flat? Did nobody see the lines in front of the store? (And can we say the iPhone is a luxury item when half the custodial staff in the office building I now work in seems to have them?) Well, all predictions are that Q3 2010 will be the best iPhone sales Apple will have ever seen, but that a huge amount went to previous iPhone users and not so many to new customers, globally.

And as far as Nokia's share goes, there is one fundamental business things that Nokia is very good at and has always been very good at: making sure that all the pieces and steps to make phones arrive at the right factory at the right time, and the end product ends up in the store at the right time, with never too little or too much inventory at any step. That's called 'logistics' and if you are really good at these kinds of predictions and fulfillment, you end up being able to make your products cheaper than your competitors while still being able to charge the same, or charge less and still make a good profit. Nokia does logistics well, so they can make a profit on value phones. Nokia also has a big portfolio of smartphones that are not all super duper high end range, the C and E series and other models. They run the Symbian smartphone operating system, but on cheap processors and with not that much memory.

The result is that Nokia has a whole set of mid-range "value" phones that they sell to countries and populations where expensive premium iPhones do not do well. So yes, people stand in line in Indonesia for a Nokia smartphone, a messaging phone, of a type that in the US only a teen would buy, if it was offered in the US at all. That's where their market growth is coming from: pushing 'advanced' models and capabilities down the hierarchy of consumers.

But however much its market share is still bigger or growing compared to Apple's in some views of the data, Nokia is not seen as a market leader. Their flagship smartphones have been getting mediocre to disastrous reviews for a while now, with some having been simply released way too early with flaws that the market simply will not stand for since Apple raised the bar with their first iPhone. Nokia Fanboy wisdom is that if you want to know what features Apple will release now, just look at what features Nokia flagships had 3 years ago -- but reality is that these are advanced features the market mostly ignores until Apple releases them, because Apple packages these features in such a way that users can find them where they expect them and not 3 menus deep, and in a way that makes them work.

Apple is just minor competition. Samsung wants Nokia's title of the premiere phone maker, and Samsung is willing to spend to get it, adopt any outside technology that will help, invent any advancement they need. And when it comes to cheap smartphones, nothing will beat Chinese manufacturers slapping together equipment with Google's free Android operating system on them. Google's Android is just bulldozing ahead on all sales fronts, because Android is both cheap for manufacturers to build devices with and does have what consumers want and Nokia and BlackBerry are lagging on: touchscreen devices, and a flourishing marketplace for cheap apps that is quick and easy to use. BlackBerry does have its wonderful messaging integration, but it doesn't get widely perceived as a fun media and apps machine (yet), and Nokia's smartphone system, Symbian, well, its services to integrate with the rest of the Internet are just a mess, its app store needs continuous upgrades to become acceptable, and the whole package of fun and media and discovery and ease of use is just not there right now. Their cheerleader bloggers are leaving, numbers keep coming out their consumers are considering other phones like Android or BlackBerry.

So what is next, what can Nokia do to take their lead back, to count again in innovation? Nokia has a new flagship device, the N8, they are readying to ship real soon. The device that has to erase the memory of how bad the N97 ended up being for many people and how clunky the 5800 was to use. I have held it, I have played with it and I can say the hardware is gorgeous. Now that every smartphone is some kind of dark slab with more black or some metallic plastic on the back, Nokia went for a textured all-metal enclosure, anodised in bright fun colors, that feels solid, with buttons that look and feel robust and real. The result is something unlike anything on the market: a device that feels like a serious machine yet manages to also be sleek and fresh. It has a soul. I wanted to lick my orange N8, expecting it to taste like ice-cold orange Fanta.

Nokia N8 in blue. Image credit to Ben Smith from The Really Mobile Project and Rafe Blandford.

Nokia N8 software. Image credit to Ben Smith from The Really Mobile Project and Rafe Blandford.

