You're new to this whole computing thing aren't you.
Yeah, I've only been in it for about 20 years.
I love how Iphone fanboys try to steer the conversation into very specific points in order to support their flawed conclusions.
Actually, the volume button doing something else depending on the front application was the whole central point of discussion on this thread. Maybe you should have read it.
In answer to your question, good HCI design is to have a button do the most logical function in that situation,
No, it means that it does what the user expects it to do in that situation. Users aren't logical machines, this is an important point in HCI.
this means that you can have a contextual volume button that changes the volume of media when playing a movie or change the volume of a ringtone in other situations.
Yes, because the user doesn't know or care that there are multiple volume settings on the device stacked on each other.
Another example is the use of a back button, which will stop a web page loading when one is loading or exit the application when one is not.
I'm not aware of any device doing that, but then again I don't know many of them.
If you can't see how contextual actions are an important part of HCI I truly pity you.
Using context is something else than having to explicitly learn an interface.
Why do I have to learn how to drive, Why do I have to learn how to write.
Because we haven't found a way to automate that reliably yet. Companies are working on both of them as I type this (autonomous driving and speech recognition).
Because these are both inherently complex actions that require training.
So? Why should a user care?
As an end result you have an additional skill that will be useful in your future life.
Unless that skill is useless, because they finally figured out how to avoid having to learn it.
A person who does not know how to use a computer has not advantage over someone who does not use a computer, to paraphrase Mr Twain.
Yes, but mobile phone developers aren't in the business of enlightening customers.
The computer is much better at remembering things than me.
Clearly, but this means you have a problem, not the computer.
So, you can remember everything that was ever said and done in your vicinity in the last 20 years without any loss? My computer can. If you can't, there has to be something wrong with you.
Your statements can be summed up in one phrase "I am dumb, do everything for me" and is endemic of what is wrong in modern western society.
I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about the target customers for mobile phones. In the end, HCI is about making the user happier and so getting them to buy more stuff from you. Raising the finger and saying "but by learning these 1000 pages documentation, you shall have knowledge that might bring you great power eventually" you're just like a teacher reprimanding an eight-year old. People don't like being treated like an eight-year old, not even the ones that are 8 years old.
If you are unwilling to learn how to use technology, dont complain when it becomes too complex for you to use as it's entirely because of your own ignorance.
Elitist thinking like you're demonstrating here is the primary reason why so many people still shit their pants when working on computers, and still refuse to let anything technology into their life. To quote my ex-gf: "I don't want to have a computer at home, because at home I want to relax." As a consequence, we get stuff like those wacky internet-related laws and software patents, because the people in power are scared of technology and don't know the tiniest thing of it.
Well, then still the writer will be the one who is unhappy. That the writer happens to hold some other positions in the team is irrelevant for this.
On a tangent, the lack of dedicated writers might also be one of the reasons for the generally uninteresting stories of AAA titles. Even the highly commended story-centric Heavy Rain has one that would probably be considered very bland when it'd be used for a film.
Well, the specs say that you are not allowed to do that, but of course, why should Comcast care about that. That's actually the big question for me as well, how will ISPs act with these new powers?
One guy told me, that a game they developed was starting out to be something like a sci-fi RPG, but one day they got a call from the publisher who told them, that "with all the LotR stuff going on, we should do something with hobbits and evles".
A true game designer doesn't care whether you slap on the elve texture or the space marine texture. The game itself doesn't have to change just because you changed the setting. If you want to have some insight into this, read about the MDA model. This paper is great in explaining the whole concept of game design without requiring reading a 400+ pages book.
As far as I've heard stories of the police raids in my country, I can consider myself lucky when they can differentiate between my laptop and my toaster.
That may be useful to some, but I always assign non standard ports. I have a HTTP server, but port 0 is not forwarded. Even when I had one computer, I used nonstandard ports. Now I assign ports based on what PC is running the service, so one PC may get ports 11xxx, another 12xxx and so on.
That's fine for you, but imagine having to explain that setup to your grandmother. With IPv6, all she has to do is plug the device into the network, everything else is auto-setup. (in case you're wondering why she'd need something like that, just think about VoIP and video chat applications).
Well, I didn't know that. This is good, but having two or three IPs per host on the same network makes configuration a bit difficult
No it doesn't, because that's done automatically. You just have to plug the device into the network.
especially since (again, I don't know how v6 handles this) if DNS returns all addresses, the host may pick the public one to connect to an internal host.
That's what DDNS is there for (ahavi and similar implementations). You only have to remember the host name, the lookup is done for you without any server whatsoever.
