Just to show that everyone can make mistakes on the web, no matter how big you are or how much money you have. I got here by clicking on the “Convert” button in an Office 2007 completed trial. I wanted to see pricing, but low, I can’t. Oh well.
I’ve pointed out before that the Apple iPod/iPhone software’s reliance on the clickable panic button is a real weakness. This morning I’ve been working with an LG Chocolate which has a mixture of touch buttons for navigation and softkeys, but a real clickable keypad for data entry. The screen is dark, small, and recessed behind a fashionable casing and is not touchable.
I find it difficult to move from the light brushing movement needed for the touch buttons to the quite firm click of the keypad. Combined with the small size is makes for cramped fingers. Even discounting the awful LG user interface software, it makes for doing anything other than making calls very fiddly.
Clearly anybody with a feeling for user interface design will know that consistency of action is important; now we can add to that the need for physical consistency of the interface.
Insisting that everything be artificially consistent is, of course, just as bad, so I think that answering/hanging up calls work well with a positive click, even if the rest of the interface is just brushing.
Clearly there is plenty of scope for additional innovtion in physical handset design as well as user interface software.
I remember reading a comment to the effect that a lot of the “2.0″ stuff was putting “the interface layer people in charge of the infrastructure” and this just doesn’t work. Twitter’s lack of reliability is a painful example of this happening in practice.
However not all “2.0″ services and people should be tarred with this brush.
I love this article in Time about how the iPhone 3G will be ideal for mobile porn. Gosh, you can cut out the carrier, gosh kids will be able to get at it. So how does this change from any other phone with a browser, or for that matter an iPod Touch?
However the humour in the article appears to be unintentional: “the iPhone is like a Trojan horse that lets smut providers cut out the carrier as middleman.” Heavens above, they missed off the trademark on Trojan! And it gets better: the Apple spokewoman is called Bowcock. The less said about that the better, I think.
On a more serious note, as a service provider things like Vodafone’s Adult Content Blocker is an inconvenience, it’s not very well implemented, but it does actually do what it says on the tin. However the article makes no mention of the good work that has been done in the UK at least in this area, and it ignores the unregulatable world of personal wifi.
You can feel the glee oozing out between the words as the journalists report that Android has been delayed. We told you so, the mobile world is not as easy as you tried to make it look screams the whitespace between some banal reporting.
However this Schadenfreude hides the real story, which is hinted at in this quote from FierceWireless “insiders say carriers are having trouble customizing Android so it promotes their own Internet offerings.”
The whole point of the internet and Android was openness and configuration, so this translates as “the carriers are finding it difficult to prevent users getting access to Google’s services.” It would be simply stupid to blame replacing one icon with another pointing to a fixed carrier deck for a multi-month slide in deadlines, it must be deeper.
So my I told you so for the day was that the “open” in Android is only for the operators, not for consumers.
Reading Neil Perkin’s post on failing quickly after a day of working on various patents highlighted the huge gulf between the way we need to work today and the systems our great-great grandfathers put in place. Nearly 30 months after submitting a patent covering some of our mobile advertising technology I’m now having to do some work relating to the application, when it’s being ad-powering sites like metro.mobi for months. That’s daft.
So why bother with patents? Simple - investors use them as evidence of intellectual property ownership. Patent portfolios directly represent company value. And you’d be surprised to find out just how many patents the champions of web time and 2.0 are filing - hundreds of them.
But there must be a better way to achieve this value and protection, especially for smaller companies and inviduals for whom patenting is prohibitively expensive.
So what is Patent 2.0?
This BBC interview has Bill Gates reminiscing about how it all got started, including how Paul Allen lower him into the rubbish to recover a listing of the operating system source for the minicomputer they were playing with in the evenings. He also describes how he wrote a scheduling algorithm for his school that managed the classes, which had the interesting quirk that most of the girls in his year were in his classes.
As it happens I wrote a scheduling program for my father’s school back in probably 1980 or so, my father was talking about it the other day. My one replaced a system of cards which could have holes punched or clipped in them to allow selection using metal rods. Each pupil had a card and by using the rods the school could spot timetable clashes. Mine worked on an Apple II in UCSD Pascal and took many hours of churning to come up with a printed listing of an optimal solution. I remember it printed our rows of stars on the screen for each pass over the data to show it was still working. It was used by my father’s school for quite a few years.
I’ve been running my N95 8GB with e-mail connected all the time at home to try the push e-mail. It’s great - my pocket goes chrrrrring! everytime a new e-mail arrives, in real time. It’s a neat piece of technology and even managed to make my elder daughter jealous as I was getting more messages than her!
For e-mail addicts like me this is great, however most of the messages are spam in the evening, which dramatically reduces the utility of the alerts. Phone clients need to get with the program and include some form of spam filtering. It’s not that difficult, since our server marks everything dodgy - all the client would have to do is detect [spam] and put it into a different inbox. I’m sure you can get different e-mail clients that do that, but they won’t support the push and they won’t be integrated as well into the user experience.
I’ve just been contacted by a German student about my chaotic desk. Ania asked me some questions about how I work in this happy chaos, how I find objects, do I lose items, and anything that might help. I was able to answer these promptly, and Ania reply with thanks and promises to send me the results of her design diploma.
Now roll back a couple of years and this would not have been possible. Ania’s research would have been forcibly limited to her fellow students, staff, family and friends. That’s not a good control group as they are likely to have similar demographics and behaviours.
Using Flickr was a very smart way of crossing those boundaries and getting a much wider selection.
Last year one of my Flickr photos was picked to go into the Schmap guide to New York City, thereby making me feel good, avoiding them paying for the image, and putting professional travel photographers out of work. Or something like that - they do link back to the original source which is nice.
They have now put their guide in an iPhone format, and sent me this link to see what it looks like. If you access this link from the iPhone/iPod touch you get the real thing, if you access it from a desktop browser, you get an emulation. That’s cool.
