The first days we buy a new computer it always seems much faster than the old one and we are very delighted. But what happen after? Do we get used to it and we don’t notice the speed anymore? Maybe. Do we install lots of software and it gets slower? Maybe. Do we install new much heavier versions of our software and it starts struggling? This for sure!

Come on, it’s cool to have a new flaming version of our favorite software with lots of new feature we almost never use. It’s true, this is a cheap argument, but the benchmark published few days ago should make us think more about this. Hopefully with flash hard-drives at least the starting up will speed up a lot (of course if we wouldn’t have to restart Windows continuously because all its dirty resources usage), but what will happen with all the other applications?

If we think about what happened in all these years, we can easily understand why this happened. The first reasons that come to my mind are:

• Much higher competition: many more software houses fighting to implement the most pointless feature, the important is that it is new, otherwise you wouldn’t pay all that money for it.
• Much shorter software life: The software life got much shorter, computer companies changed processors continuously (especially Macs) so when you change computer you have to update your software as well. Who would bother to fix some bugs when a new release will come shortly?
• Many users like stupid effects on their computer’s GUI: I was looking for some videos on YouTube related to OpenGL and the firsts I got where the ones that represented a Linux distro with the fire effect burning the windows, to close them, or distortion effect on the windows while dragging them. Weren’t the Linux users the more pragmatic ones? I’m also wondering who likes that cheesy effect of the Time Machine in the new MacOS with moving stars and so on.

In a very competitive business we know how the user experience is easily the last issue to be considered. Take the mobile phones as example. Why after so many years there is still so much crap around? The only explanation is that the customers are all fools. Maybe they never had a good phone or they just don’t give a s*it. Personally I care about it and I’ve been lucky enough to have a Treo650 for more than 2 years. It is very good for many things:

• It doesn’t crash
• The Operating System is very user friendly and it is designed for touch-screens (and it has of course one)
• You have many applications, sometimes open-source and written by single developers, that make it even more handy
• The battery lasts a lot

Of course there where also some bad things:

• Very poor audio quality during conversation
• Very poor camera definition

Not so many bad things, so the minimum that you would expect is that the newer versions will solve those stupid issues and will provide you a fantastic user experience. Too easy, reality is that the new versions (also years more recent) are even worse.

I tried to change the phone with one running Windows Mobile 5, but that OS would be able to make the biggest Microsoft fan trash a brand new phone straight away after some of those fantastic error windows. We were almost forgetting that the phone now is a computer.

Finally Steve Jobs arrives and claims that he will provide the best phone experience with their new Iphone. At least they noticed that at the moment there is no phone on the market that doesn’t have same bad defects. For them, though, the phone is something you use to see movies, listen music or watch the internet. Personally instead I write messages, I write new appointments, I write notes. In few words, I write! For this reason I would appreciate much more a full qwerty keyboard like the Treo, but I’m probably a minority and they will also provide a fantastic multi-touch sensitive screen! I’m sure they will make some clever changes because at the moment it doesn’t appeal to me to do hundreds time the same gesture to scroll my pictures when I could just repeat the pressure of a button (or keeping it pressed). They wanted though to keep the user experience safe and thus not to make the platform accessible to bad developers. Hey, they just found a solution, since the phone will run Safari, why not to use javascript? Wow, very good news considering the limitation of it and that of course you won’t be able to use the multi-touch capability. Couldn’t they certified the quality of third part software or have a way to easily uninstall the software in the case some amateur, like me, would ruin their fantastic user experience? Another missed opportunity to make the World better, or at least people more happy!
I don’t want to be hypocrite, I did lots of not user-friendly softwares in my life (including very CPU intensive flash banners), but I’m feeling it’s time to do something NOW. Vista is out and is rubbish, new mobiles are out and are rubbish. Let’s stop buying new technology until they won’t care about the user long term satisfaction and thus not considering us as kids that after few days won’t play anymore to the same toy (but of course they really wanted it). At the moment I just hope my Treo650 will run for long, very long.

Our mobiles screens are getting everyday bigger and brighter, my Treo, for instance, is capable of transforming itself in a light in not daylight contexts. This made me think of many ideas around the context of using the mobile display as a short range communication tool. Quite interesting the fact that it is meant to be for very long range interactions.
There are also situations in public where speaking becomes odd and also shyness can be an obstacle. If we consider that nowadays our environment is getting crowded of flat screen / projectors, why not to use our own?

In this first implementation the user can use the display to show text messages he writes, not sms. The size of the text of course depends on the display size. The user can then change the text speed if necessary. As you can see it’s a pretty banal application, but it could be a good start to investigate on the usages we could do of those big displays.

Following two demo videos, unfortunately not a proper scenario, I’ll leave it to your imagination (someone trying to approach a gril in a club, for instance, or suggesting something private to a friend in public spaces).

Due for technical limitations of the platform I developed the first prototype, many of my ideas are not yet implemented, but hopefully I’ll be able to do it soon or later (if anyone is interested on helping me, it will be of course welcome).

At the moment it has been developed a PalmOS version, thanks to the fundamental work from Jagat N. Mahapatra, and a FlashLite 2.x version, that I did by myself. At the moment I’m considering the eventuality of developing a J2ME version (that would make it much more accessible).

