The one exception I can think of off the top of my head, was the computer panels in Star Trek: The Next Generation. They actually did do some UI design for the animations and controls, thinking of what controls needed to always be available at certain stations, and what controls should only be available in certain contexts.
Granted, the whole thing was just laid out in Illustrator on a Mac, printed on transparent film in a color laser, and then laid over a diffused flourescent light in the panel; but the thought was there.
You may want to take note of the Cadillac CTS-V. It pretty much breaks the old-guy mold, as they decided to go directly after the BMW M3 and Mercedes C63 AMG. It's the first Cadillac that was actually made by Cadillac that can actually negotiate a turn without smashing into the nearest tree.
For what it's worth, the iDrive controller is a little less crappy now, because they've added buttons on the front of it to get you into the most used functions. A quick google for an image results in not only showing the buttons, but showing that they've been angled against each other so that you can actually feel for the one you want without taking your eyes off the road.
Seems they are going the exact opposite way of the touchscreen. Thank Jeebus.
I have talked to people that prefer them, but they are mostly silly gits or management types that have no idea how color correction works, or why a more expensive display is preferable in a managed color environment at equal resolution - the backlight.
Yeah. Apple is ramping up releases in order to screw over jailbreakers.
Or, there was a bug with Exchange calendaring that caused iOS devices to fill up Exchange server drives by interpreting a meeting series with no end date quite literally. I sure can't figure out why they would want to push that out as fast as possible...
It wouldn't even get to ratification, since you'd need 67 Senators and 288 members of congress to essentially vote for their own retirement unless you try to go the Constitutional Convention route, which has never been done since the Constitution was written.
Some of them would stay around after the next election, but a lot of them are there specifically because there's no one else in their district stupid enough to run for the office that also has the speaking and critical thinking skills necessary to not look like a complete idiot in a televised debate. For examples, see: the moron Republican Senatorial Nominee asshats from Indiana and Missouri when talking about rape and abortion that fueled a nationwide "war on women" meme in the 2012 election.
Political parties have finite amounts of money to spend in an election. They put that money where they actually have a chance to push things in their direction.
They don't need to spend money in Eastern Washington, because it's reliably Republican except for maybe the Spokane area. They don't need to spend money in the Puget Sound region, because it's largely wasted money that won't even move the needle with your average Seattle / Tacoma resident.
Same thing happens in Oregon. For statewide office, you only need to win 5 counties - Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington, Lane, and Marion. You win those 5, the other 16 don't matter. And those counties are 60 to 70% deep Democrat. Democrats don't need to spend National dollars on Portland media, because they won there before the Primary election even happened. And they aren't going to spend money out in Pendleton or Ontario because it's already firmly in the Republican column.
If you aren't in a state like Ohio that has a fairly liberal north, a fairly conservative south, and a middle that is concretely in the middle; yet swings the bat of double-digit electoral votes, you just don't get the attention of the national parties in a national election.
Trust me, you have it better in Washington. I grew up in Oregon and lived there until 3 years ago. I now live in Ohio, the swing state of all swing states. I also live in a "swing county" within that swing state. The volume of direct mail election horseshit I received would have probably kept my house warm for a few weeks if I had a fireplace, and that says nothing for the amount of TV advertising for elections. Budweiser was drowned out by the two Presidential campaigns during live sporting events, and then there was the congressional elections on top of it.
Yeah, that's what the rev limiter is for. Engine makes lots of noise, but just bounces off the limiter until you either get it to stop running, put it in gear, or run it out of gas.
Motorcycles also have a clutch lever on the left handgrip, which would allow you to shift the transmission to neutral with a few clicks of the gear foot lever. I guess there are automatic transmissions on some motorcycle models now, but that's mostly a scooter thing. Predominantly, they all have a manual sequential gearbox.
Because Apple and Google haven't already done that?
To think that the OEMs are just now catching on to what a tablet computer should be because Microsoft put one out (read: cloned someone else's hardware but put Windows on it) is the worst kind of tunnel vision.
I'm not going to put an unsupported hack that I have to pay for to get the same functionality and UI I already have into a business environment that I support across an entire continent.
