if we're conflating matter with information or information-processing.
A blender perfectly simulates what happens in a blender, mapping matter to information. It is empirically perfect, in that every possible unit of information is represented by a dedicated unit of matter, without shortcuts; it is a perfect simulation of what happens in the theoretical case of "something being blended" which is a subset of the logically possible set of phenomena connected to the physical manifestations found in an appliance store as a "universe" of a particular kind.
"Ah," goes the response, "but in conventional simulations, the physical nature of the reality being simulated is different from the physical nature of the substance of the simulation, i.e. there is a logical congruence reliant upon some measure of generalization, but not a physical congruence, because the only reason to 'run a simulation' is for the case in which physical resources are inadequate to the computational task with complete fidelity, i.e. the case in which we can not 'simulate the concept' using a perfect and total material instance of it."
So be it. But that's my point. If all of this—you, me, the universe—is just a simulation in a "computer" of a physical order so radically different from it as to be analagous to the physical differences between—say—the simulation of a nuclear explosion and the explosion itself (the sorts of things that we need to run simulations of)—then we're talking about a "real" (i.e. non-computed, non-simulation) space so different from our own as to make the use of our terms ("computer", "simulation", and so on) in it, bound up as they are with our own ontological and epistemological limitations and assumptions, essentially meaningless—or worse, ideological—suggestive of something (by virtue of the intuitive and connotative properties of 'computer' and 'simulation') that simply isn't (and, practically speaking, can't be in any universe that we're familiar with) the case.
For this to be true in even the most allegorical sense would require that we stretch the definitions of "computer" and "simulation" well beyond anything we currently understand and well beyond the bounds of our ability to be concise and specific about what the terms mean. Using these terms here is just mixing up apples and oranges.
We might as well, in other words, say that our universe is a blender inside a giant appliance store, a stageplay inside a giant theatre district, a mildewing blow tickler inside a giant hoarder's garage mess, or anything else bearing the one of the rough relationships signal:carrier, content:form, fragment:whole, instance:structure, etc.
I mean, what sort of computer are we talking about here? What is its nature, not just logically, but physically? Do we even know that we're speaking "physically"? Isn't this the scale at which such quantities break down? And doesn't our idea of computation and simulation require precisely that mathematical rules apply for these to be carried out in the first place?
Do they continue to be gainfully employed as a digger, yet still dig with their bare hands?
What do they and their boss know about their productivity and job requirements that you don't?
What are they digging for? Is it likely to be damaged by a spade? Are they relying on the tactile sensation in their hands as they dig to make critical digging decisions of some kind? What is the cost of spades? What is the urgency of this dig? Is the limited supply of spades reserved for cases in which rapid digs are needed, in order to avoid excessive spade wear? How long do they dig? Does the spade cause repetitive stress injuries or blisters that hamper their work later on, and for longer periods of time, despite the apparent productivity gains early on? Even if we go all the way to the silly end of the spectrum, are spades against their religion? Even if so, are they nonetheless the most productive member on their team even with bare hands, leading the boss to not give two damns whether they use a spade or a ball of cotton candy to do their work? If you mess with the magic sauce that makes them the most productive person on the team, are you going to be out of a job before they are, even if you believe that your orders for them to change are the "correct" ones?
It seems to me that the job of tech designers isn't to know about digging, but to listen to the diggers carefully as the experts on their kind of digging, digging needs, and the totality of their work life as diggers, and to thoughtfully provide the technical resources needed to enable diggers to do digging as they see fit. They are, after all, the diggers. We are the tech people. Our job is to make tech—which is merely a means to everyone else, not an end. Make the wrong means that doesn't help them to achieve their ends, and you will find that nobody values your tech, no matter how much you try to explain that a spade is a spade.
We're conflating use cases and identities when we say "Newbie." As technology designers, we need to be concerned with use cases. There may be a statistical overlap between the two, but mistaking one for the other gets us into deep water for design purposes.
Rather than newbies, let's talk use cases.
Case #1: User is not "at desk, at work" but is rather "in flow, in everyday personal life." They need, for party-planning purposes, or for kid-care purposes, for example, to "send an SMS, "send an email," or "buy more diapers on Amazon.com." These are use cases that are all much better handled by tablets or mobiles, particularly if the user does not spend most of their work or personal life sitting at a computing system. The larger computing system imposes an extraordinary amount of overhead for (say) the stay-at-home parent that just wants more diapers. Leave the playroom, go to the den, power up the desktop, sit down, confront a desktop full of resources, figure out which one is the right one, start the application, and so on. All of that is overhead when we have mobiles: pull iPhone from pocket, press button, tap Amazon, type "diapers", click Buy, put phone back in pocket.
As technology folks, we have a terrible habit of taking someone's bewilderment to mean that they need more training or they're a "newbie," rather than looking at it practically: they're being told that they have to do an *awful lot of work* (moving through the house, navigating a full suite of powerful computing resources, learning to manage them) just to get some more diapers in the midst of their *real life*, the one that they actually care about, which involves diapers, not computing.
Case #2: Person new to computing is also new to the job, but it is now their *full time job* to make charts and graphs with Excel. They will happily sit down with the 600 page book, online training tutorials, and get to work learning. Why? Because this is a set of resources that are not overhead to them—it is the productive work that they will be expected to do, so the investment in time and computing use makes perfect sense. It is work, not waste.
I'd argue that in most cases, trying to marry a full-on computing environment (hierarchical file system or DB storage in quantity, multiple applications, multiple peripherals and forms of connectivity) to a rapid, task-based interface is not going to work out because they're two different use cases. Rapid, task-based use demands lightness and speed. General-purpose "big computing" resources toward the achievement of office work demands feature-richness, open-endedness, and deliberateness (i.e. the opposite of lightness and speed). One is highly endpoint-oriented, the other has no endpoint and is highly process-oriented.
The right answer is not to redesign the desktop environment. The right answer is to get the stay-at-home parent an iPad, or a laptop with everything but the web browser uninstalled, one that preferably boots straight to the web browser—in which case, the UI doesn't matter at all, because the user has no intention to use it.
The "newbies" that we commonly reference are actually a use case—people that feel that their current goals are not well-served by a high-overhead investment in full-scale computing. To serve their needs with a full-on whitebox computer, we just have to strip out the general purpose computing entirely, or at the very least, hide it entirely—which makes the system all but useless for those embroiled in "general purpose computing" use cases, particularly in comparison to those that have a full desktop UI available to them.
Make a better desktop environment *and* make a better information appliance, and both sets of users will thank you.
Try to make a desktop environment *that is* an efficient information appliance, and the computing-for-work people will find it to be inefficient and unhelpful while the casual-net-users will find it to be slow and needlessly complex in comparison to their sister's iPad.
there are 30 years of detailed field research on this. Again, see Suchman's "Plans and Situated Actions," Dourish's "Where the Action Is," etc., or visit the ACM digital library and look at usability research (i.e. involving observation of real people in real settings) in CSCW, HCI, etc.
You have one basic fact wrong: they *do* have to think about what it's "time" to do.
Users in computer-at-desk contexts do not have a detailed roadmap for what to do on a click-by-click basis, either from their boss or inside their heads. They have a general set of goals for, say, the quarter ("Get this project launched"), perhaps the week ("Make sure everyone is on-task and progress is being made; keep the CTO appraised of any roadblocks"), and the day ("Put together charts and graphs for Wednesday's meeting to detail progress").
But it is *these* tasks that are "theoretical" quantities. They translate into dozens and dozens of clicks, mouse movements, UI interactions, and so on, many of them interdependent (or, in Suchman/Dourish terms, indexical—that is to say, order-important and constitutive of an evolving informational and UI flow context).
The user may have "Tell bob about tomorrow's meeting" already decided, but they are imagining Bob and imagining Bob *at* the meeting. From there, activity is practical and adaptive. They emphatically do *not* have this in their heads:
- Take mouse in right hand - Flick mouse to lower-left to establish known position - Move mouse 5 inches toward right, 0.5 inches toward top of desk to precise location of email icon - Click email icon - Wait 0.4 seconds for email window to appear - Move mouse 7.2 inches toward top of desk, 2 inches toward left to precise location of To: field - Click to focus on field - Type "Bob" - Wait 0.1 seconds for drop-down with completions to appear - Hit down arrow three times to select correct Bob - Press enter...
You laugh, but in fact this is precisely what you're suggesting: that users have a roadmap already. They don't. That's why we invented the GUI—to provide a visual catalogue of available computing resources and an indication of how to access them on an as-needed basis. Then, the user has to decide, in the moment, what was needed. Every single attempt to make things more "simple" or more "efficient" by presenting *only* that one thing that designers imagined to be needed at a given time—the "obvious" next step—has led to users that either feel the system is useless, that fight it to get it to do what they want, or that simply go around the system (I'll just do this task offline, on a pad of paper). You can make very telling changes to users' productive workflows and levels of productivity by changing orderings or locations of icons, etc. Marketers also know this very well on the web (google "page hotspots" to see the research about positioning of advertising and how deeply it affects CPC and other factors in online marketing).
At a less granular level, something like "Get this project launched" is also not available in a detailed roadmap to a user. Go ahead, ask them to elaborate on the precise set of tasks involved in their big quarterly responsibility. They'll come up with 20, 30, maybe even 80 split into four or five sub-areas. But getting the project launched for an average middle manager over the course of a quarter involves tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of discrete actions, gestures, etc., some computing-based, some not, with the computing-based ones split across dozens of applications and contexts.
