Digital inequalities

John Naughton reports a NY Times article on wireless bandwidth consumption. Not surprisingly, 10% of users are consuming 90% of the bandwidth...and Finns consume 1 gigabyte of wireless data a month; 10 times the rest of Europe.

QR codes and twitching

Hugo Andrade and David Parra Puente, of the Pacoche Nature Reserve in Ecuador, are trying to connect birdsong with identification information, using QR codes as a mediator between the two: something like Shazam for birdsong. The QR code step may seem a bit clunky but it allows a two-way interaction from song to book, and vice versa, recognising the limitations of typical birdsong descriptions ('tee-do-do-eet') in field guides and, perhaps, that mobile phones have limitations for field consultation.

[Reported by Jennifer Ouelette via NotExactlyRocketScience]

Siri says

This and many more at STSS.

[via John Naughton]

Steve Jobs

Couldn't let the day pass without some comment on Steve Jobs, without whose contribution I and probably many others might still be finding IT awkward but necessary. This quote comes from an interview in Wired in 1996.

What's the biggest surprise this technology will deliver?

The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't.

That's going to break people's hearts.

I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much - if at all.

These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I'm not downplaying that. But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light - that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important.

It's quoted by Tim Carmody in a thoughtful piece on how Apple technology helps his son, who is on the autistic spectrum, communicate. 

[via Mark Barratt]

What's the use of an iPad?

John Naughton quotes Andrew Orlowski's review of the HP's Touchpad:
'After just one year, the iPad is making more revenue than Apple's 30-year-old personal computer division. It's almost bringing in as much as Dell brings in from PCs. This is a huge business, already. And nobody can quite say what their iPad is good for. If ever a computer was a means to an end, then the iPad is it – rather than doing anything uniquely iPad-ish, it takes lots of "ends" a laptop (or Kindle, or smartphone) gets you to, and just gets you there slightly more conveniently. PCs are going to be around a long time; the iPad will be right there alongside them.'
Reminds me of Clayton Christensen's assessment in The Innovator's Dilemma of Apple's early abandonment of the Newton:
'...when they initially emerge, neither manufacturers nor customers know exactly how or why the products will be used...Building such markets entails a process of mutual discovery by customers and manufacturers - and this simply takes time.' (p.135)
Times have certainly changed.

Hot air balloons and subversion

iPhone hack of advertising hoardings in Times Square, using a hot air balloon to raise a signal repeater to the hoardings' height.



May be a fake, but that's not the point. Reminds me of a picture that will be familiar to students of psycholinguistics (Bransford and Johnson (1972)). Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 11, 717-726).

[iPhone hack via iotwatch]

Reading from small displays

Jakob Nielsen, emphatically, on the difficulty of reading complex texts (such as privacy agreements) from iPhone-size displays. Citing research by R.I. Singh and colleagues Nielsen notes that texts are more difficult to read on small displays because the smaller window of information means greater reliance on the reader's memory and because navigating to access more information both distracts from the reading task and introduces the new task of 'reacquiring location' in the text.

(And, yes, he's aware that most people never read privacy agreements in any case.)

[via InfoDesign]

Heads-up mobile interactions

Marko Ahtisaari on freeing smart-phone users from total, heads-down engagement with their phone displays, not just by voice control but by smarter interface design which cues the users' interactions more effectively. He picks up the theme again at LeWeb 2010 where he discusses the current landscape of smartphone operating systems.

Device, on-line article reading and time of day

 
Analysis by ReaditLater showing how different devices (computer, phone, iPad) come into play to read on-line articles, according to time of day. Not surprisingly, perhaps, iPad reading peaks at the end of the day.

What a coffee table e-book can do

Excellent Robert Scoble interview with Jean-Marie Hullot about his development of Fotopedia Heritage, an interactive compilation of photos of UNESCO World Heritage sites, compiled by photographers, app curators and the communityof users, and linked to aggregated information (currently drawn from UNESCO, Wikipedia and TripAdvisor) about each site. This is a first step towards personalised travel guides, and other applications Hullot has yet to reveal. Hullot describes how the essential components of the 'book', community, curation and iPad (or iPhone) technology are bound together by his team's understanding of software, a capacity he feels traditional publishers still lack.

Aside from the technical merits of the application, the delicious presentation of the photos (which are curated rigorously for quality) sent me straight to Google with thoughts (ahead of Hullot's travel application) of future destinations.

[via John Naughton]

Psychologising the iPhone 4 antenna furore

Hm, don't want to add to the millions of pixels that have been spilt on this but Graham Bower at NetImperative analyses how Apple's own marketing (explicitly promoting the new atenna design) and mass commentary on the web (focusing on the specifics of loss of reception) worked together to create a storm. Despite Bower's invocation of groupthink, nocebo effect and availability heuristic I think Apple will survive.

[via Usability News]

Tablet as a supplement to large-screen TV viewing

Nordkapp have published findings of some user research, carried out with Sonera, examining the relationship between tablet computers (shorthand, iPads) and TVs, and more generally how how tablets fit into domestic life. Nice to have these simple studies in the public domain.