This is what the "Oh, stop complaining about the new Start screen and just install some hack" crowd don't quite understand. That's great for your own PC, but I have 60k+ end user devices and line-of-business PCs to support, and I certainly don't have the time or resources to retrain everyone away from the Start menu they've been using for 18 years; much less the energy to deal with the specter of an actual problem caused by that unsupported hack which would leave me out on the end of a long branch in an IT department filled with managers that know how to use a chainsaw.
They can feel free to do that. The Fortune-25 company I work for is already running away from Dell just at the rumor of going private. We like being able to get information about the health of our strategic partners that we annually do 7-figure business with, and we can't do that with a private company in the way that we can with a public corporation.
If they go private, they're going to lose a lot of Enterprise business that they have today, and I don't think they realize that.
The only two ways you get "sold out" is if market demand outgrows supply, or if you restrict supply to be less than existing demand. It's too early to tell which one this is.
These would normally sell to the same outfits that use Windows Tablet Edition, except they all started migrating to iPad last year: Health Care.
The health care industry loved the convertible Tablet PC because doctors could still scrawl on something with a pen, but now it doesn't have to be collated and typed by some assistant or intern in order to get into the digital records. They love this new generation of tablet even more because it's not a massive brick of hardware for the same functionality, and you don't have to charge the battery twice a day for it to continue working.
It brings less to the table, and in a meaningful way. Convertible notebooks are heavy. I have a whole lab of these things with models ranging over the last 6 years (Lenovo X60 Tablet, X200 Tablet, X201 Tablet, X220 Tablet, X230 Tablet, ThinkPad Twist Ultrabook), and even the latest ones are 4x the weight of iPad or Galaxy Tab 10.1 with less battery life.
The only thing they have going for them is that they build and act just like a laptop; so the infrastructure is already here.
Good job on running a fanboy filter on what I said.
Remember when I said " If it has more useful features, then it probably is a better product"? No? Then maybe you should read it again.
Also, you're "must have" list may be a "must have" list for you, but you do not represent the entire market, or even a pluralism of the market. What is "must have" for you very well may be "I can live without" for other people. For instance, I can whittle your list down to:
- LTE - useable maps that instant start
My battery lasts all day. I'm not constantly switching on and off all that stuff because my device manages it good enough that my battery already lasts all day. I have LTE already. I don't need nor want NFC. Any phone with an LED flash already has a "notification LED". I can find apps that do what I need on the app store I already use, so I don't need several app stores that all have the same stuff, or a subset of it. I don't use the storage I have now, because my music isn't stored locally on the device.
The maps thing would be nice though, but the only way you get "instant start" is by sacrificing battery to power up that GPS radio to periodically / constantly track where you are.
Quick question... is good product design about packing in as many features as possible, whether they are something people will actually use, or actually good ideas, or actually implemented in a good way, or something someone will actually use?
No. There are countless products in every market where the company that makes them does exactly that. They shove in every bell and whistle, whether it makes sense or not, whether it can be used in reality or not, and they are mediocre-at-best products. Many of them are bad, and you spend money on those features you will never use, just to get the handful that you will.
Just because the iPhone has "less features" doesn't make it a bad product. Similarly, just because some other phone has "more features" doesn't necessarily make it a better product. If it has more useful features, then it probably is a better product; if those features are implemented in a useful way that isn't buried under a horrible unusable interface, or requires everyone you interact with to also have that product for the feature to be of any use.
(None of what I said above applies to any specific product or manufacturer unless explicitly stated. This post was not meant to be a critique of any particular device, rather a critique on the concept of "more features == better")
I had my Time Warner Cable bandwidth increased without asking about a month ago here in Cincinnati because of competition from Cincinnati Bell laying down their fiber service all over town. That being said, if I could kick Time Warner to the curb and get Cincinnati Bell's Fioptics service where I live, I would in about three shakes of a lamb's tail.
This isn't only happening where Google is doing their fiber experimentation.
Slashdot Mirror
Statehood doesn't exactly happen overnight. Congress does a thing, then state legislatures ratify.
This gives plenty of time for those "wealthiest residents" to move their assets to some other tax haven.
Guess you didn't think of that.
The one exception I can think of off the top of my head, was the computer panels in Star Trek: The Next Generation. They actually did do some UI design for the animations and controls, thinking of what controls needed to always be available at certain stations, and what controls should only be available in certain contexts.