All I can say about the software, though, is what has already been seen in videos: yes it is fast and zippy, yes it is technically very accomplished underneath, and boy yes, it is just clunky looking. Symbian^3 is still stuck with too much black and grey, too many mental artifacts to keep track of (home screens, home buttons, widgets of all shapes and sizes creating jumpy lay-outs, application choosers with scroll bars that just recede into more black) and the whole thing just doesn't delight or surprise. Not the biggest surprise since Nokia spun Symbian off into its own Open Source consortium, and Open Source has no track record of truly beautiful and curated graphical user interfaces, depending as it must on the good-will of volunteers. I have been unable to confirm the Symbian Foundation has user testing labs, or commissions any user testing of its products, or can demand the manufacturers do it.

But we all know that what comes out of the box itself on the device is only half the story. The other half is how it relates to the Internet for maps and music and storage and getting applications. Well, for the services side, there is a portfolio of them, branded under the name Ovi. Half of the music store, "Ovi Comes With Music", is a non-starter for many: to this day, after years of being on the market, it still will not work with Apple Macintosh computers, nor browsers besides Internet Explorer, thus creating a ghetto. The tracks are also still heavily encumbered with Digital Rights Management while all other music stores have dropped that, which means tracks bought or rented from Nokia can not be transferred to other devices and you are basically locked to only your phone to listen to them or to a specific PC you can only change every 3 months. Yet what consumers want is to listen to their music everywhere and make it feel like they own their collection. Ovi Maps has its loyal fans but I personally find harder to work with on my device than Google Maps, Ovi Contacts currently confuses me, and the whole Ovi proposition is disjointed on the web from the art direction to the capabilities -- you'd think a service with a contacts manager and a mapping application would allow you to quickly see where your contacts live on a map. No such luck. And no real new services or integration now for years. Ovi has stagnated.

So, a flagship device with no good Internet services behind it, while Google and Apple integrate with your life on your computer and the web. What about applications? The new hot?

They are actually still hard to make for Nokia Symbian devices. Nokia is working hard to make it easier, transitioning to new toolkits, but word among developers is that even with the new tools you have to install this and install that and tune this package and that thingy, and when you actually have it all working, the development environment still does not compare to the tight experiences Google and Apple offer to develop on their devices. As said, Nokia is moving away from its traditional, impenetrable, awful Symbian C++ tools that take between 3 to 18 months to get fully proficient in, to a toolset called Qt and more standard C++. The idea was that if you wrote to Qt your application would work on Symbian phones and the new smartphone system Nokia co-built with Intel, MeeGo, but Qt is now being delivered with a different interface set for either Symbian or MeeGo so you will have to rewrite chunks of your app anyway, exactly what we were told would be avoided. Still, yes, there it is, Nokia has announced they are dropping Symbian for their flagship phones and going with this new MeeGo stuff.

Nokia is not just a smartphone maker. They are a phone maker with a vast portfolio of low and mid end mobile phones as well, phones that run on their Series 40 software platform that so many people know and love. The line-up will be Series 40 for low and mid-range, Symbian for messaging phones, MeeGo for the high end. Because of that logistics thing Series 40 phones are selling worldwide really well. So well they keep the company very much in the black, in markets other phone makers cannot touch because of their costs. But Series 40 are not attention-catching phones in future innovation, they do not put Nokia on the map of high-end innovators. You can't lead without owning smartphones because what is a smartphone now will be a featurephone (mid range) in 18 months and low end 18 months after that. Series 40, however, really works well, conserves battery, does well with little memory, and does get new features as phones get better.

The smartphone division has a new leader and he has promised to kick ass. He has got his work cut out for him. He will have to yell at every part of Ovi to get their frickin' act together and become an integrated system of services instead of the current demoralizing collection of silos (semi-secret: each Ovi service you see is made by its own team, and the teams are not in the same country. Try getting a coherent offering out of that). The bigger hurdle is that he will have to be willing to become very unpopular when he kills the bonuses for a lot of groups in the company when he holds back phones for simply not being ready or not being at a high enough standard. He doesn't have to just get out better phones, no, he will have to change the mentality of the company that makes them. Let's see him indeed ride rough over Nokia's Finnish consensus culture that so far has allowed smartphones that are at 80% of desirability to come out, something that used to work before Apple set the standard that a smartphone had to be 100% delightful -- a grade Apple sometimes doesn't even make. Let's see him give some real direction and alignment and make all those scatter-shot pieces one convincing whole. And then lets see him doing it with MeeGo.

