Apologies to Adobe

I have ranted and raved on this blog about Adobe CS3. Then recently I my computer acted like it wanted to die on me. Turns out my hard drive was fried and had been for a while. After installing a new hard drive my laptop feels like new. All issues with CS3 have since disappeared. I am little ashamed of my emotional outbursts. My deepest apologies to Adobe, CS3 is a fine product!

Trash Recycling

German's are holier than thou when it comes to separating trash for recycling. Their trash bins exhibit labels such as "Glass", "Paper", "Bio", "Packaging" (metal, plastic packaging) and "Restmüll" (remaining trash that can't be recycled). While this is descriptive for the content, it doesn't conjure up a larger conceptual model. Adaptive Path's Information Architect Leah Buley's trip to the California Academy of Sciences prompted the essay of the company's current newletter issue.
In the article she showed a picture of trash bins at the academy and came to the conclusion that labels matter after all! I couldn't agree more. The image in Leah's essay inspired me to do a little Google Image research on trash recycling.

trash bins at the California Academy: Image by Leah Buley

Spanish trash bins

German trash bins

Maltese trash bins

Palmer/Obama

Life is truly immitating art. Would Senator Obama been able to win the democratic nomination without TV's "24"? It seems like a ridiculous question and yet, other blogs have been wondering about the same thing ("markmeynell", TV Blog "Remote Access").

In this article Dennis Haysbert says his role paved the way Barack Obama.

Photoshop CS 3 - worst Photoshop version ever!

Ok, ok, ok... I bitched about it before...

Adobe CS Blues
Abobe CS3, OS X Installation Problems
Adobe Flash CS3 Unstable Crapware

... but I can't get over it because as a designer Photoshop effects my life every single day. I am miserable, angry and frustrated. If you actually use many layers and organize them folders - be warned! Even though my work is screen based with file sizes around 20 MB PS crashes and hangs and f***s up daily. You WILL restart your computer often. You WILL lose work and waste time.

I used to run PS on a Mac Quadra 605 with 20 MG of ram and "Ram Doubler" installed. I expected to sit and watch progress bars. Get used to it again.



I should have never updated to CS 3. This suite is a sham. It's a memory hog (MBP, 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of ram).



If you would like to avoid a lot of this....



... and haven't bought CS 3 - save your nerves and don't buy it! It's not worth the money.

That was fast!

Wasn't it not only a few months back that we first heard of multi touch technology, the iPhone and Jeff Han? I recently gave a lecture on touch technology at the University of Salzburg, Austria. I wanted to start my talk by going back to the roots. So I (image-)googled the word "touch" expecting to find images of mothers with babies or perhaps pornography. Instead my search returned pictures of devices equipped with touch technology - over 58,000,000.00 of them!! Has the word "touch" become synonomous with "touch technology"?

I am surprised how fast it trickled into the public conciousness, especially since touch technology only uses a small fraction of our actual sense of touch. The abilities to sense temperature, shape, degrees of softness, texture, pain or the position of your muscles and joints are not playing any part in touch technology so far. A slick surface provides little haptic feedback which for example makes typing difficult.

At this year's Cebit convention, T-Mobile had an multi-touch installation, that was part Minority Report, part Jeff Han Screen and part vertical MS Surface "wall". In this video people seem so bored with the content itself. In fact they are not dealing with the data at all. How long will it take for the novelty of scaling and turning objects to wear off? What kind of interesting public application could this offer?

Service Efficienista

I've been buying my coffee at Starbucks for 15 years. I think that outs me as a fan of the company. Yesterday I strolled into Starbucks at Astor Place and was greeted by a member of the staff wearing a "Janet Jackson Mic". He asked for my order. I was bothered by the experience, because instead of looking at the face of the person greeting me, I stared at his microphone and wondered who he was talking to when he dispatched my caffein craving. I couldn't see his collegue at the receiving end. Instead of talking to me, his attention was with somebody "out there". Headphones indicate privacy, because we usually listen to something like music or a phone conversation.

The experience became technical and distancing, rather then personal. Since I associate Starbucks with hours of hanging out over a cup of coffee (and maybe a refill..). I wonder if other customers felt rushed as well. And what happens if you don't know which coffee drink you're in the mood for today?

A few years ago I helped creating the technical service scenario at the Prada Epicenter Store on Prince and Broadway in New York. My Job was building the user interface for the store's "staff device", a hand held computer that could do everything from reading RFID tags to pulling up stock information and customer history. In my opinion it was a gigantic flop, because nobody researched the experience of what it would actually feel like to use the device in a customer/sales rep relationship. I walked into the store many times over the years and talked to the people working there about the staff device. I watched them and not once did I see an employee using one.

We have to be very careful when adding technology to a sales scenario. The experience can be off-putting - at least to the customer.

No Flash Player for iPhone Anytime Soon!

(Sound of expelled breath...)

At the shareholder meeting two days ago Steve Jobs spelled it out: no Flashplayer for the iPhone! The reasons? Flash Lite, Adobe's Flash Player for the mobile platform is too weak, the desktop version too slow on the iPhone. The iPhone, in other words, needs a new Flash Player!

