This article was originally published in Canadian Developer Connection.

Comments on “The Device/Desktop” Opportunity

The Device/Desktop Opportunity got a number of comments, both in the “Comments” section and sent directly to me via email. First, I’d like to say “please keep those comments coming!” One of my intentions was to start some discussion.

I got a number of comments whose essence was “Why don’t the users simply use a photo editing tool and bring their photos down to the right size and DPI themselves, then copy them to the device?” To a geek, this suggestion sounds very sensible; in fact, I did just that to confirm what I thought the application that came with the device did.

The problem is that most users don’t see it that way. A commenter named Joshua summed it up nicely when he wrote:

I think we geeks, being somewhat more familiar with the tools than the problems, find it relatively easy to tweak an existing tool to do the job, than to “suffer” with Yet Another Not-Quite-Adequate Problem-X-Solving Tool.

Conversely, non-geek users don’t want to have to be bothered with all that hoo-hah. They see the task as moving the pictures from their camera or computer to the device. Do they really have to learn about some other program and fiddle with their photos to do just that? Weren’t computers supposed to make their lives easier?

This isn’t laziness or pride in ignorance on the part of non-geeks. It’s just that they have different interests and priorities than we developers do. To put yourself in their shoes, think of how most of us would make spaghetti: probably with store-bought dried pasta, canned sauce and pre-grated cheese. Now imaging how chef Gordon Ramsay would scream at you in a stream of put-downs and curse words for doing so. In his mind, he’s justified; in your mind, he’s being an elitist jerk who just doesn’t get the fact that you just want some spaghetti.

In the same comment, Joshua also talked about an interesting idea: putting the necessary desktop/device interface software right on the device. He wrote that the Flip Mino camcorder (which looks like a pretty fun device; Toronto-based photoblogger Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of it) comes with the necessary software for Windows and Mac stored within it.

Should “Cheap” Sites Look Cheap?

Last week, while having a late-night post-party snack with a couple of Toronto-based tech entrepreneurs — Facebook Cookbook author Jay Goldman and CommandN co-host Will Pate – we got to talking about sites that were successful in spite of their “pretty crappy” visual design. The site that got the discussion rolling was the dating site and Canadian ASP.NET success story Plenty of Fish (for a good general intro, see this New York Times article). From there, a number of examples came up, including Craigslist and a popular IIS-based site that lets you search for and book cheap airfare and travel packages. These sites all do their jobs quite well, but if you showed them to a web designer, you’d see a conniption fit within seconds.

“Travel sites all search the same data,” said Jay, “and many of them are running on the same back-end. They just use different design templates. Maybe people think that [the cheap-looking but successful travel site] gives you cheaper deals because they look cheap.”

He may have a point. Part of Craiglist’s charm is its stripped-down, not-even-trying-to-look-good design. Does that design send users the same subtle message in the same way that the no-frills “anti-design” of “big box” discount stores sends to their customers? It may be something to think about if you’re building a customer-facing site for a business whose main selling point is low prices or saving its customers money.

The New Look for Calculator in Windows 7

In the Coding Horror article If You Don’t Change the UI, Nobody Notices, Jeff Atwood makes an interesting point: if you want users to notice changes you’ve made to the functionality or back end of an application, they should be mirrored by appropriate corresponding changes to the front end or user interface. Along the way, he points to a Raymond Chen article I’d never seen before. As much as I view Raymond with the highest esteem – he’s probably forgotten more about coding that I’ll ever learn — at a certain point in his article, I did a facepalm. Can you guess when that point was?

The OLPC XO Laptop. It’s one of eWeek’s “Most Important Products of 2007″.

In case you wanted a quick list of what eWeek declared as the “Most Important Products of 2007″, here they are:

1. Amazon EC2
2. Apple iWork ‘08
3. DiVitas Mobile Convergence
4. Fluke Networks OptiView Series III Integrated Network Analyzer
5. Google Apps Premier Edition
6. Hewlett-Packard Hp c3000 blade server
7. One Laptop Per Child XO
8. Oracle Database 11g
9. RIM BlackBerry 8820

My reaction: “iWork? Really?” I’d have picked the iPhone, as I think its approach to the mobile browser is worth stealing.

