Equally intriquing, the phrase "The WHO killed kennedy" causes Google to point to Elvis as the assasin!
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=The+WHO+kille d+kennedy
Maybe it's a conspiracy...:-D
Elvis is just a patsy. The real mind behind the conspiracy is obviously Roger Daltrey.:-)
I think the music cartels do "get it," but to them, "it" is something different. Everyone assumes that they're selling music, when in fact the product is a shiny disc sold at a ridiculous markup (over production cost). Furthermore, the selling point isn't the content, it's the name on the front cover that the label has sunk a lot of money into promoting in every way imaginable (magazines, TV chat shows, etc) _except_ exposure to the music. The record companies may view the sale of a relatively obscure CD as a lost sale for the singer/band they've spent $x million promoting.
I suspect that the record companies discovered that it's easier or cheaper to market an image and a name, so they don't even bother to market the music anymore (where samples would be most effective). Their ideal customer isn't one who has heard the tune on the radio and likes the song, but one who buys a CD simply because it's the newest one from popular singer/group X.
Just 2c from someone who hasn't bought a CD since Weird Al's _Running With Scissors_, not because of a boycott, but because I haven't heard any good songs recently.
Google has just announced its first annual programming contest!
Always good to see that these announcements are buzzword and cliche compliant.
That just means they're going to have another contest next year.
Now, if they'd annouched a First Annual Google Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, *that* would be not only buzzword and cliché but also pop-culture reference compliant.:-)
Well, there are both good and bad ways to use adaptive UI, just as with anything else in UI design. "Personalized menus" happens to be a example of one that's particularly annoying.
In addition to organizing commands into categories, menus already hide them away until they're needed; that's the whole point. Selective-display menus hide the commands even more and just add extra steps to get to them when they're needed. What's worse, the user has been learning to use the interface, and using a hidden command moves it to the "recently used" list. This adds it back to the truncated menu, often rearranging it so any benefit from learning the shortened version is now lost, and the user has to relearn or retrain muscle memory. I hate it too, and I always turn it off ("adapting" the UI in a way that works).
A better use of adaptive UI is not to change the layout or components out from under the user, but to look for patterns of usage and facilitate those. For example, if a user consistently follows action 'a' with actions 'g' and 'i', the adaptive UI could recognize this and ask politely if these should be combined into a single action, perhaps putting a button on the toolbar if a-g-i is frequently used. That's a pretty simple example, but it shows that adaptation isn't necessarily all bad.
Adaptive UI will probably develop like graphical UIs have in the past: by trial-and-error to see what works and what doesn't when you put it in front of the user. Most of it probably won't, probably because UIs are designed either by programmers who often have a hard time separating the internals of the program from the way it's used, or by marketing folks who think that more gimmicks, flash, and colors equals better.
It's my feel that adaptive UIs that complement rather than hinder both learning and experienced users are still off in the future (but maybe that's because I'm on my second read through The Diamond Age and thinking of the Primer).
Slashdot Mirror
Equally intriquing, the phrase "The WHO killed kennedy" causes Google to point to Elvis as the assasin!e d+kennedy
:-D
:-)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=The+WHO+kill
Maybe it's a conspiracy...
Elvis is just a patsy. The real mind behind the conspiracy is obviously Roger Daltrey.
Paul
I think the music cartels do "get it," but to them, "it" is something different. Everyone assumes that they're selling music, when in fact the product is a shiny disc sold at a ridiculous markup (over production cost). Furthermore, the selling point isn't the content, it's the name on the front cover that the label has sunk a lot of money into promoting in every way imaginable (magazines, TV chat shows, etc) _except_ exposure to the music. The record companies may view the sale of a relatively obscure CD as a lost sale for the singer/band they've spent $x million promoting.
I suspect that the record companies discovered that it's easier or cheaper to market an image and a name, so they don't even bother to market the music anymore (where samples would be most effective). Their ideal customer isn't one who has heard the tune on the radio and likes the song, but one who buys a CD simply because it's the newest one from popular singer/group X.
Just 2c from someone who hasn't bought a CD since Weird Al's _Running With Scissors_, not because of a boycott, but because I haven't heard any good songs recently.
Paul
Google has just announced its first annual programming contest!
:-)
Always good to see that these announcements are buzzword and cliche compliant.
That just means they're going to have another contest next year.
Now, if they'd annouched a First Annual Google Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, *that* would be not only buzzword and cliché but also pop-culture reference compliant.
Paul
So now they're training monkeys to be lazy. We've already doomed our own existance through convenience, we don't have to take the monkeys down with us
Don't worry. There will always be a group of die-hard monkeys that refuse to give up the command line.
Paul
Well, there are both good and bad ways to use adaptive UI, just as with anything else in UI design. "Personalized menus" happens to be a example of one that's particularly annoying.
In addition to organizing commands into categories, menus already hide them away until they're needed; that's the whole point. Selective-display menus hide the commands even more and just add extra steps to get to them when they're needed. What's worse, the user has been learning to use the interface, and using a hidden command moves it to the "recently used" list. This adds it back to the truncated menu, often rearranging it so any benefit from learning the shortened version is now lost, and the user has to relearn or retrain muscle memory. I hate it too, and I always turn it off ("adapting" the UI in a way that works).
A better use of adaptive UI is not to change the layout or components out from under the user, but to look for patterns of usage and facilitate those. For example, if a user consistently follows action 'a' with actions 'g' and 'i', the adaptive UI could recognize this and ask politely if these should be combined into a single action, perhaps putting a button on the toolbar if a-g-i is frequently used. That's a pretty simple example, but it shows that adaptation isn't necessarily all bad.
Adaptive UI will probably develop like graphical UIs have in the past: by trial-and-error to see what works and what doesn't when you put it in front of the user. Most of it probably won't, probably because UIs are designed either by programmers who often have a hard time separating the internals of the program from the way it's used, or by marketing folks who think that more gimmicks, flash, and colors equals better.
It's my feel that adaptive UIs that complement rather than hinder both learning and experienced users are still off in the future (but maybe that's because I'm on my second read through The Diamond Age and thinking of the Primer).
Just my 2 1909-S VDBs,
Paul