Tracking the Inevitable Technocracy

HTC’s Sense UI seems pretty rock-solid to me, even when it...

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:51:00 -0400

HTC’s Sense UI seems pretty rock-solid to me, even when it falls into the usual pitfall of tab overflow, e.g., the bottom menu for the Music application, which seems to have 2 options offscreen. However, I’m sure there’s a way to customize that row, so it shouldn’t matter that the views you use the least are initially obscured.

Without your typical left/right arrows around it, it looks like you should be able to scrub that bar and move the selection all the way over to the obscured items as well without having to navigate through all neighbors.

There are many tabbed screens in S60 given its legacy, and while I am not offended by most of S60’s UI today, the fact that navigating tabs was not made more touch-friendly in 5th Edition is one of the few things that does, pardon the saying, rub me the wrong way.

Nokia N97 review: a tale of two bloggers | Engadget

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:08:56 -0400

Nokia N97 review: a tale of two bloggers | Engadget:

This review acts as a kind of coda to my recent posts about smartphone and my own recent purchase. In particular, I noticed this passage:

I had a fascinating conversation with Bhaskar Roy of Qik the other evening. As you might know, Qik is the revolutionary mobile platform that lets users stream video live from their phones, but what you might not know is that it got its start on S60, thanks largely to the platform’s openness and the availability of high-spec hardware. Qik’s available on a variety of platforms these days, but it turns out that the N97 is the one and only device — regardless of platform, manufacturer, whatever delineation you like — that currently allows them to capture near-HD widescreen video. Granted, a good 5 megapixel camera with so-called “nHD” 642 x 358 video recording capability at 30fps certainly helps, but Qik also found that S60 allowed them to interact directly with the N97’s DSP in ways that other platforms wouldn’t dream of allowing. Safety versus stability is a never-ending debate unto itself in the smartphone app world, and Nokia (certificate drama aside) generally chooses to trust its partners to develop the right software and its customers to install the right software more than others. I like that.

I like that, too.

Good for you, Palm.

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:11:00 -0400

Something weird is going on with me and the Palm Pre release: I don’t entirely care.

I do care at an industry level, because I want Apple to feel some competition so they start fixing their problems instead sitting on their hands (and mountains of cash), but personally the phone just doesn’t interest me that much. There’s definitely a good amount of interest regarding the UI, multitouch and gesture implementations they put in, as an interaction designer. But the phone itself? Eh.

Currently, I see the phone marketplace in two categories right now: Mutable or Focused.

Being Mutable isn’t just about the connectivity of the device, but about how else you are using the device in new places with new people or in new contexts. The iPhone absolutely tears up this category: thanks to its popularity, plus the ease of over-the-air downloads from the App Store, you can almost immediately pair up with someone else in a new social media experience on the spot in a foreign location, for example. OS 3.0 will extend contexts with the new API, solidifying the device as a handheld device that can simply become anything you want it to be.

Focused devices need to be connected too, but not nearly as much as Mutable ones do because their hardware features are meant to be outstanding. A prime example would be Samsung’s 12-megapixel cellphone, what the industry used to call a “feature phone” but is now being built on a smartphone platform instead of a custom OS like it would have been before. The personal value of having the Focused device trumps the Mutable value of it, but does not remove it — in particular, there must be some mutability of the essential feature that spurned the purchase.

Palm is just finding its legs. It won’t be able to fully compete as a Mutable device until it gets more users and more developers, which is why you’ll see crazy experiments with billboards that can be controlled by iPhones before you’ll see them on the Pre. This kind of catch-up is what any competitor in the smartphone business has to do, and the gap simply can’t be filled until the handsets are sold and in enough user’s hands.

As a Focused device, it has no outstanding hardware features. It has no widescreen optimized-for-movies display and has no dedicated music controls. It sports a 3.2 MP camera for the same reason Apple’s will — it would be laughed off the stage if it didn’t include one — but there is no dedicated camera button and no auto-focus. The energy at Palm went into making the Pre a really rich PIM experience for its owner, such as beautiful calendar management and great contact features like “Synergy” which lets you aggregate details about a person live off of multiple services like AIM and Facebook automatically.

