When in "browse" mode, iTunes basically only has two choices: navigate by artist/album, or navigate by genre/artist/album. I think iTunes should be customizable so as to match the navigation on the iPod.
I was a little confused by this at first but then I realized that I don't even bother using the browse boxes anymore.
With the entire library or a playlist selected, I start typing in the search box in the upper right. If I type in "jazz" it'll filter down the library to those with "jazz" in any of the meta-data fields. If I type in "beethoven" it'll do the same. I find it's a lot faster to navigate music using this method than any other method.
That's all well and good, but the biggest problem to working with clay and getting the shape onto the computer is getting clay all over your $K's worth of interface devices.
So this morning I was planning on calling their aesthetics bluff (if you saw my apartment building you'd consider this hilarious) but I read that the dish needs to face the southern sky. I have a patio on the south-side of the building, but it conveniently faces a gigantic tree, and I'm on the first floor. I'll have to check with a DirecTV technician, but I'm guessing the setup won't work. I might contact the guys who live a few floors above me and see if they're interested in going in on the dish system with me.
The FCC has a very helpful Fact Sheet regarding the issue. For those too lazy to click, renters can install an antenna on the private area of their residence (indoors or on a private balcony or porch) but public areas (shared walkways, balconies, and roofs) do not fall under the scope of this legislation. As such, management may impose restrictions on the mounting of such permanent structures as television dishes.
I actually asked my apartment manager about installing a dish on my covered patio area, and I got a quick "no". The reason: aesthetics. Apparently there's an apartment policy that states that no antenna or dish can be visible, even on porches.
Even given that I signed an agreement to the above when I moved into my apartment, it seems like this fact sheet says otherwise as long as it's not in a common area. Is this something that you have dealt with and "won"? *
* quotes meant to emphasize that it's not necessarily a game or personal vendetta.
Don't get this. It's a piece of junk. I bought this to keep an eye on the pets while at work. It has horrible stability issues and is really sensitive to heat (can't even put it above my fridge because it's too hot). Furthermore, to view the video stream you'll need Internet Explorer, as it uses an ActiveX plugin. It comes witha desktop app client which is functional but isn't great.
The thing that irks me the most is that there is no way to grab a frame (jpg format, whatever), and there's no way to save the video stream without using the desktop app.
Check out SageTV. It's pretty much a Tivo wanna-be, but it has both a client and server. I have the server running with two Hauppage WinTV 250s and clients running on various computers at home. I'm able to watch both any channel/program either on live TV or recorded. Connecting to the server from outside isn't a problem. When I'm bored at work I'll set up recording schedules or check on what shows have been recorded for the day.
The hard part is going to be bandwidth. At "good" quality the stream is 2 gigs per hour, which isn't too bad but I sometimes have problems watching TV on my laptop when the signal gets degraded. I'm unable to watch shows from the office, however -- my DSL line isn't brawny enough.
The shows are written to the hard drive as standard mpeg2 files, however. I'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to run some sort of script to re-encode them at lower quality and bitrate and stream to the outside world. I'm too lazy to tinker with that, and prefer copying shows from the last few nights to my laptop. That way I get full quality, despite the 24-48 hour "latency".
Does anyone know if gmail was an inhouse devleopment ? Or is it third party. I am interested on becuase I notice that when it load of gmail it says "please wait..." can I assume that in fact this is some sort of Java applet that is loading. I noticed that someone sent me an email to my account - and it appeared without me having to rfresh the browser - did not see a hidden frame / meta fresh either - interested to know how they are doing this.
Not sure about whether it's in-house or not. There is no Java applet involved, however for IE an ActiveX object ('Microsoft.XMLHTTP') is loaded to send and receive XML messages. Everything else is straight DHTML (Javascript + DOM). It works on a wide range of browsers because they kept the design simple. There could be some browser detection logic to handle specific browser nuances.
There are indeed frames involved. The topmost document contains a frameset containing 2 frames, each of which contain necessary IFRAMEs. I believe the "no-refresh" feature is done through XMLHTTP, although I could be wrong.
and was told it's because they get morons deliberately trashing the PCs' BIOS settings, not because of any particular fiddling people do with Windows.
