Published on
February 28, 2006 in
Design.
The ACM IT magazine publishes an article written by Andreas Pfeiffer titled »Why features don’t matter anymore: The new laws of digital technology«. He lists ten fundamental rules for the age of user experience technology. The article begins with this:
The iPod was never sold on the grounds of its technical merits: Apple hit a gold-mine by marketing a cool new way of integrating music in your life. Even when Apple announced the iPod with video, it presented it not as the best multi-media player in the universe, but as a cool new way of watching “Desperate Housewives” and other TV shows.
This observation applies a meme to marketing that I often present in one of my lectures: the differences in the definition of the term »functionality«. In a system-centered perspective functionality is based on features and potential things one could do. In a user-centered perspective functionality is based on tasks and actual actions that are performed. With simpler words: »Functionality« is not about what I could do with a system in theory, but rather what I am actually doing in practice.
This is really hard to understand for developers who tend to focus on the feature list of a system and then suggest users just need more training to get the most out of the product. The marketing would make packages filled with things you could do (if only you would be a power user enough to handle that power!). But the daily frustration with software that is oh-so powerful taught users to become sceptical: they’d rather buy something that does few things right than something that does many things wrong.
I think the iPod was never appealing as a standalone product but rather as a piece of an integrated and thought through product system with the Music Store and iTunes as “missing pieces” for anything you could possibly do with your music: listening, ripping, mixing, collecting, burning CDs, archiving, shopping, gifting, subscribing – and taking it with you on the go, to a party or in the car. In the WIndows-world you had all this functionality spread over different applications and hardware from different vendors – which often requires mere luck to get everything to work without problems.
Update: Tim Bruysten pointed me to this funny parody: How would the iPod packaging look like if Microsoft would have designed it?
Published on
February 28, 2006 in
Design.
A very nice example of visual explanations: the wave vs. matter paradox of quantum physics.
Published on
February 20, 2006 in
Politics.
BBC reports that US secretary of offense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledges that the “war on terror” is primarily a struggle of ideas. He proposes the US propaganda machinery must be capable of fighting down the unfavourable news from offensive media with a “more effective 24-hour propaganda machine”.
Hm. I was thinking free press and freedom of speech is a core ingredient to freedom and democracy. Obviously it is not enough to pay Iraqi journalists to carry US reports.
While everyone is talking about AJAX and JavaScript there is a very old technology taking up steam that could replace the DOM+JavaScript approach: XUL. Look for example at this application called »Songbird«.
The problem with XUL has always been a lack of development tools. XULrunner seems to fill a huge gap here. Anyway it seems that the web browser technology is set out to take over the standard user experience one day. Vendors will be able to deliver grown-up applications (and even parts of it) over the net at the time of request.
I have a constantly updated presentation about »The future of computing«. One chapter of it is about security and surveillance technology – the face recognition approach in particular. Two computer science students in Haifa, Israel, have invented a face recognition method with a 3D scan. It can radically improve the success rate and it was even able to seperate them apart: they are twins. The problem is that this approach requires a database of 3D scans of the faces to be matched with the current sample: So how would you collect those 3D datasets?
Now there is a research group in United Kingdom showing a 40 millisecond 3D scan from a single video frame (see demo video). It uses a projection of stripes on the face and then calculates the surface from their distortion. This could even become a way to recognize faces from a running video… and combined with light sources/camera sensors outside of the visible wave length I suspect it could even be possible to aquire the 3D scans without notice of the scanned person. I don’t know the approach is capable of recognizing people wearing glasses or a large beard.
[found via omnio.org]
Published on
February 6, 2006 in
Tools.
This tool is used to enable some kind of visual programming with apple script components
Metafy’s Anthracite Web Mining Desktop toolkit gives you the tools you need to build powerful data processing systems with an easy-to-use visual interface that makes complex manipulations quickly possible. Anthracite is built for people who need to transform internet sources and/or large data sets into integrated information quickly and easily without scripting.
Published on
February 5, 2006 in
Business.
Only a couple of hours left fo everyone to decide wether or not he/she should go the the Webmontag event in Frankfurt today. There are around 60 people that have announced to attend this meetup. There are also a number of presentators. So it seems to become a very informative and lively evening.
Tobias (flying sparks) points to a audio recording of David Heinemeier Hansson with a keynote at OSCON ‘05. He talks about the basic ideas behind Ruby on Rails.
Update: There are also slides available as PDF from the Ruby on Rails website.
I have written about this before. Now Apple translates the iTunes Music Store model to educational content. Students listen to lectures, download subscribed video feeds or podcasts. Apple acts as a service provider hoping it would broaden the footprint of educational technology.
Published on
February 5, 2006 in
Tools.
There is a new Blog Editor called Performancing available as Firefox Extension.
Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browse and lets you post to your blog easiy. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as well as post to your blog.
This is what it looks like:
It also offers some del.icio.us integration. The UI has still some usability issues, but generally Performancing seems to be a slick little add-on for Firefox.