Especially since v6 IPs are harder to remember.
Again, DDNS. Trying to remember IPs is so 1990ies.
Also, those applications that send the IP address as payload are badly designed. The IP address already is in the header of the packet, why send a copy of it in the data section?
I agree on that, but not sending it in the data section still doesn't help with NATs.
Yes, FTP does this wrong, though I used a few FTP servers and they could find out the external IP by either DNS or some other method.
The original idea behind that was that you can hook up two FTP servers to each other (one passive one active) and copy files directly. Nowadays FTP servers don't allow that any more, since it's a bit of a DoS vulnerability. I personally consider FTP to be deprecated, there are much better protocols now, like WebDAV.
IM, like Skype, already just works, I just need to forward the required port (the same amount of configuration as would be to allow that port in the firewall).
Port forwarding is a huge hack that requires the user to do security-related stuff that shouldn't be touched by a layperson. Skype has a different solution: When you actually have reasonably fast direct internet access while running Skype, you act as a supernode. This means that you act as a proxy when two NAT-using persons want to talk to each other. If you pay for your data transfer (and you always do, even when it's indirectly), you pay for two persons you don't even know being able to audio/video chat.
In what way is having to remember what a specific button does in a specific situation actually progress?
In what way is having to learn how a hierarchical file system works actually progress? Why do I have to learn how a computer works, as opposed to bringing the computer to learn how I think? The computer is much better at remembering things than me.
1. Is Comcast going to give me unlimited IPv6 addresses? How will that work through my router? Do I now need to announce every device to Comcast?
You get a subnet, and your router routes the whole subnet. Just like with IPv4, coincidentally.
NAT makes for a pretty good firewall. I have Linux and Mac machines, and consumer devices, behind my current NAT router. With NAT and SPI, I have it pretty good.
As opposed to having a firewall, instead of having a firewall?
Hey, I understand the need for IPv6. I guess I just don't want to lose what NAT offers.
Like what? Nothing what you stated had anything to do with NAT as such.
Still a better risk than having the issues this story's guy would have if they actually find the files they're suspecting he has.
A classical solution to police raid anxiety is having a kill switch, which auto-erases all problematic drives at the push of a button. However, this still requires you to be at home and have your wits (police raids are usually very early in the morning, in order to catch you at home and off guard). With my solution, you don't have to do anything, just let them take the server with them, making all proof unreachable forever.
Of course, for me personally it would still be a death sentence, since I need my computers to earn money to pay my bills, but I don't have to be guilty in any way to be under that threat anyways.
(As a side note, I still have my password at the moment, since there are actually some things that need the server get rebooted, like kernel upgrades or moving the server rack around.)
My UPS-equipped Linux server uses encrypted hard drives for data storage. I never reboot it, so the only case where I'd have to enter the password is when somebody pulls the plug on it (like the police would do when confiscating the equipment).
2) Exits the folder if I'm looking at an app folder.
That's only a variation on the theme "get me out of here".
3) Takes me to the home screen if I'm on any screen other than the home screen or an app folder.
Yes, that's a breakage of the theme, and a very recent addition. It's better than doing nothing, since you've already terminated all apps.
4) Takes me to the search screen if I'm on the home screen
Same thing as above.
When I double click my home button, it:
1) Brings up the music controls if the device is locked
2) Hides the music controls if the device is locked and the music controls are already visible
3a) On a device that supports iOS4 multitasking, it brings up the task manager screen (don't recall the name of it) if the device is not locked
3b) On a device that doesn't support iOS4 multitasking, it:
3b1) Brings up the music controls if music is playing (and I should mention, that this is an entirely different looking set of music controls than the one it brings up when the device is locked).
Don't you think that those are pretty much the same thing?
3b2) Behaves like a single click if no music is playing and you are in an app or on a screen other than the home screen
3b2) Does absolutely nothing if no music is playing and you are already on the home screen
That's no longer the case on iOS4.
When I click the volume button, it:
1) Controls the volume (using the volume control overlay) when the the device isn't locked
2) Controls the volume (using the volume control overlay) when the device is locked and music is playing
3) Does absolutely nothing when the device is locked and music is not playing.
4) Controls the volume without displaying the volume control overlay on any screen where there is a volume slider showing. However, if you wait a few seconds and the UI autohides, then suddenly the volume button displays the overlay again.
To summarize: 1) It controls the volume.