It cannot be mapped out because it is contingently assembled—it has to be done on an as-we-go-basis. So the tasks in the "to do list" (and, in fact, in cognitive behavior) are theorized ("Create a new instance of the platform on test VPN, set up credentials for team") rather than existing as a detailed, moment-by-moment list of actions. This is why user docs people actually have to sit down and use the system, and int
only to see GNOME do the same thing not so very long after that, in the grand scheme of things. That's when I went to Mac OS from Linux (having been a Linux user since 1993). And that was that.
I stuck with KDE4 for at least 2-3 months. But it was a lot of meta work (i.e. work on the environment itself, rather than work *in* the environment). By the time the desktop came back in some form, I was long gone.
At the time that I left KDE, I had been a KDE user since KDE Beta 3 (1.0 beta 3 that is), having switched from TWM and an old.twmrc file from my SunOS days. In fact, I wrote one of the earliest reviews on the web for KDE (during the early beta phase) to be published by (at that time) a top 10 internet property. I was one of those early "Will Linux someday overtake Windows on the desktop?" pundits on the strength of what I saw in the new KDE platform. I was a longtime, committed user. But the total break in the workflow from 3.0->4.0 was unforgivable. KDE 3.0 was chintzy and showed its Linux/X heritage far too much, sure, but 4.0 was flat-out unusable for the first months. It eliminated common workflow assumptions *at the same time* as being so buggy as to fail to do anything predictably. The result was that you never knew whether you were looking at a behavior (an unexplained one at that) or a bug. But it didn't matter, because something different would happen the next time anyway.
When I went to GNOME I found it to be usable in ways that hadn't been true in the GNOME 1.0 days (GNOME 1 was a disaster; tough enough to keep it running, and see the "integration" at work, tougher still to actually use it). So I settled into GNOME and never logged into KDE again.
Then the "press" began to hit in Linux circles about what was coming for the GNOME 3 release, and about the adoption by major distros. I tried the stuff in the dev repository, decided to hackintosh my Thinkpad T60 on a spare partition to give Mac OS X a go, and three months later, after having been a Linux user for going on two decades, I bought a MacBook Pro and haven't had a Linux partition or installation around since (well, except in my phone and router).
Even veteran developers are relatively attached to their workflows. You have benchmarks to hit, as a general rule in modern life, and they do not involve configuring your desktop. Any time spent configuring/learning to use a GUI all over again is, quite simply, is money lost.
In simpler terms than all of this discussion, that's where GNOME and KDE screwed up. Whatever you think of the theory behind the reimagination of the Linux desktop UX/UI, the fact is that there was no demand for it. Like all open source projects, it happened without any particular concern for whether there was demand or not, or for where demand was pointing.
If the Linux world had collectively been interested in driver support, OS X level polish, and interoperability with the most common/dominant commodity and infrastructure systems in use over the '00s, Linux might be *the* dominant operating system today, running the bulk of cloudspace/serverspace, the bulk of mobile computing/phone space, and the bulk of desktop space. Instead, the fatal flaw of open source software kicked in—nobody has to think about the market. The developers had their freedom, and they exercised it.
And the result is a bunch of Netcraft confirmations that Linux on the desktop is dying. (Has died?)
Except that the desktop cannot work using the phone/tablet model because user expectations do not suggest that metaphor when they sit at a desktop.
Even if the desktop metaphor was too complex to master, users still sit down at a desktop and think, "now where are my files?" because they intend to "do work in general" (have an array of their current projects and workflows available to them) rather than "complete a single task."
As was the case with a desk, they expect to be able to construct a cognitive overview of their "current work" at a computer—an expectation that they don't have with a phone, which is precisely experienced as an *interruption to* their "current work." KDE, Gnome, and most recently Windows 8, made the mistake of trying to get users to adopt the "interruption of work" mental map *as* the flow of work. It's never going to happen; they need to be presented with a system that enables them to be "at work." In practice, being "at work" is not about a single task, but about having open access to a series of resources about that the user can employ in order to *reason* about the relatedness and next steps across a *variety* of ongoing tasks. That's the experience of work for most workers in the industrialized world today.
If you place them in a single-task flow for "regular work" they're going to be lost, because they don't know what the task is that they ought to be working on without being able to survey the entirety of "what is going on" in their work life—say, by looking at what's collected on their desktop, what windows are currently open, how they're all positioned relative to one another, and what's visible in each window. Ala Lucy Suchman (see her classic UX work "Plans and Situated Actions"), users do not have well-specified "plans" for use (i.e. step 1, step 2, step 3, task 1, task 2, task 3) but are constantly engaged in trying to "decide what to do next" in-context, in relation to the totality of their projects, obligations, current situation, etc. Successful computing systems will provide resources to assist in deciding, on a moment-by-moment basis, "what to do next," and resources to assist in the construction of a decision-making strategy or set of habits surrounding this task.
The phone metaphor (or any single-task flow) works only once the user *has already decided* what to do next, and is useful only for carrying out *that task*. Once the task is complete, the user is back to having to decide "what to do next."
The KDE and GNOME experiments (at least early on) hid precisely the details necessary to make this decision easy, and to make the decision feel rational, rather than arbitrary. An alternate metaphor was needed, one to tell users how to "see what is going on, overall" in their computing workday. The desktop did this and offered a metaphor for how to use it (survey the visual field, which is ordered conceptually by me as a series of objects). Not only did the KDE and GNOME not offer a metaphor for how to use this "see what is going on" functionality, they didn't even offer the functionality—just a series of task flows.
This left users in the situation of having *lost* the primary mechanism by which they'd come to decide "what to do next" in work life for two decades. "Before, I looked at my desktop to figure out what to do next and what I'm working on. Now that functionality is gone—what should I do next?" It was the return of the post-it note and the Moleskine notebook sitting next to the computer, from the VisiCalc-on-green-screen days. It was a UX joke, frankly.
The problem is that human beings are culture and habit machines; making something possible in UX is not the same thing as making something usable, largely because users come with baggage of exactly this kind.
using too many words. He means that users of personal computers (as opposed to mobile devices) want simply a "desktop."
As in, the metaphor—the one that has driven PC UI/UX for decades now.
The metaphor behind the desktop UI/UX was that a "real desktop" had:
- A single surface of limited space - Onto which one could place, or remove files - And folders - And rearrange them at will in ways that served as memory and reasoning aides - With the option to discard them (throw them in the trash) once they were no longer needed on the single, bounded surface
Both of the "traditional breaking" releases from KDE and GNOME did violence to this metaphor; a screen no longer behaved—at least in symbolic ways—like the surface of a desk. The mental shortcuts that could draw conclusions about properties, affordances, and behavior based on a juxtaposition with real-world objects broke down.
Instead of "this is meant to be a desktop, so it's a limited, rectangular space on which I can put, stack, and arrange my stuff and where much of my workday will 'happen'" gave way to "this is obviously a work area of some kind, but it doesn't behave in ways that metaphorically echo a desk—but I don't have any basis on which to make suppositions about how it *does* behave, or what affordances/capabilities or constraints it offers, what sorts of 'objects' populate it, what their properties are,' and so on.
I think that's the biggest problem—the desktop metaphor was done away with, but no alternative metaphor took its place—no obvious mental shortcuts were on offer to imply how things worked enough to allow users to infer the rest. People have argued that the problem was that the new releases were too "phone like," but that's actually not true. The original iPhone, radical though it was, operated on a clear metaphor aided by its physical size and shape: that of a phone—buttons laid out in a grid, a single-task/single-thread use model, and very abbreviated, single-option tasks/threads (i.e. 'apps' that performed a single function, rather than 'software' with many menus and options for UX flow).
Though the iPhone on its surface was a radical anti-phone, in practice, the use experience was very much like a phone: power on, address grid of buttons, perform single task with relatively low flow-open-endedness, power off and set down when complete. KDE4/GNOME3 did not behave this way. They retained the open-endedness, large screen area, feature-heavy, and "dwelling" properties of desktops (it is a space where you spend time, not an object used to perform a single task and then 'end' that task) so the phone metaphor does not apply. But they also removed most of the considered representations, enablements, and constraints that could easily be metaphorically associated with a desktop.
The result was that you constantly had to look stuff up—even if you were an experienced computer user. They reintroduced *precisely* the problem that the desktop metaphor had solved decades earlier—the reason, in fact, that it was created in the first place. It was dumb.
That's what he means by "classic desktop." "Linux users want a desktop, not something else that remains largely unspecified or that must instead be enumerated for users on a feature-by-feature basis with no particular organizing cultural model."
There's already a decent tradition in the social sciences examining the role that emotion increasingly plays as a resource to be allocated in economic systems. Affect becomes labor, across industries (not just software programming).
And yes, there is more than an Orwellian whiff about this. But it is what it is—companies hire great attitude, drive, belief, positivity, team spirit, etc. In several contracts I've been involved with, companies actually had metrics for positivity vs. negativity in meetings, communication, and so on, and this was a part of weekly evaluations. They want to see your Facebook page. Everyone knows that it matters whether you "present" well. People with a "great outlook" and "enthusiasm about the company" are routinely promoted over those that are more competent but perhaps dour. In fact, supremely-competent-but-dour is the butt of jokes (as Slashdot's conventional wisdom is already aware).
