I recently bought a Creative Nomad 3 jukebox. It's got 20GB, analog/digital in, USB 1.1 & firewire hookups, two line-outs, a headphone jack, and space for two batteries (brings it up to 22 hours).
At first, I started syncing over USB, man was that slow! For $30, you can pick up a firewire card, pop it in, and wham! stuff transfers super-fast.
I love it. Sure, it's a little bigger than an iPod, but that doesn't bother me. The interface is pretty darn good, you can create playlists on the device, I've got tons of battery life, the sound quality is great, and I saved a bunch of money. What's not to love?
Well, there is one thing that sucks about it. The Creative software that comes with it. Ditch it and get the Notmad Explorer software from Red Chair. It's a lot more streamlined, and syncs ID3 tags correctly with the device. It's cheap and totally useful.
Todd
That's b/c Invisible Man and Farscape were total crap! Lexx is crap! The new Twilight Zone is crap! Any other "SF originals" that I forgot? Oh yeah, Saint-Sinner is crap! Taken is crap!
Stargate came to the Sci-Fi channel w/ a large "installed base" of viewers. That number was probably some significant percentage of SF's total viewship (I have no idea how large, but let's say 20%?) They want to keep that group of people happy and not lose them. Any original show that the SF channel has tried out hasn't worked out in the long run.
If a television network doesn't go by ratings, then they'll have no one watching what you think of as "quality" television. They need to attract advertisers somehow, and if their own creations aren't cutting it, then they get the boot.
It's too bad we can't start our own cable network....can you imagine the/. channel? What would you (yeah you! the one reading this right now!) put on it.
No, but perhaps computers have reached the point (or will soon) where they are fast enough so that for most people's tasks, things happen instantaneously. In effect, applications behave like like do in the palm environment. There will still need to be a way for the user to tell the computer that they're finished with a certain task, whether it's to explicitly close a document or program, or switch to another program. So perhaps a working model would be, for the average user, all their commonly used applications are 'running' all the time, and they just switch among them to do what they want. That would handle the cases where you need to do background processing of things, like downloading email or whatever.
It's hard to imagine the future and what features might work and what might not. I think that's why the computer interfaces in movies are so cool (The Matrix, Minority Report, etc.); because they dare to imagine a totally different way of interacting with a computer, and don't really have to care if it's 'realistic' or not.
Many applications have implemented an auto-save functionality. I know that it's saved my ass quite a few times with MS Word. I've never had the case where it's that feature's harmed me. Of course, I realize that the converse may be true for some people, but I would bet that overall, it's a helpful feature for most people.
On the other hand, the auto versioning function of MS Word hasn't been helpful to me. In my job, I work with Word files that can grow fairly large, 4 or 5MB, and with auto versioning enabled, these quickly grow to more than 20MB, and Word has problems dealing with them.
If I were to make a prediction, which will most likely be wrong..., I'd say that UIs with user modes will occur. A program / OS will be installed with novice mode as the default. Options would be a lot simpler, more stuff would be handled behind the scenes, without bothering the user. The user can then choose to move to a different mode (perhaps moderate or expert) if they wish.
I've found that one of the biggest problems with software is that it doesn't respect the user's time and/or attention. (This is all in regards to Windows) Why does an installer take up the whole screen while it's running? Why do applications immediately grab the focus when they are launched? If Windows pops up a dialog box (like a DHCP error message), why does that grab the focus? In all these cases, the computer assumes that it should tell the user what's the most important thing for them to be doing or pay attention to. There needs to be a better way to do these sorts of things. Perhaps part of the task bar should be an alert notification area, or something like that.
One of the tenets of good UI design is "don't annoy the user". More people should think about that when writing software.
Does the Psion multitask? I use a Palm-based PDA, (Kyocera 6035 palmphone) and while it can't run multiple apps at once, I don't really miss that for the things I want to do on it. Switching between apps is easy enough, and I don't do anything requiring background processing or the like very often.
However, one thing I do like is that the phone and the palm can both run at the same time, so I can talk to someone and look something up or take notes or whatever at the same time.
If you run windows, (I don't know who'd do THAT, but....), Linksys now packages their firmware updates in an easy-to-use auto-flashing package. It's so easy, a monkey could probably do it.
