One of the most important parts of the "Making Things Easy is Hard" article was that a good interface is not something you slap on at the end of the development cycle. Overall it's not some layer that you can add to existing programs. I'm happy that good interfaces and usability are getting a lot more press nowadays [both personally and professionally] but all too often people get this "oh, since we're almost done we need to add some usability to this" attitude. If you want a great interface you need a good designer [and not just a "usability expert", all they'll do is tell you exactly how much your UI sucks in a PowerPoint presentation] on board from the requirements phase all the way through.
Good interfaces aren't always about GUIs either. man is a terrible tool for beginners who are trying to become an expert and are willing to learn. Visualize that you've never used it before and do a man grep. Not too helpful, is it? There are great CLI interfaces as well, a tool like | is one of the things that makes *NIX OSes awesome and powerful.
The main thing that's missing on both sides of the development equation is a commitment to focus. The extremely pervasive "more features = better than" attitude is responsible for a lot of bad interfaces. And both developers and marketroids are guilty of that crime.
I'm not even talking about anyone getting injured or anything, just any politically motivated, successful computer attack gainst US interests or infrastructure. When major DDoS attacks happen they're always against commercial entities like Microsoft or SCO.
Has there ever been a documented case of actual 'cyberterrorism' against the US? It seems like all the laws and hoopla around it seem to do is hand out extremely long prison sentences to script kiddies. Most of the criminal hacking I've ever heard of was for person gain or just for reputation/attention getting. Has any actual group successfully launched anything that could be considered a terror attack?
Even the fairly cohesive stuff like the long-running India vs Pakistan web site defacement battle is just a really annoying flame war.
Sony and Nintendo are both profitable [or in Sony's case the game division is profitable]. Microsoft is trying to get into the console space by outspending everyone else. How long do you think it's going to take MS to recover the almost $300 million they paid for Rare? "Grabbed by Ghoulies" has been a pretty big failure so far. Or the $2 billion they've committed to spend developing XBox Live?
I already have a Shuttlepro v2 that I use extensively in Photoshop and Illustrator.Ironically, I don't do video work but the thing is a godsend for undo/redo, zoom and other common tasks.
I'm a male geek and I bought a mini. I wasn't really sold on the whole iPod concept at least as far as liking it enough to spend money on. Then I used a mini for a while. The tilting scroll wheel is a HUGE improvement over the 3G ipod's buttons [I can use it without looking at it] and the size difference means that it's really pocket-sized now the construction feel 100% more sturdy as well. One of the other tipping points for me was that I didn't want to be carrying $400+ worth of music player on my person. If I get mugged or something I'd much rather absorb a $250 loss. Also, since I can't fit my whole collection on even a 40 gig iPod [at a decent bitrate] I figured I'd just go with the cheapest model since I'll have to manage everything by hand anyway.
CS is a great degree for someone who is interested in math and logic and programming but not so much so for anyone who isn't into all 3. For everyone else it can be a hellish nighmare of not sleeping, forgetting what the sun looks like and getting terrible grades.
I almost flunked out of CS [I suck at coding], took some time off from school and reevaluated my priorities. It turns out I was more interested in psychology so I got a degree in that instead and worked on design as a side project. I got great grades finishing school, got a career started and had time for a social life [not that CS majors can't have them, but it's a lot easier].
I'm hoping some of this will help people realize that you don't go to undergrad to get a job, you go to get an education. Most of the people I know who are programmers nowadays don't have CS degrees, they're just good coders.
No, it'll only wreck it for people who use Windows [for now at least]. I am glad to see that ISPs are starting to just cut off people who are displaying obvious signs of virus/trojan behavior.
I just hope the media is smart enough to look at this as the symptoms of bad software instead of a problem on its own.
I'm going to ignore the driver/hardware support issue for now, I'm sure other people will cover that in depth.
It seems to me that the people who pride themselves on having open and free software are probably those least likely to actually buy games. I think the best bet in the short to medium-term is for companies that are already doing porting like Aspyr to pick up the ball once they see that a market exists. The success of shareware companies like Freeverse and Ambrosia are what has kept big-name titles on the Mac and as far as I know there aren't a lot of examples of super-successful for-pay games on Linux.
Microsoft also has a serious advantage as far as DirectX goes and its integration with Visual Studio. The development environment is a very big deal, especially as games get more and more complex.
The ST:TNG computer interfaces are a great jumping-off point for a lot of designers. They were a good blend of rectangles and curved areas and they were funky without being over the top. In fact, one of the products I'm working on now has a slight similarity to it. The engineers all notice but for some reason none of the markeing people do.
If they do this then there's no excuse except for spite for them to not fix their CSS inheritance, positionaing and box model bugs. Their line before was "oh, we're not working on that anymore and for some reason we can't tell you making padding and border attributes work correctly would require an OS rewrite which we're not doing until Longhorn."