Granted, the whole thing was just laid out in Illustrator on a Mac, printed on transparent film in a color laser, and then laid over a diffused flourescent light in the panel; but the thought was there.
You may want to take note of the Cadillac CTS-V. It pretty much breaks the old-guy mold, as they decided to go directly after the BMW M3 and Mercedes C63 AMG. It's the first Cadillac that was actually made by Cadillac that can actually negotiate a turn without smashing into the nearest tree.
For what it's worth, the iDrive controller is a little less crappy now, because they've added buttons on the front of it to get you into the most used functions. A quick google for an image results in not only showing the buttons, but showing that they've been angled against each other so that you can actually feel for the one you want without taking your eyes off the road.
Seems they are going the exact opposite way of the touchscreen. Thank Jeebus.
I have talked to people that prefer them, but they are mostly silly gits or management types that have no idea how color correction works, or why a more expensive display is preferable in a managed color environment at equal resolution - the backlight.
Yeah. Apple is ramping up releases in order to screw over jailbreakers.
Or, there was a bug with Exchange calendaring that caused iOS devices to fill up Exchange server drives by interpreting a meeting series with no end date quite literally. I sure can't figure out why they would want to push that out as fast as possible...
Yeah! Screw them for patching vulnerabilities that allow code execution and privilege escalation!
Actually, phrase different than phrase is perfectly acceptable grammar.
Such as "responding to the actual content or thoughts behind the grandparent's post is much different than being a pedantic nationalist douchebag.
It wouldn't even get to ratification, since you'd need 67 Senators and 288 members of congress to essentially vote for their own retirement unless you try to go the Constitutional Convention route, which has never been done since the Constitution was written.
Some of them would stay around after the next election, but a lot of them are there specifically because there's no one else in their district stupid enough to run for the office that also has the speaking and critical thinking skills necessary to not look like a complete idiot in a televised debate. For examples, see: the moron Republican Senatorial Nominee asshats from Indiana and Missouri when talking about rape and abortion that fueled a nationwide "war on women" meme in the 2012 election.
Political parties have finite amounts of money to spend in an election. They put that money where they actually have a chance to push things in their direction.
They don't need to spend money in Eastern Washington, because it's reliably Republican except for maybe the Spokane area. They don't need to spend money in the Puget Sound region, because it's largely wasted money that won't even move the needle with your average Seattle / Tacoma resident.
Same thing happens in Oregon. For statewide office, you only need to win 5 counties - Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington, Lane, and Marion. You win those 5, the other 16 don't matter. And those counties are 60 to 70% deep Democrat. Democrats don't need to spend National dollars on Portland media, because they won there before the Primary election even happened. And they aren't going to spend money out in Pendleton or Ontario because it's already firmly in the Republican column.
If you aren't in a state like Ohio that has a fairly liberal north, a fairly conservative south, and a middle that is concretely in the middle; yet swings the bat of double-digit electoral votes, you just don't get the attention of the national parties in a national election.
Trust me, you have it better in Washington. I grew up in Oregon and lived there until 3 years ago. I now live in Ohio, the swing state of all swing states. I also live in a "swing county" within that swing state. The volume of direct mail election horseshit I received would have probably kept my house warm for a few weeks if I had a fireplace, and that says nothing for the amount of TV advertising for elections. Budweiser was drowned out by the two Presidential campaigns during live sporting events, and then there was the congressional elections on top of it.
Yeah, that's what the rev limiter is for. Engine makes lots of noise, but just bounces off the limiter until you either get it to stop running, put it in gear, or run it out of gas.
Motorcycles also have a clutch lever on the left handgrip, which would allow you to shift the transmission to neutral with a few clicks of the gear foot lever. I guess there are automatic transmissions on some motorcycle models now, but that's mostly a scooter thing. Predominantly, they all have a manual sequential gearbox.
I'm pretty sure fuel economy wasn't exactly on this guy's mind when in the described situation.
So then push in the clutch, and take the transmission out of gear?
They still have those in Europe if they aren't using automatic transmissions, right?
Han shot first, and Pluto is still a planet.
Signed,
1977
Because Apple and Google haven't already done that?
To think that the OEMs are just now catching on to what a tablet computer should be because Microsoft put one out (read: cloned someone else's hardware but put Windows on it) is the worst kind of tunnel vision.