What "technical expertise or poise"? If you download the updated firmware, for the windows version, all you have to do is double-click on the executable, type in your router password, hit the "update" button, and you're all done. It's simple.
It's almost so simple, a monkey could do it. The problem is that no one except the more technical people will be aware of the issue and know how and where to get the firmware updates.
How many years in the future were Chapterhouse and Heretics set from Dune? It was something like a few thousand years, right? Things had changed somewhat, even with Emperor Leto (III?) keeping the empire relatively stagnant through prescience.
So, yeah, it's kinda unrealistic (yes, I realize we're talking about fiction), for all the stuff that Anderson writes about to remain unchanged.
I don't enjoy Kevin Anderson's writing at all. The characters are all so one-dimensional, and don't usually have a great deal of differentiation. Plus, as someone noted, he always tries to explain how certain aspects of a particular story universe came to be, but does it in the simpliest, cheesiest way possible.
People try to do way too many things while driving. I have a bad habit of talking on the phone, as well as switching CDs. Driving is difficult b/c it can be so unpredictable, and people lose sight of that fact. Here's some articles on use of telematics while driving:
My company recently did a study on telematics use and driver/user attention, and it was pretty freaky how poorly people were able to attend to their main task while performing the secondary telematics task.
Unfortunately, the world is run by idiots. Look at George W Bush, Jerry Falwell, Jesse Helms, the number of spelling / grammar mistakes on/., or even Stan Jones.
Is it any surprise that people get bilked so easily? P.T. Barnum had it right, "There's a sucker born every minute." I'm not usually so negative (oh, wait, I am...), but this sort of thing is no surprise to me at all.
> What troubled me, of course, is that many of the investors looked like normal middle class folks, using their own savings and hoping to cash in on a world-shaking invention. They, and people like them, were the true targets of Mr. Tilley's exhibition. *********** People, in general, are stupid. Remember, half of all people are below "average" intelligence. As PT Barnum said, "there's a sucker born every minute." In addition, people would rather believe in something to give them hope, such as this or religion, than attempt to figure things out for themselves. Why do you think that many people comment about "sheep" around here?
I'm not saying that Mr Tilley is doing this in good faith, or that I support him, which I don't, but by refusing to look beyond the surface, people do this to themselves. This also explains the ".com" boom and following crash.
ObDeloreanComment: I actually saw my first Delorean in "person" a few weeks ago, and it was pretty cool.
Thanks! A coworker and I designed the Continental FLIFO app. I'm glad you like it. Go SpeechWorks!
Your comment about your credit card company's IVR should really be aimed at their general IT department. The issue going on when you have to repeat information a bunch of times when talking to different apps or agents is a lack of CTI, which would allow your information to be 'screen popped' around with your call. Unfortunately, it's a fairly expensive and tricky technology to put into an existing telephony infrastructure.
You have to make the distinction between crappy, old-school touch-tone IVR systems, crappy speech systems, and well-designed speech systems.
In general, a speech system is used to handle non-revenue phone calls. Currently, you rarely see any kind of shopping phone apps. However, you do see a lot of informational apps, such as flight information (United, Airtran, Continental, etc.), banking (Fidelity, etc.), mutual funds, auto rental applications (Thrifty, Dollar, etc.), etc. (Boy, that's a lot of etc.s...) In my experience, you get better customer service for this type of app than you would by talking to a person, especially if you factor in the hold time involved in many call centers.
Many of the agents I speak with in my line of work support our efforts, because they know that speech apps will never totally replace them, but will decrease the number of "boring" calls that they take.
In any event, I work for SpeechWorks (speechworks.com), and I'd say that we arguably design the best speech apps in the industry. When working with a client, I always make it a point to try to influence them to include a way for their callers to get to a live person. This is simply because our speech apps can't handle all the myriad reasons someone might call.
It's like Flash, it's not a bad technology, but it's misapplied a lot and used in the wrong situations.
It's got tabs, built-in popup suppression, uses the Gecko render engine, and has a bunch of other neato options.