There is nothing more personal than one's emotion and affect; it is perhaps the most human thing about us in our day-to-day experiences, and the most individual. But more and more, it's a metric to be evaluated, a "property" of yourself as a system that must be managed to remain compatible with the company. To some extent this makes sense in an increasingly rationalized world—what's in your head is a black box. Your interactive style and self-presentation on a moment-by-moment basis are effectively your API. So efficiency dictates that a certain predictability, compatibility, and growth-oriented, team-oriented set of assumptions will be valued, and thus, ought to be "implemented" by you as the manager of your own API.
At the same time, what good is a world in which nobody can have a bad day or a personal opinion on anything? In which your bank balance is directly correlated to your ability to feel the emotions that your boss has outlined for employees in the company handbook?
Is it really so great to live in an efficient and productive world that is ultimately lacking in what Hannah Arendt called humans' intrinsic "natality," the ability to do and feel something new, something individual, something that is an emergent property of the extremely complex phenomenon that is the self?
It's a bummer. (And of course, this very post is precisely the kind of post that they warn you about in the popular press, in articles about how "what you say on the internet will always be there" and future HR managers might exclude you for a position because of it, i.e. because of your negativity and clear lack of cooperation with basic emotion-and-opinion suppression culture.)
Of course, one group is exempt from these restrictions: the wealthy. They can say what they want, since as a matter of power relations, they are central in the system. Others (with less money) must amend their emotional style to be compatible with the rich, the powerful, the CEO, the venture capitalist. These latter people get to say and feel whatever is on their mind or in their gut, unlike the rest of us. And, irony of ironies, they are broadly applauded for it, no matter how extreme, atypical, or mundane the positions. The rest of us would simply be fired.
Didn't even realize that Wii U was substantively different from Wii. In fact, based on this story and the context here, still can't tell.
What would have been wrong with "Wii 2" which offers a much clearer indication that it's a next generation console? (If, in fact, it is a next generation console.)
First thing that comes to my mind with "Wii U" is that it's the educational version of the Wii.
Educational Psychology department at the local U about study strategies/study skills. Usually these are geared toward teachers (how to help their students to develop strategies) but sometimes they're even geared toward students at said U (how to study in college, and so on).
These aren't classes about how to improve your brain, or about theory. They're very meat-and-potatoes: ways to organize note-taking, ways to organize reading activity and coordinate it with note-taking, ways to prepare for exams systematically and so on. What seems a problem of recall may be a problem of cognitive data architecture—not "it's not in there" but rather "you're not putting it in there in a way that lends itself to retrieval later on."
I don't know your case or just how hard it is for you, but it's not uncommon for a broad cross-section of students to have many of the same complaints, and often the remedy is to learn differently (i.e. different, time-tested, sample-studied methods for effectively acquiring, organizing, and storing information) rather than to try to "do mental exercises" or improve some immanent property of themselves.
And it's not common sense—they get down into things like how to lay out a page of notes, in geographical regions of the page; how to key words to paragraphs; how to note pages and where, etc. Very mechanical, technique-style stuff. You may find it helpful.
Don't see any Chinese app stores. Just Cydia. All working well. Biggest problem: Nothing on Cydia is yet compatible with iOS 7.x, so in a way there's no point unless you just want system access—there's next to nothing that you can install and use. But hopefully that will change in time.
What is a surface? Is it a tablet? A laptop? Is it highly mobile (well sort of, but not like iPad) Really lightweight and fast (well sort of, but not like iPad) Powerful for stationary work (well sort of, but not like a laptop) Easy to carry (well sort of, but not like an iPad) Heavy, substantial, and durable (well sort of, but not like a laptop)
People do two things:
(1) Use technology for work or play at their desk (2) Use technology for work or play not at their desk
Two basic use cases. Just two, at the very bottom of things. In case (1) you go all-out on hardware and power; don't make them sit longer than they have to, let them get their work DONE! (Power, power, power, some ease of use, no compromises.) (2) you go all-out on not making them feel like they need to return to their desk; give them what they need to do what they need to do without feeling tethered (Mobility, mobility, mobility, touch-friendliness, battery, no compromises).
Two basic use cases and Microsoft managed to not hit either one of them well.
The product is called "Windows." Windows are static things. They are embedded into walls. They provide an unmoving portal into another space.
A monitor on your desktop behaves like a window in some sense. It is always in the same place. You sit and you look at it.
Windows Phone and Windows RT just don't make sense for mobile devices, and provide a kind of complacency to project vision and the wrong idea (unpalatable) to consumers looking for mobile devices.
MS should call the mobile product something mobile:
MS Pathways MS Journeys MS Passages MS Ways MS Compass MS Latitude
Then they should focus relentlessly on small-screen/long-battery/mobile UX for the mobile system; design toward the lightweight, mobile ethos of the new name, and market it relentlessly not as "the same as windows" but in fact as exactly different from it.
MS Windows in your office MS Compass for going places "Because you're not always sitting still. "Busy people do more than sit by Windows."
I'm not saying that the marketing is the product; we all know that's ridiculous and leads exactly to a product fail (mismatched expectations vs. reality). I'm saying that if MS was as marketing-led as they ought to have been, they'd do the field research to know what mobile users need (field research they clearly haven't done well) and target the product to those needs, as well as the marketing campaign.
Who needs Windows in their pocket on the street? Nobody. Windows belong inside walls.
Same thing goes for the hardware product. "Surface?" Sounds static and architectural. The opposite of mobility. You can see that they themselves imagined the product this way based on what was shipped out the door. Come up with something lightweight and mobile.
The Microsoft Dispatch. The Microsoft Portfolio. The Microsoft Movement (tablet) and Microsoft Velocity (phone).
These are not great ideas yet, but they're light years ahead of "Windows" and "Surface" for a mobile device that ends up acting just like a "Window" or a "Surface."
connectivity along? This was my big gripe with the Sony MN2 (see my other comment in this story). I wanted it to do some basic things: notably, to give me a buzz about events (messages, calendaring, calls). It failed miserably at this task, because keeping it charged and connected to the phone all the time in the daily flow of life turned out not to be possible without making "Sony MN2 management" a new part-time job for myself. A distant second reason for failure (but still deserves mention) is that the touchscreen was so worthless that when it did manage to buzz me, I spent a comical ten minutes tap-tap-tapping on my screen just trying to get my taps to register well enough to see what the buzzing was all about.
It was much faster and less labor intensive in the end to continue what I'd been doing, and what so many others do: fish the phone out of my pocket regularly every ten minutes to see if anything was going down.
I thought about Pebble, but the Sony product made me gun-shy about smartwatches for the general consumer market a this point (though I'd still give an Apple product a look—but without much hope that it would work for me, since I use an Android phone now).
I got a smart watch (Sony MN2) last year because I kept missing the vibrate on my phone for meetings and calls, because my phone isn't always in my pocket. I thought that if I had a device on my wrist, I'd always get the buzz and never miss anything important.
SIMPLE task for the device, no? But it failed miserably.
Reason: Same as Windows CE back in the day. The device wasn't up to the job, because it was busy trying (miserably) to do a hundred other things that it simply wasn't suited for AT ALL.
- There were multiple "apps" on the watch, including for things like Twitter and Facebook - But the screen is by nature so tiny and the device so limited, these were laughable rather than usable - Rather than focusing like a laser on doing tiny-device things well, this led to compromises: - Unusable touchscreen (inaccurate, insensitive) - Useless battery life (lucky to make a day, often less) - Worst of all, the device had to be tethered to be useful; lose tether, and it is effectively a bracelet
Compare to Windows CE:
- There were multiple applications on the devices, copying most MS desktop applications of the day - But the device was by nature so tiny and so limited, these were laughable rather than usable - Rather than focusing like a laser on doing mobile-device things well, this led to compromises: - Crappy display, crappy resistive touchscreens, inexact and unpredictable input methods - Useless battery life (lucky to make a few hours, often less) - Worst of all, CE devices had to be synced to be useful; fail to sync several times a day and they were a data prison or data corrupter, rather than a data aid
The experience with the Sony MN2 was much the same as what I remember from CE: constant nursing the device along, excessive time spent trying to "make it work" for the most simple tasks, paying WAY TOO MUCH ATTENTION all the time to the connectivity (your body and its attention are pressed into service as the mechanical tool that keep the data flowing) to ensure that it was regular and sound, no intention to try to use any of the laughable features, and continuous frustration (Oh god, the battery went dead/I lost bluetooth sync/something went wrong and I can't tell what it is on this tiny screen device with no error reporting, I didn't get buzzed about that meeting/call, WTF IS THE POINT OF THIS SHITTY DEVICE AND ALL THE TIME I SPEND NURSING IT ALONG ANYWAY?)
Wrongheaded.
I presume that if Apple decides to build one of these, they will have better success, given their reasonable HCI and design and decision-making chops.
I actually don't know. I have the luxury of having institutional access to a full range of print and electronic subscriptions. But even if they do, think about what you're asking a busy professional to do.
People are suggesting that she should just pony up $thousands annually, that she should dedicate days to travel and research, as apart from patients or family, when there's no necessary technical reason to do so, and now, with ILL, that she should stick to a research project about a case or two for the many weeks that it takes to make ILL work.
Sure, there's ILL, and it may well work as it used to (though I doubt it for electronic resources, based on the ways that licenses right now are written). But we're asking her to stick to a project for $thousands and $weeks of constant attention. She's a professional. She is busy. And she ought to have access. The point is not to ask, "can it, plausibly, be done?" but rather "what is science for, and is this the way that it ought to work?"