Don't "blame Adobe". These are useful, non-trivial, novel patents that took a lot of research to develop. Unless you think that specific pieces of directionally influenced [non-symmetric] 4D to 3D matrix math with interactive tuning are just so obvious to everybody that they're not worth protecting. This stuff isn't the one-click patent.
If the Gimp team wants real CMYK they can do it themselves with a team of volunteers, a few Gretag spectrophotometers and several years of fine-tuning but there's a reason that everyone licenses this stuff from Pantone, Screen, EFI, Adobe, etc. and it's because it's really, really, really hard to do.
One thing though, I didn't get crap from responding to jobs posted on craigslist, I actually spoke to a hiring manager once who got 1200 resumes for a job she posted in 2003. With those odds you could be some sort of god and it's likely the hiring manager would never even see it. Job postings aren't free on CL, in fact they're the site's main source of income IIRC.
I posted my resume [formatted pretty in HTML with direct links to my portfolio] as often as possible [delete the previous day's one and repost it the next day] and got good responses.
At least for the Bay Area craigslist.org is where it's at. I got one job through HotJobs in 2001 but basically every other job [contract and permanent] I've gotten from the internet since 1996 is from craigslist.
I think most of those make their money because companies have to publicise postings to fulfill their EOE status.
From what I've seen they have yet to show a working prototype that is actually playing games on it. They have a giant aluminum box with a PC case concealed entirely within it that they plug in and the logo on the front lights up.
When I first heard of the Phantom I assumed it was one of those startups that exists for the purpose of failing but getting the founders paid while it happens. There's a lot of dumb people out there with a lot of money to throw around. At this point though it seems like they're going to go through with the whole thing and it's going to suck as much as we all think it will.
One funny side note, it appears that the champions of overdone Flash BS, 2advanced, have made a "strategic marketing alliance" with Infinium Labs. If this means that they're not getting cash up front for their work they're in for a nasty shock.
I would have to agree. I often can't come up with a solution to a problem when I'm sitting at my desk and I have to go to the employee lounge or somewhere like that when I have to actually invent something.
There's some facet of sitting at a computer that makes it hard to come up with interfaces. The more time I spend in this field the more I use pencil and paper.
On the other hand the PS2's layout is more flexible and does not require a developer to 'rank' the buttons in importance. And the z-button is just a crime on the GC controller.
In the end though consumers have shown which they prefer.
As an interface designer I'm happy on both a professional and personal level to see user-centric design getting press lately. On the other hand I'm afraid that a lot of MBA-types will read articles like this and figure that they can just throw a designer at a problem and expect them to fix everything that's wrong with their product.
Real UI design will not fix fundamental flaws in a product. In fact a good designer will probably uncover problems that no one had noticed before. The reason that Tivo's interface is good is because the entire product was designed from the beginning around being easy to use. I'm willing to bet that there were designers involved in the product from the very beginning.
I recommend that people interested in this sort of thing read Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. It's a bit harsh on engineers and I don't buy Cooper's zealousness regarding his techniques but it has a lot of good insight into what can go wrong and how to avoid it.
I also really wish that the press could find a better poster child for our indutry than Nielsen, whose core competency is attention whoring and getting people to pay him thousands of dollars for speaking gigs [something he excels at]. He's got some pretty smartcoworkers who have actually designed products that changed the way we interact with computers. Nielsen's crown jewel is a kooky Sun skunkworks project.
an industry where many young buyers have to take the time to squirrel away $50 for a typical purchase.
Haven't we already seen tons of consumer data that shows that almost all money spent on games is by people over the age of 25? And aren't both Half-Life 2 and Duke Nukem Forever going to be rated M?
I just realized the big stick that the feds have - they can probably just say that they require all software and equipment that they purchase to have these safeguards so if you want the government to buy any of your products you have to comply.
Just like in the Adobe case people seem to be igoring the "why" of the whole situation.
Does HP want to include these technologies? Hell no. Just like Adobe [and every other company that makes imaging software, printers, scanners and copiers] they're under tremendous pressure from the government to include this stuff. I don't know exactly what legal precedent the feds have over including this stuff but everyone in the industry is complying.
There's several more techniques that aren't mentioned in that article as well including ways for counterfeits to be traced to specific [as in serial number] devices on higher-end equipment.
There's a lot more shareware gaming on the Mac, companies like Ambrosia, Spiderweb and Freeverse put out good quality games. If you get anything though I'd recommend Escape Velocity.
