Windows alert box at Luton Airport

Originally uploaded by Richard M Marshall

I love it when display systems show inappropriate messages. I guess whoever writes this stuff just doesn’t think it’s going to happen, in this case the idea of an alert appearing on alternate graphics card perhaps. Maybe it’s lack of a central reporting mechanism.

I discovered that one of my colleagues with an N95 8Gb didn’t know he could hold down the “menu” key and get a list of running applications and switch between them, like Alt-TAB on Windows. I’ve know that for a while, but someone had to show me originally when I first started using S60 devices. It’s just plain not obvious.

I also found out that you can use the left and right arrows to step through e-mails, automatically downloading and displaying the next message. I guess that’s obvious when you think about it - up and down scroll the text, so that’s two dimensions - but it’s not simple to find out without pressing the wrong button.

So the big question is, how can these useful functions be made easier to find on a mobile device, especially when people don’t read anything? Some ideas coming up soon.

Hugely busy week, which is great, but I managed to have some time to have a coffee and chat to Nigel Eccles of Hubdub.com today. As we were swapping notes on our companies, he commented that much as he liked his N95 he found it very hard to find the things he used regularly. I showed him my fully customised so-called ‘active’ main screen and he was amazed. So I showed him how to change the configuration.

He asked a very good question: why does Nokia hide such useful features under many, many levels of clicks? Why aren’t their no-doubt numerous and talented human factors people  allowed to fix this? Good questions, no answers.

[Off this evening to watch my friend Osman Kent of SongPhonic records narrate a show of Turkish Whirling Dervishes at the Edinburgh International Festival. Very cool. No links as the Festival ends this weekend.]

This blog has now been rehosted at our co-lo and should now be much faster. Editing articles is certainly dramatically faster. Unfortunately one comment on the Patent 2.0 item fell between the two versions. If you could repost that would be great, sorry about that.

I’ll be writing more next week now that the move has hardened.

One of my rules in business has always been to grasp problems head on and solve them, ideally turning customer frustration to delight. For deep software engagements this can lead to a much stronger relationship than a purely successful deployment. Clearly you don’t go in intending to fail, but if something does go wrong, take the time to make it better than right. While this is far from being original thought, it’s interesting to see how different companies handle failure.

I happened to post on twitter that I was having trouble streaming an AlwaysOn video via Blip.tv. Shortly afterwards I received an e-mail from someone at Blip offering to help solve the problem. Unsurprisingly the problem, which was probably in the last mile, had solved itself by then anyway and I was able to watch the suggested test video - a 7 minute eposide of Captain Blasto. The streaming was perfect, which is more than can be said for the acting, and I was happy to post back on Twitter and here about the incident.

On the other hand, I’ve been trying to book some tickets for the Edinburgh International Festival (aka the Official Festival for us locals). Two nights in a row the website declared that my cards were declined which was nonsense. I e-mailed in the problem and received a polite, somewhat-apologetic message to the effect that no one else had complained and that tickets were being sold, and that there might be an issue with the address, I could try the box office. In other words a nicely worded brush off. I tried the site again and it still was failing, so booked via the phone. The chap on the phone was very helpful, but that’s not really the point. Someone should have taken the pain of understanding what was going wrong.

So I’m delighted at Blip but reserved about the reliability of Hub Tickets.

I’ve just taken my first Ryanair flight. It was a good experience, and while the removal of the magazine pocket might make storing in-flight stuff difficult, it certainly improves leg room. Good swap in my view; shove your reading material into your pockets. Or talk to your neighbour, as I ended up doing, a very pleasant student of Physics and Philosophy heading to Dublin for a Muse concert. I had to admit to never having heard of muse; talk about feeling old.

Anyway, the thing that struck me was interesting was that the cabin crew used a sensible technique for the headcount. Rather than struggling to count up the actual number of heads, they counted the empty seats. On this flight there were only 18 open seats, a much more manageable number to hold in your head, and with the benefit that they don’t move around.

My rocket scientist friend Jean Chevallier had long ago suggested that this was a much better match to the requirement of knowing exactly how many people were on board, but this was this was the first time I’d seen it happen.