Last week, my friend Mark Askwith, a producer at Space — the Canadian sci-fi channel — dropped me a line asking if I’d like to talk about a couple of cool gadgets in a segment for HypaSpace, Space’s “geek news” program. It sounded like a fun idea, so I said I’d do it.

Mark and Space camera guy Darcy came over to the TSOT offices last Wednesday to do the shoot, which some of my co-workers starred in. The segment will air during the year-end installment of HypaSpace; I’ll post the broadcast date as soon as I found out when it is.

I took some photos during the shoot — they appear below.

Darcy, the camera guy from Space. In this shot, he’s setting up his camera prior to the shoot.

Strike! Darcy films a segment where my co-workers Mariko and Adam play a round of Wii Bowling.

Wii action. Mark and Darcy watch and Mariko and Adam bowl on the office Wii. Gotta love the perks in the place.

“Music is where I’d like you to touch…” My co-worker Alex demos his iPod Touch as Darcy films.

Alex is a hand model now! Mark watches as Darcy shoots an iPod Touch segment — I’ll do the voice-over.

The “beauty shot”. Darcy gets a shot of the featured gadgets, using the office video game screen as the background.

Although it’s relatively old news, it’s all the buzz on the tech blogs today: Accordion Hero, the accordion version of the Guitar Hero videogame:

Alas, Accordion Hero is just a parody — it’s just a clever idea that’s been given it’s own website.

However, that doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t built an accordion-style for Guitar Hero-type games. Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d like you to meet Oded “SoundGuy” Sharon and the game controller that he created by hacking a toy accordion. Here’s a photo of Oded playing Frets on Fire (a Free Software version of Guitar Hero) with his “Accordion Hero” controller:

You can find out more about the controller in this entry on his blog.

Oded, you’re a true Accordion Hero — I salute you with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!

Happy Hallowe’en! If you’re feeling that your jack o’ lantern just doesn’t enough nerd oomph, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ Cylon-O-Lantern might be what you need. Here’s a video of the Cylon-O-Lantern in action…

Can’t see the video? Click here.

According to the Sybarites site, there’s a Ferrari-branded Segway:

Segway have teamed up with Ferrari to release a special limited edition version of their i2 Personal Transporter. Ferrari have used Segway’s as a transportation method around their Maranello factory for sometime now, the Segway PT i2 Ferrari Limited Edition comes in Ferrari’s signature color, red and features the Scuderia Ferrari logo at the base. It has a range of almost forty kilometers off one battery charge and can be easily stowed in the trunk of a car for longer journeys. It comes with a handlebar bag made of leather.

A refrain we use quite often here at Global Nerdy is that Microsoft’s consumer offerings make you feel as though you’re dining from the table scraps from the dumpsters of the customers they really love: corporate drones running Office, Exchange and SQL Server. However, there are a couple of bright spots in their more recent consumer items:

• The XBox 360, which despite the “red ring of death” issue, has proven to be a great console for the hardcore gamer,
• and just now, the fact that the first-gen Zune can have all the new features being delivered in the second-gen Zune through a free software upgrade. Engadget puts it best: “This is how you treat your customers”.

This move isn’t just uncharacteristic of Microsoft, but in light of the recent Appledickery — that is, Apple’s war against its own fans — it’s downright inspired:

• The iPhone’s “early adopter tax” — dropping the price of the 8GB iPhone a mere two months after its initial release and Steve Jobs’ initial brush-off of angry users with the line “That’s what happens with technology”.
• iPhone “bricking” — Apple’s disabling of modified iPhones.
• The “gimping” of the iPod Touch. Despite the fact that the iPod Touch is running on the same OS as the iPhone, some of its software is a crippled version of the iPhone’s.