What you enumerated in all of these is the things the programmers at Apple had to implement, not the thing the user perceives. For example, the notion "get me out of here" might mean many things in software, but the notion stays the same (per definition). "Take a picture" is certainly not the same notion as "increase the volume".
Your keyboard has a button on it near the bottom that's really long and doesn't have a label. Most of the time, when you're typing sentences, when you press this button it inserts a space character in the text. Do you get confused when you're online and you're using TAB to skip between interface elements, you land on a button, press the space bar, and it "clicks" the button? This key is only supposed to insert spaces into text, right? Why is it also clicking buttons that you've focused? That's madness!
Your example shows the major difference between the touch-based iOS devices and generic computers. On the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, you never have context-specific behavior of any buttons. The space bar on the onscreen keyboard always inserts a space into the focused text field. The home button always terminates the current application (well, except when you double/triple-press it or you're already on the home screen and there's nothing to terminate). iOS never requires the user to remember any keyboard hotkeys or differing behavior based on the current application's state. The return key even changes to "Submit" in a web form, or "Search" in the search bar, etc.
You just can't directly compare the user interface of a traditional computer to this new kind of system.
Great that you have read the article you apparantly did look at:
The photos are licensed under a Creative Commons License. Famous classic images such as Lena, the Baboon, etc., often used when doing compression comparisons, are unfortunately not free of copyright.
Tell me when even 5% of the websites that I use regularly are available over IPv6 and I'll look at setting up my VPS to do the same.
Hard to say, since you don't list what sites you are using regularly. However, google search is available via http://ipv6.google.com, which is a rather big part of common web usage.
So far I've never met anyone who didn't have the urge to jump off a building after being forced to use it.
I actually also quite like it. So far all people I've met that were frustrated with it tried to use it for stuff it wasn't designed for, like Java or C++. When used properly, its autocompletion and autoindention is great, it has an adequate resource management, and the project settings panel actually has a search field and everything on a single page (unlike Visual Studio, where you have to navigate around like crazy and search manually when you don't know exactly where something is).
Slashdot Mirror
No wonder I can't figure this twitter thing out. I'm out of school and don't have herpes.
The whole life is a constant test.
You're new to this whole computing thing aren't you.
Yeah, I've only been in it for about 20 years.
I love how Iphone fanboys try to steer the conversation into very specific points in order to support their flawed conclusions.
Actually, the volume button doing something else depending on the front application was the whole central point of discussion on this thread. Maybe you should have read it.
In answer to your question, good HCI design is to have a button do the most logical function in that situation,
No, it means that it does what the user expects it to do in that situation. Users aren't logical machines, this is an important point in HCI.
this means that you can have a contextual volume button that changes the volume of media when playing a movie or change the volume of a ringtone in other situations.
Yes, because the user doesn't know or care that there are multiple volume settings on the device stacked on each other.
Another example is the use of a back button, which will stop a web page loading when one is loading or exit the application when one is not.
I'm not aware of any device doing that, but then again I don't know many of them.
If you can't see how contextual actions are an important part of HCI I truly pity you.
Using context is something else than having to explicitly learn an interface.
Why do I have to learn how to drive, Why do I have to learn how to write.
Because we haven't found a way to automate that reliably yet. Companies are working on both of them as I type this (autonomous driving and speech recognition).
Because these are both inherently complex actions that require training.
So? Why should a user care?
As an end result you have an additional skill that will be useful in your future life.
Unless that skill is useless, because they finally figured out how to avoid having to learn it.
A person who does not know how to use a computer has not advantage over someone who does not use a computer, to paraphrase Mr Twain.
Yes, but mobile phone developers aren't in the business of enlightening customers.
Clearly, but this means you have a problem, not the computer.
So, you can remember everything that was ever said and done in your vicinity in the last 20 years without any loss? My computer can. If you can't, there has to be something wrong with you.
Your statements can be summed up in one phrase "I am dumb, do everything for me" and is endemic of what is wrong in modern western society.
I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about the target customers for mobile phones. In the end, HCI is about making the user happier and so getting them to buy more stuff from you. Raising the finger and saying "but by learning these 1000 pages documentation, you shall have knowledge that might bring you great power eventually" you're just like a teacher reprimanding an eight-year old. People don't like being treated like an eight-year old, not even the ones that are 8 years old.
If you are unwilling to learn how to use technology, dont complain when it becomes too complex for you to use as it's entirely because of your own ignorance.
Elitist thinking like you're demonstrating here is the primary reason why so many people still shit their pants when working on computers, and still refuse to let anything technology into their life. To quote my ex-gf: "I don't want to have a computer at home, because at home I want to relax." As a consequence, we get stuff like those wacky internet-related laws and software patents, because the people in power are scared of technology and don't know the tiniest thing of it.