We made society, as human beings. We can make it better. I'd suggest that this is a case in which it can be made to function much, much better than it currently does. The goal behind having therapists of all stripes is to help people to overcome real problems, not to test the therapists to see whether or not they can navigate arcane social structures and processes. We should make their jobs as easy as possible. Hell, this applies to virtually every job title. Jobs exist for a reason—because there is demand for what they do, because we value it. Why not, then, make the jobs of professionals as plausible and as easy as possible, rather than risking their doing a much worse job simply so that a few corporations that produce little of value (the value in academic publishing is produced by the academics and the researchers, not by the publishers in the era of easy print-on-demand and easy online access) can earn a decent chunk of change.
1) Which libraries have _print_ as opposed to _electronic only_ subscriptions, and 2) Amongst those that do not (I'm guessing the majority), which allow access to electronic resources by non-students/non-faculty (this kind of access is expressly forbidden, at any cost, by many subscription packages offered to universities).
Even if she is able to identify a library that offers non-affiliated individuals access, she will have to pony up whatever the cost of access for the public to the library is, and then, at that stage, she will have access to _one_ journal. It is unlikely that all of the resources that she needs are to be found in that _one_ journal, and much more likely that relevant material is published in several or even several dozen journals, in which case all she has to do is grill library personnel for 20-30 minutes with a detailed list in each phone call, and likely pony up the access fees (and the transportation, and the saturday mornings) to jump around from one library to another on a wild goose chase over many weeks to piece together the materials that an academic can assemble over a cup of coffee without leaving their screen. Just who, pray, are the academics producing their research _for_? Surely those who might actually be able to use it practically?
All of this stuff can technically be accessed from her office, too, in the space of 10 minutes, but for the profit-oriented restrictions (that do not reflect costs, see my previous post) imposed by journal "publishers."
"irritating," not "irritable," my apologies for the misuse of the word (it's late where I am); and I should note that the department had to change the name of the journal and all of its graphics as they brought it entirely in-house and severed the Springer relationship, since Springer held the rights to everything, including all past issues, meaning that the new journal is just that—a clean slate, post-Springer (and good riddance).
as a managing editor, I can tell you that they do not incur substantial expenses, and that academics provide the important parts of the service, essentially for free in the cases of most journals. It's not like putting out a magazine; we didn't even have copy or layout editors for our journal, the most inexpensive components of editorial labor. It paid the university department that hosted the journal a mere thousands (single digits) per year. There were two "paid" staffers—myself and one other person, The rest of the "editorial board" consisted of faculty of our and another several universities doing the work for free, under the auspices of the "professional duties" of the academics involved (not as paid by Springer, as paid by their respective institutions). Peer reviewers—free. Editorial labor (copy, layout to production files according to specs, submissions queue, even rough line editing, style work)—graduate students looking for a title to add to their emerging CVs.
Essentially Springer's total cost for putting out the journal amounted to the several thousand (again, single digit thousands, split between myself and one other individual) that they (usually belatedly) paid our department annually for the entire journal in its substance, plus printing/distribution (a pittance given the circulation size of academic journals and the cost per print subscription—not to mention the increasing number of electronic-only subscriptions). They had one liason that handled our entire "account," and the level of labor involved allowed this person to be "over" several _dozen_ journals as just a single person. That's as much a labor footprint, in its entirety, as our journal actually had inside the "publisher."
And for this, they held onto the reprint/reuse rights with an iron fist, requiring even authors and PIs to pay $$$ to post significant excerpts on their own blogs.
Seeing the direction the wind has been blowing over the last half-decade, the department decided (and rightfully so) that it's basically a scam, that academic publishing as we know it need not exist any longer, and wound down both the print journal and the relationship with Springer several years ago, instead self-publishing the journal (which is easy these days) to much higher revenue for the department, and the ability to sensibly manage rights in the interest of academic production and values, rather than in the interest of Springer's oinking at the trough on the backs of academics.
Oh, and many university libraries (particularly in urban areas) do not admit just anyone off the street; you must generally hold an ID that grants access to the library (often student or faculty, plus a paid option for the general public, either monthly or annually, that can vary from somewhat affordable to somewhat expensive). Not to mention that for many people, yes, it is a significant professional hardship to lose a day or two of work to be trekking into foreign territory and sitting amongst the stacks—and that this hardship is made much more irritable by the fact that the very same articles are sitting there online, in 2013, yet can't be accessed at reasonable cost.
As an academic, I have the same frustration. We bemoan the state of science in this society, yet under the existing publishing model we essentially insure that only a rarefied few scientists and the very wealthy elite have access to science at all. $30-$60 is not a small amount for the average person—and that is the cost to read _one_ article, usually very narrowly focused, and of unclear utility until they've already paid the money, that is borderline unreadable for the layperson (or for the magazine author hoping to make sense of science _for_ the layperson) anyway. Why, exactly, would we expect anyone to know any science at all beyond university walls, under this arrangement?
and even DRM is merely an obstacle to be overcome to get to the Game . That . You . Must . Play . Now .
The problem is that the games suck. Right now in the 'AAA' space we have an orientation something like:
85% production values 5% compelling and entertaining story and writing 10% gameplay 0% replay value
Show me a game like this, and I'll spend rather a lot, and even suffer DRM for it:
10% production values 20% compelling and entertaining story and writing 50% gameplay 20% replay value
When the technology didn't allow for production values to matter, everything was tied up in gameplay, writing, and replayability. Games had to be entertaining to sell.
Now, particularly given the ways that games are marketed (and the synergy between this kind of marketing and the marketing that happens on the hardware side), everything is about jaw-dropping renderings. It feels like the late '80s and early '90s, when everyone in CS departments were printing out raytrace scenes at 24x36 and hanging them on the wall.
At first, it was "omigod thassocool" to see a bunch of floating cones and spheres and rendered bolts with clearly articulated threads reflecting the image of the chessboard on the other side of the picture. But by the mid-'90s, it was like, "humf, what else you got, I am no longer amazed by the fabulousness of this technology."
That's how I feel about games now. A decade or a decade and a half ago, game engines and triangle count and an asymptotic approach to "photorealistic realtime" rendering were enough to make a person shell out $$$ just to "have the experience."
But now it's old hat. Someone else posted in this story about games being all about showing you sliding your car sideways into a flock of sheep. That pretty much sums it up—how many hours do they spend on tableaux like this? It's plots of shiny raytrace scenes on department walls all over again. I had occasion to play a few games (Silpheed, a few Sonics, etc.) on someone's Sega CD setup not so long ago. I was like "Shit, this is fun!" and then shortly after I realized why I had abandoned gaming in the early 2000's. I just preferred to spend my money on more entertaining things.
I find crossword puzzles to be as fun as many of the 'AAA' titles of the last half-decade.
I use markdown + Deadalus for long-form (i.e. dozens of pages) content that will go to print.
I use markdown + Mou for short-form content that will go online.
If you write for online distribution at all and you don't know about Mou, you should definitely check it out. Similar statement for those that write books but don't know about Daedalus.
As someone that writes a great deal both for online and offline distribution, I use markdown *extensively*.
It's fabulous for the grunt work of formatting: headers, italics, links. The rest can be done by tossing in HTML, XML, or whatever other markup code is needed. It's fabulously lightweight and fast and unobtrusive.
In fact, for all those "I wrote my dissertation in LaTeX, *sniff* *sniff*" people here on Slashdot, how about this:
I wrote my dissertation on an iPad 2, in Daedalus, in markdown, embedding HTML or other kinds of markup as necessary, then formatting it all in a final pass through a couple different parser/formatters. Sometimes the right tool for the job is the one that you have to think about the least—the one that stays out of your way—and for me, that's markdown+Daedalus.
(Yes, I'm prepared for the onslaught of accusers, ridiculers, and doubters here—prepared to ignore them.)
with beginning grad students. In papers, they often feel like they have to cite every . last . factual . assertion . and . word . that . they . use, to the point of having paragraphs with 20 citations in them, unreadable. But they're so terrified of "plagiarism" and heard that lecture so many times at the beginning of so many classes that it's hard to talk them out of citing Pythagorus or some writing about him when using the Pythagorean theorem, Perskyi when using the word "television," and so on. Exhausting.
As an analog to this, they often hesitate to say anything new (i.e. anything they can't find a citation for). It's as though they feel like only institutions and the famous have license to make new things in the world, and then be cited. It recalls for me the similar divide between creators/consumers, with a hard territorial border in between the two camps, that RIAA/MPAA/BSA et. al. have tried to inculcate into the cultural consciousness.
I bought a Sony smartwatch just to have the experience and on the off chance that it would be fabulous.
It was anything but.
You're absolutely right: the "smart watch" is a dead end.
Smart —fine. Wearable — excellent. Watch —stupid.
Packing a third of a smartphone (it can't do most of what a smartphone can do, at least not directly and independently) into a device with a crazy-small display size and a battery that might last you a day before needing to be charged (and remember, when you think about charging, that a "watch" is something strapped to your wrist that you rarely want to think about in logistical terms in your everyday life) just plain doesn't make anything about life better.
Wearable tech sounds great, but it'll be something other than "bluetooth device running your phone's OS that you need to charge all the time and that does less than your phone."
Slashdot Mirror
if we're conflating matter with information or information-processing.