Couldn't they put a password on the BIOS settings? Windows can be made demo-safe....I think it's just that retailers and manufacturers don't put the effort in -- i guess they don't need to.
All Apple product displays, however, seem to be accompanied by some company rep (ie salesperson), although some of them don't seem to be any more helpful than a typiacl Best Buy rep.
Stop by an Apple store if you can. They give more free reign on their computers than you would, since people need to try them out.
I noticed this not just at big Apple stores, but also at Apple setups in other retailers (CompUSA, Fry's). They let potential buyers play, while the HP and Sony machines are locked up in a tight slideshow/animation demo-only mode. I don't use Apple machines but guess which section of a retail store I'll check out just for fun?
I'm on Packet8 as well. Works fine, and as the parent suggests it's really dependent on your internet connection. I switched from cable to DSL for reliability and it works great. Also I have friends and family abroad and it definitely makes for cheap international calls.
I messed up on the form submit earlier (evidently I don't have the expert hand eye coordination of a pro gamer)
I think what you've stated applies to any profession. Most people hardly make any money starting out any career, and all careers cost something (including opportunity cost). I don't know anyone with a successful career that got started without huge education (college, training) and time (experience) costs. It's just the way it is. Furthermore, people with successful careers constantly invest in their career future. Yes, I consider O'Reilly books to be an investment (but not WROX books).
And as for sticking to your day job...I think pro gamers would sneer at what you and I do for a living and stick to theirs, thanks.
You're better off becoming a professional musician or pro athelete than a pro gamer.
Sure, the TOP GAMERS make over 200k a year (BTW - being a pro gamer also means you need to buy bleeding edge technology, so that 200k isn't much after you subtract your monthly computer upgrade budget), but most hardly make any... not to mention that you not only have to be fabulous with one game, but with at least one new game ever year or so. If you take a break, or have an off year or two, you are in debt.
I'll stick to my day job, thanks.
A couple hundred meg on a 60 gig hard drive isn't so much is it? I don't typically search through files, but I imagine others might.
I probably don't take advantage of indexing on XP, but I know that the indexing that goes on in IDEs (Eclipse, IDEA) is a huge help. "Summoning" files is so much nicer than navigating a source tree.
I've got a standard Sony Trinitron. Nothing special. I've seen teletext and it is readable, but it's quite big and blocky. It'll be hard to get a computer to output something like that.
I have one of my old computers hooked up to a 32" Sony. Watching quicktime trailers, playing silly flash games, downloading and watching a movie off MovieLink, and playing music with visualizations is pretty good.
Browsing the web, however, is a pain in the ass. Text is very hard to read, even with the font sizes cranked up.
Using a TV as monitor for playing media is a viable solution, however, especially if you have your hi-fi sound system in the proximity of your TV. It's much nicer to kick back and listen to mp3s on the couch rather than at your desk.
What I would REALLY like to have is web-based Outlook access. To me, this would be the best of all worlds, but for personal (legal) use, it's just way too epensive and complex to maintain.
Then set up an IMAP account with some ISP. You get the benefit of hosting/redundancy and you can check from a full-blown mail client (Thunderbird, Outlook, Eudora). You can also usually set your clients to sync and make your downloaded emails available offline. If your local machine blows up or you travel, you can always access your email through an IMAP webmail client.
Would you still say that it would be easy for someone to innovate their way out of it?
Possible, yes. Easy, no. Come on...we're all builders/hackers/designers at heart. Why should we take the easy way out? Apple has set a bar whether or not they have a patent on their design, but what's wrong with going further?
Because whether or not they were trying to innovate their UI, there would be certain UI conventions that were verboten, like the scroll wheel.
Is the circular flat wheel the ONLY way to get through an ordered list of data? It's definitely a pretty sexy and marketable design but there's no reason that a few smart designers couldn't "synergize" or whatever and come up with something comparable if not better. Give industrial and interaction designers out there some credit.