So clearly, the Pre aims to be a Mutable device, trying to lure developers into exploiting the wide but basic features within — which means its going straight for Apple’s lunch. Judging by certain moves like making it masquerade as an iPod for the Pre’s iTunes compatibility, it seems like Palm really is trying to force Apple into making a move that Palm laywers want to jump on — either Apple leaves it alone and lets Palm try to muscle in on its turf, or Apple goes after Palm and risks having a court force Apple to let everyone in on its fun if it loses.

But that battle is happening on turf I gave up on long ago. Mutable devices amuse me to no end, but the lack of a quality camera kills it for me. After experiencing how valuable it was to me having the N95 8GB in my pocket when my son was born, I’d never go back. I no longer want to look at cameraphone photo that turns out to be a wonderful moment and think “if only I had a better/real camera on me.” This is why I pre-ordered an N97, with an improved 5 MP camera (better sensor and flash) but with other improvements (like touch) to make sure I don’t miss out on anything that lets me use the camera and my photos in new and interesting ways.

If Palm is successful, either Apple will need to differentiate further to keep their lead, or this newly-recharged Palm can release a high-end Pre for those still waiting for better hardware features. Which is why I’m rooting for Palm to kick Apple’s ass. I finally want to see that when Apple kicked everyone else’s ass when they introduced the iPhone, that someone out there learned from it.

Beware Of Android Bearing Gifts

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:06:39 -0400

Beware Of Android Bearing Gifts:

Great analysis of the current troubles Android is facing in the marketplace, particularly for developers and OEMs. Andreas deftly points out that while the Android announcement spawned some amazing industry-wide shifts (e.g., birth of Symbian Foundation), it just actually hasn’t paid out for those adapting and deploying the system.

…Up to 2008, Google was working with one OEM (HTC) and one operator (T-Mobile). And since 2009 it has to work with nearly 10 OEMs (Motorola, Huawei, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, HTC, Acer, Lenovo, Archos, Garmin, Toshiba) and several operators (O2, Vodafone, T-Mobile China Mobile, ..).

You would think that Google’s mighty 20,000+ workforce can easily cope. But the 100-strong Android team that Google acquired isn’t showing signs of scaling to match the demand; at least the roadmap seems to lack the pace of development, let alone innovation that is expected from Google.

Topsy launched the other day — it’s a search engine...

Wed, 27 May 2009 14:56:00 -0400

Topsy launched the other day — it’s a search engine for links in Twitter that ranks link importance by the number of their retweets. An interesting idea, but I have a big gripe about this particular use.

There was a good post recently about the overall value of Twitter as metadata and annotations to the web, but Topsy shows how this can backfire. Take a look at this result & related tweet for example.

An update is a rather predictable beast. It can tell us:

original/reply/forwarded status (e.g, leading with an RT, or having a reply ID)
associated users (sender, plus @usernames)
a location (the URL(s))
some description/comment (remaining text that is not any of the above)

But Topsy doesn’t do anything special with these beyond expanding a URL and getting its title. It repeats the update without any further parsing, so it doesn’t help us focus past the stuff it has decided to format nicely already. A link update is already noisy, but now it’s even noisier as we have to read things twice; Why do I need to see the short URL when the link is right above it?

In fact, with this screenshot, the body text is identical to the linked story’s headline. So as metadata, on the surface, this update is just plain useless. However, the metadata of the update itself is — the date it was posted, the reply thread, the sender, etc.. This information should accompany the result as well, especially if the text is identical to the page title (which then points out that text should be hidden). Why should your user need to expend the effort to determine what’s different in the update when there isn’t anything different about it?

If we’re going to start using Twitter as metadata, we’ve got to start intelligently parsing it and displaying it for users. Otherwise, it’s just another burden on a user to find meaning and context in what’s been given to them — much like retweets themselves.

BTW: If you haven’t guessed yet, I’m a strong objector to RTs.

It’s not that radial menus don’t work, it’s...

Sat, 23 May 2009 19:06:00 -0400

It’s not that radial menus don’t work, it’s that they’re never essential. To this date, I’ve never seen a user interface done radially that couldn’t be done better in another format.