So, are our hopes now on MeeGo? Only if Intel is breathing new ideas into it, and Intel is seriously hiring for it. You see, whether there is or isn't some stunning smartphone environment software inside Nokia waiting to come out is irrelevant: that innovative and beautiful software will have to pass the hurdle of the same mid-level managers that so far for the last three years have approved the N97 and 5800 and all the sameness blackness of Symbian^3, so why expect they will suddenly allow a huge change now -- assuming they even have it in their labs -- instead of more of the same? From the last 4 years I'd say the innovation in MeeGo will only happen if the Intel side of the cooperation comes up with it, because Nokia certainly hasn't shown it owns excellence in that process. Maybe Anssi can get new managers to let new designs flourish, and the pipeline of innovation will be great and mobile MeeGo will integrate seamlessly with online Ovi, and the whole experience will raise the bar above the coherent targeted experiences Apple and Google will come out with from their current advantage. Yeah.

Or more likely, after a few more years of bleeding innovation and bleeding fans Nokia will declare victory by saying that their mid-range Series 40 phones are now so smart and so good with their J2ME apps and their music players that Nokia does not need a separate smartphone division anymore, and pull out of that market altogether. They will coast some on an internal mythology of "making good solid tools the world actually uses while the other companies makes flashy nonsense phones" and say how that aligns with their no-nonsense Nordic roots, while completely losing their lead. The will become the Bic ballpens maker of the mobile phone world selling buckets and buckets of them in the developing world and in the cheap end of the portfolios of operators, while Mont Blanc fountain pens Apple gets all the headlines and aspiration.

Or not. The figures of Nokia's bleeding leadership will be put in front of the world next week when their quarterlies and outlooks come out, and hopefully their shareholders or board of directors will not want to sign up to being a commodity maker with a flat share price. Hopefully they will demand an end to the culture that allowed Nokia to be unable to produce good software in both their smartphones and their webservices, starting at the top that hasn't been able to pull mobile and online and ease and beauty together, that hasn't demanded it from the divsions they lead. Exciting times ahead for the Big Blue N then. But talking about Nokia turning this around is like talking about making the industrial changes to stop Global Climate Change: you know it can be done, many think it must be done, and yet it doesn't seem to really take off.

Me? After years of having had and used one of the first Symbian phones in the US when I tested for Nokia, of importing my own Symbian phones when I lived in the US after I had left Nokia, after having put my whole family on Nokia phones, am considering a cute Sony Ericsson Android phone. It is not lickably fresh-looking, though. I am kind of regretting that. The N8 really is something else.

The Real Use Of Apple's Facetime

2010-07-12T09:54:00.006+01:00

The Ad:

Genius Mike on The Reality:

Electronic jackoff is going to be huge. Let's all agree on that.
Unrecordable, no cellphone minutes used
Out-of-band payments could make dial-a-slut reality
"Insert $10 into my e-account and i'll answer your call!"
Get facetime integrated into a PC and WIZZOW
Banks and banks of bitches fingering themselves Just 4 U
All spun off of a server
Gnight

Which makes me wonder why this hasn't happened for Skype yet then. They do videocalling pretty good as well. Is it the mobile aspect?

Also, why is the girl in the ad looking down? The camera is above the screen, right?

The Social Part May Be Outdated Soon

2010-06-13T10:07:00.005+01:00

Image via CrunchBase

It is, or will be pretty soon, arguable that Facebook has peaked. Yet many phones designed in the last two years have Facebook as a central part of their strategy. Sure they include Twitter functionality as well, and maybe other sites as well, but Facebook is always at the top of the list. But as we see, the popularity of sites changes. Friendster peaked, Orkut peaked, so many were hot and peaked and then all their users moved on.

