The Disneyland quote strikes me, if only because I've always been fascinated with theme parks as well as MOOs, and they've always felt, to me at least, similar in some weird sense. My own early experiments with MOO-building felt a bit Disneylandish. (Incidentally I conducted the interview linked to in this story. I might have thought to bring this topic up, if I'd had access to the GNE alpha. Probably not, though; good eye.)
But I think the similarity is really just in the fact that, given the heterogenaity of MOO authorship, you're going to see at least as many "themes" in a MOO as "lands" in a contemporary amusement park, if not more. The other thing theme parks and MOOs have in common, of never being complete or static, is also there, but for different reasons. MOOs change as new users discover and add to them; theme parks increasingly change due to commercial imperatives only. There's nothing collaborative about Six Flags Over Texas, you know?
At the risk of setting off everyone's Jon Katz alarm, I'll say this: there seem to be a lot of geeks into theme parks. Why do you think that is?
That's the thing: Buffy's always been one of the most moral shows on television. Not moralistic, but always clearly presenting a certain very honorable view of the world.
The way they're handling the Spike relationship would not be such a big problem if I didn't keep seeing James Marsters' image on merchandise aimed at the younger part of the show's demographic.
We've known since September that SMG's contract was up for renewal after this season and she hadn't made up her mind. And they've been throwing around crazy references to seasons past, in almost every episode. This announcement could not have been foreshadowed more starkly, and if you're surprised by it, then frankly, you reflect the level of intelligence the show's last two seasons have descended to.
Okay, maybe that's sort of harsh. And I admit I liked the musical. There, I said it.
Maybe I'm showing my age with that reference, but the continuing romantic tension between the heroine and the man who attempted to rape her has been one of the biggest turnoffs this season of a show I used to like. Jumped the shark indeed.
IMO, ideally, open-source will allow any user to be his own tyrant, by separating content from implementation via open data standards (file and interchange formats) and distributed data storage and synchronization.
That's all well and good, but soup-to-nuts software packages are popular amongst desktop and business users for a reason. People just want their tools to work; they don't want to construct long commands piping processes together (or do equivalent operations with the mouse, or write an AppleScript to automate said operations, etc.).
This interview is good, but in my experience Alan Cooper hits the target a little better when it comes to focusing on who the user is and what his/her goals actually are. The Inmates Are Running The Asylum also nails the idea of the UI designer as tyrant. "Step away from the spec and no one will get hurt!"
You've been able to get a reconditioned Visor Deluxe for $99 for months. And I've seen m100s retailing at $99. If Palm is smart, they'll aim this thing substantially under $100, like $60. And with the reduced complexity of the hardware I figure that's what they're aiming for.
Anyone who thinks simpler, cheaper Palms won't grow Palm's market share is spending too much time around other geeks. I recently gave my old m100 to my mom - all she wants is a portable datebook. She has trouble with Graffiti, but not too much.
And don't forget all those little geek-larvae out there, kids who just want a PDA but don't have the luxury of getting high-paying tech jobs while they're still in high school, like we did. (On second thought, those kids will all want Hiptops.)
Most UI treatises are like this article, in that they're great at spotting the problem (file system GUIs are inconsistent, weird, and difficult for new users to grasp) but not very good at defining a solution.
The reason for this: Geeks like to systematize things. Try as they might, most UI designers are not very good at thinking like non-geeks. The author of this article shows his fundamental geek nature in the way he gets all into overworking the details of the problem and coming up with an equally overworked "solution."
The key lies in realizing that most new users, those people who haven't bought computers yet, do not care about the system. They don't care about desktops, they don't care about file trees, they just care about their work. Other posts have covered that argument adequately, so I'll stop. But they key when designing UI is to keep yourself in check and not to go off the handle like this guy. Alan Cooper's method of user personas, and thinking about their needs, not your own wants, is the best way of doing this that I've seen.
It takes logic to understand a computer, and most people just can't grasp the concept of logical thinking. "The computer shouldn't do that when I click there!" "Why?" "Because.. that's a stupid thing to do!"