(not holding my breath here...)

Since Safari on the iPhone is the real thing, a Flash Lite version of the player wouldn't help anybody. Most Flash sites for the internet simply can't be transported to the lite player. More then ever it is best practices to have an html version of your Flash sites to avoid user frustration.

User Driven Design is NOT User Centered Design!

Today I participated in a study conducted by the University of Basel – http://phpserver.psycho.unibas.ch/websiteexpectation

It asked to wireframe a typical online shop, online newspaper and company web site by dragging and dropping UI elements like "main navigation" , "company logo", "contact link" onto a screen. What exactly does this study hope to accomplish?



If you want to improve usability on websites you need to look at each specific case. There is no generic online-shop which works for *all* situations, products and users. Leave the improvement of usability to designers who will apply user research results and combine them with their own skills and creativity. This kind of study does not lead to more usable web sites. Just to innovation-free same ol'-same ol'.

I believe in a designer's work experience, the knowledge of what works and what doesn't. I believe in creativity, breakthroughs and revolution. I believe in the intricate knowledge of human behavior and desire. Stop praying at the altar of the-user-knows-best!

Two days ago the Mac Book Air came out. If it will turn out to be a visionary product remains to be seen, but the omission of an optical drive, driven by the goal to create a truly wireless machine, is bold. It wouldn't have happened if you had ask typical laptop users if they wanted that.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
Steve Jobs May 25, 1998

Applelujah!

Wal-Mart Sells Universal MP3s without DRM Restrictions. No Mac Support!

Wether Universal is truly interested in selling DRM free music online remains to be seen. Starting yesterday, they made a selection of albums and song available at walmart.com until January 31st. Each song can be purchased for 94 cents. Other vendors, including Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Google Inc., Best Buy Co., RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody,..., were chosen for this test-run. Interestingly Apple‘s Musicstore was excluded, despite the fact that it is the largest platform for music downloads. Although MP3s are completely compatible with any music playing device – including the iPod and iPhone platforms, Mac Users are not welcome on Walmart‘s site. Instead they presented with this message:

We‘re sorry, your operating system is incompatible. .....visit again after you upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP.

Incompatible with DRM free music downloads?? Somebody willing to upgrade their system to download some crappy MP3s?

Then I asked a collegue with Parallels and WIN XP installed to load the site, I was curious to see the interface Walmart came up with:

Why is all type on the page so tiny?



Songs can be previewed, but there is no „player“ functionality. You have to listen to a song to the bitter end, even when you don‘t like it. Sad...

Typing on the iPhone, Practise Makes Perfect?

The first order of the day after my arrival in New York was to visit a store that sold the iPhone, in my case the Union Square location of AT&T. The store was almost empty and got access to an iPhone immediately. After studying the device exstensively online, I felt pretty comfortable using it right away, until I tried to enter a URL in Safari‘s address bar. Using the virtual keyboard is incredibly tough!! I mistyped constantly and everything. Forget about a two thumb approach. Thumbs are less of a pointing device, they hit the keyboard on an angle and force you to compensate for it, which is a hard thing to do. A few days later I met my friend Dave Carroll, associate professor at Parsons School of Design's graduate degree program Design and Technology. Dave is a notorious early adopter and has some great iPhone tips to share on his blog mercurious.com. He convinced me to trust the iPhone spell correction feature. So I tried to plow through writing text without regard to spelling. After a little while I was able to produced text fairly fluently.



However, the spell correction does not come into place when typing URLs. Get used to bookmarking URLs as fast as possible! I was disappointed that the iPhone doesn‘t have any other dictionary but the english one. Don‘t look for international keyboard layouts. They are not implemented with this first version. This iPhone is strictly for the english speaking market, which is weird because the States are so diverse as far as spoken languages go. Dave showed me javascript based keyboard layouts online, but their small button sizes are not suited for the iPhones finger-pointer approach.

Wholefoods Cuts the Dispatcher Person

Observe a new implemetation of interaction design: Already famous for their well thought out dispatch system that allows Wholefoods to get 100 customers through the registers in about 5 Minutes, they automated (improved?) the process. The store got rid of the dispatcher person in favor of a computerized service. Customers line up in up to 8 colorcoded ailes. A monitor overhead displays corresponding color bars that sequentially display as well as „call out“ the next available cash register. The system senses faster then a person could when a register has become available again.



Apparently the usefulness of the system is up for debate. The next day the dispatcher guy was back to work in „tandem“ with the system. In my personal opinion the system is clear enough, speeds up the waiting in line and relieves a person from a tedious dispatch job.

Adobe CS 3 Blues

I am soooo frustrated with Adobe CS3. I've complained about it before. This is another warning! Photoshop sucks up more resources than my entire system. I am working on a MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of memory and I am here to tell you: It's not enough! You will experience lags of 3-6 minutes(!) while Photoshop collects data from the hard drive instead of memory. It will feel like PS died on you. (My work is all screenbased, my files are tiny). You will endure frustrating crashes, especially when using "Save for Web and Devices". The whole application often feels like a beached whale. I hoped for speedy and elegant and bought CS3 the day it came out, because I so wanted my tools to be optimized for the Intel chipset. Well, keep hoping!