Because a 'good UI' is by definition similar to existing UIs. Have you ever watched a totally computer illiterate person struggle with using a scroll bar? happens all the time.
You've described a familiar UI, which is only one of many factors contributing to usability. And yes, scroll bars are rather difficult to use for someone who's never seen them before -- how does this prove that a good UI is similar to other UIs? Scroll bars are a very prevalant UI element. By your logic shouldn't it be "good UI" because it's very common across many applications and operating systems?
Yes, scroll wheels, menus, and hierarchical menus preceeded the iPod, but I don't see any mp3 player or other portable device encompass all these elements in one coherent package. I could be wrong but the iPod was a very NEW UI, yet everyone seems to hail the iPod UI as being a "good UI".
Now personally I think the iPod UI does have its drawbacks (as all interfaces do) and some improvements can be made geared toward using a portable music player in a certain context (while driving, for example). But Apple designed for a pretty broad audience and they did it well. However, there is no reason to say that the iPod UI is the be-all and end-all for portable media players. There is more than one way to design for this task, and there's no reason why a different UI couldn't succeed.
Basically it'd be at best a major nuisance, and at worst force everyone else to have ungainly user interfaces.
How would it force everyone else to have "ungainly" UIs? If they can't directly copy the iPod interaction design then *GASP* they would instead have to innovate and come up with a new and perhaps better way of going about playing music on a portable device. Imagine that...
(At least accepting that iPod's UI is good and easy to use, my (admittedly limited) experience with it was one of great frustration personally.)
Well there you go...you even say that you find the iPod frustrating to use. It's quite entirely possible that someone could come up with something better, perhaps the design to rule them all even to suit your taste in device interactions.
The obvious answer is "No". This is an interview, not work. Should you reject a doctor because he doesn't want to give you a free exam as part of your interview process? Peolple want to be judged based on their professional work, not on bullshit interview problems. That doesn't mean that most people won't do it, it just means they won't like it.
By the time a candidate steps into an interview room a good interviewee already has a good feel for the following, either by fine-toothing the resume or conducting a preliminary phone-interview:
General technical background (technologies, APIs).
Listing of applicable experience.
Credentials (education, certification, IP awards, etc etc)
Notice that at the time of interview the hiring manager should have already judged a candidate's professional work and background. Good interviewers will proceed to validate and qualify the claims made in the resume, and more importantly, explore whether the candidate appears to be a good teammate. It's not uncommon for companies to assign a candidate's potential future co-workers to be interviewers. So why not do this by simulating a day-to-day shop discussion? The interviewer wouldn't be asking the candidate to check in some code for the next release -- that would be retarded -- but tossing a few questions in the air and working on a whiteboard seems pretty par for the course.
The hardest thing to do in this business is understand the problem and come up with a solution that is maintainable, easy to code and scalable. If I want to know how to solve a specific algorithm like that, I'll google.
I don't consider myself a Java developer (I design/build UIs) but I would be pretty dismayed if I saw a self-proclaimed Java developer resort to looking up that "algorithm" on google. Granted, the parent post's wording is a little ambiguous but that shouldn't stop an interviewee from asking a few clarifying questions, then writing out half-decent code that avoids a few blatant obstacles, in this case the requirement for Collections to store primitives. The parent is really referring to candidates not being able to live up to their own talk, which I think is a valid statement. If someone groans about writing a snippet of code in an interview, wouldn't that make him look like a crappy potential co-worker who groans about writing code for production?
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I was a little confused by this at first but then I realized that I don't even bother using the browse boxes anymore.
With the entire library or a playlist selected, I start typing in the search box in the upper right. If I type in "jazz" it'll filter down the library to those with "jazz" in any of the meta-data fields. If I type in "beethoven" it'll do the same. I find it's a lot faster to navigate music using this method than any other method.
Wrap the clay in saran wrap.
So this morning I was planning on calling their aesthetics bluff (if you saw my apartment building you'd consider this hilarious) but I read that the dish needs to face the southern sky. I have a patio on the south-side of the building, but it conveniently faces a gigantic tree, and I'm on the first floor. I'll have to check with a DirecTV technician, but I'm guessing the setup won't work. I might contact the guys who live a few floors above me and see if they're interested in going in on the dish system with me.