A blender perfectly simulates what happens in a blender, mapping matter to information. It is empirically perfect, in that every possible unit of information is represented by a dedicated unit of matter, without shortcuts; it is a perfect simulation of what happens in the theoretical case of "something being blended" which is a subset of the logically possible set of phenomena connected to the physical manifestations found in an appliance store as a "universe" of a particular kind.
"Ah," goes the response, "but in conventional simulations, the physical nature of the reality being simulated is different from the physical nature of the substance of the simulation, i.e. there is a logical congruence reliant upon some measure of generalization, but not a physical congruence, because the only reason to 'run a simulation' is for the case in which physical resources are inadequate to the computational task with complete fidelity, i.e. the case in which we can not 'simulate the concept' using a perfect and total material instance of it."
So be it. But that's my point. If all of this—you, me, the universe—is just a simulation in a "computer" of a physical order so radically different from it as to be analagous to the physical differences between—say—the simulation of a nuclear explosion and the explosion itself (the sorts of things that we need to run simulations of)—then we're talking about a "real" (i.e. non-computed, non-simulation) space so different from our own as to make the use of our terms ("computer", "simulation", and so on) in it, bound up as they are with our own ontological and epistemological limitations and assumptions, essentially meaningless—or worse, ideological—suggestive of something (by virtue of the intuitive and connotative properties of 'computer' and 'simulation') that simply isn't (and, practically speaking, can't be in any universe that we're familiar with) the case.
For this to be true in even the most allegorical sense would require that we stretch the definitions of "computer" and "simulation" well beyond anything we currently understand and well beyond the bounds of our ability to be concise and specific about what the terms mean. Using these terms here is just mixing up apples and oranges.
We might as well, in other words, say that our universe is a blender inside a giant appliance store, a stageplay inside a giant theatre district, a mildewing blow tickler inside a giant hoarder's garage mess, or anything else bearing the one of the rough relationships signal:carrier, content:form, fragment:whole, instance:structure, etc.
I mean, what sort of computer are we talking about here?
What is its nature, not just logically, but physically? Do we even know that we're speaking "physically"? Isn't this the scale at which such quantities break down?
And doesn't our idea of computation and simulation require precisely that mathematical rules apply for these to be carried out in the first place?
Do they continue to be gainfully employed as a digger, yet still dig with their bare hands?
What do they and their boss know about their productivity and job requirements that you don't?
What are they digging for? Is it likely to be damaged by a spade? Are they relying on the tactile sensation in their hands as they dig to make critical digging decisions of some kind? What is the cost of spades? What is the urgency of this dig? Is the limited supply of spades reserved for cases in which rapid digs are needed, in order to avoid excessive spade wear? How long do they dig? Does the spade cause repetitive stress injuries or blisters that hamper their work later on, and for longer periods of time, despite the apparent productivity gains early on? Even if we go all the way to the silly end of the spectrum, are spades against their religion? Even if so, are they nonetheless the most productive member on their team even with bare hands, leading the boss to not give two damns whether they use a spade or a ball of cotton candy to do their work? If you mess with the magic sauce that makes them the most productive person on the team, are you going to be out of a job before they are, even if you believe that your orders for them to change are the "correct" ones?
It seems to me that the job of tech designers isn't to know about digging, but to listen to the diggers carefully as the experts on their kind of digging, digging needs, and the totality of their work life as diggers, and to thoughtfully provide the technical resources needed to enable diggers to do digging as they see fit. They are, after all, the diggers. We are the tech people. Our job is to make tech—which is merely a means to everyone else, not an end. Make the wrong means that doesn't help them to achieve their ends, and you will find that nobody values your tech, no matter how much you try to explain that a spade is a spade.
We're conflating use cases and identities when we say "Newbie." As technology designers, we need to be concerned with use cases. There may be a statistical overlap between the two, but mistaking one for the other gets us into deep water for design purposes.
Rather than newbies, let's talk use cases.
Case #1: User is not "at desk, at work" but is rather "in flow, in everyday personal life." They need, for party-planning purposes, or for kid-care purposes, for example, to "send an SMS, "send an email," or "buy more diapers on Amazon.com." These are use cases that are all much better handled by tablets or mobiles, particularly if the user does not spend most of their work or personal life sitting at a computing system. The larger computing system imposes an extraordinary amount of overhead for (say) the stay-at-home parent that just wants more diapers. Leave the playroom, go to the den, power up the desktop, sit down, confront a desktop full of resources, figure out which one is the right one, start the application, and so on. All of that is overhead when we have mobiles: pull iPhone from pocket, press button, tap Amazon, type "diapers", click Buy, put phone back in pocket.
As technology folks, we have a terrible habit of taking someone's bewilderment to mean that they need more training or they're a "newbie," rather than looking at it practically: they're being told that they have to do an *awful lot of work* (moving through the house, navigating a full suite of powerful computing resources, learning to manage them) just to get some more diapers in the midst of their *real life*, the one that they actually care about, which involves diapers, not computing.
Case #2: Person new to computing is also new to the job, but it is now their *full time job* to make charts and graphs with Excel. They will happily sit down with the 600 page book, online training tutorials, and get to work learning. Why? Because this is a set of resources that are not overhead to them—it is the productive work that they will be expected to do, so the investment in time and computing use makes perfect sense. It is work, not waste.
I'd argue that in most cases, trying to marry a full-on computing environment (hierarchical file system or DB storage in quantity, multiple applications, multiple peripherals and forms of connectivity) to a rapid, task-based interface is not going to work out because they're two different use cases. Rapid, task-based use demands lightness and speed. General-purpose "big computing" resources toward the achievement of office work demands feature-richness, open-endedness, and deliberateness (i.e. the opposite of lightness and speed). One is highly endpoint-oriented, the other has no endpoint and is highly process-oriented.
The right answer is not to redesign the desktop environment. The right answer is to get the stay-at-home parent an iPad, or a laptop with everything but the web browser uninstalled, one that preferably boots straight to the web browser—in which case, the UI doesn't matter at all, because the user has no intention to use it.
The "newbies" that we commonly reference are actually a use case—people that feel that their current goals are not well-served by a high-overhead investment in full-scale computing. To serve their needs with a full-on whitebox computer, we just have to strip out the general purpose computing entirely, or at the very least, hide it entirely—which makes the system all but useless for those embroiled in "general purpose computing" use cases, particularly in comparison to those that have a full desktop UI available to them.
Make a better desktop environment *and* make a better information appliance, and both sets of users will thank you.
Try to make a desktop environment *that is* an efficient information appliance, and the computing-for-work people will find it to be inefficient and unhelpful while the casual-net-users will find it to be slow and needlessly complex in comparison to their sister's iPad.
there are 30 years of detailed field research on this. Again, see Suchman's "Plans and Situated Actions," Dourish's "Where the Action Is," etc., or visit the ACM digital library and look at usability research (i.e. involving observation of real people in real settings) in CSCW, HCI, etc.
You have one basic fact wrong: they *do* have to think about what it's "time" to do.
Users in computer-at-desk contexts do not have a detailed roadmap for what to do on a click-by-click basis, either from their boss or inside their heads. They have a general set of goals for, say, the quarter ("Get this project launched"), perhaps the week ("Make sure everyone is on-task and progress is being made; keep the CTO appraised of any roadblocks"), and the day ("Put together charts and graphs for Wednesday's meeting to detail progress").
But it is *these* tasks that are "theoretical" quantities. They translate into dozens and dozens of clicks, mouse movements, UI interactions, and so on, many of them interdependent (or, in Suchman/Dourish terms, indexical—that is to say, order-important and constitutive of an evolving informational and UI flow context).
The user may have "Tell bob about tomorrow's meeting" already decided, but they are imagining Bob and imagining Bob *at* the meeting. From there, activity is practical and adaptive. They emphatically do *not* have this in their heads:
- Take mouse in right hand ...
- Flick mouse to lower-left to establish known position
- Move mouse 5 inches toward right, 0.5 inches toward top of desk to precise location of email icon
- Click email icon
- Wait 0.4 seconds for email window to appear
- Move mouse 7.2 inches toward top of desk, 2 inches toward left to precise location of To: field
- Click to focus on field
- Type "Bob"
- Wait 0.1 seconds for drop-down with completions to appear
- Hit down arrow three times to select correct Bob
- Press enter
You laugh, but in fact this is precisely what you're suggesting: that users have a roadmap already. They don't. That's why we invented the GUI—to provide a visual catalogue of available computing resources and an indication of how to access them on an as-needed basis. Then, the user has to decide, in the moment, what was needed. Every single attempt to make things more "simple" or more "efficient" by presenting *only* that one thing that designers imagined to be needed at a given time—the "obvious" next step—has led to users that either feel the system is useless, that fight it to get it to do what they want, or that simply go around the system (I'll just do this task offline, on a pad of paper). You can make very telling changes to users' productive workflows and levels of productivity by changing orderings or locations of icons, etc. Marketers also know this very well on the web (google "page hotspots" to see the research about positioning of advertising and how deeply it affects CPC and other factors in online marketing).
At a less granular level, something like "Get this project launched" is also not available in a detailed roadmap to a user. Go ahead, ask them to elaborate on the precise set of tasks involved in their big quarterly responsibility. They'll come up with 20, 30, maybe even 80 split into four or five sub-areas. But getting the project launched for an average middle manager over the course of a quarter involves tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of discrete actions, gestures, etc., some computing-based, some not, with the computing-based ones split across dozens of applications and contexts.