Mostly, I’ve seen them implemented in obvious wrong ways. There’s no real way to make such a menu work like a right-click in a web page. You could move the cursor to a fixed location for the menu so it has the space it needs, but then you’re moving the user’s cursor. That’s pretty damn disruptive, and many users would lose their grounding with a move like that. But on the flip side, the whole system is about user efficiency, i.e. gestural input, or equal mousing distance to all options, which means you can’t reposition the menu from the edge of the screen and not move the cursor with it. The whole thing just breaks down on both ends.

Data visualizations, sure, but menu/input systems? No.

FWIW, the menu above from Songza is the #1 “notable implementation” on Wikipedia’s entry for this.

With apologies to @jmspool, and rant on Twitter replies and presumption

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:35:00 -0400

jmspool: The problem with the @ reply fix is it's all or nothing, when it should be based on conversations. (See the interesting. Avoid the boring.)
noahmittman: It's not a fix if you don't want to see them, it's Twitter shouting, i.e., you might as well preceed the update with 'hey'
jmspool: That's my point. Add 'hey' (a great idea, btw) puts the responsibility on the tweeter, when it really should be the reader's.
noahmittman: True, but "responsibility" is a hard word to justify when it comes to Twitter. Last "hey" post I saw was an LOL and emoticon. || If it's not actually valuable, the user is just spamming the 97% who didn't use it for some conversation boasting || Using profile pages has always been the way to see everyone's conversations, which is compl. foreign now thanks to the API clients || Those who live in replies 80/20 would take over a user's timeline 4x over if they adopted this "fix" || Why not simply reply to someone and then update "having a great convo with @user" -- If it's worth telling me about it, then *tell me.*

The myth of building your own blog

Thu, 14 May 2009 18:03:00 -0400

Many people believe that in order to have a “proper” blog you have to build it yourself. For most people, this is becoming less and less the case. Unless you are a back-end programmer, it doesn’t make much of a difference.

But Noah! Why would you stuff all your work on wordpress.com when you can host it yourself? Well, are you? Are you really hosting it yourself?

Truth is, you are paying a company for web hosting. I use GeekISP for the sites that I build by hand (or by Drupal, now there’s a gray area when it comes to DIY and having it done for you), and I pay them for it. When you add to it, e.g., some MySQL connections, typically the cost goes up too, so yeah you could run your own Basecamp-like package on your ISP, or that additional cost could go into an actual Basecamp account. For most users, the latter is the more headache-free choice.

But what about terms of use violations! Why rely on someone who could turn around and shut your stuff down because they didn’t like it? Sadly, ISPs are under as much scrutiny regarding illegal activity on their networks as these platform providers are. Your web hosting could be blocked just as easily as your dedicated service, and while the laws are slightly more in your favor in the hosting vs. paid application scenario, it’s not by much. Unless you run your own servers in your own house, and your provider is only giving you network connectivity, someone else is serving that content for you and their liability may make them take action on your stuff.

Like any good media archivist will tell you, the key is how easy it is to copy your content. In this case, how portable your data is. Portability is what allows you to pick up from one application service to another just like you could move from one hosting provider to another, if you were forced to. For bloggers, it’s a simple choice: moving posts from one place to another is fairly simple, and only becomes complex if you’re worried about “linkrot.”

There’s been an explosion of good *.tumblr.com and *.wordpress.com blogs out there, many times masked by a custom domain (imagine my surprise when I saw the wordpress.com dashboard appear when viewing a GigaOM site). For many cases, the only hosting you really need can be done by such a platform provider. Both have odd views about portability. Wordpress uses their own XML format, but since it is so popular and well-documented, other sites have added support for the format into their importers — there is no true standard for this kind of export, although the old MovableType format comes close (but only because there was a massive migration from the platform when SixApart started charging money for it).

I love Tumblr, but I don’t like the continued lack of any portability, not even imports. It’s not that I want to change blogging platforms (in fact, I’ve put a lot of content on ice until there’s an import mechanism added because I’ve tried so many others and Tumblr is the product I want), but I want to make sure what I’ve created is backed up — not just in case there’s some rare unrecoverable crash that screws up Tumblr’s backups, but in the long term, like if Tumblr has to shut down and I’m forced to move.

And more importantly, so that my content is mine, in a sense of the word.

About a hinge.

Mon, 11 May 2009 14:36:00 -0400

I recently placed my pre-order for the N97, and as part of the build-up to the shipping of the device, Nokia published this video about the design of the phone available to all on their new Nseries blog. I find this video particularly interesting because of the emphasis they put into the feel and sound of the device’s slider.