It takes a year or more to design a good phone interface, and in that time the hot site your phone is trying to be a conduit for could be out of favor. There goes your fashionable phone -- unless you commit to a design that allows multiple conduits and either letting 3d parties develop these conduits for the new hot sites or having an in-house team that keeps building them.

Meanwhile, it took a number of tries to configure my wireless access point in my reception to share the networking it receives from my office wirless LAN over its single ethernet jack so I could connect my television. Yes, my new television wants to be on the Internet, not something I would thought I would ever say 10 years ago. It took me an hour to find out between all the manufacturers how this should be properly done. How do people without degrees in Computer Science do this? Still, I can now display my flickr stream as a slideshow.

HTML5 Will Save Us Again

2010-06-01T21:18:00.004+01:00

Genius Mike: Antivirus Firm Warns of New Mac OS X Spyware Application
no click
point to be made: how much malware was enabled on the Win side simply because of the gaping functionality holes in Windows?

FJ!!: and security holes

Genius Mike: how many times in your life have you had to reach for an unzipper, un-rarrer, media player, or more?

FJ!!: UNIX is really gonna be tested now

Genius Mike: my understanding is that unix has already been sodomized and left for dead
Windows has made massive strides
And OS X needs the most work of them all.

FJ!!: UNIX is on your desktop right now
at least the security model

Genius Mike: ja

FJ!!: and that will be tested

Genius Mike: the services will be tested, and the user-gateway (passwords, windows annoyer or whatever it's called)

FJ!! : well, yes that coding will
but UNIX has been working for a while on not letting memory and pointer errors escalate

Genius Mike: yes, and so has Windows
Windows 7 is nearing state-of-the-art

FJ!!: kernel wise?

Genius Mike: yes, and library scrambling
and address scrambling
and stack protection
and so forth.

FJ!!: scrambling seems like such a kludge

Genius Mike: The man who said flashless, javascriptless IE8 on Win7 was the most secure browsing platform wasn't lying
Every barrier helps.

FJ!!: wonder how the NSA plays bejeweled then

Genius Mike: HTML5! the savior of the universe!
How'd you cure your herpes? HTML5!
Who colored the moon taupe? HTML5!
HTML5 is a box of tinctures sold out of a gypsy wagon

FJ!!: I think it made Steve Guttenberg a star too

Genius Mike: :]

FJ!!: I am so posting this on TST

Trusting Privacy

2010-05-19T23:06:00.008+01:00

Image via CrunchBase

Company starts service. People like the service. People use the privacy and filtering part of the service. Company wakes up to huge hosting and bandwidth bills. People get caught up in the service and post their multi-faceted lives with different privacy levels and filters to the service. Company realizes their real asset is all their data, and wants to mine it. Company changes Terms Of Privacy. Nobody notices until they do notice it.

And suddenly people are very very scared when they realize their lives and reputations are in the hands of, well, no longer four plucky guys in a garage who want to do The Right Thing, but god knows who where with what capital, who want a return and have a lot of bills to pay and are sitting on your very marketable private life.

I am not talking about Facebook here. I am talking about LiveJournal, a social blogging system that had privacy and filtering groups baked in. Compared toFacebook, LiveJournal is an intensely geeky service that makes it difficult to put up media, but hey, us geeky and computer-literate people live for this and went and did it. And after many a sale and tribulation, we now all have to deal with the fact that the content we have been making, our gossips, our rants, our career-ending descriptions of practical jokes on our bosses, safely hidden behind privacy walls since the millenium turned, are on systems owned now by a bunch of people in Russia nobody really knows.

Facebook is still in the same hands, but has indeed the same problem of very high bills, and the fact that the current revenue models are not quite paying the bills, or not enough according to the people with capital. And now an even larger group of people -- 1/3 of Canada has a Facebook profile if the numbers are to be believed, and that is just one country -- is suddenly confronted with that their private lives may, or have, become over-public, way beyond intended.