This user is using logic; s/he just isn't using the same logic as the OS' UI designers. And why should s/he? S/he hasn't been taught it yet.
Don't forget that you can prove anything logically, provided that you start from the right givens.
I can't be the only one to notice the similarities here - the boyish black guy on navigation, the transporter that everyone's afraid will turn them inside out...
I never heard anything about the sex romps or all the goths who worked there.
Which implies, to my mind, that there really wasn't a corporate culture saturated with sex - it was just a small clique of well-placed people who all knew each other, didn't really know very many other people in the company, and were all sleeping with each other. So, naturally, the whole company "must" have been doing it, right?
The author of these articles has made the same mistake as Washington reporters who live in the Beltway and naturally assume that, because they give a crap about the latest government scandal, the whole world must be just as enthralled.
If you're a journalist, you can't just check your facts; you've got to check your whole view of reality.
I wrote a long article a couple of years ago, on some of the reasons that these cultures tend to follow each other around. Glad to see that the 'geek culture' meme isn't strictly my own hysteria. =^) Here's the article.
Re:Will game consoles kill family life a little mo
on
First Looks At XBox
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· Score: 1
A family that lets its children play all the time is a family that was dead to begin with.
Be released their file management system under a BSDoid license. If they released their app-server component under the same license, you might have a good foundation for a window manager, at least.
(While the reasons that BeOS as a whole won't be open-sourced have been hashed out here recently, it makes perfect sense for them to open-source the app server - for one thing, there's themeability locked in there somewhere. OSS hackers could unlock it and then some. And, of course, I'm talking about BeOS code that would have to be ported. But hey.)
Yes, we here at Eazel performed numerous user tests and surveys which all indicate that the number one use of Linux on the desktop is MP3 play, closely followed by that Same Game thing. =^)
No, of course Eazel doesn't think an embedded MP3 player is a killer app, and we probably made too big a deal out of it at the show. The reason it was part of the demo was to show off what you can do with Bonobo and componentization. The MP3 thing was a good way to demonstrate this because it's sort of random - it expands people's notion of what can happen in a file browser.
In Nautilus (and Evolution and any Bonobo-container app), you can not only integrate Web browsing and file-system browsing without locking anyone into anything, but you can integrate anything from a Bonobo-ized image editor to StarOffice. The separation between "desktop environment" and "applications," and the notion that you must go launch something else to do your work, is a legacy idea that adds complexity to the user experience. When Microsoft built the Web browser into the file browser, it was a UI innovation - it was just bloated and monopolistic. An open-source componentization model makes those problems go away.
And yes, I work for Eazel, but A) I don't necessarily speak for them, and B) don't expect anyone on #gnome to have heard of me.
I think Evolution was the most exciting thing at the show, myself. (But then, I've been staring at Nautilus for a good long time.)
Eight year olds wouldn't be caught dead playing Magic anymore. It's all about Pokemon. And the Pokemon culture is different enough that Wizards of the Coast (publishers of Magic, Pokemon, and D&D, and organizers of Gen Con) wisely keeps it separate (for protection of all parties involved).
If Origins was any indicator, collectable card games are a lot less prevalent at the big game conventions these days.
The WSP needs to learn (or remember) something simple that my parents taught me: when you're angry, write a letter. Then, write another draft to make sure you've said everything you want to say. Then, put it in an envelope, seal it, and DON'T SEND IT.
Words written in anger will be around long after the anger is gone, and this editorial was obviously written out of mere frustration and impatience. They will be kicking themselves for it in a month or so.
Not everyone who is singled out for being depressed or violent or suicidal or "different" is a geek.
Well, zztzed, at the risk of sounding Clintonesque, it depends what you mean by the word "geek." In my own experience, virtually everyone who uses the word today means something different by it. To most of us here, it means one thing, to Katz it means something slightly different, and to Pinkerton... well, they'd never use the word, but their WAVE criteria express their definition pretty well. And to a lot of American high schoolers, the word "geek" still means nothing other than "depressed or violent or suicidal or 'different'."