Well, then still the writer will be the one who is unhappy. That the writer happens to hold some other positions in the team is irrelevant for this.
On a tangent, the lack of dedicated writers might also be one of the reasons for the generally uninteresting stories of AAA titles. Even the highly commended story-centric Heavy Rain has one that would probably be considered very bland when it'd be used for a film.
Well, the specs say that you are not allowed to do that, but of course, why should Comcast care about that. That's actually the big question for me as well, how will ISPs act with these new powers?
Since you're behind a NAT, you don't act as a supernode.
No, that's the job of the game writer, not the game designer.
I'd guess hosting a few video chat streams is a bit more than 10kB/s...
One guy told me, that a game they developed was starting out to be something like a sci-fi RPG, but one day they got a call from the publisher who told them, that "with all the LotR stuff going on, we should do something with hobbits and evles".
A true game designer doesn't care whether you slap on the elve texture or the space marine texture. The game itself doesn't have to change just because you changed the setting. If you want to have some insight into this, read about the MDA model. This paper is great in explaining the whole concept of game design without requiring reading a 400+ pages book.
As far as I've heard stories of the police raids in my country, I can consider myself lucky when they can differentiate between my laptop and my toaster.
That may be useful to some, but I always assign non standard ports. I have a HTTP server, but port 0 is not forwarded. Even when I had one computer, I used nonstandard ports. Now I assign ports based on what PC is running the service, so one PC may get ports 11xxx, another 12xxx and so on.
That's fine for you, but imagine having to explain that setup to your grandmother. With IPv6, all she has to do is plug the device into the network, everything else is auto-setup. (in case you're wondering why she'd need something like that, just think about VoIP and video chat applications).
Well, I didn't know that. This is good, but having two or three IPs per host on the same network makes configuration a bit difficult
No it doesn't, because that's done automatically. You just have to plug the device into the network.
especially since (again, I don't know how v6 handles this) if DNS returns all addresses, the host may pick the public one to connect to an internal host.
That's what DDNS is there for (ahavi and similar implementations). You only have to remember the host name, the lookup is done for you without any server whatsoever.
Especially since v6 IPs are harder to remember.
Again, DDNS. Trying to remember IPs is so 1990ies.
Also, those applications that send the IP address as payload are badly designed. The IP address already is in the header of the packet, why send a copy of it in the data section?
I agree on that, but not sending it in the data section still doesn't help with NATs.
Yes, FTP does this wrong, though I used a few FTP servers and they could find out the external IP by either DNS or some other method.
The original idea behind that was that you can hook up two FTP servers to each other (one passive one active) and copy files directly. Nowadays FTP servers don't allow that any more, since it's a bit of a DoS vulnerability. I personally consider FTP to be deprecated, there are much better protocols now, like WebDAV.
IM, like Skype, already just works, I just need to forward the required port (the same amount of configuration as would be to allow that port in the firewall).
Port forwarding is a huge hack that requires the user to do security-related stuff that shouldn't be touched by a layperson. Skype has a different solution: When you actually have reasonably fast direct internet access while running Skype, you act as a supernode. This means that you act as a proxy when two NAT-using persons want to talk to each other. If you pay for your data transfer (and you always do, even when it's indirectly), you pay for two persons you don't even know being able to audio/video chat.
In what way is having to remember what a specific button does in a specific situation actually progress?
In what way is having to learn how a hierarchical file system works actually progress? Why do I have to learn how a computer works, as opposed to bringing the computer to learn how I think? The computer is much better at remembering things than me.
1. Is Comcast going to give me unlimited IPv6 addresses? How will that work through my router? Do I now need to announce every device to Comcast?
You get a subnet, and your router routes the whole subnet. Just like with IPv4, coincidentally.
NAT makes for a pretty good firewall. I have Linux and Mac machines, and consumer devices, behind my current NAT router. With NAT and SPI, I have it pretty good.
As opposed to having a firewall, instead of having a firewall?
Hey, I understand the need for IPv6. I guess I just don't want to lose what NAT offers.
Like what? Nothing what you stated had anything to do with NAT as such.
Still a better risk than having the issues this story's guy would have if they actually find the files they're suspecting he has.
A classical solution to police raid anxiety is having a kill switch, which auto-erases all problematic drives at the push of a button. However, this still requires you to be at home and have your wits (police raids are usually very early in the morning, in order to catch you at home and off guard). With my solution, you don't have to do anything, just let them take the server with them, making all proof unreachable forever.