Some concerns are overblown like the cooperation with Yelp and news-sites; Facebook is not giving your Facebook data to Yelp to make your social Yelp page, the Yelp page is instead asking Facebook to fill certain blocks of it in. But, even though it is Facebook putting your social data inside the Yelp page, it says Yelp.com in the top bar of your browser so it looks like Yelp knows everything you did on Facebook, which was not the idea. This is simply a breakdown of the mental model users have of how a web page is built up. However, Facebook is also leaking your data through your friends' lousy privacy settings left and right, and is starting to have a spam and rogue applications problem, and is making it really opaque how to manage who sees what of what you make. Right now LiveJournal's intricate privacy groups are actually easier to track, and that is saying something. Facebook is having real problems.

Fundamentally, the problem is that your stuff is on other people's machines. I have said it before: that's a problem if you want to keep it private. There really isn't that much of a penalty for a company to break their Terms Of Service where they say they will keep your stuff private for you and then mine or publicize it anyway -- especially since those TOS always say they can choose to change unilaterally, and you never read them before you clicked OK anyway. Not for Facebook, not for the company backing up your text messages, not for the picture hosting site you use.

So, run from Facebook? Personally, I actually can't. The tech leaders who are being reported having done so are indeed at the level that they get reported about. Me, I do not get reported about, so without a Facebook profile, employers start wondering if I really do do social media, and since Facebook isn't passé, how effective I could be in crafting electronic strategies that include the site if I am not on it. I do lock that profile down, though, to only show what I would want an employer looking for me to see. As in, no actual content, just the cursory information.

And what about the privacy concerns? Well, done is done. We have to assume Facebook may not pull back from the brink. But it is still a fun service to stay available to your friends and see your pics and their pics and read what they are doing now. Just don't put something on there you really do not want anyone to know. Vacation pics, sure. Vacation pics of you puking, no. Treat it as a supermarket community billboard; yes it has notes that leak privacy like you have a plant for sale and like to listen to 60s Soul Records and who wants to trade? But those are no big deal. You can still follow your favorite artists and post about your BBQ. Just realize that telling the world your boss is an asshole is just not to be done over status updates anymore, unless it is a temp job and you will be gone at some point.

The Internet is generally terrible at keeping secrets. Always has been. Always will be. Especially secrets that can be found by combining little pieces together, because the Internet is really good at that. Take the pieces of your life that are not public and put them somewhere else, if you must put them on the Internet at all, with no links like names or aliases pointing back to your public you.

And as time goes by, and people actually do not do this because only geeks really understand the danger, and we all become more and more used to people making everything public, we will all gain. We will all realize people have multiple facets to their lives, and we will get used to all knowing too much about each other. And like people packed in London public transport during rush-hour, we will develop the ability to just not look and not acknowledge each other, as necessary to stay sane and work together.

And that's great. Because keeping track of whom you said what to really is too much work.

An Evening With The Mobile Web vs Mobile App Debate

2010-04-22T21:12:00.004+01:00

Image via CrunchBase

One of big question these days for people with a great mobile idea is how to distribute your content or service: a purpose-made application? A nicely scaling website? A website built to look like an application on the right phones? This is actually an expensive question to get wrong now so many want to deliver content to the pockets of so many. Competition is fierce, time-to-market is an issue, visibility is an issue, and meanwhile Apple may simply not let you play.

Arguments all around. It is easier to discover apps than mobile services, as application stores catalog and rate applications while the mobile web does not. It is easier to RE-discover apps that to rediscover mobile websites, because apps get stored on home screens and bookmarking is still apain. However, with 50.000 apps in one store and home screens filling up, both these advantages are about to be lost for apps, so what gets left? Mobile web pages allow creators to not have to go through approval processes, be able to push out innovative updates instantly as fast as they can upload a website, and to hit many different phones at a fraction of the investment costs to make apps for every phone.

