Ramblingly precise..

Dvimidh's Piano Practice

2013-09-14T16:42:00.000-04:00

Part 2 - Scalable Design Elegance - or why I would never purchase an iPhone

2013-09-10T22:41:00.000-04:00

It has been two years since I wrote a blog (Part 1) about my reluctance to move from Windows 6.5 platform and the need for a Scalable Design Elegance. Since then, I have made a switch to Android and am now using Samsung Galaxy Note. It is time, I followed up on that blog from two years ago with some more specific examples to illustrate my point about Scalable Design Elegance. The fact that I am publishing this on the day Apple is announcing its new iPhone is just a coincidence, but It does try to illustrate the problem I have with iOS, Windows 7 and other non-scalable OSs in general.

So here it goes. The scalable design elegance, to me is a question of simplicity versus functional scalability. iOS/iPhone/ Windows Phone etc. provide the simplicity (stable, simple to use and elegant) but limited if you want to customize core functionality (examples below for Home screen and Keyboard).

Let me start by a confession, In my 8 years of using smartphones, I have never liked the base OS on any phone (I have tried Palm, WinMo 6.1 to 6.5, BB, iOs and extensively used WinMo 6.5 and now Android). It has always taken me endless tweaking and customization over weeks and sometimes months before I can get the phone to behave and function exactly the way I need it to. The gripe I have with Apple (for that matter with Microsoft with it's new tile based Windows Phone) is that it dictates how a functionality needs to be. You take it or leave it. There is no alternative if it does not meet your needs completely. The problem with that approach is that it meets 80% of typical needs. If you are (like me) in the remaining 20%, it does not work.

Let me illustrate using a couple of examples,

Example 1. Home Screen - The native home screens on any of the phones (iPhone, Windows tiles, Android skins from Samsung, HTC, Motorola etc.) all fall short when, I get down to very specific needs. iPhone is very minimalist, it does not even allow for widgets like World time or a short cut for Lock Screen. One feature that I cannot get in any phone including Android, is the ability to add a short cut to a specific file. This last feature, comes handy to quickly open a specific Excel or Word file that you use for a specific purpose. Most home screens, only provide a link to an App. You have to open the app, and then search or select the file you want to view/edit. On my home-screen I have direct links to a set of files, I access regularly. It's like the files on your Windows desktop, ready to go in one click.

The only HomeScreen that caters to almost everything I need is SPB Shell. I have used it for 4 years now. It was on the Pocket PC (Win Mo 6.5) phones from HTC and the exact same Shell is on my Samsung Android Galaxy Note. I am ambivalent to the OS or even the phone brand (it can be a Nokia for all I care). As long as it allows me to install SPB Shell and give me the Home Screen feature I need. The default Home Screen on most phones is the design feature or functionality and you can customize it to an extent. The true scalable design is one that allows me to change the native HomeScreen itself. Thankfully Android allows that. iPhone, Windows Phone, BB do not.

2. Keyboard Example - The same goes with the keyboards (I should say input methods). iPhone allows two methods, keyboard and Siri. There is no other option if you want something more or different. For me, the critical feature in a keyboard is the shortcuts. Similar to Windows PC, I need Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-Z and so on. I need short-cuts for Cut, Copy, Select, Select All, Redo/ Undo and so on. I had a custom key-board called Resco Keyboard on all of my Win-Mo phones. On the Android, I have found A.I. Keyboard that provides exactly what I need. The screen-shot below would explain it better. Regardless of which, App or window I am in, the custom key-board allows great editing features. Besides, cut, copy, paste, redo/undo, it allows me to move cursor one letter at a time, or one word at a time (navigation arrows in the middle). Moreover I can just use the same to select a letter or a Word, one at a time.

I am not suggesting that iPhone or Windows Phone design a keyboard exactly the way I want it. Everyone has different needs. I may like keyboard short-cuts, you may like Swype and someone else may like to use a stylus to scribble in his/her own handwriting.

Summary - Each phone or platform will cater to its core market with 80% features. What is important is that the platform or phone company recognize that there will always be 20% cases where their features will not work or will come short. They have to provide the design scalability to allow users to either replace core functionality or customize to meet the exception scenarios. I am not espousing that they build a keyboard that caters to all 100% needs but recognize that 20% of users will always need something else and allow to install a custom keyboard.