I actually asked my apartment manager about installing a dish on my covered patio area, and I got a quick "no". The reason: aesthetics. Apparently there's an apartment policy that states that no antenna or dish can be visible, even on porches.
Even given that I signed an agreement to the above when I moved into my apartment, it seems like this fact sheet says otherwise as long as it's not in a common area. Is this something that you have dealt with and "won"? *
* quotes meant to emphasize that it's not necessarily a game or personal vendetta.
The thing that irks me the most is that there is no way to grab a frame (jpg format, whatever), and there's no way to save the video stream without using the desktop app.
Check out SageTV. It's pretty much a Tivo wanna-be, but it has both a client and server. I have the server running with two Hauppage WinTV 250s and clients running on various computers at home. I'm able to watch both any channel/program either on live TV or recorded. Connecting to the server from outside isn't a problem. When I'm bored at work I'll set up recording schedules or check on what shows have been recorded for the day.
The hard part is going to be bandwidth. At "good" quality the stream is 2 gigs per hour, which isn't too bad but I sometimes have problems watching TV on my laptop when the signal gets degraded. I'm unable to watch shows from the office, however -- my DSL line isn't brawny enough.
The shows are written to the hard drive as standard mpeg2 files, however. I'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to run some sort of script to re-encode them at lower quality and bitrate and stream to the outside world. I'm too lazy to tinker with that, and prefer copying shows from the last few nights to my laptop. That way I get full quality, despite the 24-48 hour "latency".
Not sure about whether it's in-house or not. There is no Java applet involved, however for IE an ActiveX object ('Microsoft.XMLHTTP') is loaded to send and receive XML messages. Everything else is straight DHTML (Javascript + DOM). It works on a wide range of browsers because they kept the design simple. There could be some browser detection logic to handle specific browser nuances.
There are indeed frames involved. The topmost document contains a frameset containing 2 frames, each of which contain necessary IFRAMEs. I believe the "no-refresh" feature is done through XMLHTTP, although I could be wrong.
Couldn't they put a password on the BIOS settings? Windows can be made demo-safe....I think it's just that retailers and manufacturers don't put the effort in -- i guess they don't need to.
All Apple product displays, however, seem to be accompanied by some company rep (ie salesperson), although some of them don't seem to be any more helpful than a typiacl Best Buy rep.
I noticed this not just at big Apple stores, but also at Apple setups in other retailers (CompUSA, Fry's). They let potential buyers play, while the HP and Sony machines are locked up in a tight slideshow/animation demo-only mode. I don't use Apple machines but guess which section of a retail store I'll check out just for fun?
I'm on Packet8 as well. Works fine, and as the parent suggests it's really dependent on your internet connection. I switched from cable to DSL for reliability and it works great. Also I have friends and family abroad and it definitely makes for cheap international calls.
I think what you've stated applies to any profession. Most people hardly make any money starting out any career, and all careers cost something (including opportunity cost). I don't know anyone with a successful career that got started without huge education (college, training) and time (experience) costs. It's just the way it is. Furthermore, people with successful careers constantly invest in their career future. Yes, I consider O'Reilly books to be an investment (but not WROX books).
And as for sticking to your day job...I think pro gamers would sneer at what you and I do for a living and stick to theirs, thanks.
You're better off becoming a professional musician or pro athelete than a pro gamer. Sure, the TOP GAMERS make over 200k a year (BTW - being a pro gamer also means you need to buy bleeding edge technology, so that 200k isn't much after you subtract your monthly computer upgrade budget), but most hardly make any... not to mention that you not only have to be fabulous with one game, but with at least one new game ever year or so. If you take a break, or have an off year or two, you are in debt. I'll stick to my day job, thanks.
I probably don't take advantage of indexing on XP, but I know that the indexing that goes on in IDEs (Eclipse, IDEA) is a huge help. "Summoning" files is so much nicer than navigating a source tree.