I'm not going to put an unsupported hack that I have to pay for to get the same functionality and UI I already have into a business environment that I support across an entire continent.
This is what the "Oh, stop complaining about the new Start screen and just install some hack" crowd don't quite understand. That's great for your own PC, but I have 60k+ end user devices and line-of-business PCs to support, and I certainly don't have the time or resources to retrain everyone away from the Start menu they've been using for 18 years; much less the energy to deal with the specter of an actual problem caused by that unsupported hack which would leave me out on the end of a long branch in an IT department filled with managers that know how to use a chainsaw.
So because Microsoft spent untold treasure on redeveloping their interface into something worse, downloading an unsupported hack makes it all better?
Am I supposed to support that on 60,000 end user devices in a corporation?
Get a fucking clue.
They can feel free to do that. The Fortune-25 company I work for is already running away from Dell just at the rumor of going private. We like being able to get information about the health of our strategic partners that we annually do 7-figure business with, and we can't do that with a private company in the way that we can with a public corporation.
If they go private, they're going to lose a lot of Enterprise business that they have today, and I don't think they realize that.
The only two ways you get "sold out" is if market demand outgrows supply, or if you restrict supply to be less than existing demand. It's too early to tell which one this is.
These would normally sell to the same outfits that use Windows Tablet Edition, except they all started migrating to iPad last year: Health Care.
The health care industry loved the convertible Tablet PC because doctors could still scrawl on something with a pen, but now it doesn't have to be collated and typed by some assistant or intern in order to get into the digital records. They love this new generation of tablet even more because it's not a massive brick of hardware for the same functionality, and you don't have to charge the battery twice a day for it to continue working.
It brings less to the table, and in a meaningful way. Convertible notebooks are heavy. I have a whole lab of these things with models ranging over the last 6 years (Lenovo X60 Tablet, X200 Tablet, X201 Tablet, X220 Tablet, X230 Tablet, ThinkPad Twist Ultrabook), and even the latest ones are 4x the weight of iPad or Galaxy Tab 10.1 with less battery life.
The only thing they have going for them is that they build and act just like a laptop; so the infrastructure is already here.
Good job on running a fanboy filter on what I said.
Remember when I said " If it has more useful features, then it probably is a better product"? No? Then maybe you should read it again.
Also, you're "must have" list may be a "must have" list for you, but you do not represent the entire market, or even a pluralism of the market. What is "must have" for you very well may be "I can live without" for other people. For instance, I can whittle your list down to:
- LTE
- useable maps that instant start
My battery lasts all day. I'm not constantly switching on and off all that stuff because my device manages it good enough that my battery already lasts all day. I have LTE already. I don't need nor want NFC. Any phone with an LED flash already has a "notification LED". I can find apps that do what I need on the app store I already use, so I don't need several app stores that all have the same stuff, or a subset of it. I don't use the storage I have now, because my music isn't stored locally on the device.
The maps thing would be nice though, but the only way you get "instant start" is by sacrificing battery to power up that GPS radio to periodically / constantly track where you are.
Quick question... is good product design about packing in as many features as possible, whether they are something people will actually use, or actually good ideas, or actually implemented in a good way, or something someone will actually use?
No. There are countless products in every market where the company that makes them does exactly that. They shove in every bell and whistle, whether it makes sense or not, whether it can be used in reality or not, and they are mediocre-at-best products. Many of them are bad, and you spend money on those features you will never use, just to get the handful that you will.
Just because the iPhone has "less features" doesn't make it a bad product. Similarly, just because some other phone has "more features" doesn't necessarily make it a better product. If it has more useful features, then it probably is a better product; if those features are implemented in a useful way that isn't buried under a horrible unusable interface, or requires everyone you interact with to also have that product for the feature to be of any use.
(None of what I said above applies to any specific product or manufacturer unless explicitly stated. This post was not meant to be a critique of any particular device, rather a critique on the concept of "more features == better")
I had my Time Warner Cable bandwidth increased without asking about a month ago here in Cincinnati because of competition from Cincinnati Bell laying down their fiber service all over town. That being said, if I could kick Time Warner to the curb and get Cincinnati Bell's Fioptics service where I live, I would in about three shakes of a lamb's tail.
This isn't only happening where Google is doing their fiber experimentation.