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One of the most important parts of the "Making Things Easy is Hard" article was that a good interface is not something you slap on at the end of the development cycle. Overall it's not some layer that you can add to existing programs. I'm happy that good interfaces and usability are getting a lot more press nowadays [both personally and professionally] but all too often people get this "oh, since we're almost done we need to add some usability to this" attitude. If you want a great interface you need a good designer [and not just a "usability expert", all they'll do is tell you exactly how much your UI sucks in a PowerPoint presentation] on board from the requirements phase all the way through.
Good interfaces aren't always about GUIs either. man is a terrible tool for beginners who are trying to become an expert and are willing to learn. Visualize that you've never used it before and do a man grep. Not too helpful, is it? There are great CLI interfaces as well, a tool like | is one of the things that makes *NIX OSes awesome and powerful.
The main thing that's missing on both sides of the development equation is a commitment to focus. The extremely pervasive "more features = better than" attitude is responsible for a lot of bad interfaces. And both developers and marketroids are guilty of that crime.
I'm not even talking about anyone getting injured or anything, just any politically motivated, successful computer attack gainst US interests or infrastructure. When major DDoS attacks happen they're always against commercial entities like Microsoft or SCO.
Has there ever been a documented case of actual 'cyberterrorism' against the US? It seems like all the laws and hoopla around it seem to do is hand out extremely long prison sentences to script kiddies. Most of the criminal hacking I've ever heard of was for person gain or just for reputation/attention getting. Has any actual group successfully launched anything that could be considered a terror attack?
Even the fairly cohesive stuff like the long-running India vs Pakistan web site defacement battle is just a really annoying flame war.
Well I'll be damned. I wonder how long until they recoup their investment in it though.
It's less of a "who's going to survive?" issue and more of a "how long are Microsoft's shareholders going to put up with this money pit?"
Of course MSN is still around and that's never even come close to proftiability.
Sony and Nintendo are both profitable [or in Sony's case the game division is profitable]. Microsoft is trying to get into the console space by outspending everyone else. How long do you think it's going to take MS to recover the almost $300 million they paid for Rare? "Grabbed by Ghoulies" has been a pretty big failure so far. Or the $2 billion they've committed to spend developing XBox Live?
I already have a Shuttlepro v2 that I use extensively in Photoshop and Illustrator.Ironically, I don't do video work but the thing is a godsend for undo/redo, zoom and other common tasks.
I'm a male geek and I bought a mini. I wasn't really sold on the whole iPod concept at least as far as liking it enough to spend money on. Then I used a mini for a while. The tilting scroll wheel is a HUGE improvement over the 3G ipod's buttons [I can use it without looking at it] and the size difference means that it's really pocket-sized now the construction feel 100% more sturdy as well. One of the other tipping points for me was that I didn't want to be carrying $400+ worth of music player on my person. If I get mugged or something I'd much rather absorb a $250 loss. Also, since I can't fit my whole collection on even a 40 gig iPod [at a decent bitrate] I figured I'd just go with the cheapest model since I'll have to manage everything by hand anyway.
I just wish the dock wasn't such a rip-off.
CS is a great degree for someone who is interested in math and logic and programming but not so much so for anyone who isn't into all 3. For everyone else it can be a hellish nighmare of not sleeping, forgetting what the sun looks like and getting terrible grades.
I almost flunked out of CS [I suck at coding], took some time off from school and reevaluated my priorities. It turns out I was more interested in psychology so I got a degree in that instead and worked on design as a side project. I got great grades finishing school, got a career started and had time for a social life [not that CS majors can't have them, but it's a lot easier].
I'm hoping some of this will help people realize that you don't go to undergrad to get a job, you go to get an education. Most of the people I know who are programmers nowadays don't have CS degrees, they're just good coders.
No, it'll only wreck it for people who use Windows [for now at least]. I am glad to see that ISPs are starting to just cut off people who are displaying obvious signs of virus/trojan behavior.
I just hope the media is smart enough to look at this as the symptoms of bad software instead of a problem on its own.
I'm going to ignore the driver/hardware support issue for now, I'm sure other people will cover that in depth.
It seems to me that the people who pride themselves on having open and free software are probably those least likely to actually buy games. I think the best bet in the short to medium-term is for companies that are already doing porting like Aspyr to pick up the ball once they see that a market exists. The success of shareware companies like Freeverse and Ambrosia are what has kept big-name titles on the Mac and as far as I know there aren't a lot of examples of super-successful for-pay games on Linux.
Microsoft also has a serious advantage as far as DirectX goes and its integration with Visual Studio. The development environment is a very big deal, especially as games get more and more complex.
The ST:TNG computer interfaces are a great jumping-off point for a lot of designers. They were a good blend of rectangles and curved areas and they were funky without being over the top. In fact, one of the products I'm working on now has a slight similarity to it. The engineers all notice but for some reason none of the markeing people do.