Maybe we need a new word. "Geek" is still a hot-enough button for a lot of folks that it ends some important conversations before they start. What phrase can we use that's succinct, and communicates, but doesn't exclude any of the diverse groups to which it needs to refer?
It's a hard problem. You might be thinking that the geek spectrum is too complex to fit inside any one term, and that we simply shouldn't reduce these issues with the goal of increasing the number of people who understand them. But that's the way media works today, like it or not. If we're going to defend ourselves, our rights and our cultures, we need to start thinking seriously and respectfully about the subtle art of public relations.
This is an excellent point. Napster is not where the culture is. If you do Napster searches for, say, the new Stereolab album, some Hieroglyphics or Quannum hip-hop cuts, any but the most generic drum-and-bass artists, or basically anything that isn't bland, stupid top-40, you won't find much. Napster makes it easy for people with mainstream tastes to find music that's already widely distributed, and copy it around for free. Niche music and niche tastes are not well represented in the Napster user base.
What Napster is really saying is that this genre of mainstream, radio-friendly music is, or ought to be, too cheap to meter. It doesn't make sense that you have to pay $17 (yes, music fans, in many places CD prices are still that high) for a Ricky Martin CD, when the music on that CD is the cultural equivalent of a cheap, ubiquitous product like Coca-Cola. The RIAA has artificially kept its price up, so people have found a means to go around them, via technology. It's theft, strictly speaking... but it's the invisible hand at work.
If major labels were smart, they'd realize that this is a sign to them. They can flex their muscles now and keep supporting high prices for trash music, but for the long term, if they want to make money in the digital age, they'd better get busy making music that people are willing to pay for.
There are a couple of directions that interfaces could go, that I'd like to bring up here, with some explanation for those who might be unfamiliar with them.
The first is Lifestreams, a file management concept created by David Gelernter, one of the Unabomber's better known victims. Lifestreams abandons hierarchical file systems entirely (from the user's perspective, anyway) in favor of a timeline, robust search capabilities, and saved searches. For more info on Lifestreams (and some of the weird commercial products that have arisen from it), check Gelernter's company Mirror Worlds. Current GUIs have taken baby steps toward this concept - you can save Sherlock searches in MacOS and use them the same way you would a folder, and BeOS has powerful queries. But neither system has had the guts to encourage users to rely on them.
The second is a system created by Jef Raskin, one of the principal inventors of the Macintosh. Raskin's system essentially had no file system interface. You turned it on by beginning to type a sentence; booting was instant, and your sentence appeared on screen, from the very first keystroke. If you needed some graphics, you went and got a graphics tool and started drawing on screen. If you neede to work on some old file, you had the system search for it. In ways, it was a lot lke Apple's aborted OpenDoc paradigm, but made more effective by building a computer around it from first principles, rather than shoehorning it into an existing PC system. Raskin's system eventually became the Canon Cat, an emasculated commercial failure that Canon bundled with a daisy wheel printer and sold as a secretarial aid. I looked around for nice links on the Cat but didn't find much; you can always try Jef Raskin's site.
Slashdot Mirror
The Disneyland quote strikes me, if only because I've always been fascinated with theme parks as well as MOOs, and they've always felt, to me at least, similar in some weird sense. My own early experiments with MOO-building felt a bit Disneylandish. (Incidentally I conducted the interview linked to in this story. I might have thought to bring this topic up, if I'd had access to the GNE alpha. Probably not, though; good eye.)
But I think the similarity is really just in the fact that, given the heterogenaity of MOO authorship, you're going to see at least as many "themes" in a MOO as "lands" in a contemporary amusement park, if not more. The other thing theme parks and MOOs have in common, of never being complete or static, is also there, but for different reasons. MOOs change as new users discover and add to them; theme parks increasingly change due to commercial imperatives only. There's nothing collaborative about Six Flags Over Texas, you know?
At the risk of setting off everyone's Jon Katz alarm, I'll say this: there seem to be a lot of geeks into theme parks. Why do you think that is?