The 80-20 rule does not apply only to user types or features but extends to scenarios. In Systems Analysis context, we call these the ability for a system to handle exception scenarios. You typically do not need to copy email from within a Contact Card. In most cases, you can just initiate an email from the contact itself; simple and user friendly. But there would be 20% scenario, where you need to open a contact, copy email address and paste it in a chat box or an html form. if you cannot have that functionality, your Copy/Paste and Contact functionality fall short for these 20% scenarios.

I will end with an analogy with a real life example of automobile transmissions in cars. The ability for cars to change gears without a clutch and change gears automatically is a great innovation. It's very elegant, simple and very user friendly. It makes car driving easy and allows for adoption by many users. This would be something similar to iPhone's innovations. Now consider scenario where the car is stuck in mud, in snow or on a steep hill. You would need to drive in a manual mode and use the lowest gear possible. You would not want to rely on the automatic gear for these scenarios. To me, what iPhone does is innovate like automatic transmission but it does not provide for a manual override for the exception scenarios. It dictates that I should never select my own gear. It tells me either I drive in automatic gear or take a hike. To me it does not work, I live in New England and it snows, you see.

2011 Fall Color Trip - 3 Videos

2011-10-26T21:27:00.001-04:00

2011-09-18T23:00:00.000-04:00

Scalable Design Elegance - Features, functionality, functional capability and how I cannot decide on a new smartphone !

I have been using smartphones for close to 6 years now and consider myself an advanced user with a high geek quotient. I like to keep myself up-to-date with the latest gizmos and am always on the lookout for the next cool gadget to add to my collection.

While I have blown money on multiple new gadgets (DSLR, eReaders, Gaming Consoles and software suites), I have not changed my smartphone for more than 2 years. In fact, I have not changed the platform at all. My first smartphone was AudioVox PPC 6500 with Sprint in 2005. Since then, I have owned HTC Mogul 6800, HTC Touch Pro and my current phone HTC Touch Pro 2. While I graduated to new versions (WM 6.1 to WM 6.5) and switched instruments, I have managed to stick to Microsoft's, alas ! now doomed platform, Windows Mobile.

For more than an year, I have been looking to buy my next smartphone. I have zealously kept track of every new version and Apps landscapes of new platforms viz. iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7. I have been evaluating the implications of moving to one of these platforms and so far I have not found a smartphone model that fits my requirement.

And this got me thinking !

"Am I afraid of change, to let go of what I've become used to over the last 6 years?" - The answer was no. I am normally excited when moving to new platforms. It's almost an obsessive compulsion with me to 'figure things out'. I can keep myself busy, till I have figured out every feature, functionality, settings, tweaks and so on, whether it's XBox Kinect console or a new software suite. For example, I have mastered GIMP, InkScape and PhotoShop, but I still get excited and spend considerable time trying out new image editing, painting Apps on my wife's iPad 2. Similarly for Video Editing; I used Nero for 4 years but easily switched to Sony Vegas when needed to. So it definitely is not a reluctance to change.
"Is money the problem?" Hmm.. :) I have the budget approval from Finance Minister at home so that is not a consideration either. In fact I'm worried that my wife may buy an Android or iPhone5 for my coming B'day.
And lastly the legacy problem - "The latest phones, platforms do not appeal to my geeky fondness for legacy things". For a while, I believed that this was the case. The way old timers continue to yearn for Unix or Dos prompt as they adopt Windows based OS. While I liked my wife's iPad 2, I would not buy it for myself. She lent it to me for a few days to take with me on a recent business trip. I actually got used to typing sans physical key-board and really enjoyed the rich media on iTunes, the drawing apps, the battery life and so on but in the end it (iOS) fell short compared to my Win 6.5 on HTC Touch Pro-2.

So what is it that is making me nervous and reluctant to decide on a new platforms in the face of an absolute knowledge of demise of Windows 6.5 platform.

To make sense of my inability to decide in the face of perplexing, and what I consider, a choice between equally unfavorable options, I started breaking down the problem and I think I am beginning to finally figure it out.

I am hypothetically, calling it as my need for a 'Scalable Design Elegance' in a platform. I would like to be truly agnostic of the platform as long as I can find utility and value. So here is the premise - I need "Design Elegance" that can scale and continuously allow me to discover deeper functional capability as my need for each feature continues to mature. The three key elements, If I can break them down are,

Features (What I need the smartphone to do)
The Functionality (how the features are implemented)
Functional Capability (How much more or different things I can do for a given functionality)

Over the next series of blogs, I will take some of the key smartphone features (like email, keyboard, home screen etc.) and try and articulate what I like in my current smartphone and how the current spate of phones fall short in my need for the Scalable Design Elegance.

