The main problem with the N-Gage is not its features, interface, cost, the fact that you have to take the battery off to switch them out or any number of other things. The main problem with it is that it's not a very good game console. If it wasn't a phone at all and just a GBA competitor people still wouldn't like it. The framerates in the 3D titles is choppy, the control surface is poor, the screen is oriented the wrong way and the color is too washed out [ever tried Puzzle Bobble?]. If it was a great game system then yes, people would put up with some quirks.
I first tried it out at the GDC last year and thought it was a joke. That's before I know about the game-switching antics, the sidetalking or the exorbitant cost.
Someone at Nokia needs to read The Inmates Are Running the Asylumn.
Re:example in practice
on
KISS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You could load the thing with WAVs if you wanted [or a bit more reasonably high-bitrate LAME MP3s]. The point is that the sound quality is limited by the source file, not the device.
On the original topic, most of the direct competitors of the iPod have more features [FM radio, more formats, etc.] but overall people care more about what it's like to actually use the thing. I've noticed that iPod purchases seem to happen in clusters where someone in a group of people will get one and by letting other people play with it it can change opinions.
Look at Microsoft Office, the best usability improvement they've made in the last several years was to hide most of the features in the menu by default.
I hope this thing has some sort of extremely novel control system, as the console will have no way of knowing which screen the player is looking at. I can't see this being that much of an advantage in any game with fast action except ones designed to use the "keep track of both screens at once" principle as the overall point of the game.
I'd consider the "Digital Audio" G4s to be the best price/performance place for people looking for a cheap way to play around with OS X. Most of them came with Quickdraw Extreme-capable video cards and they all have at least a CD burner.
Just make sure you stock up on RAM [at least 512 IMO] and you'll have a smooth while not exactly rocket-powered OS X experience. The 466s seem to run around $500 on eBay.
That's all well and good for a personal site or an informational one but for businesses people depend on the quality and consistency of the design as one of their internal metrics for how trustworthy a company is.
It doesn't matter much at this point, the damage has been done and it'll take years to undo, even if this service pack had fixed it.
Pollard criticized the studio for not permitting the original version of such films to hit the states, saying "If they own the rights to this film, then this film is not available to U.S. consumers -- period." Funny, I bought both Shaolin Soccer and Hero as gifts for people for under $10 each in Chinatown last week. And these aren't bootlegs, are uncut [which is a HUGE problem I have with Miramax], are excellent transfers and have perfect sound. SHaolin Soccer is actually made funnier by the Engrish subtitles as well.
Remind me why I should purchase edited, dubbed, region-locked versions of these movies for $20+ each again?
Wattage has no direct bearing on the loudness or audio quality of a system!
Now I'm sure that this is a pretty boomin' artificial pipe organ these guys have built but this focus on wattage in consumer electronics must stop. It's like saying that the car engine that uses the most gas or revs at the highest speed is the most powerful while ignoring all other relevan statistics.
I hope you guys enjoy your eleventy-billion watt multimedia systems with 1% THD.
The recipe for their success was... hiring GUI designers from popular skins download sites.
Too bad they didn't hire any actual user interface designers [or at least a graphic designer for their website or even someone who could figure out that it doesn't draw scrollbars in Mozilla]. The 'skin' scene is nice if all you want is eye candy and shiny objects but little else. And looking at their software it doesn't even look like they listened to those desingers much.
User interface design for software is not a paintjob or some quick usability fixes while you're in beta, it's a part of product development.
Don't worry, I gave it to a friend, I didn't actually throw it away. The key point is that I got rid of it.
I sold a whole lot of stuff in the $20-50 range on ebay as well, after listing fees and paypal I didn't make out like a bandit but I did end up with a couple hundred extra dollars which is better than a sharp stick in the eye.
I took the bold and unpopular move of getting rid of everything I didn't really need. It was rough and I wouldn't really have done it if I wasn't moving to a much smaller place but the fact of the matter is that most of the stuff you have around "just in case" is never actually going to be useful. 2 gig SCSI drive when I haven't owned a computer with a SCSI card for 2 years? Gone. Boxes for gear costing under $20? Gone. Quick reference card for my router? Didn't need it when I set it up 3 years ago, don't need it now. Receipt and warrantee info for something that's been out of warrantee for 2 years? Into the shredder.
I highly recommend a paper shredder BTW, less because I'm worried about the security of my trash and more for processing mail I don't need so that you don't end up with those piles of envelopes that are 99% credit card apps and that one bill you actually need.