My comment on their posting picks up on some very simple ergonomic issues that might limit tablet use: their weight, relative complexity compared to some current technology we use (such as old-fashioned transistor radios, which require a simple flick of a switch to turn them on and off) and (while they're still so new and shiny) squeamishness about using them in watery environments such as bathrooms.

Cat and iPad

Competition for finches playing guitars.

iPad's impact on productivity

John Naughton is road-testing an iPad and comments on how its 'one-app-at-a-time' interface limits productivity when writing his blog. A fluid interaction on 'a real computer', of selecting a source, highlighting it and pulling it into Wordpress for publication now becomes a very clunky sequence of opening applications, cutting and pasting etc. As Naughton comments, the experience highlights Apple's focus on the iPad as a tool for consumption.

Don Norman (and Jacob Nielsen) on gestural user interfaces

Both halves of the NielsenNorman group have had a swipe (sic) at gestural user interfaces: Nielsen in his Alertbox and Norman in his column in Interactions and on his web site.

Norman's main concern is that beyond a core set of well-understood gestures (move up/down, move forward/back, shrink/enlarge, and shake to change) gestures are arbitrary and have to be learned. Many of these more arbitrary gestures don't have an obvious converse, so can leave the user stranded if they make a mistake (although to be fair to Android interfaces, of which he is critical, there's always the 'back' key). Norman identifies the need for clear graphical correlates on the display for gestures to be discoverable and usable. I think he's right. So no display 'real estate' efficiencies in gestures then.

iPad: redressing the balance

'They've [laptops] all been largely obsoleted (at least at my home) by a sleek $499 device that doesn't really have any right to be called a "computer" in the traditional sense.

Sure, there's a handful of tasks that I still would prefer a real computer, but -- amazingly -- that list has now shrunk dramatically. In less than a week.'

From this post, by Chuck Hollis, which is linked everywhere.

An internet of things - not yet

This concept, the Copenhagen Wheel, which stores energy when you brake for you to draw on to boost your cycling uphill, gets a pretty rough reception at BoingBoing. Hardy cyclists think it's for whimps, green cyclists point out that the energy cost of manufacture will negate any benefit it might bring by encouraging cycling, others point out that its weight will add to the effort required to ride the bike in the first place, that not enough energy will be captured in braking to give a significant boost, and so on. But the derision reaches crescendo at its control mechanism: an iPhone app, which can also, incidentally, give you feedback about your effort levels and attainment of you personal fitness goals, and share your cycling data with friends (oh, and connect you to a green points club - at this point I had to check this wasn't an April 1 video). These are not the advantages we're looking for in an internet of things.

We know there's mileage (sorry) in things being able to give information about themselves. It's easy to see the fit with tracking in industrial and commercial inventories; healthcare and military applications make sense too. But, as for tracking the details of your cycling, like internet-connected bathroom scales, unless at the extremes of fitness training, there's just too much of the anorak about them at the moment.

I can see, though, applications where connected things will make sense in the future. For example, if we're taxed on our use of certain roads, we might want our car to track its location and mileage (and present those to us coherently) so we can check our bills.

Coincidentally, the issue of the FT, where I first saw the connected scales, also featured an item on the launch of the first remote TV control in 1956. Remote controls didn't seem essential in the UK, at least, until the late 1980s when satellite TV increase the number of channels available and channel hopping became (for some) a way of viewing.

Defining the usable device

This is Jeff Raskin's 1979 (and prescient) definition of the ultimate, usable computer:

This is an outline for a computer designed for the Person In The Street (or, to abbreviate: the PITS); one that will be truly pleasant to use, that will require the user to do nothing that will threaten his or her perverse delight in being able to say: "I don't know the first thing about computers," and one which will be profitable to sell, service and provide software for.

You might think that any number of computers have been designed with these criteria in mind, but not so. Any system which requires a user to ever see the interior, for any reason, does not meet these specifications. There must not be additional ROMS, RAMS, boards or accessories except those that can be understood by the PITS as a separate appliance. For example, an auxiliary printer can be sold, but a parallel interface cannot. As a rule of thumb, if an item does not stand on a table by itself, and if it does not have its own case, or if it does not look like a complete consumer item in [and] of itself, then it is taboo.

From Stanford's archive, 'Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley'.

[via John Naughton]

Thumbs down for iPad

Several people are finding it hard to be excited by the iPad. Their verdict, in summary: an over-grown iPhone, with less functionality and connectivity than its smaller sibling, that locks users into consumption (of Apple-approved apps) rather than supporting creation.

Aaron Swartz and Cory Doctorow both rail against the boundaries of Apple's walled garden (which, Tim Bray has described as Disneyfied). Jeff Jarvis is modifying his initial enthusiasm. And this, by Quinn Norton, on the lack of impact of hyped technology on poor people, is salutary.

Incidentally iPad's backlit LCD display, while ideal for video and games, is, apparently, no match for Kindle.

[Quinn Norton and Tim Bray links via John Naughton]

Two different faces of Apple

Neil Curtis' condensed compilation of the hype at iPad's launch last week. [via John Naughton]

In contrast, Jonathan Ive quietly considering the design obsessiveness that makes the hype possible. [via Nordkapp]