I'm probably naiive, but is there a major reason to disable the Drive Indexing Service?
I've got a standard Sony Trinitron. Nothing special. I've seen teletext and it is readable, but it's quite big and blocky. It'll be hard to get a computer to output something like that.
Browsing the web, however, is a pain in the ass. Text is very hard to read, even with the font sizes cranked up.
Using a TV as monitor for playing media is a viable solution, however, especially if you have your hi-fi sound system in the proximity of your TV. It's much nicer to kick back and listen to mp3s on the couch rather than at your desk.
Then set up an IMAP account with some ISP. You get the benefit of hosting/redundancy and you can check from a full-blown mail client (Thunderbird, Outlook, Eudora). You can also usually set your clients to sync and make your downloaded emails available offline. If your local machine blows up or you travel, you can always access your email through an IMAP webmail client.
By the way that's a sweet client side tree. Props.
Possible, yes. Easy, no. Come on...we're all builders/hackers/designers at heart. Why should we take the easy way out? Apple has set a bar whether or not they have a patent on their design, but what's wrong with going further?
Is the circular flat wheel the ONLY way to get through an ordered list of data? It's definitely a pretty sexy and marketable design but there's no reason that a few smart designers couldn't "synergize" or whatever and come up with something comparable if not better. Give industrial and interaction designers out there some credit.
You've described a familiar UI, which is only one of many factors contributing to usability. And yes, scroll bars are rather difficult to use for someone who's never seen them before -- how does this prove that a good UI is similar to other UIs? Scroll bars are a very prevalant UI element. By your logic shouldn't it be "good UI" because it's very common across many applications and operating systems?
Yes, scroll wheels, menus, and hierarchical menus preceeded the iPod, but I don't see any mp3 player or other portable device encompass all these elements in one coherent package. I could be wrong but the iPod was a very NEW UI, yet everyone seems to hail the iPod UI as being a "good UI".
Now personally I think the iPod UI does have its drawbacks (as all interfaces do) and some improvements can be made geared toward using a portable music player in a certain context (while driving, for example). But Apple designed for a pretty broad audience and they did it well. However, there is no reason to say that the iPod UI is the be-all and end-all for portable media players. There is more than one way to design for this task, and there's no reason why a different UI couldn't succeed.
How would it force everyone else to have "ungainly" UIs? If they can't directly copy the iPod interaction design then *GASP* they would instead have to innovate and come up with a new and perhaps better way of going about playing music on a portable device. Imagine that...
(At least accepting that iPod's UI is good and easy to use, my (admittedly limited) experience with it was one of great frustration personally.)
Well there you go...you even say that you find the iPod frustrating to use. It's quite entirely possible that someone could come up with something better, perhaps the design to rule them all even to suit your taste in device interactions.
By the time a candidate steps into an interview room a good interviewee already has a good feel for the following, either by fine-toothing the resume or conducting a preliminary phone-interview:
Notice that at the time of interview the hiring manager should have already judged a candidate's professional work and background. Good interviewers will proceed to validate and qualify the claims made in the resume, and more importantly, explore whether the candidate appears to be a good teammate. It's not uncommon for companies to assign a candidate's potential future co-workers to be interviewers. So why not do this by simulating a day-to-day shop discussion? The interviewer wouldn't be asking the candidate to check in some code for the next release -- that would be retarded -- but tossing a few questions in the air and working on a whiteboard seems pretty par for the course.
I meant to say, the requirement for Collections to store objects.
Oops...
I don't consider myself a Java developer (I design/build UIs) but I would be pretty dismayed if I saw a self-proclaimed Java developer resort to looking up that "algorithm" on google. Granted, the parent post's wording is a little ambiguous but that shouldn't stop an interviewee from asking a few clarifying questions, then writing out half-decent code that avoids a few blatant obstacles, in this case the requirement for Collections to store primitives. The parent is really referring to candidates not being able to live up to their own talk, which I think is a valid statement. If someone groans about writing a snippet of code in an interview, wouldn't that make him look like a crappy potential co-worker who groans about writing code for production?