The hardest part for me was getting rid of books, I've never done that in my life. When going through them though I found a suprising number that not only had I only read once, I didn't even really like them. Got a few books I really wanted instead of 50 I hated from my local used bookstore.
For things that I actually do need to store I use white plastic crates with hinged lids. They stack well, keep dust out and you can label them with a dry-erase marker.
Please study some design while you're at it, there's too many mega-techie HCI people out there who know all the rules and best practices and cognitive psych but cannot actually design an interface.
I've always been stunned by HCI-oriented UI designers who say things like "I don't care what color it is" or "just fill in this wireframe" to visual designers.
Usability testing is a Good Thing but it frequently takes place too late to fix any of the fundamental problems of the product.
I recommend Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum for a good [albeit pretty preachy] treatment on the difference between usability professionals and UI designers and how to do user-centric product development.
Forget living on the moon, there's some improvements we can make right now:
A version of Internet Explorer that correctly ignores whitespace and comments [I'm giving them a pass, MS claims that fixing their CSS implementation will require an OS rewrite]
A color printer with cheap consumables
A television service that only gives you channels you actually want
A car alarm that only goes off when your vehicle is actually being broken into or stolen
An email client that ships with built-in spam filters for the words 'mortgage', 'consolidate', 'viagra', 'diploma', 'enlarge', 'degree' and 'inkjet'
I saw a posting for mail room personnel at CNet that said "must have 2 years previous corporate mail room experience". And it wasn't for managing the thing, it was just a nomal clerk position.
Would you want to hire someone who was either a) so uncapable that working the mail room is the peak of their abilities or b) so ambition-free that they had multiple years of mailroom experience without advancing?
It depends on where you are. In San Francisco you must have residential phone service to get DSL [thanks SBC!]. Fortunately people have his habit of not securing their wireless networks and slightly out-of-spec antennas are easy to build.
Anyway, this bill comes about 3 years too late for a lot of us. Also, much like cell number portability I'll believe it when I see it.
The best GUI engine developed, IMHO, was InterViews, which used a version of Postscript for everything. Postscript gave you the benefit of totally scalable graphics, so you could enlarge or shrink with zero loss. It was standard. It was also the same language other devices used, so translation from device to device was unnecessary. And it supported more than simple vectors.
SVG is very similar to Postscript and PDF. The syntax is similar, the structure of the documents is similar, the same company invented all 3 and they all use cubic spline curves instead of Flash's wonky quadratic splines (ever wonder why small type frequently looks weird in Flash?)
If Boeing has crates and crates marked "titanium sheets" sitting around, you can damn well bet that other airplane-producing defense contractors will be very interested.
I recently interviewed at Yahoo! which is located right next to Lockheed's main manufacturing facility and there are signs all along the road expressly forbidding photography of the Lockheed facility.
Trust me, us UI designers are just as nervous about that statement. Hell, many of my jobs mainly consist of cleaning up crappy interfaces that marketing managers or engineers decided they could do on their own.
If you're good with Photoshop it's difficult to not make more money than you spent on it in a year. Even a beginning designer could make enough to buy the whole suite in under a week. Plus it's deductible.
Now there's a lot of people recommending thg Gimp in this thread and if you use it and enjoy it that's fine. But feature and usability-wise there is absolutely no comparison. Yes, OSS is wonderful but the fact remains that for someone who is trying to make money using a bitmap-editing program Photoshop offers a better value propisition than the Gimp does, even though you have to pay for it. Adobe doesn't take the money they make from Photoshop and use it to pay for a factory that converts orphans and kittens and orphaed kittens into fuel oil, they improve their products continuously. There's a reason that a real alternative to Photoshop doesn't exist and it's not because Adobe is anticompetitve or anything, it's because it's really hard and really expensive to make software as good Photoshop unless you're just ripping off thier feature list as quickly as you can. One of the reasons that I don't like The Gimp is that except for Script-fu and a mess of a user interface the developers brought nothing original to the bitmap editing table and are instead content to just poorly ape the work of others. Now that's innovation, eh?
As far as activation goes, it's not that big of a deal either. Adobe is only using it on Photoshop for Windows. It's pretty obvious that it'll get cracked. They're probably just doing it to please their dumb shareholders who think that all those copies of Photoshop being used to ham-fistedly combine Domo-kun, Admiral Akbar and the Eiffel Tower at Fark will somehow magically become sales.