Through these blogs, I am hoping to get a clarity to decide on my next smartphone and more importantly get myself out of the resignation to this cognitive dissonance in my search for the perfect smartphone.

Part II of this blog is - here

Dvimidh's day with soccer

2010-12-11T21:18:00.000-05:00

GIMP Magic - Special effects with picture

2009-08-05T23:13:00.000-04:00

Click on the attached GIF file to see the animated picture. I have touched up the pic to remove all the people

from the beach.

My Google Voicemail

2009-07-10T11:43:00.000-04:00

Tutorial Part I: How to play Internet radio on your PocketPC

2009-05-02T13:40:00.001-04:00

I have been searching for a way to play internet radio on my Windows Pocket PC for sometime now. After trying out some of the popular commercial players like Resco Pocket Radio, Pocket Tunes, Kinoma player etc.), I have finally settled on a free software called GSPlayer (short for Green Software Player). The problem with GSPlayer though, is that it does not have any documentation. It took me a lot of trial and error and scouring through multiple user forums to finally figure a way to efficiently listen to internet radio stations. The two that helped a little were Bloggerbase and mobilitySite.

I have created this blog to help simplify this for you. There are three steps to it

Installing GSPlayer on your Pocket PC
Getting the Internet Radio Stations of your choice from the web
Creating a playlist of these radio stations on your GSPlayer

1. Installing GSPlayer on your Pocket PC

Installing GSPlayer on your PocketPC is the easiest of the three steps. Here is the Link to get the latest Player. The zip file is available to download (separate for touch-screen and non-touchscreen windows mobiles) and contains both a .CAB file that can be installed directly to your PPC and an .EXE file that you can use to install through your desktop and ActiveSync.

2. Getting the Internet Radio Stations from the web

There are multiple ways to do this. You can either get the exact URL of the radio stream from the publisher or download the playlist (.pls extension). I have tried the following two sites

PDA Tuner - Requires you to subscribe to their site for full access. It has PDA friendly version of their site and some of the streams will play through native Windows Media Player on your PPC
ShoutCast - Does not require registration and seem to have a bigger collection of free radio stations. Though, I could not find a PDA friendly version of the site and found the desktop version very cumbersome to select and navigate through various genres.

For GSPlayer, the following steps describe how to import an internet radio astation from ShoutCast. The GSPlayer should have been already installed on your PPC with appropriate 'Options' (to be covered in Part-II of the tutorial).

Step 1- Go to ShoutCast from your PocketPC browser.
Step 2- Browse the genre or search to narrow down on the station you want to listen to
Step 3- Click on the 'Tune In' button
Step 4- A new browser window will open with the default, in-browser ShoutCast player at the top left in this window. Based on your browser, the ShoutCast player may not be visible in your PPC. Opera or IE will not show the player but you should be able to see it in SkyFire browser. Regardless of your browser, you should be able to see the option to "Listen in Winamp or OtherPlayer" below the ShoutCast player place. Click on that button
Step 5- In the new browser window that opens, select the second option, "Play in your Default Media Player" and click on "Save".
Step 6 - Go back to the station you wanted to play. Now clicking on the 'Tune In' button will download a .pls file that should play in your GSPlayer by default.

3. Creating a playlist of radio stations on your GSPlayer

I will cover this in part II of this tutorial; in a separate blog.

I'm painting Again

2009-03-16T10:40:00.001-04:00

It's been a while since I painted; more than 2 years, in fact. What has been keeping me from it was the inertia and finding the time and the mood.

Four things got me out of my inertia,

- I had woved not to browse the net for a week (i'd begun to realize my compulsive habit to keep checking news sites)

- I sprained my back on Thursday and had been bedridden over most of the weekend.

- A beautiful gift of a pencil set, that I spent 2 hours in bed, sharpening (there were 120 colored pencils in the set)

- A set of books, I had borrowed from the library. One 'Painting beautiful skin tones with color & light' in oil, pastel and watercolor - by Chris Saper' really got me itching to try my hands at a portrait again.

It's a portrait of my kid brother making a face. Medium - colored pencils and oil pastels on paper.

It's not as good as I had like it to be. I messed up the left eyebrow, left side of his chin and the values are patched up.. but it's a start and I'm happy to have started..