Todd
Re:I've got an interface for you
on
GUIs for Everyone
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I actually think that the next big interface "revolution" will be in multi-modal. I currently have a Kyocera 6035 palmphone. It's great. I love the (limited) interaction between the phone and the palm. However, it'd be great if you could speak to it:
- manipulate your addressbook, calendar, to do list while you're walking somehere: ("what's my next appointment", "new todo call mark tomorrow", "what's bob's phone number") it'd also be great for use while driving
- interact with location-based services. such as "what's the nearest chinese restaurant?"
- use a MapQuest type app for driving directions ("Drive for 5 miles, and turn right onto Oak Road. When you're there, say, "next"".)
- it could help you screen calls (phone rings: it looks up the name in your address book, and says, "Bob Smith's calling, take it?")
- intelligent voice dialing for your whole addressbook
- limited web searching, for specific, short pieces of information: think 411 replacement, yellow pages (actually, kind of like a speech analog to palm.pqas).
Of course, you'd have to be able to set modes: screen interaction only, limited speech (alerts, important things), mostly speech, all speech. Some situations are good for speech, others not so much. The thing could ask you a question and display some information on the screen. You could choose which item you want by physical selection or by speech.
I imagine something like Jane in the Ender novels; always there, not too obtrusive. The main computer in Star Trek is perhaps a more accurate model, except that there are problems with how it was depicted (examples: no clear use of an "activating" keyword. Sometimes they'd use "computer....", but not always. They'd ask the computer to make leaps of logic, etc.). But, the basic premise is relatively realistic, if perhaps in the longer-term view of things.
Check out WildFire (http://www.wildfire.com or 1800 wildfire), it has some functionality that I think is pretty close.
I'm not convinced that gesture-based interfaces will work that well. I mean, the Minority Report scenes w/ the pre-cog image sifting was extremely cool, but for a day to day work basis, I don't see it as being precise enough.
In addition, in the workplace, speech interaction with your computer, especially for dictation, won't fly until sub-vocalizations can be recognized. Most people either work in cube farms or have officemates. Imagine if it was like everyone in your office was on the phone all the time. That'd get annoying pretty quick. In addition, remember this one commercial for MCI, or Sprint or someplace like that? Picture this guy sitting on a park bench with lots of pigeons around; he's doing some stock trading and gets very animated and jumps around yelling, scaring the birds. What an asshole. If someone was behaving like that for real, I'd deck 'em.
3-D desktop stuff won't fly. First-off "doom-style" where you navigate around to all your programs and data: Why take the time and energy to remember spatially where your programs and data are? What's the benefit? Yes, I've seen the "sysadmin doom" program, and while it's a cool experiment and somewhat fun, there's no benefit. Sometimes an organized list of items is much easier to navigate. That's one of the (many) reasons why MS Bob failed. People forgot where they put stuff!
Second: like looking into a cube and seeing your running programs on the interior faces,
Third: head / eye tracking / mouse: I've seen this used to good effect on disabled or paralyzed people. It can be a great enabler for them. But, for the average person, who's motor skills are decent, there's little improvement over a "regular" mouse or trackball or whatever. In combination with speech or a mouse-type device, it might work ok, but it won't be the mouse-killer.
I'm not saying the the WIMP model is the best out there, but we need a lot of thought and research to determine what's going to replace it. So far though, I see few contenders.
Todd
Re:What has HCI expertise done for us lately?
on
GUIs for Everyone
·
· Score: 1
That's not always true. Of course, it is in some cases. The UI / usability field is undergoing a growth period, and is experiencing growing pains. The current mode is to gain exposure and acceptance.
Read other posts in this story. You see lots of bitching about bad UI designs. You also see some praise about good ones. I'm not saying that every UI designer is competant, but neither is every programmer.
There are lots of good UI designers out there, working on lots of products, doing great design. You don't hear about them b/c they're actually doing design work and not pontificating. The "UI visionaries" are arguably a valuable asset, until they start over-stating their cases or get too big for their britches.;)
The Macintosh is a direct result of mostly good (and sometimes great, sometimes bad) UI design. Without them for Microsoft to cop from, where do you think we'd be?
7. I'm not positive as to what Nielson means when he writes "circular menu", but wouldn't a more intelligent solution be something like this?