Twenty years ago, the portable music player of the time — the Walkman — could only be a Walkman since it was a single-purpose hardware whose sole task was to play cassette tapes. That era’s video players, cellular phones and handheld electronic games also faced the same mechanical limitation — each device could only perform its intended task. Under the hood, each of these device types was quite different.

These days, there isn’t much that separates music players, video players, phones and handheld electronic games. While the user interfaces are different, they’re all just general-purpose computers that vary in processing power and memory. This fact is not lost on the vendors, but many are hoping that consumers are still stuck on the mechanical-era “upgrade treadmill” mindset. Apple seems to be thinking this way, but Microsoft apparently isn’t. Kudos to Microsoft for treating their early adopters properly.

Say hello — and probably goodbye — to my friend, Globe and Mail writer Jeff Gray, with whom I worked at the Queen’s Journal (a.k.a. “The Urinal”), the official student paper of Crazy Go Nuts University. He BikeBerries — that is, uses his BlackBerry while bicycling:

As a columnist who has suggested that cyclists should wear helmets, and shouldn’t use iPods in downtown traffic, I can’t very well come out in favour of using cellphones and BlackBerrys on the roads. Of course you shouldn’t. And it seems that sensible people have figured this out.

Still, gliding on your bike on a little side street, with no one coming, typing “ok” and pressing send? No harm done.

Dude, it’s even easier to pull over when you’re on a bike. Just do it, or else I’m posting those photos from the Journal staff party. You know, the “tongue” ones.

Back when I lived closer to Toronto’s downtown core (I was a five-minute bike ride from the financial district), I saw New City Hall bathed in the glow of a half-dozen large floodlights one night. I went to take a closer look and saw a stuntwoman attached to a line, running right down the side of one of the buildings. It was obviously a movie shoot.

I walked up to one of the crew who appeared to be on a break and asked if she could tell me what movie they were shooting.

“Resident Evil 2,” she said.

She must’ve seen the surprised look on my face, because she quickly followed it up with a “Yeah, enough people saw the first one to justify a sequel.” (Little did we know back then that there would be enough interested in the second to justify yet another sequel.)

The “leak” about an upcoming generation of Zunes as reported by Engadget leaves me with pretty much the same feeling. They’re to be released on October 16th and two types are expected:

• Draco, the smaller flash-based Zune, which will come in 4GB and 8GB versions
• Scorpio, the larger hard drive-based Zune, which will have an 80GB capacity and a screen that is supposed to be “awesome” for video.

Both Zunes will feature the not-quite-square, not-quite-circle user interface called a “squircle”. You may be tempted to scream “stupid marketing/branding made-up word!”, but apparently such a term exists in mathematics.

Back when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s, I loved the Usborne series of books about life in the future. Now that I’m living in the future, I’m trying to find these old books and see how many of their predictions of life today came true. The Usborne Guide to Computer and Video Games, which I pointed to in an earlier entry, was rather accurate in its predictions of what was in store for video and computer games. The future home tech featured in Usborne’s Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century (whose cover appears below) isn’t too far off the mark either; most of it would be easily found at your local Best Buy.

One section in Future Cities is titled Computers in the Home. It describes a home of future, as seen through the eyes of a British author dabbling in sci-fi in the late 1970s. Here’s its introduction:

Computers in the Home

The picture on the right takes you into the living room of a house in the future. The basics will probably be similar — windo9ws, furniture, carpet and TV. There will be one big change though — the number of electronic gadgets in use.

The same computer revolution which has resulted in calculators and digital watches could, through the 1980s and ’90s, revolutionise people’s living habits.

Television is changing from a box to stare at into a useful two-way tool. Electronic newspapers are already available — pushing the button on a handset lets you read ‘pages’ of news, weather, puzzles and quizzes.

TV-telephones should be a practical reality by the mid 1980s. Xerox copying over the telephone already exists. Combining the two could result in millions of office workers being able to work at home if they wish. There is little need to work in a central office if a computer can store records, copiers can send information from place to place and people can talk on TV-telephones.