They haven't controlled for a possible variable: maybe this just means that TiVo users are smarter than everyone else.
The way they're handling the Spike relationship would not be such a big problem if I didn't keep seeing James Marsters' image on merchandise aimed at the younger part of the show's demographic.
Again, maybe I'm just showing my age here.
We've known since September that SMG's contract was up for renewal after this season and she hadn't made up her mind. And they've been throwing around crazy references to seasons past, in almost every episode. This announcement could not have been foreshadowed more starkly, and if you're surprised by it, then frankly, you reflect the level of intelligence the show's last two seasons have descended to.
Okay, maybe that's sort of harsh. And I admit I liked the musical. There, I said it.
Maybe I'm showing my age with that reference, but the continuing romantic tension between the heroine and the man who attempted to rape her has been one of the biggest turnoffs this season of a show I used to like. Jumped the shark indeed.
That's all well and good, but soup-to-nuts software packages are popular amongst desktop and business users for a reason. People just want their tools to work; they don't want to construct long commands piping processes together (or do equivalent operations with the mouse, or write an AppleScript to automate said operations, etc.).
This interview is good, but in my experience Alan Cooper hits the target a little better when it comes to focusing on who the user is and what his/her goals actually are. The Inmates Are Running The Asylum also nails the idea of the UI designer as tyrant. "Step away from the spec and no one will get hurt!"
Anyone who thinks simpler, cheaper Palms won't grow Palm's market share is spending too much time around other geeks. I recently gave my old m100 to my mom - all she wants is a portable datebook. She has trouble with Graffiti, but not too much.
And don't forget all those little geek-larvae out there, kids who just want a PDA but don't have the luxury of getting high-paying tech jobs while they're still in high school, like we did. (On second thought, those kids will all want Hiptops.)
The reason for this: Geeks like to systematize things. Try as they might, most UI designers are not very good at thinking like non-geeks. The author of this article shows his fundamental geek nature in the way he gets all into overworking the details of the problem and coming up with an equally overworked "solution."
The key lies in realizing that most new users, those people who haven't bought computers yet, do not care about the system. They don't care about desktops, they don't care about file trees, they just care about their work. Other posts have covered that argument adequately, so I'll stop. But they key when designing UI is to keep yourself in check and not to go off the handle like this guy. Alan Cooper's method of user personas, and thinking about their needs, not your own wants, is the best way of doing this that I've seen.
Don't forget that you can prove anything logically, provided that you start from the right givens.
At least that was the impression I was under many, many Moz-versions ago. Maybe something's changed.
You can mod him down now, he is full of love. =^)
Which implies, to my mind, that there really wasn't a corporate culture saturated with sex - it was just a small clique of well-placed people who all knew each other, didn't really know very many other people in the company, and were all sleeping with each other. So, naturally, the whole company "must" have been doing it, right?
The author of these articles has made the same mistake as Washington reporters who live in the Beltway and naturally assume that, because they give a crap about the latest government scandal, the whole world must be just as enthralled.
If you're a journalist, you can't just check your facts; you've got to check your whole view of reality.
I know some heads out there know what I'm talkin about. Represent!
(While the reasons that BeOS as a whole won't be open-sourced have been hashed out here recently, it makes perfect sense for them to open-source the app server - for one thing, there's themeability locked in there somewhere. OSS hackers could unlock it and then some. And, of course, I'm talking about BeOS code that would have to be ported. But hey.)
No, of course Eazel doesn't think an embedded MP3 player is a killer app, and we probably made too big a deal out of it at the show. The reason it was part of the demo was to show off what you can do with Bonobo and componentization. The MP3 thing was a good way to demonstrate this because it's sort of random - it expands people's notion of what can happen in a file browser.
In Nautilus (and Evolution and any Bonobo-container app), you can not only integrate Web browsing and file-system browsing without locking anyone into anything, but you can integrate anything from a Bonobo-ized image editor to StarOffice. The separation between "desktop environment" and "applications," and the notion that you must go launch something else to do your work, is a legacy idea that adds complexity to the user experience. When Microsoft built the Web browser into the file browser, it was a UI innovation - it was just bloated and monopolistic. An open-source componentization model makes those problems go away.