1 2 3 4 m 5 6 7 8
where 'm' is where your mouse cursor is. Say you right-click, and that menu pops up; your options are displayed in an "array" fashion. I suppose that it could be considered "circular".
9. The round mouse was a mistake b/c it is difficult to orient it correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
All for $250 (counting a $50 rebate (link to a pdf)).
At first, I started syncing over USB, man was that slow! For $30, you can pick up a firewire card, pop it in, and wham! stuff transfers super-fast.
I love it. Sure, it's a little bigger than an iPod, but that doesn't bother me. The interface is pretty darn good, you can create playlists on the device, I've got tons of battery life, the sound quality is great, and I saved a bunch of money. What's not to love?
Well, there is one thing that sucks about it. The Creative software that comes with it. Ditch it and get the Notmad Explorer software from Red Chair. It's a lot more streamlined, and syncs ID3 tags correctly with the device. It's cheap and totally useful. Todd
Stargate came to the Sci-Fi channel w/ a large "installed base" of viewers. That number was probably some significant percentage of SF's total viewship (I have no idea how large, but let's say 20%?) They want to keep that group of people happy and not lose them. Any original show that the SF channel has tried out hasn't worked out in the long run.
If a television network doesn't go by ratings, then they'll have no one watching what you think of as "quality" television. They need to attract advertisers somehow, and if their own creations aren't cutting it, then they get the boot.
It's too bad we can't start our own cable network....can you imagine the /. channel? What would you (yeah you! the one reading this right now!) put on it.
Todd
It's hard to imagine the future and what features might work and what might not. I think that's why the computer interfaces in movies are so cool (The Matrix, Minority Report, etc.); because they dare to imagine a totally different way of interacting with a computer, and don't really have to care if it's 'realistic' or not.
Many applications have implemented an auto-save functionality. I know that it's saved my ass quite a few times with MS Word. I've never had the case where it's that feature's harmed me. Of course, I realize that the converse may be true for some people, but I would bet that overall, it's a helpful feature for most people.
On the other hand, the auto versioning function of MS Word hasn't been helpful to me. In my job, I work with Word files that can grow fairly large, 4 or 5MB, and with auto versioning enabled, these quickly grow to more than 20MB, and Word has problems dealing with them.
If I were to make a prediction, which will most likely be wrong..., I'd say that UIs with user modes will occur. A program / OS will be installed with novice mode as the default. Options would be a lot simpler, more stuff would be handled behind the scenes, without bothering the user. The user can then choose to move to a different mode (perhaps moderate or expert) if they wish.
I've found that one of the biggest problems with software is that it doesn't respect the user's time and/or attention. (This is all in regards to Windows) Why does an installer take up the whole screen while it's running? Why do applications immediately grab the focus when they are launched? If Windows pops up a dialog box (like a DHCP error message), why does that grab the focus? In all these cases, the computer assumes that it should tell the user what's the most important thing for them to be doing or pay attention to. There needs to be a better way to do these sorts of things. Perhaps part of the task bar should be an alert notification area, or something like that.
One of the tenets of good UI design is "don't annoy the user". More people should think about that when writing software.
Todd
However, one thing I do like is that the phone and the palm can both run at the same time, so I can talk to someone and look something up or take notes or whatever at the same time.
Todd
Todd
It's almost so simple, a monkey could do it. The problem is that no one except the more technical people will be aware of the issue and know how and where to get the firmware updates.
Todd
Todd
Try reading any of L Ron Hubbard's books!
Todd
How many years in the future were Chapterhouse and Heretics set from Dune? It was something like a few thousand years, right? Things had changed somewhat, even with Emperor Leto (III?) keeping the empire relatively stagnant through prescience.
So, yeah, it's kinda unrealistic (yes, I realize we're talking about fiction), for all the stuff that Anderson writes about to remain unchanged.
I don't enjoy Kevin Anderson's writing at all. The characters are all so one-dimensional, and don't usually have a great deal of differentiation. Plus, as someone noted, he always tries to explain how certain aspects of a particular story universe came to be, but does it in the simpliest, cheesiest way possible.
Read someone else.
Todd
Todd
You mean, like this one?