There are many more reasons and trade-offs to think about, like how well can a web-app integrate with the phone, and does it need to, and what devices to target for development. By now I usually find this debate very boring because the answer really depends on a long list of questions only the service-creator can answer, with the added complication of what Venture Capital Funds will or will not invest in, what they consider hot this quarter. The only good debates about it these days are the ones that clarify the current questions, and add the right questions to ask, not the ones that try to force an answer or ideology. Having real experience on both fronts help.

Which is why I so enjoyed spending time last Monday evening at the Mobile Design UK event. One of the speakers was Jason Fields who described how his blog, app.itize.us, a curated collection of beautiful and great iPhone apps, came to be, took off, and now holds lessons of what makes a great app -- but also informs just how many of these efforts are made by one or two people and no more. The other was Fjord Design and Flirtomatic's Mark Curtis, who has real experience pushing out a mobile service that makes great revenue by offering virtual gifting, profile adornment, and paid search results in a flirting context. Flirtomatic tried to be a JAVA app, and failed because of phone capabilities, hit it big as a mobile website, tried to make an iPhone app, and found that they still hit their business goals better as a pure mobile web play.

The reality is that making an iPhone or Android application means your service will end up working on far fewer devices than a single well-coded gracefully-failing mobile web site will. Yet many developers flock to making iPhone apps even if their service could just as well have been done as a site. Why? Mark mentioned how he found one of the big reasons to go with an application, the ease of getting paid, was not an issue for him: Flirtomatic was doing just fine getting proper mobile billing to work for them, so could this criterium be discarded? Yet, yet... earlier Jason had mentioned all these '1 or 2 people in the home office' efforts at making apps. So I got to ask Mark, what about them? How many people did Flirtomatic need to get carrier billing to work, and is it reproducible by me and my best friend working in our spare time?

The answer was yes in Europe, because there are wholesalers -- who will take a cut -- to manage billing for your premium service through all the mobile carriers, Europe-wide. But outside, like the US...? No, you have to negotiate with every carrier, one by one, and that isn't just the big 4, but also carriers like Cricket and Alltell. This requires resources.

And I guess that is really the overriding reason why so many hopefuls have joined the app goldrush. If all there was was the mobile web, motivated teams would have made that work. But most of all, we want a shot at that pot of gold, as in getting paid, and Apple has made that work near-flawlessly for consumers and developers. The mobile web, well, nobody was really in charge, and so you have to deal with a shaky system of premium SMSes, wholesalers to depend on, and headaches where they are not... and the small teams simply can't.

I guess my guiding questions for app vs web in mobile these days is: is your service worth paying for, and if so, just how small a team are you?

Give Em What They Need

2010-03-28T12:05:00.005+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Jered Floyd pointed me to the UX Magazine article where Dominique Leca writes about The Impossible Bloomberg Makeover. This Makeover was commissioned by Portfolio and asked 3 design firms to make over the Bloomberg news terminal. The Bloomberg Terminal is an information service used by financial and other analysts, that consists of hardware and software as a package to deliver near real-time information for people who make very quick decisions based on the market. And has a very distinctive and hideous interface

The highest-profile firm to submit a design was IDEO, who took 3 weeks of study and drew on years of experience in the financial realm. 3 weeks is nothing, by the way, for an overhaul of a known and important service like this, especially when commissioned on a magazine's article budget, or having to be billed internally as a promotional project. In 3 weeks you get a couple of service designers and visual artists to look at the original for a few days until they go "Uh-huh, oh yeah, I kinda get it", generate some wild brainstorms, sit down with the local senior partner to pick two to expand on, and then select one of the two up for final presentation. I've done cycles like this myself inside large design agencies. You do not get a final product. You do not even get anything that will be recognizable after contact with actual reality.¹

The UX Mag article goes on to leave the impression that Bloomberg explicitly rejected this make-over because on an Old Boys Tree-house Club-house mentality: they prefer the ugly tough-to-master software because it keeps newbies and the uncommitted out. Of course, Bloomberg did not ask Portfolio to redesign their terminal, and there was thus preciously little for them to accept or reject. Some of the comments already state that UX Magazine is getting the narrative wrong, and it is not about keeping newbies out and feeling big, but also that the current terminal has a high utility that the redesigns simply do not recognize.