And yes, I work for Eazel, but A) I don't necessarily speak for them, and B) don't expect anyone on #gnome to have heard of me.
I think Evolution was the most exciting thing at the show, myself. (But then, I've been staring at Nautilus for a good long time.)
If Origins was any indicator, collectable card games are a lot less prevalent at the big game conventions these days.
The WSP needs to learn (or remember) something simple that my parents taught me: when you're angry, write a letter. Then, write another draft to make sure you've said everything you want to say. Then, put it in an envelope, seal it, and DON'T SEND IT.
Words written in anger will be around long after the anger is gone, and this editorial was obviously written out of mere frustration and impatience. They will be kicking themselves for it in a month or so.
There was one good one posted on mozillazine last week - X-Objects: X-DOM, X-Browser, X-Version Objects. It doesn't cover everything, but it'll tell you how to do 80% of what people do with DHTML.
Well, zztzed, at the risk of sounding Clintonesque, it depends what you mean by the word "geek." In my own experience, virtually everyone who uses the word today means something different by it. To most of us here, it means one thing, to Katz it means something slightly different, and to Pinkerton... well, they'd never use the word, but their WAVE criteria express their definition pretty well. And to a lot of American high schoolers, the word "geek" still means nothing other than "depressed or violent or suicidal or 'different'."
Maybe we need a new word. "Geek" is still a hot-enough button for a lot of folks that it ends some important conversations before they start. What phrase can we use that's succinct, and communicates, but doesn't exclude any of the diverse groups to which it needs to refer?
It's a hard problem. You might be thinking that the geek spectrum is too complex to fit inside any one term, and that we simply shouldn't reduce these issues with the goal of increasing the number of people who understand them. But that's the way media works today, like it or not. If we're going to defend ourselves, our rights and our cultures, we need to start thinking seriously and respectfully about the subtle art of public relations.
What Napster is really saying is that this genre of mainstream, radio-friendly music is, or ought to be, too cheap to meter. It doesn't make sense that you have to pay $17 (yes, music fans, in many places CD prices are still that high) for a Ricky Martin CD, when the music on that CD is the cultural equivalent of a cheap, ubiquitous product like Coca-Cola. The RIAA has artificially kept its price up, so people have found a means to go around them, via technology. It's theft, strictly speaking... but it's the invisible hand at work.
If major labels were smart, they'd realize that this is a sign to them. They can flex their muscles now and keep supporting high prices for trash music, but for the long term, if they want to make money in the digital age, they'd better get busy making music that people are willing to pay for.
There are a couple of directions that interfaces could go, that I'd like to bring up here, with some explanation for those who might be unfamiliar with them.
The first is Lifestreams, a file management concept created by David Gelernter, one of the Unabomber's better known victims. Lifestreams abandons hierarchical file systems entirely (from the user's perspective, anyway) in favor of a timeline, robust search capabilities, and saved searches. For more info on Lifestreams (and some of the weird commercial products that have arisen from it), check Gelernter's company Mirror Worlds. Current GUIs have taken baby steps toward this concept - you can save Sherlock searches in MacOS and use them the same way you would a folder, and BeOS has powerful queries. But neither system has had the guts to encourage users to rely on them.
The second is a system created by Jef Raskin, one of the principal inventors of the Macintosh. Raskin's system essentially had no file system interface. You turned it on by beginning to type a sentence; booting was instant, and your sentence appeared on screen, from the very first keystroke. If you needed some graphics, you went and got a graphics tool and started drawing on screen. If you neede to work on some old file, you had the system search for it. In ways, it was a lot lke Apple's aborted OpenDoc paradigm, but made more effective by building a computer around it from first principles, rather than shoehorning it into an existing PC system. Raskin's system eventually became the Canon Cat, an emasculated commercial failure that Canon bundled with a daisy wheel printer and sold as a secretarial aid. I looked around for nice links on the Cat but didn't find much; you can always try Jef Raskin's site.