Todd
People try to do way too many things while driving. I have a bad habit of talking on the phone, as well as switching CDs. Driving is difficult b/c it can be so unpredictable, and people lose sight of that fact. Here's some articles on use of telematics while driving:
My company recently did a study on telematics use and driver/user attention, and it was pretty freaky how poorly people were able to attend to their main task while performing the secondary telematics task.
Todd
a) don't wear seatbelts while driving
b) smoke
c) eat fast food
or
d) think with their mouths open.
Unfortunately, the world is run by idiots. Look at George W Bush, Jerry Falwell, Jesse Helms, the number of spelling / grammar mistakes on /., or even Stan Jones.
Is it any surprise that people get bilked so easily? P.T. Barnum had it right, "There's a sucker born every minute." I'm not usually so negative (oh, wait, I am...), but this sort of thing is no surprise to me at all.
In addition, people are innately greedy. Check out the CEO scandals, the number of people who drive SUVs needlessly, the people who beg online for donations to relieve their credit card debt, pork-barrel politics, or people at a buffet. Greediness, combined with the stupidity of the general public makes for a bad combination. I'm not one of those nuts who thinks that everything should be regulated into some hippy-like hell, but people need to think before they act.
ObArticleRelatedComment: I wish I could get my company to switch to AbiWord; it's pretty cool.
Todd
SPWX product listing
and yes, I do work there. Todd
Check it out; I've been listening for a few months...
Don't know how it compares to Nectarine though.
http://c64.org/radio/
Todd
> What troubled me, of course, is that many of the investors looked like normal middle class folks, using their own savings and hoping to cash in on a world-shaking invention. They, and people like them, were the true targets of Mr. Tilley's exhibition.
***********
People, in general, are stupid. Remember, half of all people are below "average" intelligence. As PT Barnum said, "there's a sucker born every minute." In addition, people would rather believe in something to give them hope, such as this or religion, than attempt to figure things out for themselves. Why do you think that many people comment about "sheep" around here?
I'm not saying that Mr Tilley is doing this in good faith, or that I support him, which I don't, but by refusing to look beyond the surface, people do this to themselves. This also explains the ".com" boom and following crash.
ObDeloreanComment: I actually saw my first Delorean in "person" a few weeks ago, and it was pretty cool.
Todd
check it out
Todd
Thanks! A coworker and I designed the Continental FLIFO app. I'm glad you like it. Go SpeechWorks!
Your comment about your credit card company's IVR should really be aimed at their general IT department. The issue going on when you have to repeat information a bunch of times when talking to different apps or agents is a lack of CTI, which would allow your information to be 'screen popped' around with your call. Unfortunately, it's a fairly expensive and tricky technology to put into an existing telephony infrastructure.
Todd
You have to make the distinction between crappy, old-school touch-tone IVR systems, crappy speech systems, and well-designed speech systems.
In general, a speech system is used to handle non-revenue phone calls. Currently, you rarely see any kind of shopping phone apps. However, you do see a lot of informational apps, such as flight information (United, Airtran, Continental, etc.), banking (Fidelity, etc.), mutual funds, auto rental applications (Thrifty, Dollar, etc.), etc. (Boy, that's a lot of etc.s...) In my experience, you get better customer service for this type of app than you would by talking to a person, especially if you factor in the hold time involved in many call centers.
Many of the agents I speak with in my line of work support our efforts, because they know that speech apps will never totally replace them, but will decrease the number of "boring" calls that they take.
In any event, I work for SpeechWorks (speechworks.com), and I'd say that we arguably design the best speech apps in the industry. When working with a client, I always make it a point to try to influence them to include a way for their callers to get to a live person. This is simply because our speech apps can't handle all the myriad reasons someone might call.
It's like Flash, it's not a bad technology, but it's misapplied a lot and used in the wrong situations.
Todd
No, you can tell by what they have in their shopping carts. The cell phones just confirm it.
Wasn't that [also] from a friend's episode? Joey is speaking with Rachel about something and that exchange happened.
Todd
It's got tabs, built-in popup suppression, uses the Gecko render engine, and has a bunch of other neato options.
Todd
I actually think that the next big interface "revolution" will be in multi-modal. I currently have a Kyocera 6035 palmphone. It's great. I love the (limited) interaction between the phone and the palm. However, it'd be great if you could speak to it:
.pqas).