It cannot be mapped out because it is contingently assembled—it has to be done on an as-we-go-basis. So the tasks in the "to do list" (and, in fact, in cognitive behavior) are theorized ("Create a new instance of the platform on test VPN, set up credentials for team") rather than existing as a detailed, moment-by-moment list of actions. This is why user docs people actually have to sit down and use the system, and int
only to see GNOME do the same thing not so very long after that, in the grand scheme of things. That's when I went to Mac OS from Linux (having been a Linux user since 1993). And that was that.
I stuck with KDE4 for at least 2-3 months. But it was a lot of meta work (i.e. work on the environment itself, rather than work *in* the environment). By the time the desktop came back in some form, I was long gone.
At the time that I left KDE, I had been a KDE user since KDE Beta 3 (1.0 beta 3 that is), having switched from TWM and an old .twmrc file from my SunOS days. In fact, I wrote one of the earliest reviews on the web for KDE (during the early beta phase) to be published by (at that time) a top 10 internet property. I was one of those early "Will Linux someday overtake Windows on the desktop?" pundits on the strength of what I saw in the new KDE platform. I was a longtime, committed user. But the total break in the workflow from 3.0->4.0 was unforgivable. KDE 3.0 was chintzy and showed its Linux/X heritage far too much, sure, but 4.0 was flat-out unusable for the first months. It eliminated common workflow assumptions *at the same time* as being so buggy as to fail to do anything predictably. The result was that you never knew whether you were looking at a behavior (an unexplained one at that) or a bug. But it didn't matter, because something different would happen the next time anyway.
When I went to GNOME I found it to be usable in ways that hadn't been true in the GNOME 1.0 days (GNOME 1 was a disaster; tough enough to keep it running, and see the "integration" at work, tougher still to actually use it). So I settled into GNOME and never logged into KDE again.
Then the "press" began to hit in Linux circles about what was coming for the GNOME 3 release, and about the adoption by major distros. I tried the stuff in the dev repository, decided to hackintosh my Thinkpad T60 on a spare partition to give Mac OS X a go, and three months later, after having been a Linux user for going on two decades, I bought a MacBook Pro and haven't had a Linux partition or installation around since (well, except in my phone and router).
Even veteran developers are relatively attached to their workflows. You have benchmarks to hit, as a general rule in modern life, and they do not involve configuring your desktop. Any time spent configuring/learning to use a GUI all over again is, quite simply, is money lost.
In simpler terms than all of this discussion, that's where GNOME and KDE screwed up. Whatever you think of the theory behind the reimagination of the Linux desktop UX/UI, the fact is that there was no demand for it. Like all open source projects, it happened without any particular concern for whether there was demand or not, or for where demand was pointing.
If the Linux world had collectively been interested in driver support, OS X level polish, and interoperability with the most common/dominant commodity and infrastructure systems in use over the '00s, Linux might be *the* dominant operating system today, running the bulk of cloudspace/serverspace, the bulk of mobile computing/phone space, and the bulk of desktop space. Instead, the fatal flaw of open source software kicked in—nobody has to think about the market. The developers had their freedom, and they exercised it.
And the result is a bunch of Netcraft confirmations that Linux on the desktop is dying. (Has died?)
Except that the desktop cannot work using the phone/tablet model because user expectations do not suggest that metaphor when they sit at a desktop.
Even if the desktop metaphor was too complex to master, users still sit down at a desktop and think, "now where are my files?" because they intend to "do work in general" (have an array of their current projects and workflows available to them) rather than "complete a single task."
As was the case with a desk, they expect to be able to construct a cognitive overview of their "current work" at a computer—an expectation that they don't have with a phone, which is precisely experienced as an *interruption to* their "current work." KDE, Gnome, and most recently Windows 8, made the mistake of trying to get users to adopt the "interruption of work" mental map *as* the flow of work. It's never going to happen; they need to be presented with a system that enables them to be "at work." In practice, being "at work" is not about a single task, but about having open access to a series of resources about that the user can employ in order to *reason* about the relatedness and next steps across a *variety* of ongoing tasks. That's the experience of work for most workers in the industrialized world today.
If you place them in a single-task flow for "regular work" they're going to be lost, because they don't know what the task is that they ought to be working on without being able to survey the entirety of "what is going on" in their work life—say, by looking at what's collected on their desktop, what windows are currently open, how they're all positioned relative to one another, and what's visible in each window. Ala Lucy Suchman (see her classic UX work "Plans and Situated Actions"), users do not have well-specified "plans" for use (i.e. step 1, step 2, step 3, task 1, task 2, task 3) but are constantly engaged in trying to "decide what to do next" in-context, in relation to the totality of their projects, obligations, current situation, etc. Successful computing systems will provide resources to assist in deciding, on a moment-by-moment basis, "what to do next," and resources to assist in the construction of a decision-making strategy or set of habits surrounding this task.
The phone metaphor (or any single-task flow) works only once the user *has already decided* what to do next, and is useful only for carrying out *that task*. Once the task is complete, the user is back to having to decide "what to do next."
The KDE and GNOME experiments (at least early on) hid precisely the details necessary to make this decision easy, and to make the decision feel rational, rather than arbitrary. An alternate metaphor was needed, one to tell users how to "see what is going on, overall" in their computing workday. The desktop did this and offered a metaphor for how to use it (survey the visual field, which is ordered conceptually by me as a series of objects). Not only did the KDE and GNOME not offer a metaphor for how to use this "see what is going on" functionality, they didn't even offer the functionality—just a series of task flows.
This left users in the situation of having *lost* the primary mechanism by which they'd come to decide "what to do next" in work life for two decades. "Before, I looked at my desktop to figure out what to do next and what I'm working on. Now that functionality is gone—what should I do next?" It was the return of the post-it note and the Moleskine notebook sitting next to the computer, from the VisiCalc-on-green-screen days. It was a UX joke, frankly.
The problem is that human beings are culture and habit machines; making something possible in UX is not the same thing as making something usable, largely because users come with baggage of exactly this kind.
using too many words. He means that users of personal computers (as opposed to mobile devices) want simply a "desktop."
As in, the metaphor—the one that has driven PC UI/UX for decades now.
The metaphor behind the desktop UI/UX was that a "real desktop" had:
- A single surface of limited space
- Onto which one could place, or remove files
- And folders
- And rearrange them at will in ways that served as memory and reasoning aides
- With the option to discard them (throw them in the trash) once they were no longer needed on the single, bounded surface
Both of the "traditional breaking" releases from KDE and GNOME did violence to this metaphor; a screen no longer behaved—at least in symbolic ways—like the surface of a desk. The mental shortcuts that could draw conclusions about properties, affordances, and behavior based on a juxtaposition with real-world objects broke down.
Instead of "this is meant to be a desktop, so it's a limited, rectangular space on which I can put, stack, and arrange my stuff and where much of my workday will 'happen'" gave way to "this is obviously a work area of some kind, but it doesn't behave in ways that metaphorically echo a desk—but I don't have any basis on which to make suppositions about how it *does* behave, or what affordances/capabilities or constraints it offers, what sorts of 'objects' populate it, what their properties are,' and so on.
I think that's the biggest problem—the desktop metaphor was done away with, but no alternative metaphor took its place—no obvious mental shortcuts were on offer to imply how things worked enough to allow users to infer the rest. People have argued that the problem was that the new releases were too "phone like," but that's actually not true. The original iPhone, radical though it was, operated on a clear metaphor aided by its physical size and shape: that of a phone—buttons laid out in a grid, a single-task/single-thread use model, and very abbreviated, single-option tasks/threads (i.e. 'apps' that performed a single function, rather than 'software' with many menus and options for UX flow).
Though the iPhone on its surface was a radical anti-phone, in practice, the use experience was very much like a phone: power on, address grid of buttons, perform single task with relatively low flow-open-endedness, power off and set down when complete. KDE4/GNOME3 did not behave this way. They retained the open-endedness, large screen area, feature-heavy, and "dwelling" properties of desktops (it is a space where you spend time, not an object used to perform a single task and then 'end' that task) so the phone metaphor does not apply. But they also removed most of the considered representations, enablements, and constraints that could easily be metaphorically associated with a desktop.
The result was that you constantly had to look stuff up—even if you were an experienced computer user. They reintroduced *precisely* the problem that the desktop metaphor had solved decades earlier—the reason, in fact, that it was created in the first place. It was dumb.
That's what he means by "classic desktop." "Linux users want a desktop, not something else that remains largely unspecified or that must instead be enumerated for users on a feature-by-feature basis with no particular organizing cultural model."
There's already a decent tradition in the social sciences examining the role that emotion increasingly plays as a resource to be allocated in economic systems. Affect becomes labor, across industries (not just software programming).
And yes, there is more than an Orwellian whiff about this. But it is what it is—companies hire great attitude, drive, belief, positivity, team spirit, etc. In several contracts I've been involved with, companies actually had metrics for positivity vs. negativity in meetings, communication, and so on, and this was a part of weekly evaluations. They want to see your Facebook page. Everyone knows that it matters whether you "present" well. People with a "great outlook" and "enthusiasm about the company" are routinely promoted over those that are more competent but perhaps dour. In fact, supremely-competent-but-dour is the butt of jokes (as Slashdot's conventional wisdom is already aware).