Not to mention the fact that it's Microsoft's responsibility to port WMV and not Apple's. MS has announced that they're working on WMP 9 for OS X but it probably won't be out until Windows Media 10 with an all-new, all-incompatible set of codecs comes out for Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
The main problem with the N-Gage is not its features, interface, cost, the fact that you have to take the battery off to switch them out or any number of other things. The main problem with it is that it's not a very good game console. If it wasn't a phone at all and just a GBA competitor people still wouldn't like it. The framerates in the 3D titles is choppy, the control surface is poor, the screen is oriented the wrong way and the color is too washed out [ever tried Puzzle Bobble?]. If it was a great game system then yes, people would put up with some quirks.
I first tried it out at the GDC last year and thought it was a joke. That's before I know about the game-switching antics, the sidetalking or the exorbitant cost.
Someone at Nokia needs to read The Inmates Are Running the Asylumn.
You could load the thing with WAVs if you wanted [or a bit more reasonably high-bitrate LAME MP3s]. The point is that the sound quality is limited by the source file, not the device.
On the original topic, most of the direct competitors of the iPod have more features [FM radio, more formats, etc.] but overall people care more about what it's like to actually use the thing. I've noticed that iPod purchases seem to happen in clusters where someone in a group of people will get one and by letting other people play with it it can change opinions.
Look at Microsoft Office, the best usability improvement they've made in the last several years was to hide most of the features in the menu by default.
I hope this thing has some sort of extremely novel control system, as the console will have no way of knowing which screen the player is looking at. I can't see this being that much of an advantage in any game with fast action except ones designed to use the "keep track of both screens at once" principle as the overall point of the game.
Those Soldams are also about double the price.
A lot of folks have been curious as to how There has managed to stay in business for so long, now we know that it's our tax dollars at work.
I'd consider the "Digital Audio" G4s to be the best price/performance place for people looking for a cheap way to play around with OS X. Most of them came with Quickdraw Extreme-capable video cards and they all have at least a CD burner.
Just make sure you stock up on RAM [at least 512 IMO] and you'll have a smooth while not exactly rocket-powered OS X experience. The 466s seem to run around $500 on eBay.
That's all well and good for a personal site or an informational one but for businesses people depend on the quality and consistency of the design as one of their internal metrics for how trustworthy a company is.
It doesn't matter much at this point, the damage has been done and it'll take years to undo, even if this service pack had fixed it.
Just like the Playstation 2's specs killed the Dreamcast.
I'm sick of that argument. Sega did a perfectly fine job of running the Dreamcast into the ground all by themselves, Sony just helped them along.
Pollard criticized the studio for not permitting the original version of such films to hit the states, saying "If they own the rights to this film, then this film is not available to U.S. consumers -- period."
Funny, I bought both Shaolin Soccer and Hero as gifts for people for under $10 each in Chinatown last week. And these aren't bootlegs, are uncut [which is a HUGE problem I have with Miramax], are excellent transfers and have perfect sound. SHaolin Soccer is actually made funnier by the Engrish subtitles as well.
Remind me why I should purchase edited, dubbed, region-locked versions of these movies for $20+ each again?
Hey guys, guess what?
Wattage has no direct bearing on the loudness or audio quality of a system!
Now I'm sure that this is a pretty boomin' artificial pipe organ these guys have built but this focus on wattage in consumer electronics must stop. It's like saying that the car engine that uses the most gas or revs at the highest speed is the most powerful while ignoring all other relevan statistics.
I hope you guys enjoy your eleventy-billion watt multimedia systems with 1% THD.
The recipe for their success was ... hiring GUI designers from popular skins download sites.
Too bad they didn't hire any actual user interface designers [or at least a graphic designer for their website or even someone who could figure out that it doesn't draw scrollbars in Mozilla]. The 'skin' scene is nice if all you want is eye candy and shiny objects but little else. And looking at their software it doesn't even look like they listened to those desingers much.
User interface design for software is not a paintjob or some quick usability fixes while you're in beta, it's a part of product development.
Don't worry, I gave it to a friend, I didn't actually throw it away. The key point is that I got rid of it.
I sold a whole lot of stuff in the $20-50 range on ebay as well, after listing fees and paypal I didn't make out like a bandit but I did end up with a couple hundred extra dollars which is better than a sharp stick in the eye.
You could have a geek-oriented garage sale too.