A few years ago, Donald Norman shifted his usability writings into a field he likes to call “emotional design.” In his TED presentation from 2003 on the topic, he talks about looking at the qualities of objects that makes us attracted or connected to them, and how that actually makes them work better, thanks to a little thing called “psychology.” It seems as though the designers of the N97 are very much like-minded when it comes to this subject.

There’s something funny about this — and the phone slider in particular — when it comes to the current marketplace. Back when the Palm Pre was unveiled, Pete Skillman made a quick jab at the industrial design of the N95, saying there was “a lot of topological complexity” to it. The design philosophy of the Pre, it turns out, is about hiding these elements — screws, rails, ports, etc. — so that the device seems like one solid almost-magic thing.

And when looking outside at this comment, throwing away all the “let’s chase Apple” moves in the mobile industry, we know this isn’t the case. Even just one category of high-end watches lets us know that while some people may be emotionally drawn to a seamless, perfectly smooth black orb that does everything, others like to see that complexity surfaced, particularly when it is expertly done. To have an insight on how it works or how it was built. To have an understanding or a sense of wonder about the device.

When I heard the jab at the N95, I did react negatively to it. Generally, I’m the type that likes to have a fundamental understanding of how my stuff works. Think cars: you want to know what’s going wrong with your car when there’s a hiccup, yet there a millions of drivers who don’t know anything about how their car works, and don’t care to find out. However, many want to be able to open their car up, or at least feel like they could if they wanted to (even though they know they never will — it’s the “potentiality” market, i.e. those that buy Hummers).

To a certain extent, this has been the primary dividing line between the iPhone and the non-iPhone users: a certain willingness to let the phone or the software do all the work, a certain passing of control to the device, or to let the phone hide settings or features that the “average” user doesn’t need to see. Essentially, a driving minimalist aesthetic that would lead them more towards this watch that the previous linked one.

So what does this say? Well, it means that some people just prefer the more elaborate design, where the object is rich in detail and presents its intricacies at some level where someone can open it up and marvel at it.

For those people, it will be far more difficult to connect emotionally to something that deliberately hides those pieces from you. A slider that open and closes comfortably is just one part of an industrial design that clearly aims for those people.

The Making of the Nokia N97, as posted on Nokia’s Nseries...

Thu, 07 May 2009 15:03:00 -0400

The Making of the Nokia N97, as posted on Nokia’s Nseries blog.

The 526-word entry associated with this video has been moved to a new post because according to Tumblr caption text is caption text, period, and was not appearing in all outputs of the website.

Who knows your security questions?

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:37:56 -0400

The latest email hack to hit the news was the report that Salma Hayek’s email account was compromised without any password trickery. And once again, like with Gov. Sarah Palin and her Yahoo! email account, it all had to do with these providers’ password recovery systems.

How does this happen? It happens because of a few factors:

It is considered poor security to allow anyone but the account holder to have access to the user’s password. Support agents only have as much access to password process as the users do, when the system is built properly. There should never be a system where an agent can say “Ok, it looks like your password is _____” because that means there exists a system that can pull up anyone’s passwords. That’s insecure from an outside-hacker point-of-view and from a disgruntled-employee point-of-view.
When this email service is the user’s only email account, there is no backup address to send a reset password to. Everything must happen in the browser at that moment. If I ask to reset my password, the reset password process happens right then and there.

But most importantly:

The user’s security questions, meant to be only answerable by the account holder, are weak.

In the case of Sarah Palin, the Yahoo! questions were preset options such as “what is your mother’s maiden name,” which in the case of an elected official, are all on public record. It was actually prohibited to use any public email system, mostly because her communications as a governor are part of state record and must be accountable & sufficiently secured.

Which is why the Salma Hayek situation is particularly amusing, because MobileMe does the “right” thing by allowing the user to configure their own questions. In this case, Hayek had entered “favorite character” as her question, and it didn’t take the hacker long to find that the answer to this was “frida.” Being a public figure, it doesn’t take long to flip through a number of interviews online and find an actual public statement of what her favorite role has been. Hell, it may have been on last night in a repeat of Inside the Actor’s Studio for all I know.