My first digital Painting

2008-04-20T03:00:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I have picked up paint and brush in the real life (and the way things are going right, it may be a while before I manage to do so.). I have been spending more and more time on my laptop; work, personal erronds, news, keeping in touch with friends and for most of my spare-time activities.
Lately, I have been spending a lot of time looking for an alternative to Windows Vista for my next laptop upgrade. After getting excited about Max, I have ruled it out as it is definitely not for me (that's another blog I need to write, why Mac wouldn't work for me). Anyways, I liked Ubuntu (Linux) and these days I spend a lot of time finding Linux alternatives to various softwares, I have gotten used to. I have discovered GIMP and InkScape in the process. I have really been impressed with InkScape and what it's capable of. So here it is; my first digital art using InkScape.

And since you wouldn't believe I painted it from scratch, I will upload a video of how I painted it. :)

InkScape Demo

2008-04-19T14:59:00.000-04:00

Snow on mountains around LA

2008-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00

Dvimidh learns to sit

2007-12-25T13:00:00.000-05:00

Float in Water

2007-06-18T01:54:00.001-04:00

My dad can stay aflot in water without moving. Here he is floating in 8 ft deep swimming pool. www.sminkal.com

Salvaging a Sunday Siesta

2007-04-16T02:57:00.000-04:00

Sunday Siestas have always managed to mess-up my week'ends'. Despite my well-meaning intentions for a quick nap, they end up being long slumbers that span the whole afternoon and some times stretch into evening. This weekend was no different. I was slightly tired from all the running around from the previous day and our lunch on Sunday was a sleep-inducing, sambhar-rice.

The routine is always the same, I will offer to help my wife in the kitchen, which she will decline, I will then try to either paint, read, blog or work on my homepage. Within 20 minutes though, I will be either reclining on the futon or be heading towards our bedroom. Before I know it will be 5.30 - 6 PM in the evening and I'll be looking at a long sleepless night ahead of me. I tend to wake up groggy, and invariably be unable to focus on any meaningful tasks thereafter.

Normally I rent movies or browse google-Video/ YouTube till I fall asleep. Basically, keep busy with inane, mindless activities that wouldn't disturb my wife's sleep. Only once was I able to convince my wife to drive some 25 miles to watch a 11.30 PM movie show. Sunday late night shows are like watching a movie on a giant home-theatre; we had the whole theatre to just the two of us.

Well, this weekend I finally managed to do something different. I woke up to a very pleasant evening with my kind of wheather (The aftermath of an untimely rain; an overcast sky with rain bearing clouds; trees awashed in fresh green and wet roads..). There was a slight drizzle, and even though I could see sun-light filtering through the cloud cover in a couple of places, it felt like dusk. It was 5.30 PM.

On an impulse, I decided to go for a round of golf. The initial absurdness of the idea turned into excitement once I looked up the golf-etiquette of "playing it alone". It was one of the most pleasurably serene thing I have done in a while. I started out writing a blog about it but then I discovered this beautiful article, which more than puts it in words, it almost paints the picture for you. (Playing Alone - In golf, as nowhere else, man is entirely self-sufficient. by Tom Chiarella for Esquire).

You can view the course (have posted pics for Hole 2 and 3) in GoogleMap

The morning after

2007-01-28T13:17:00.000-05:00

It's 10.20 AM in the morning.. I slept at 6.30 AM and am already up, my eyes are burning a bit, but the paintings beacons.. but before that.. let me have my breakfast and my tea...

Resuming my blog

2007-01-28T04:46:00.000-05:00

It's Saturday night (or shall i say Sunday morning) 1.45 AM and i'm at work.. There is a productoin deployment and some 40 guys are working tonight.. It's insane the way the IT world works..

It's rained in LA today; my kind of weather.. reminds me of my Singapore days. Roads soaked in rainwater, shiny and dark.. The grass and the trees find their natural green color again.. I like the way it smells and the way things look.

I'm trying to pain one such painting right now.. it's work in progress.. (it's been bloody that way for more than 4 weeks now. I wonder when i'll finish it..)
The foreground is supposed to be a tar road with water left over from a rain. The image on left is a cropped version. You can check out the the progress at my website www.sminkal.com. ( --> my current work).

Two of my friends are getting married in Feb back in India.. Oh how I would love to attend those weddings..

2004-02-09T07:05:00.000-05:00

What a lousy earth! How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with an Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.
- Catch 22