If they do this then there's no excuse except for spite for them to not fix their CSS inheritance, positionaing and box model bugs. Their line before was "oh, we're not working on that anymore and for some reason we can't tell you making padding and border attributes work correctly would require an OS rewrite which we're not doing until Longhorn."
Don't "blame Adobe". These are useful, non-trivial, novel patents that took a lot of research to develop. Unless you think that specific pieces of directionally influenced [non-symmetric] 4D to 3D matrix math with interactive tuning are just so obvious to everybody that they're not worth protecting. This stuff isn't the one-click patent.
If the Gimp team wants real CMYK they can do it themselves with a team of volunteers, a few Gretag spectrophotometers and several years of fine-tuning but there's a reason that everyone licenses this stuff from Pantone, Screen, EFI, Adobe, etc. and it's because it's really, really, really hard to do.
One thing though, I didn't get crap from responding to jobs posted on craigslist, I actually spoke to a hiring manager once who got 1200 resumes for a job she posted in 2003. With those odds you could be some sort of god and it's likely the hiring manager would never even see it. Job postings aren't free on CL, in fact they're the site's main source of income IIRC.
I posted my resume [formatted pretty in HTML with direct links to my portfolio] as often as possible [delete the previous day's one and repost it the next day] and got good responses.
At least for the Bay Area craigslist.org is where it's at. I got one job through HotJobs in 2001 but basically every other job [contract and permanent] I've gotten from the internet since 1996 is from craigslist.
I think most of those make their money because companies have to publicise postings to fulfill their EOE status.
From what I've seen they have yet to show a working prototype that is actually playing games on it. They have a giant aluminum box with a PC case concealed entirely within it that they plug in and the logo on the front lights up.
When I first heard of the Phantom I assumed it was one of those startups that exists for the purpose of failing but getting the founders paid while it happens. There's a lot of dumb people out there with a lot of money to throw around. At this point though it seems like they're going to go through with the whole thing and it's going to suck as much as we all think it will.
One funny side note, it appears that the champions of overdone Flash BS, 2advanced, have made a "strategic marketing alliance" with Infinium Labs. If this means that they're not getting cash up front for their work they're in for a nasty shock.
I would have to agree. I often can't come up with a solution to a problem when I'm sitting at my desk and I have to go to the employee lounge or somewhere like that when I have to actually invent something.
There's some facet of sitting at a computer that makes it hard to come up with interfaces. The more time I spend in this field the more I use pencil and paper.
On the other hand the PS2's layout is more flexible and does not require a developer to 'rank' the buttons in importance. And the z-button is just a crime on the GC controller.
In the end though consumers have shown which they prefer.
I'm still waiting patiently for an alarm clock that can be programmed to not go off on the weekend. Maybe I'll just have to design it myself.
As an interface designer I'm happy on both a professional and personal level to see user-centric design getting press lately. On the other hand I'm afraid that a lot of MBA-types will read articles like this and figure that they can just throw a designer at a problem and expect them to fix everything that's wrong with their product.
Real UI design will not fix fundamental flaws in a product. In fact a good designer will probably uncover problems that no one had noticed before. The reason that Tivo's interface is good is because the entire product was designed from the beginning around being easy to use. I'm willing to bet that there were designers involved in the product from the very beginning.
I recommend that people interested in this sort of thing read Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. It's a bit harsh on engineers and I don't buy Cooper's zealousness regarding his techniques but it has a lot of good insight into what can go wrong and how to avoid it.
I also really wish that the press could find a better poster child for our indutry than Nielsen, whose core competency is attention whoring and getting people to pay him thousands of dollars for speaking gigs [something he excels at]. He's got some pretty smart coworkers who have actually designed products that changed the way we interact with computers. Nielsen's crown jewel is a kooky Sun skunkworks project.
an industry where many young buyers have to take the time to squirrel away $50 for a typical purchase.
Haven't we already seen tons of consumer data that shows that almost all money spent on games is by people over the age of 25? And aren't both Half-Life 2 and Duke Nukem Forever going to be rated M?
I just realized the big stick that the feds have - they can probably just say that they require all software and equipment that they purchase to have these safeguards so if you want the government to buy any of your products you have to comply.
Just like in the Adobe case people seem to be igoring the "why" of the whole situation.
Does HP want to include these technologies? Hell no. Just like Adobe [and every other company that makes imaging software, printers, scanners and copiers] they're under tremendous pressure from the government to include this stuff. I don't know exactly what legal precedent the feds have over including this stuff but everyone in the industry is complying.
There's several more techniques that aren't mentioned in that article as well including ways for counterfeits to be traced to specific [as in serial number] devices on higher-end equipment.
There's a lot more shareware gaming on the Mac, companies like Ambrosia, Spiderweb and Freeverse put out good quality games. If you get anything though I'd recommend Escape Velocity.
You might want to check out Yohoho Puzzle Pirates as well.