Flash is not much better. Adobe opted to create an annoying fade-in-all-windows-when-switching-between-apps effect that accomplishes first and foremost a laggy response. Don't ever try to use the debugger before saving your work FIRST, you will experience crashes!

Physical Interfaces: BumbTop, the iPhone and Leopard

Recently I rewatched Anand Agarawala's demo BumbTop at TED 2007. BumbTop is a three dimension cubicle desktop. Documents on the desktop have physical qualities like weight, size, light reflection etc. They can be stacked, flipped through, bumbed into and organized in ways more similar to a real world desktop.



What struck me in the demo was the audience's reception. Partly due to Anand's humorous presention style, but largely because of the surprise effect the interface holds, the audience was clapping, laughing, even cheering. When the iPhone was introduce in January there were tons of moments like these. When Steve Jobs first scrolled through a song list with the flip of his fingers, the audience erupted. It is the RE-cognition factor. In that instance we identify a resemblance between real life physical behavior and the onscreen simulation of such physicality. It is a magical moment.

At the WWDC 2007 Steve Jobs presented the latest beta release of Leopard, Apple's upcoming OS for Macintosh. For a long time I imagined Apple's designers to arrive at their user interface solution by cheer genius. It never occured to me that the might take their "inspiration" from others, even purchase UI solution like Coverflow (first introduce to the general public with iTunes 7) from Steelskies . With the release of Leopard it will be a standard way to view information in its redesigned Finder.


"Stacks" in Leopard's Desktop

Leopard continues and broadens its use of animation as a general interface element. The Dock tags on the new "stack" feature, which may have been borrowed from BumbTops stack function, but lacks its physicality. Other Leopard features show me the direction Apple's interfaces are headed. Coverflow, Time Machine, Stacks and Spaces are all feature that rely heavily on animation. At the heart of them is Core Animation, a set of animation routines offered to developers to easily produce animated interfaces.

Leopard looks fun to use, but generally feels light, digital and spacey (quite literally in Time Machine). Animations in Leopard accelerate and decrease in speed which is a quality taken from a real world physicality. There is a new quality of light and shadow peeking through the new 3d-ish Dock design, but compared to BumbTop there is no sense of weight. The reason for that might be that we are still using a mouse pointing device.
In BumbTop is strikes me as odd to manipulate objects imbued with weight using a mouse pointer which cannot return physical feedback that resembles pushing weighted objects around. In makes sense that Leopard lacks the physical quality of weight. Leopard will also run on the iPhone, where the manipulation of information is accomplish with your fingers. While weighted pressure on its multi-touch surface will have no bearing, speed of movement does and thus represents one more step in the direction of physical interfaces.

Wireless Power Transfer at MIT

Yesterday technologyreview.com published an article about wireless power transfer. MIT researchers were able to transfer electricity wirelessly to make a lightbulb light up.



I would love to lead a cable free existence! No more bulky charger cables to bring along on vacation and to the office? I'm sold!



In the article Professor Peter Fisher, one of the researchers, said: "As long as the laptop is in a room equipped with a source of wireless power, it would charge automatically without having to be plugged in. In fact, it would not even need a battery to operate inside such a room."







No batteries would make my labtop a lot lighter.... Then I remembered that I am already scared of the electro-magnetic fields of my cell phone. What about the safety of living organism in such equipped rooms? The thought of overhead coils charging my laptops, cell phones and light bulbs was starting to make me very uncomfortable.



Later I read a report on dailymail.co.uk. Dr Soljacic, one of the researchers said that:



"Most objects in the room - such as people, desks and carpets - would be unaffected by the electromagnetic field. But any objects designed to resonate with the electromagnetic field would absorb the energy[....] The researchers believe there is little to worry about on safety grounds, saying that magnetic fields interact weakly with living organisms and are unlikely to have any serious side effects."











Noticing the large amount of comments to the technologyreview.com article, I got curious. The comments were heated. People seemed very knowledgable about induction coils and called the project "dungheap" and "hype".



Kitk said:



" Systems like this can put out nasty little surges of vastly higher peak power than whatever is rated--mine burned a hole through insulated aluminum sheet metal. Sure, the new ones might control that, but ANYTHING that receives this power by coupling even a little, even at a microscopic level, can be cooked! I never tried my test a second time, because I knew if the transfer went wrong, I might light up and cook. Great lab trick, but like home nuclear reactors, not too wise."



Salammoniac was really familiar with the subject matter and furious about the hype:



"[...]45% efficiency is nothing to crow about. It's lousy, requiring 133 watts to drive a 60 watt bulb. On top of that, I bet that number is coil in to coil out efficiency, not wall socket to light bulb. A simple power cord will be at least 99% efficient, socket to bulb, more if you use a fatter cord. That's why we use wires, dummy.

Having this thing running all the time is the electromagnetic equivalent of turning on the fire sprinklers, so that whenever you are thirsty, all you have to do is hold out your cup."



That doesn't sound very convincing. We'll see in a few years time. In the meantime get a new Apple labtop. At least their magnetically attached power cords won't make you trip and kill yourself ... or your computer.