Many people may prefer to carry on working in an office with others, but for those who are happy at home, the savings in travelling time would be useful. Even better would be the money saved on transport costs to and from work.

Pictured below is a scan of the two-page spread in which the Computers in the Home section appears. It points out some features in a future home, most of which you might find in your own living room today.

Click to see the full picture at full size.
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Here’s the accompanying text, with my commentary in italics:

The Electronic Household

This living room has many electronic gadgets which are either in use already or are being developed for people to buy in the 1980s.

1. Giant-size TV

Based on the designs already available, this one has a super-bright screen for daylight viewing and stereo sound system.

(Came true and even was surpassed in some ways. 42-inch plasma screens sell at Costco for about $1000 and TV isn’t just broadcast in stereo, but 5:1 surround.)

2. Electronic video movie camera

Requires no film, just a spool of tape. Within ten years video cameras like this could be replaced by 3-D holographic recorders.

(The bit about tape came true in the 80s and is surpassed today by recorders that write to magnetic and optical disk as well as solid-state memory. Holograms, a “science news” favourite that seemed to crop up in the news once a month, don’t have the future-appeal they did back then.)

3. Flat screen TV

No longer a bulky box, TV has shrunk to a thickness of less than five centimetres. This one is used to order shopping via a computerised shopping centre a few kilometres away. The system takes orders and indicates if any items are in stock.

(Strange how they separated “giant TV” from “flat screen” TV, as if it were an either-or-but-not-both choice. It’s come true, all right: the LCD monitor with which I’m making this entry is a mere 3 centimetres thick, and the head office of Amazon — this entry links to Future Cities in its catalog — is about 3000 kilometres away.)

4. Video disc player

Used for recording off the TV and for replaying favourite films.

(Came true and surpassed with DVDs, Tivo, movies-on-demand and the merging of disc players and videogames.)

5. Domestic robot rolls in with drinks.

One robot, the Quasar, is already on sale in the USA. Reports indicate that it may be little more than a toy, however, so it will be a few years before “Star Wars” robots tramp through our homes.

(Things didn’t turn out as predicted. The Quasar, pictured below, was much less than a toy. In fact, it turned out to be a hoax:

We do have the Roomba, though, and we do live in a world where a robot gladiator contest is a viable TV show.)

6. Mail slot

By 1990, most mail will be sent in electronic form. Posting a letter will consist of placing it in front of a copier at your home or post office. The electronic read-out will be flashed up to a satellite, to be beamed to its destination. Like many other electronic ideas, the savings in time and energy could be enormous.

(Two areas in which retro-future predictions break down are how we’ll communicate with our machines and how we’ll communicate with each other. Most models of electronic mail as perceived around 1980 was always some form of tele-copying, where you’d write or type your original letter, which would then be scanned into electronic form and then printed at the post office closest to the receiving party. Even the U.S. Postal Service envisioned this model, since they saw mail, whether physical or electronic as their rightful domain. Remind me to post and article about this sometime.)

]]> http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/08/28/home-electronics-of-the-future-as-predicted-28-years-ago/feed/ 3 http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/07/30/i-wouldnt-want-to-try-this-with-an-iphone/ http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/07/30/i-wouldnt-want-to-try-this-with-an-iphone/#comments Mon, 30 Jul 2007 05:00:33 +0000 Joey deVilla http://globalnerdy.com/2007/07/30/i-wouldnt-want-to-try-this-with-an-iphone/

It was the geek party trick of the evening. I was standing by the beer fridge at Friday’s b5media office-warming party when someone asked where the bottle opener was. Not seeing one in sight, Chris whipped out his Blackberry and used it to open a beer bottle. I had my camera handy and shot this video:

Chris says that Blackberries are tough. Once, in a fit of anger, he hurled his Blackberry into his truck — he cracked his windshield, but the Blackberry was unahrmed. After opening a couple of beer bottles, he showed me his Blackberry: it had some gouge marks where it had made contact with the bottlecap, but it was working just fine.