Lacking cases of celebrity, this is one of the examples why crimes happen more often between people that know each other than people who don’t — it’s because they have the upper hand on personal knowledge. “What town you were born in” is horribly weak when you’re living in the same city you were born in, for example. Or worse, questions of the “your first ____” variety might be more obscure, but require that you’ve owned one before, becoming an unusable selection.

This is why I love systems that let you enter your own questions because I don’t make them questions. I make them call-and-response in-jokes that stem from high school that were shared with only two or three other people who I remain in contact to this day, and make absolutely no sense to anyone else because quite frankly they didn’t make any sense when we made them up — they were just that random.

“Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!” is one of my unhackable questions. While it has roots in popular culture from our high-school days, it is both remarkably obscure and incredibly malformed from its original source to the point where it can’t be sourced. It could be a ninja scream from NBC’s The Master, or a parody of a Max Headroom Coke ad. You’ll never know.

But the point is: only three people know, and those people know they are the only ones who know. Checkmate.

Follow the new poing!@. THAT IS ALL.

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:25:03 -0400

Follow the new poing!@. THAT IS ALL.

June is going to be awesome

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 18:10:18 -0400

With the end of Q1 2009, June is shaping up to be a massive month for gadgets. The only question I’m left with is how much will go unannounced or unfinished given the economy? How ambitious could these companies have been given the advancements we’re making?

WWDC is set for June, and with it comes the obligatory new iPhone rumors. It is also the date for the N97 launch for Nokia, which may come with a worldwide release instead of the usual EMEA-only launch. Atom netbooks are piling up, Nvidia ION-powered devices are starting to appear, etc. etc.. Heck, even the DTV transition is now happening in June.

There’s a weird kind of guilt set up for me, now that I’ve saved up for my big purchase — currently planned to be the N97, although I’m certainly open to last-minute breaking news — in that there’s probably better uses for the money than fueling yet another gadget purchase. Part of it is also financial, and also environmental. Mostly, it’s because I have a 6-month old infant.

But since it’s my job to stay on top of these things, I truck along, while trying to find new homes for my old gadgets (and never ever simply discarding them).

Speaking of which, if you’re in New York, CeX are pretty awesome for that sort of thing.

I haven’t been paid by my local I Sold It on eBay! since December, and have already filed a BBB complaint as they tell me my new checks are on the way. So stay away from that — really, if the items hadn’t been significantly large and heavy, and local pick-up only, I would have sold it on eBay myself.

Migrating to Tumblr

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:17:00 -0400

I’m taking a bit of inspiration from stevenf again and throwing caution to the wind and moving my main blog over to Tumblr, like I’ve wanted to for months now.

Very soon, teradome.com will point here, to the new blog. My hub page will now be hosted on my previously-inactive noahmittman.com domain, which makes a lot more sense, honestly.

For the folks out there who started following me on Tumblr for poing!@, that tumblelog will be kept running, but because of the way Tumblr links a login to only one main blog (while all the additional blogs are treated as sub-accounts with different features and access rules) I’ve modified my main account to be called/named “teradome” and added a new “poing” sub-account.

The short of it all is that you will need to follow that sub-account to stay poinged, as your current subscriptions are only attached to the main account.

Sorry for the confusion, but hopefully you’ll find this blog just as interesting as the other one.

Well, probably not. There will probably be less Pokemon photoshops.

Math Homework 911 Call

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:57:48 -0400

Math Homework 911 Call

diesel sweeties: 8-bit robot romance webcomic and geeky...

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:22:54 -0400

diesel sweeties: 8-bit robot romance webcomic and geeky t-shirts : Whatever Doesn’t Klingon Makes You Starfleet

Photo

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:17:45 -0400

Can’t tell if this is an insult or a promise.

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:41:00 -0400

Can’t tell if this is an insult or a promise.

Likes

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:00:27 -0400

I like the Tumblr Likes, it’s a nice alternative to reblogging, but what I don’t like is that you can’t do anything with them. No public viewing, no RSS, nothing.

The Matrix came out ten years ago today

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:58:27 -0400

But, if we’re being fair, the franchise became old about three months later.

You know, realizing this was the first thing that *really* made me feel old, which is why I’m really happy to have found that this was the first post on Wanna Feel Old?