Teradome.

Tracking the inevitable technocracy.™

A weblog about culture and technology by Noah Mittman • Feedback

Mar8

Mar7

Macs as the back-end

I’d be willing to say that this year might be the last year we see major front-end changes in Mac OS X.

Last night it struck me that the Mac desktop is now the equivalent of the tuning console your car mechanic might use to make fine adjustments to your car’s internal systems when you bring it in. The car, obviously enough, is now the iPhone OS.

I don’t think Apple wants to, or even could, eliminate Mac OS X entirely, but they’ve made it painfully obvious with their iPhone OS devices that the common, consumer-facing computer is not going to be running the windowed OS as we know it today.

Apple needs Mac OS X to be that turning panel. It’s the OS for people who make stuff, and focusing on creative arts is what they’ve always done.

But the pressure to make the OS sexy is gone now — the Snow Leopard release is practically proof of this. What’s important now is to make Mac OS X a solid professional’s development platform, and part of solidifying this has been keeping iPhone and iPad development on Mac OS X.

Mac OS X is the back-end to create the iPhone OS front-end, and both are premier experiences.

Soon, the premiere iLife experience won’t be on Mac OS X, it’ll be on iPad. Not immediately — Apple still needs to sell laptops — but it will happen. The only question remaining is when, if ever, iPhone OS metaphors start appearing on Mac OS X, and when these devices change from current laptops to future tablets.

Mar5

Courier Pagestream UI demo - Uploaded by engadget

The devil’s in the (shipping) details, however. These renders look awesome, but I’ll reserve the full 2010 Awesomeness Prize until we see some hardware and a live demo.

(For starters, most of the pen usage shown in the renders are hands floating over the device, but none of the writing shows the user resting their hand/wrist down on the surface in the way that most people write. It’s these small ergonomics/usability details that add up and usually put Microsoft stuff behind Apple’s.)

Mar2

One-Third of U.S. Without Broadband→

This is fascinating and worthy of discussion in our industry. Collectively, we’ve screwed up. Badly. What can we do to make computers attractive to the third of our country who don’t use any of our stuff?

Make them less like cars and more like radios.

Remove the maintenace, tweaking, under-the-hood nonsense, and replace them with extremely clear features and use-cases.

(This is why I will be recommending iPads to pretty much anyone who asks, by the way.)

89 notes

Feb27

Wisconsin senator critical of NBC handling of online access to Olympics - latimes.com→

Yeah, I’m critical of it too.

Kohl said he doesn’t understand why NBC doesn’t offer viewers the opportunity to pay directly for online access to all Olympic coverage.

“I fear that that this practice of locking up certain content only for pay-TV subscribers may be a preview of what is to come with respect to TV programming shown on the Internet, particularly in the context of the proposed Comcast/NBC Universal merger,” said Kohl.

Feb26

First glimpse at Symbian^4 YAWN edition.

Ok, here’s the intrinsic problem with Symbian.

In many cases, it’s fine. Updating it is fine. Modernizing it is fine. What’s not fine is that they waited 5 years to do it, and they’re still playing catch up.

What’s here is what everyone else is already doing. Period. Nokia may have a strong brand, but every year they don’t catch up to modern UX standards is another 30 or so handsets that people get to see and potentially switch to.

Feb23

I wonder how well this shirt sells. May have to update it to “S60 Users Do It With Grandfathered Technical Support” soon.

I wonder how well this shirt sells.

May have to update it to “S60 Users Do It With Grandfathered Technical Support” soon.

Feb22

Feb20

What's so great about Heavy Rain

Wow, I don’t understand why people keep missing what is significant about Heavy Rain. The latest article I’ve seen claimed it and Wii Sports were not that different.

Now that we’ve all shouted “well, one has a narrative, for starters,” let’s get to the meat of this post. Why are people not “getting” Heavy Rain?

Believe me, this is not something that needs getting. Many people are not going to like it. The complaints seem to stem from the opinion that it is not a game, because the player has no agency in the plot, and the choices you make have very little to do with the story’s outcome.

But let’s step back from this for a second — this is an interactive movie — and so the goal isn’t to let the user control the characters to change story events, it is to let the user steer the characters into and through story events in order to heighten empathy.

Much of the Podtoid cast had their biggest problem with the selection of the Crime Scene chapter for the PSN demo. There was little you did except wander through an overgrown lot near some train tracks, and hit R1 several times to find a few hidden items. You can’t even leave the area until you find them all.

Yet the Crime Scene chapter could easily be seen as scavenger hunt, or even some sort of word search puzzle. Sure, it’s not a great game, but it is one. What Heavy Rain aims to do is have player live in between the lines of the script, sitting close to character intent and finding ways to transfer character emotion into the player by having them virtually walk a mile in their shoes.

It’s raining, it’s miserable. There’s a lot of officers getting in the FBI agent’s way, and he doesn’t want to be wandering around looking for evidence because it seems like he’s hiding something himself. The search game of the Crime Scene is a perfect juxtaposition to him because it is slow and tedious and allows the right kind of introspection on the character to occur as he is mostly alone with his thoughts.

If Heavy Rain fails, it will be because it is simply not a good narrative. If it can’t create a story worth caring about, and if it can’t offer characters that are believable or sympathetic when they are controlled, then no amount of interactivity can save it. It’s a movie after all, and there’s a specific story to be told. If it succeeds, then it should create a level of intimacy with its people & events that hasn’t been reached before.

I’ve heard the game reviewed as “emotionally draining.” Sounds like it did its job right.