There is nothing more personal than one's emotion and affect; it is perhaps the most human thing about us in our day-to-day experiences, and the most individual. But more and more, it's a metric to be evaluated, a "property" of yourself as a system that must be managed to remain compatible with the company. To some extent this makes sense in an increasingly rationalized world—what's in your head is a black box. Your interactive style and self-presentation on a moment-by-moment basis are effectively your API. So efficiency dictates that a certain predictability, compatibility, and growth-oriented, team-oriented set of assumptions will be valued, and thus, ought to be "implemented" by you as the manager of your own API.
At the same time, what good is a world in which nobody can have a bad day or a personal opinion on anything? In which your bank balance is directly correlated to your ability to feel the emotions that your boss has outlined for employees in the company handbook?
Is it really so great to live in an efficient and productive world that is ultimately lacking in what Hannah Arendt called humans' intrinsic "natality," the ability to do and feel something new, something individual, something that is an emergent property of the extremely complex phenomenon that is the self?
It's a bummer. (And of course, this very post is precisely the kind of post that they warn you about in the popular press, in articles about how "what you say on the internet will always be there" and future HR managers might exclude you for a position because of it, i.e. because of your negativity and clear lack of cooperation with basic emotion-and-opinion suppression culture.)
Of course, one group is exempt from these restrictions: the wealthy. They can say what they want, since as a matter of power relations, they are central in the system. Others (with less money) must amend their emotional style to be compatible with the rich, the powerful, the CEO, the venture capitalist. These latter people get to say and feel whatever is on their mind or in their gut, unlike the rest of us. And, irony of ironies, they are broadly applauded for it, no matter how extreme, atypical, or mundane the positions. The rest of us would simply be fired.
Didn't even realize that Wii U was substantively different from Wii. In fact, based on this story and the context here, still can't tell.
What would have been wrong with "Wii 2" which offers a much clearer indication that it's a next generation console? (If, in fact, it is a next generation console.)
First thing that comes to my mind with "Wii U" is that it's the educational version of the Wii.
Educational Psychology department at the local U about study strategies/study skills. Usually these are geared toward teachers (how to help their students to develop strategies) but sometimes they're even geared toward students at said U (how to study in college, and so on).
These aren't classes about how to improve your brain, or about theory. They're very meat-and-potatoes: ways to organize note-taking, ways to organize reading activity and coordinate it with note-taking, ways to prepare for exams systematically and so on. What seems a problem of recall may be a problem of cognitive data architecture—not "it's not in there" but rather "you're not putting it in there in a way that lends itself to retrieval later on."
I don't know your case or just how hard it is for you, but it's not uncommon for a broad cross-section of students to have many of the same complaints, and often the remedy is to learn differently (i.e. different, time-tested, sample-studied methods for effectively acquiring, organizing, and storing information) rather than to try to "do mental exercises" or improve some immanent property of themselves.
And it's not common sense—they get down into things like how to lay out a page of notes, in geographical regions of the page; how to key words to paragraphs; how to note pages and where, etc. Very mechanical, technique-style stuff. You may find it helpful.
Don't see any Chinese app stores. Just Cydia. All working well. Biggest problem: Nothing on Cydia is yet compatible with iOS 7.x, so in a way there's no point unless you just want system access—there's next to nothing that you can install and use. But hopefully that will change in time.
What is a surface?
Is it a tablet?
A laptop?
Is it highly mobile (well sort of, but not like iPad)
Really lightweight and fast (well sort of, but not like iPad)
Powerful for stationary work (well sort of, but not like a laptop)
Easy to carry (well sort of, but not like an iPad)
Heavy, substantial, and durable (well sort of, but not like a laptop)
People do two things:
(1) Use technology for work or play at their desk
(2) Use technology for work or play not at their desk
Two basic use cases. Just two, at the very bottom of things. In case (1) you go all-out on hardware and power; don't make them sit longer than they have to, let them get their work DONE! (Power, power, power, some ease of use, no compromises.) (2) you go all-out on not making them feel like they need to return to their desk; give them what they need to do what they need to do without feeling tethered (Mobility, mobility, mobility, touch-friendliness, battery, no compromises).
Two basic use cases and Microsoft managed to not hit either one of them well.
project management.
The product is called "Windows." Windows are static things. They are embedded into walls. They provide an unmoving portal into another space.
A monitor on your desktop behaves like a window in some sense. It is always in the same place. You sit and you look at it.
Windows Phone and Windows RT just don't make sense for mobile devices, and provide a kind of complacency to project vision and the wrong idea (unpalatable) to consumers looking for mobile devices.
MS should call the mobile product something mobile:
MS Pathways
MS Journeys
MS Passages
MS Ways
MS Compass
MS Latitude
Then they should focus relentlessly on small-screen/long-battery/mobile UX for the mobile system; design toward the lightweight, mobile ethos of the new name, and market it relentlessly not as "the same as windows" but in fact as exactly different from it.
MS Windows in your office
MS Compass for going places
"Because you're not always sitting still.
"Busy people do more than sit by Windows."
I'm not saying that the marketing is the product; we all know that's ridiculous and leads exactly to a product fail (mismatched expectations vs. reality). I'm saying that if MS was as marketing-led as they ought to have been, they'd do the field research to know what mobile users need (field research they clearly haven't done well) and target the product to those needs, as well as the marketing campaign.
Who needs Windows in their pocket on the street? Nobody. Windows belong inside walls.
Same thing goes for the hardware product. "Surface?" Sounds static and architectural. The opposite of mobility. You can see that they themselves imagined the product this way based on what was shipped out the door. Come up with something lightweight and mobile.
The Microsoft Dispatch.
The Microsoft Portfolio.
The Microsoft Movement (tablet) and Microsoft Velocity (phone).
These are not great ideas yet, but they're light years ahead of "Windows" and "Surface" for a mobile device that ends up acting just like a "Window" or a "Surface."
connectivity along? This was my big gripe with the Sony MN2 (see my other comment in this story). I wanted it to do some basic things: notably, to give me a buzz about events (messages, calendaring, calls). It failed miserably at this task, because keeping it charged and connected to the phone all the time in the daily flow of life turned out not to be possible without making "Sony MN2 management" a new part-time job for myself. A distant second reason for failure (but still deserves mention) is that the touchscreen was so worthless that when it did manage to buzz me, I spent a comical ten minutes tap-tap-tapping on my screen just trying to get my taps to register well enough to see what the buzzing was all about.
It was much faster and less labor intensive in the end to continue what I'd been doing, and what so many others do: fish the phone out of my pocket regularly every ten minutes to see if anything was going down.
I thought about Pebble, but the Sony product made me gun-shy about smartwatches for the general consumer market a this point (though I'd still give an Apple product a look—but without much hope that it would work for me, since I use an Android phone now).
I got a smart watch (Sony MN2) last year because I kept missing the vibrate on my phone for meetings and calls, because my phone isn't always in my pocket. I thought that if I had a device on my wrist, I'd always get the buzz and never miss anything important.
SIMPLE task for the device, no? But it failed miserably.
Reason: Same as Windows CE back in the day. The device wasn't up to the job, because it was busy trying (miserably) to do a hundred other things that it simply wasn't suited for AT ALL.
- There were multiple "apps" on the watch, including for things like Twitter and Facebook
- But the screen is by nature so tiny and the device so limited, these were laughable rather than usable
- Rather than focusing like a laser on doing tiny-device things well, this led to compromises:
- Unusable touchscreen (inaccurate, insensitive)
- Useless battery life (lucky to make a day, often less)
- Worst of all, the device had to be tethered to be useful; lose tether, and it is effectively a bracelet
Compare to Windows CE:
- There were multiple applications on the devices, copying most MS desktop applications of the day
- But the device was by nature so tiny and so limited, these were laughable rather than usable
- Rather than focusing like a laser on doing mobile-device things well, this led to compromises:
- Crappy display, crappy resistive touchscreens, inexact and unpredictable input methods
- Useless battery life (lucky to make a few hours, often less)
- Worst of all, CE devices had to be synced to be useful; fail to sync several times a day and they were a data prison or data corrupter, rather than a data aid
The experience with the Sony MN2 was much the same as what I remember from CE: constant nursing the device along, excessive time spent trying to "make it work" for the most simple tasks, paying WAY TOO MUCH ATTENTION all the time to the connectivity (your body and its attention are pressed into service as the mechanical tool that keep the data flowing) to ensure that it was regular and sound, no intention to try to use any of the laughable features, and continuous frustration (Oh god, the battery went dead/I lost bluetooth sync/something went wrong and I can't tell what it is on this tiny screen device with no error reporting, I didn't get buzzed about that meeting/call, WTF IS THE POINT OF THIS SHITTY DEVICE AND ALL THE TIME I SPEND NURSING IT ALONG ANYWAY?)
Wrongheaded.
I presume that if Apple decides to build one of these, they will have better success, given their reasonable HCI and design and decision-making chops.
I actually don't know. I have the luxury of having institutional access to a full range of print and electronic subscriptions. But even if they do, think about what you're asking a busy professional to do.
People are suggesting that she should just pony up $thousands annually, that she should dedicate days to travel and research, as apart from patients or family, when there's no necessary technical reason to do so, and now, with ILL, that she should stick to a research project about a case or two for the many weeks that it takes to make ILL work.
Sure, there's ILL, and it may well work as it used to (though I doubt it for electronic resources, based on the ways that licenses right now are written). But we're asking her to stick to a project for $thousands and $weeks of constant attention. She's a professional. She is busy. And she ought to have access. The point is not to ask, "can it, plausibly, be done?" but rather "what is science for, and is this the way that it ought to work?"