- manipulate your addressbook, calendar, to do list while you're walking somehere: ("what's my next appointment", "new todo call mark tomorrow", "what's bob's phone number") it'd also be great for use while driving
- interact with location-based services. such as "what's the nearest chinese restaurant?"
- use a MapQuest type app for driving directions ("Drive for 5 miles, and turn right onto Oak Road. When you're there, say, "next"".)
- it could help you screen calls (phone rings: it looks up the name in your address book, and says, "Bob Smith's calling, take it?")
- intelligent voice dialing for your whole addressbook
- limited web searching, for specific, short pieces of information: think 411 replacement, yellow pages (actually, kind of like a speech analog to palm
Of course, you'd have to be able to set modes: screen interaction only, limited speech (alerts, important things), mostly speech, all speech. Some situations are good for speech, others not so much. The thing could ask you a question and display some information on the screen. You could choose which item you want by physical selection or by speech.
I imagine something like Jane in the Ender novels; always there, not too obtrusive. The main computer in Star Trek is perhaps a more accurate model, except that there are problems with how it was depicted (examples: no clear use of an "activating" keyword. Sometimes they'd use "computer....", but not always. They'd ask the computer to make leaps of logic, etc.). But, the basic premise is relatively realistic, if perhaps in the longer-term view of things.
Check out WildFire (http://www.wildfire.com or 1800 wildfire), it has some functionality that I think is pretty close.
I'm not convinced that gesture-based interfaces will work that well. I mean, the Minority Report scenes w/ the pre-cog image sifting was extremely cool, but for a day to day work basis, I don't see it as being precise enough.
In addition, in the workplace, speech interaction with your computer, especially for dictation, won't fly until sub-vocalizations can be recognized. Most people either work in cube farms or have officemates. Imagine if it was like everyone in your office was on the phone all the time. That'd get annoying pretty quick. In addition, remember this one commercial for MCI, or Sprint or someplace like that? Picture this guy sitting on a park bench with lots of pigeons around; he's doing some stock trading and gets very animated and jumps around yelling, scaring the birds. What an asshole. If someone was behaving like that for real, I'd deck 'em.
3-D desktop stuff won't fly. First-off "doom-style" where you navigate around to all your programs and data: Why take the time and energy to remember spatially where your programs and data are? What's the benefit? Yes, I've seen the "sysadmin doom" program, and while it's a cool experiment and somewhat fun, there's no benefit. Sometimes an organized list of items is much easier to navigate. That's one of the (many) reasons why MS Bob failed. People forgot where they put stuff!
Second: like looking into a cube and seeing your running programs on the interior faces,
Third: head / eye tracking / mouse: I've seen this used to good effect on disabled or paralyzed people. It can be a great enabler for them. But, for the average person, who's motor skills are decent, there's little improvement over a "regular" mouse or trackball or whatever. In combination with speech or a mouse-type device, it might work ok, but it won't be the mouse-killer.
I'm not saying the the WIMP model is the best out there, but we need a lot of thought and research to determine what's going to replace it. So far though, I see few contenders.
Todd
That's not always true. Of course, it is in some cases. The UI / usability field is undergoing a growth period, and is experiencing growing pains. The current mode is to gain exposure and acceptance.
Read other posts in this story. You see lots of bitching about bad UI designs. You also see some praise about good ones. I'm not saying that every UI designer is competant, but neither is every programmer.
There are lots of good UI designers out there, working on lots of products, doing great design. You don't hear about them b/c they're actually doing design work and not pontificating. The "UI visionaries" are arguably a valuable asset, until they start over-stating their cases or get too big for their britches.
The Macintosh is a direct result of mostly good (and sometimes great, sometimes bad) UI design. Without them for Microsoft to cop from, where do you think we'd be?
Todd
3.
5. I agree with you there.
7. I'm not positive as to what Nielson means when he writes "circular menu", but wouldn't a more intelligent solution be something like this?
1 2 3
4 m 5
6 7 8
where 'm' is where your mouse cursor is. Say you right-click, and that menu pops up; your options are displayed in an "array" fashion. I suppose that it could be considered "circular".
9. The round mouse was a mistake b/c it is difficult to orient it correctly.
Todd