Having Tweeted this article indicating I was buying the magazine's narrative, I got a response from someone with a past as an insider in a company that had similar news stream products. I am not quoting this person directly, because what I was sent was off-the-cuff and needs a little restructuring.

A lot of the displays include 100ms real-time updates that subconsciously inform the trader as to what's going on. Color and Motion are not only important to the experience, they ARE the experience. Going to some calligraphy on papyrus experience breaks their understanding of the data, and this understanding goes back decades.

The Terminal and its ilk are optimized for no surprises ever. It's not stubbornness that keeps things from changing, it's an overwhelming desire to have the exact same thing in front of you in the morning.

We had a product called [...] that had that exact same white portal look and users hated it beyond belief. It says "I'm a fluffy web portal", not "I'm a business tool".
Literally trillions of dollars ride on this UX experience.

Point 3 is close to what the magazine says, Point 2 is something all us ovehaulers have to deal with, especially in combination with the last line about the trillions, but Point 1 is, to me, the most important one here. The redesigns obliterated the utility.

Yes, the Bloomberg Terminal is ugly, but if read the feedback correctly, the display gives you glance-reading flash-understanding in return. It's very Tufte in that sense: the display shows quantitative information in a way that lets you absorb it all very fast, by quickly intepreting patterns, as the comments on the magazine I linked to indicate. Making a display that has this feature likely could be done in a more visually pleasing way, but IDEO's mock up, especially the point of more and more identical black-on-white panels being added to the side, is not it.

As Craigslist shows 'Pretty' is a 'nice to have'. 'Utility' is the 'must have'. The Bloomberg Terminal has the 'must have'. Understand what that is before moving into the 'nice to have's.

1 What you do get, however, is a direction and conversation piece to galvanize you and your client into making the time and resources available to do the service overhaul properly and right, as you now can show that there is a promise for something better at the other side, and that your agency can deliver it.

Dear Spotify

2010-03-18T19:42:00.002Z

Image via CrunchBase

If you are going to make me log in anyway, and your server knows I am logged in, it would be nice if I could control the Spotify radio I have running on my media PC with the Spotify client I may have running on my phone, or on my other laptop, or even on iPads. That way, I don't need to get out of bed to switch the music off. Or try to run VNC on my iPhone, which is a really funny experience.

User Experience: The Sociological Component

2010-03-12T19:39:00.007Z

Genius Mike just mentioned to me that "fleeting interesting: you can sign up for 3G directly on the ipad. it's metered, alerts you when you're running low, lets you PAYG after you use up your quota, and lets you cancel without any human involvement."

In other words, Apple has removed the biggest pain point from the mobile / cellular experience for the customer: dealing with the operator.

Apple has also thus removed what is seemingly the worst pain point for the operator: having to deal with the customer. What, too harsh? I would think that if we weren't a problem to the operators, they wouldn't treat us like they do.

On a more serious note, I know that many Pay As You Go (PAYG) carriers show you your balance after every transaction, including browsing (using a technology called SSID, which is best described as 'SMS Lite'). This means that you do see how your data usage makes your allowance go down. I know of no subscription or monthly plan that does something similar and actually warns you when you are reaching your limit or cap on data usage; the usual thing for operators to do is to silently switch the consumer to a more expensive per-byte plan. This warning on the iPad may be the first real-time instant feedback a mobile device gives you that you are running out of data on your monthly plan.

Since operators really want to get rid of unlimited data plans, and this is a consumer-friendlier way of managing data allocation than silently charging the subscriber a mint for data overages, expect this to trickle down to all smartphones. All you need to do as an operator is have a really simple data plan with easily allotted blocks, and software on the phone that knows about them and can shop for more.

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