]]> http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/07/30/i-wouldnt-want-to-try-this-with-an-iphone/feed/ 0 http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/06/29/the-free-software-foundation-wants-to-save-us-from-that-lying-cheating-iphone/ http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/06/29/the-free-software-foundation-wants-to-save-us-from-that-lying-cheating-iphone/#comments Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:02:35 +0000 Joey deVilla http://globalnerdy.com/2007/06/29/the-free-software-foundation-wants-to-save-us-from-that-lying-cheating-iphone/

Free as in godawful design.

In case you hadn’t heard (or, in case you actually cared), the Free Software Foundation is releasing version 3 of the GPL today. As you might expect, today’s iPhone release is eclipsing GPL v3’s release, but the FSF are undeterred in their mission. In fact, they’re using this coincidence to remind you that the iPhone is a proprietary device with proprietary software created by a proprietary company:

Peter Brown, the executive director of the Boston-based FSF, is also anticipating that the iPhone will include some free software licensed under the GPL. “On June 29, Steve Jobs and Apple will release a product crippled with proprietary software and digital restrictions: crippled, because a device that isn’t under the control of its owner works against the interests of its owner,” he said.

“We know that Apple has built its operating system, OS X, and its Web browser, Safari, using GPL-covered work. It will be interesting to see to what extent the iPhone uses GPL’d software,” he said.

Version 3 of the GPL fights the most recent attempts to take the freedom out of free software, and attacks “Tivoization”—devices that are built with free software but use technical measures to prevent users from making modifications to the software—which could prove to be a problem for Apple and the iPhone, he said.

Of course, if Free Software were the deciding factor for consumers, the GP2X would be the hot ticket in handheld games, not the Nintendo DS. And the hot console would be the…well, the Free Software console that someone will work on, as soon as they’re done with the HURD.

As much as I love and use Free Software, I’ve become quite cynical about its major proponents and figureheads. Whenever I hear someone say “As a card-carrying member of the FSF”, I automatically equate it in my mind with Grampa Simpson’s declartion, “I am not a crackpot!” [MP3 link]

Click the image to hear an MP3 of Grampa Simpson saying “I am not a crackpot!”

]]> http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/06/29/the-free-software-foundation-wants-to-save-us-from-that-lying-cheating-iphone/feed/ 0 http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/06/21/you-know-what-big-hands-meansmaller-iphone/ http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/06/21/you-know-what-big-hands-meansmaller-iphone/#comments Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:52:59 +0000 Joey deVilla http://globalnerdy.com/2007/06/21/you-know-what-big-hands-meansmaller-iphone/

My co-worker James “Yes, that’s my real name” Koole pointed this out to me earlier this week, and now BoingBoing is pointing to a blog entry that does a bang-on comparison of earlier and later iPhone ads. In the later ads, the iPhone looks smaller because the hands holding it are larger. Almost freakishly so, in fact:

You know what big hands mean…

Here’s what we imagine the hand model for the “Rev B” iPhone looks like:

]]> http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/06/21/you-know-what-big-hands-meansmaller-iphone/feed/ 2 http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/06/04/what-isnt-gizmodo-editor-good-enough/ http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/06/04/what-isnt-gizmodo-editor-good-enough/#comments Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:37:04 +0000 Joey deVilla http://globalnerdy.com/2007/06/04/what-isnt-gizmodo-editor-good-enough/

Verbotomy, the site that challenges its readers to create new words, has this as its current challenge: come up with a word for this definition:

DEFINITION: v. intr. To obsess over, and fantasize about electronic gadgets even though you can never figure out how they actually work. n. A beautiful but useless gadget.

My friend, Kat, asks that you vote for her submission, the word gearoused.

]]> http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/06/04/what-isnt-gizmodo-editor-good-enough/feed/ 1