Any feedback is welcome.

When this autumn began I decided as indoor spare time activity (everyone knows how sad winter in London is) to improve my poor C++ maybe applying it to hand held devices. I had some applications in mind that I wanted to create and as Palm Treo owner, and in need of multimedia functionalities, with J2ME it wouldn’t have been straight forward anyway.

After my computers have been stolen (and thus lost the source of many experiments) and found out that OOP in PalmOS is not that recommended, after many months of not exiting results I ended up looking for a technical partner for PalmOS development. At that speed I would have probably delivered the applications way after PalmOS was extinct.

Of course my interest was far from producing final and refined software, i wanted mainly to prototype some ideas and it’s clear C is not the most recommended platform for prototyping, but due to my learning interest and poor testing devices availability I gave it a go.

Luckily I recently bought a second hand Nokia N70 where I could easily install FlashLite 2.1 and very easily prototype the applications with limited hardware access. In the same device I will be probably be able to use in Java at least some multimedia functionalities for more complex prototypes.

I’ll post soon the first concept, stay tuned!

While I’m finally reading Raskin’s master piece “The Humane Interface”, I came across an inspiring article. Like many of the people working on IT I’m always involved in duscussions that compare Mac versus Windows, or Apple versus Microsoft.

Being in the past mainly a Flash Developer I had to switch from Mac to PC many years ago because the big differences in the performances with that technology. In these years I enjoyed very good performances and the possibility to easily develop with different and new technologies (like J2ME, Palm OS and Flash itself) that otherwise would have been almost impossible. I left the mac soon after Mac OS X was released. I kept an eye on it from far, of course, appreciating the introduction of features like Expose and Spotlight. When few months ago though, I had to use a new I-Mac G5 to do some video editing in the office I was very disappointed from the slow responsiveness of its GUI due mainly by the fancy visual effects. Working on interactive media I reckon I’m quite sensible to these differences and those fancy effects seemed to me more annoying than inspiring. Are they that necessary?

More recently due to the growing pressure Microsoft is doing to partners about the usage of WPF, we had to do some tests in the office with Windows Vista. Probably feeling so backward comparing to Apple, Microsoft tried to animate everything to make it look cooler. Animations are cool - who could argue with that? - but as soon they get cranky and repetitive they became unavoidably A PAIN. We tried Vista on a brand new Dell with 512 MB video card, unfortunately not very good with the 3D (Nvidia Quadro NVS), and the performances were so bad that if the computer was mine I would have removed ALL the effects straight away, my masochist colleague instead is still using them. A better analysis has been done by John C. Welch and is the article I was mentioned before. Despite I’m still convinced about the slowness in OS X GUI, I like his comparison between the two systems using the example of Evolution versus Revolution. It’s clear that Microsoft wanted to do something new, unfortunately not necessarely better. Of course when we design the update of a product we have to keep in consideration the knowledge people have about its older versions, so starting from scratch is clearly never the way to go.

I wouldn’t post an obvious thing like this if yesterday Apple didn’t try to “revolutionate” the phone. Apple, in facts, tried to reinvent the phone using a fullscreen multi-touch display. I don’t want to go into the market issues, we know that cell phones’ success depends a lot from the providers and iPhone could have easily issues regarding that. It’s also nice sometimes being able to reply to the phone without having to look a screen maybe just feeling the buttons. There is no doubt that this jewel will make people talk a lot about and that many fans will do all possible to put hands on in. My concerns are about the fact that despite Apple definitely tried to make users lives easier, I noticed too much the attitude on revolutionate instead of evolving. It seems they tried to add the most wow factors features, like its scrolling and zoom with the multitouch screen, without necessary consider the usability issues. The inertia when scrolling is cool but I’m wondering if it would be faster to scroll it with a kind of scrollbar (only a swipe from top to down to scroll the whole list) or maybe studing the usage of more fingers for that interaction, and others, to speed up the task. Scrolling images seems even weaker in my opinion, wouldn’t be quicker and less effort demanding, for instance, the pressure of a stupid button? Of course much less cool but I wouldn’t scroll 100 images in its way and I’m sure there could have been a cooler and more usable solution to scroll elements, at the end the I-Pod’s wheel strongest point was probably that (they could have done a virtual wheel also, like some patents they registered showed). Of course they should have done their internal tests, but I still have big concerns about the productivity of those interaction solutions.

Revolutions unfortunately don’t bring always to evolution and if they do it they don’t do it smoothly, creating useless issues that with a proper evolution we wouldn’t face.

On October I will be judging a contest about games developed for Flash Lite platform. It is organized by the very active Italian Community Actionscript.it, and it is open to everyone, not just Italians.

Personally I would have prefered a more general contest, including thus applications, but it wasn’t possible since Macromedia did already one. But probably many of us would like to see applications more similar to games , especially the ones for children that is already a good target if we consider how many of them use already a mobile phone. So maybe I would add the category application for children that can’t be so far from a game

Probably it wouldn’t so important if the acquirent wasn’t Google. With Dodgeball acquisition the mobile social networking makes a very big step forward. Nice move from google.