Of course, for me personally it would still be a death sentence, since I need my computers to earn money to pay my bills, but I don't have to be guilty in any way to be under that threat anyways.
(As a side note, I still have my password at the moment, since there are actually some things that need the server get rebooted, like kernel upgrades or moving the server rack around.)
What do you mean, my root pw "ieatbabies" isn't that good of an idea?
My UPS-equipped Linux server uses encrypted hard drives for data storage. I never reboot it, so the only case where I'd have to enter the password is when somebody pulls the plug on it (like the police would do when confiscating the equipment).
2) Exits the folder if I'm looking at an app folder.
That's only a variation on the theme "get me out of here".
3) Takes me to the home screen if I'm on any screen other than the home screen or an app folder.
Yes, that's a breakage of the theme, and a very recent addition. It's better than doing nothing, since you've already terminated all apps.
4) Takes me to the search screen if I'm on the home screen
Same thing as above.
When I double click my home button, it:
1) Brings up the music controls if the device is locked
2) Hides the music controls if the device is locked and the music controls are already visible
3a) On a device that supports iOS4 multitasking, it brings up the task manager screen (don't recall the name of it) if the device is not locked
3b) On a device that doesn't support iOS4 multitasking, it:
3b1) Brings up the music controls if music is playing (and I should mention, that this is an entirely different looking set of music controls than the one it brings up when the device is locked).
Don't you think that those are pretty much the same thing?
3b2) Behaves like a single click if no music is playing and you are in an app or on a screen other than the home screen 3b2) Does absolutely nothing if no music is playing and you are already on the home screen
That's no longer the case on iOS4.
When I click the volume button, it:
1) Controls the volume (using the volume control overlay) when the the device isn't locked
2) Controls the volume (using the volume control overlay) when the device is locked and music is playing
3) Does absolutely nothing when the device is locked and music is not playing.
4) Controls the volume without displaying the volume control overlay on any screen where there is a volume slider showing. However, if you wait a few seconds and the UI autohides, then suddenly the volume button displays the overlay again.
To summarize:
1) It controls the volume.
What you enumerated in all of these is the things the programmers at Apple had to implement, not the thing the user perceives. For example, the notion "get me out of here" might mean many things in software, but the notion stays the same (per definition). "Take a picture" is certainly not the same notion as "increase the volume".
Your keyboard has a button on it near the bottom that's really long and doesn't have a label. Most of the time, when you're typing sentences, when you press this button it inserts a space character in the text. Do you get confused when you're online and you're using TAB to skip between interface elements, you land on a button, press the space bar, and it "clicks" the button? This key is only supposed to insert spaces into text, right? Why is it also clicking buttons that you've focused? That's madness!
Your example shows the major difference between the touch-based iOS devices and generic computers. On the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, you never have context-specific behavior of any buttons. The space bar on the onscreen keyboard always inserts a space into the focused text field. The home button always terminates the current application (well, except when you double/triple-press it or you're already on the home screen and there's nothing to terminate). iOS never requires the user to remember any keyboard hotkeys or differing behavior based on the current application's state. The return key even changes to "Submit" in a web form, or "Search" in the search bar, etc.
You just can't directly compare the user interface of a traditional computer to this new kind of system.
Maybe you should talk to them instead of posting on a random website about it...
I felt really depressed after watching it...
Using the Apple ID would help there, but I guess you can't access that from an iOS app.
That wouldn't help the dev very much, given that you can purchase any app only once on a single appstore account.
Great that you have read the article you apparantly did look at:
The photos are licensed under a Creative Commons License. Famous classic images such as Lena, the Baboon, etc., often used when doing compression comparisons, are unfortunately not free of copyright.
On the plus side, you'll have a lot more stuff to sell.
Tell me when even 5% of the websites that I use regularly are available over IPv6 and I'll look at setting up my VPS to do the same.
Hard to say, since you don't list what sites you are using regularly. However, google search is available via http://ipv6.google.com, which is a rather big part of common web usage.
So far I've never met anyone who didn't have the urge to jump off a building after being forced to use it.
I actually also quite like it. So far all people I've met that were frustrated with it tried to use it for stuff it wasn't designed for, like Java or C++. When used properly, its autocompletion and autoindention is great, it has an adequate resource management, and the project settings panel actually has a search field and everything on a single page (unlike Visual Studio, where you have to navigate around like crazy and search manually when you don't know exactly where something is).