We made society, as human beings. We can make it better. I'd suggest that this is a case in which it can be made to function much, much better than it currently does. The goal behind having therapists of all stripes is to help people to overcome real problems, not to test the therapists to see whether or not they can navigate arcane social structures and processes. We should make their jobs as easy as possible. Hell, this applies to virtually every job title. Jobs exist for a reason—because there is demand for what they do, because we value it. Why not, then, make the jobs of professionals as plausible and as easy as possible, rather than risking their doing a much worse job simply so that a few corporations that produce little of value (the value in academic publishing is produced by the academics and the researchers, not by the publishers in the era of easy print-on-demand and easy online access) can earn a decent chunk of change.
She will have to find out:
1) Which libraries have _print_ as opposed to _electronic only_ subscriptions, and
2) Amongst those that do not (I'm guessing the majority), which allow access to electronic resources by non-students/non-faculty (this kind of access is expressly forbidden, at any cost, by many subscription packages offered to universities).
Even if she is able to identify a library that offers non-affiliated individuals access, she will have to pony up whatever the cost of access for the public to the library is, and then, at that stage, she will have access to _one_ journal. It is unlikely that all of the resources that she needs are to be found in that _one_ journal, and much more likely that relevant material is published in several or even several dozen journals, in which case all she has to do is grill library personnel for 20-30 minutes with a detailed list in each phone call, and likely pony up the access fees (and the transportation, and the saturday mornings) to jump around from one library to another on a wild goose chase over many weeks to piece together the materials that an academic can assemble over a cup of coffee without leaving their screen. Just who, pray, are the academics producing their research _for_? Surely those who might actually be able to use it practically?
All of this stuff can technically be accessed from her office, too, in the space of 10 minutes, but for the profit-oriented restrictions (that do not reflect costs, see my previous post) imposed by journal "publishers."
"irritating," not "irritable," my apologies for the misuse of the word (it's late where I am); and I should note that the department had to change the name of the journal and all of its graphics as they brought it entirely in-house and severed the Springer relationship, since Springer held the rights to everything, including all past issues, meaning that the new journal is just that—a clean slate, post-Springer (and good riddance).
as a managing editor, I can tell you that they do not incur substantial expenses, and that academics provide the important parts of the service, essentially for free in the cases of most journals. It's not like putting out a magazine; we didn't even have copy or layout editors for our journal, the most inexpensive components of editorial labor. It paid the university department that hosted the journal a mere thousands (single digits) per year. There were two "paid" staffers—myself and one other person, The rest of the "editorial board" consisted of faculty of our and another several universities doing the work for free, under the auspices of the "professional duties" of the academics involved (not as paid by Springer, as paid by their respective institutions). Peer reviewers—free. Editorial labor (copy, layout to production files according to specs, submissions queue, even rough line editing, style work)—graduate students looking for a title to add to their emerging CVs.
Essentially Springer's total cost for putting out the journal amounted to the several thousand (again, single digit thousands, split between myself and one other individual) that they (usually belatedly) paid our department annually for the entire journal in its substance, plus printing/distribution (a pittance given the circulation size of academic journals and the cost per print subscription—not to mention the increasing number of electronic-only subscriptions). They had one liason that handled our entire "account," and the level of labor involved allowed this person to be "over" several _dozen_ journals as just a single person. That's as much a labor footprint, in its entirety, as our journal actually had inside the "publisher."
And for this, they held onto the reprint/reuse rights with an iron fist, requiring even authors and PIs to pay $$$ to post significant excerpts on their own blogs.
Seeing the direction the wind has been blowing over the last half-decade, the department decided (and rightfully so) that it's basically a scam, that academic publishing as we know it need not exist any longer, and wound down both the print journal and the relationship with Springer several years ago, instead self-publishing the journal (which is easy these days) to much higher revenue for the department, and the ability to sensibly manage rights in the interest of academic production and values, rather than in the interest of Springer's oinking at the trough on the backs of academics.
Oh, and many university libraries (particularly in urban areas) do not admit just anyone off the street; you must generally hold an ID that grants access to the library (often student or faculty, plus a paid option for the general public, either monthly or annually, that can vary from somewhat affordable to somewhat expensive). Not to mention that for many people, yes, it is a significant professional hardship to lose a day or two of work to be trekking into foreign territory and sitting amongst the stacks—and that this hardship is made much more irritable by the fact that the very same articles are sitting there online, in 2013, yet can't be accessed at reasonable cost.
As an academic, I have the same frustration. We bemoan the state of science in this society, yet under the existing publishing model we essentially insure that only a rarefied few scientists and the very wealthy elite have access to science at all. $30-$60 is not a small amount for the average person—and that is the cost to read _one_ article, usually very narrowly focused, and of unclear utility until they've already paid the money, that is borderline unreadable for the layperson (or for the magazine author hoping to make sense of science _for_ the layperson) anyway. Why, exactly, would we expect anyone to know any science at all beyond university walls, under this arrangement?
and even DRM is merely an obstacle to be overcome to get to the Game . That . You . Must . Play . Now .
The problem is that the games suck. Right now in the 'AAA' space we have an orientation something like:
85% production values
5% compelling and entertaining story and writing
10% gameplay
0% replay value
Show me a game like this, and I'll spend rather a lot, and even suffer DRM for it:
10% production values
20% compelling and entertaining story and writing
50% gameplay
20% replay value
When the technology didn't allow for production values to matter, everything was tied up in gameplay, writing, and replayability. Games had to be entertaining to sell.
Now, particularly given the ways that games are marketed (and the synergy between this kind of marketing and the marketing that happens on the hardware side), everything is about jaw-dropping renderings. It feels like the late '80s and early '90s, when everyone in CS departments were printing out raytrace scenes at 24x36 and hanging them on the wall.
At first, it was "omigod thassocool" to see a bunch of floating cones and spheres and rendered bolts with clearly articulated threads reflecting the image of the chessboard on the other side of the picture. But by the mid-'90s, it was like, "humf, what else you got, I am no longer amazed by the fabulousness of this technology."
That's how I feel about games now. A decade or a decade and a half ago, game engines and triangle count and an asymptotic approach to "photorealistic realtime" rendering were enough to make a person shell out $$$ just to "have the experience."
But now it's old hat. Someone else posted in this story about games being all about showing you sliding your car sideways into a flock of sheep. That pretty much sums it up—how many hours do they spend on tableaux like this? It's plots of shiny raytrace scenes on department walls all over again. I had occasion to play a few games (Silpheed, a few Sonics, etc.) on someone's Sega CD setup not so long ago. I was like "Shit, this is fun!" and then shortly after I realized why I had abandoned gaming in the early 2000's. I just preferred to spend my money on more entertaining things.
I find crossword puzzles to be as fun as many of the 'AAA' titles of the last half-decade.
I use markdown + Deadalus for long-form (i.e. dozens of pages) content that will go to print.
I use markdown + Mou for short-form content that will go online.
If you write for online distribution at all and you don't know about Mou, you should definitely check it out. Similar statement for those that write books but don't know about Daedalus.
As someone that writes a great deal both for online and offline distribution, I use markdown *extensively*.
It's fabulous for the grunt work of formatting: headers, italics, links. The rest can be done by tossing in HTML, XML, or whatever other markup code is needed. It's fabulously lightweight and fast and unobtrusive.
In fact, for all those "I wrote my dissertation in LaTeX, *sniff* *sniff*" people here on Slashdot, how about this:
I wrote my dissertation on an iPad 2, in Daedalus, in markdown, embedding HTML or other kinds of markup as necessary, then formatting it all in a final pass through a couple different parser/formatters. Sometimes the right tool for the job is the one that you have to think about the least—the one that stays out of your way—and for me, that's markdown+Daedalus.
(Yes, I'm prepared for the onslaught of accusers, ridiculers, and doubters here—prepared to ignore them.)
with beginning grad students. In papers, they often feel like they have to cite every . last . factual . assertion . and . word . that . they . use, to the point of having paragraphs with 20 citations in them, unreadable. But they're so terrified of "plagiarism" and heard that lecture so many times at the beginning of so many classes that it's hard to talk them out of citing Pythagorus or some writing about him when using the Pythagorean theorem, Perskyi when using the word "television," and so on. Exhausting.
As an analog to this, they often hesitate to say anything new (i.e. anything they can't find a citation for). It's as though they feel like only institutions and the famous have license to make new things in the world, and then be cited. It recalls for me the similar divide between creators/consumers, with a hard territorial border in between the two camps, that RIAA/MPAA/BSA et. al. have tried to inculcate into the cultural consciousness.
I bought a Sony smartwatch just to have the experience and on the off chance that it would be fabulous.
It was anything but.
You're absolutely right: the "smart watch" is a dead end.
Smart —fine.
Wearable — excellent.
Watch —stupid.
Packing a third of a smartphone (it can't do most of what a smartphone can do, at least not directly and independently) into a device with a crazy-small display size and a battery that might last you a day before needing to be charged (and remember, when you think about charging, that a "watch" is something strapped to your wrist that you rarely want to think about in logistical terms in your everyday life) just plain doesn't make anything about life better.
Wearable tech sounds great, but it'll be something other than "bluetooth device running your phone's OS that you need to charge all the time and that does less than your phone."