I took the bold and unpopular move of getting rid of everything I didn't really need. It was rough and I wouldn't really have done it if I wasn't moving to a much smaller place but the fact of the matter is that most of the stuff you have around "just in case" is never actually going to be useful. 2 gig SCSI drive when I haven't owned a computer with a SCSI card for 2 years? Gone. Boxes for gear costing under $20? Gone. Quick reference card for my router? Didn't need it when I set it up 3 years ago, don't need it now. Receipt and warrantee info for something that's been out of warrantee for 2 years? Into the shredder.
I highly recommend a paper shredder BTW, less because I'm worried about the security of my trash and more for processing mail I don't need so that you don't end up with those piles of envelopes that are 99% credit card apps and that one bill you actually need.
The hardest part for me was getting rid of books, I've never done that in my life. When going through them though I found a suprising number that not only had I only read once, I didn't even really like them. Got a few books I really wanted instead of 50 I hated from my local used bookstore.
For things that I actually do need to store I use white plastic crates with hinged lids. They stack well, keep dust out and you can label them with a dry-erase marker.
Please study some design while you're at it, there's too many mega-techie HCI people out there who know all the rules and best practices and cognitive psych but cannot actually design an interface.
I've always been stunned by HCI-oriented UI designers who say things like "I don't care what color it is" or "just fill in this wireframe" to visual designers.
Usability testing is a Good Thing but it frequently takes place too late to fix any of the fundamental problems of the product.
I recommend Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum for a good [albeit pretty preachy] treatment on the difference between usability professionals and UI designers and how to do user-centric product development.
Me fail english? that's unpossible!
I saw a posting for mail room personnel at CNet that said "must have 2 years previous corporate mail room experience". And it wasn't for managing the thing, it was just a nomal clerk position.
Would you want to hire someone who was either a) so uncapable that working the mail room is the peak of their abilities or b) so ambition-free that they had multiple years of mailroom experience without advancing?
It depends on where you are. In San Francisco you must have residential phone service to get DSL [thanks SBC!]. Fortunately people have his habit of not securing their wireless networks and slightly out-of-spec antennas are easy to build.
Anyway, this bill comes about 3 years too late for a lot of us. Also, much like cell number portability I'll believe it when I see it.
...and that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Flash is a terrible authoring environment and needs a little competition.
Free tip to Macromedia: a timeline is not even near an ideal environment for developing interactive media!
SVG is very similar to Postscript and PDF. The syntax is similar, the structure of the documents is similar, the same company invented all 3 and they all use cubic spline curves instead of Flash's wonky quadratic splines (ever wonder why small type frequently looks weird in Flash?)
I recently interviewed at Yahoo! which is located right next to Lockheed's main manufacturing facility and there are signs all along the road expressly forbidding photography of the Lockheed facility.
Trust me, us UI designers are just as nervous about that statement. Hell, many of my jobs mainly consist of cleaning up crappy interfaces that marketing managers or engineers decided they could do on their own.
If you're good with Photoshop it's difficult to not make more money than you spent on it in a year. Even a beginning designer could make enough to buy the whole suite in under a week. Plus it's deductible.
Now there's a lot of people recommending thg Gimp in this thread and if you use it and enjoy it that's fine. But feature and usability-wise there is absolutely no comparison. Yes, OSS is wonderful but the fact remains that for someone who is trying to make money using a bitmap-editing program Photoshop offers a better value propisition than the Gimp does, even though you have to pay for it. Adobe doesn't take the money they make from Photoshop and use it to pay for a factory that converts orphans and kittens and orphaed kittens into fuel oil, they improve their products continuously. There's a reason that a real alternative to Photoshop doesn't exist and it's not because Adobe is anticompetitve or anything, it's because it's really hard and really expensive to make software as good Photoshop unless you're just ripping off thier feature list as quickly as you can. One of the reasons that I don't like The Gimp is that except for Script-fu and a mess of a user interface the developers brought nothing original to the bitmap editing table and are instead content to just poorly ape the work of others. Now that's innovation, eh?
As far as activation goes, it's not that big of a deal either. Adobe is only using it on Photoshop for Windows. It's pretty obvious that it'll get cracked. They're probably just doing it to please their dumb shareholders who think that all those copies of Photoshop being used to ham-fistedly combine Domo-kun, Admiral Akbar and the Eiffel Tower at Fark will somehow magically become sales.
iTunes actually supports a whole lot of other MP3 players than the iPod, people just don't pay much attention to that anymore.
Not to mention the fact that it's Microsoft's responsibility to port WMV and not Apple's. MS has announced that they're working on WMP 9 for OS X but it probably won't be out until Windows Media 10 with an all-new, all-incompatible set of codecs comes out for Windows.