So thought for the day: look for simpler, more reliable ways of doing things.

Why do so many devices and services come with irritations. Here, for example, are but two that have annoyed me today:

When I plug my N95 into the USB port of the computer the phone asks me if I want PC Suite or Data mode. But it leaves the keyboard locked and I have to unlock the keyboard before I can make the selection. Surely the S60 asynchronous UI kit can cope with unlocking the screen on such an event?

Why does the Apple AppStore  list apps in no apparent order? I was scrolling through the Utilities category, which is definitely a misnomer, and could not see any logical reason for the ordering. inode number on the server?

How come the market puts up with these things when most of the rest of the consumer products market would reject it out of hand. One reason is that people invest quite a lot of effort in setting up their tech gadgets and don’t fancy going through the painful process again. Any other suggestions?

I’ve just spent a while down in a carphonewarehouse as Graham from the engineering team asked me to chum him along and help make the difficult decision of what new phone to get to replace his ancient Motorola RAZR. iPhone is too big and he already has an iPod Touch so he’s quite familiar with the user interface.

The choice was between an HTC Touch Diamond and the Samsung Tocca. Both roughly the same size, both touch screen, and both with cameras and the like. But the big difference is that the HTC Touch runs Windows Mobile with their own layer of graphics on top of it.

The HTC was the first device to be brought out, in a fancy pyramidal box. Once extracted from the case has a slightly strange diamond cut back to it.  Impressive packaging and design, even if none of us actually liked it.

However the real horror was switching the thing on for the first time. It’s just like starting up a Windows PC - lots of questions, restarts, and well, it’s just not consumer friendly. We had to hand it over to Garry, our laconic Carphonewarehouse salesdroid to  actually get it into the graphical user interface. And when we did there was at least a 2s lag on every operation. I clicked on what I thought would be SMS, to try the virtual keyboard, but it turned out to be e-mail and wanted configuring. Most consumers would have given up by this point. Someone at Microsoft and HTC have forgotten that this is supposed to be a phone primarily.

Clearly this is a lesson that Samsung have taken to heart. A nice package appeared out of the plain packaging and in a few seconds the phone was working. Particularly like the easy dragging of widgetty sort of things onto the desktop. However scrolling through lists was pretty wierd. Nice feedback on the touch screen, and the virtual keypad worked really well. That phone is really getting places. Only non-consumer issue was that the keyboard selection had EN as it’s label. For people who are not familar with locales, that’s not particularly clear.

In the end Graham decided that both devices had their strong points and their weaknesses and is going to think some more.

I’m delighted to say that a piece of mine is guest blog at TechCrunk UK:
Startup in the sticks - Top 10 tips on how to be an isolated Entrepreneur in the UK.

As I have already noted my office roof started raining leak water, which eventually became enough to destroy the roof tiles and soak a large area of the floor. Inevitably the leaks were directly about where my computers normally sit. Initially we pulled my desk back a meter or so, but the splashing was still enough to be a hazard. So I moved out into some spare desks, then a meeting room, and now I’m in another spare desk.

This has been an interesting lesson in mobile working. First of all, my desktop has is piled up in bits in a corner and I’ve been working on my laptop, most of the time on WiFi. There has been no impact on my ability to operate, at all. I normally only use the desktop for things needing a large scree, such as programming or graphics, and since I don’t do those very often, it’s not been a big miss.

Next, my desk phone is still sitting there. We could have patched it through to another socket in another room, but there was no need. I just use the mobile, and if I want to talk to someone else in the office I can walk over to them, or use IM.

I’m lucky enough to have my own private office with a door (mainly because I’m noisy and distracting for other people!), and that is difficult to replicate. Bose headphones help keep down the background noise, but they don’t help with private phone calls.

And finally my clutter. I like working surrounded by stuff: books, pictures, things to fiddle with, magazines. They give insipration and drive creativity. That I would miss if I had no fixed office.

Seems we’ve cut the office technology chord completely, but not the importance of work atmosphere. As usual the human element is more important than the tech.