User Interface | Betchablog

27Jun/070

A Bit of iPhone Love

The web is a really bizarre place sometimes. But this story proves that real life can always be more bizarre...

In case you have been living under a rock lately, Apple is about to release a fairly major product called the iPhone. It's a mobile phone of course, but it also does email, voicemail, web browsing as well as being a pretty darn amazing video iPod as well. Although many other phones from companies like Nokia and Sony Ericsson offer similar features, the iPhone seems to have a much greater emphasis on design and usability, as only Apple seems to be able to do.

Obviously the tech world thinks the iPhone will be a big deal because since the announcement of the device back at MacWorld last year, Apple's share price has gone through the roof, rising from about $70 per share to the $125 price it is sitting on at the moment. Whatever Apple is doing with the iPhone, it seems to be attracting the right kind of attention. There is a ridiculous amount of commentary on the iPhone, both in the regular press and also in the blogosphere, with many blog posts, news articles, and even podcasts devoted solely to it.

And it is a pretty impressive looking device to be sure. If you are the type who is into techno-toys, the iPhone is the type of device that will most likely be giving you a woody about now. The iPhone is officially released at 6:00pm EST on Friday 29th june. It's sleek and sexy and I certainly wouldn't mind one myself.

But it seems there is this guy called Greg Packer who would also really like one. I mean, he would REALLY like one. In fact, he would like one so much that he has decided to camp out in front of Apple's flagship New York City store five days in advance. That's a pretty dedicated approach to getting an iPhone. He is currently first in line, and attracting quite a bit of attention for doing so, but not all of it is good attention.

Packer is parked out in front of the beautiful glass cube that sits atop Apple's Fifth Avenue store in NYC. Because he is intent on staying in line for the next 100+ hours, he is asking passers-by for donations of food and money to tide him over. He is apparently using the toilet facilities inside the Apple Store, which is open 24/7. (I can't help wondering, if the store is open 24/7, why doesn't he just stay inside the store?) While he waits outside the store, collecting donations, he is also taking phone calls from interested journalists and blogging about his situation, and of course he is also asking for donations via PayPal on his blog as well.

At first, this might seem fairly harmless, albeit a little nutso. But after reading through the 160+ comments left on his latest blog post, there is a whole other perspective to this story. Take a look at some examples of the comments left for Mr Packer and you'll see what I mean...

I really don’t know where to start with you, you ignorant moron. I’ve no problem at all with you sleeping in a queue to get an iPhone (I’d like one myself). But asking people for food donations on the street, and ASKING FOR MONEY ON PAYPAL!!!!!!! So you’ve got a house and $500 to spare, and yet you’re sleeping on the street and asking for food and money. Moron. Moron. er, Moron!

There are hundreds of thousands living on the streets of the world, and many more millions living in poverty. None of them do this by choice. Yet you think that we should help you to survive your week at the front of a queue which basically screams ‘me, me, me! I’m a greedy consumer moron, and I want your attention’. You got it. Hope it shames you.

...and this one...

People are watching family members dying from starvation and you’re trying to raise money to eat shitty chips and sit on your ass for a piece of plastic? I think a re-evaluation of priorities is in order.

...or this one...

Dude - asking for donations while you sit in line to pay $600 for a telephone (albeit a very cool telephone) is offensive. If people are stupid enough to pay you… to sit in line… for four days … to buy aphone… for yourself… wait I take it back - you’re a genius and it’s never wrong to separate a fool from his money. Godspeed, brave iphone-waiting-in-line-genius-guy!

...and just for a bit of balance, there's this one...

Well this blog says more about the people who are posting than Greg.

For the haters and abusive posters - The guy wants to spend HIS time queuing. Leaping in with abuse says much more about you than it does about him. Not everyone in the world thinks like you. Thank God.

For the moral majority - if you really cared about the homeless, the starving or the 50% of the world who don’t have access to a phone you would be out there doing something about it and not posting on here. You are just as selfish as Greg but at least he’s being honest.

For the jealous posters - YOU are the ones who need to think about getting a life. Owning things cannot make you cool, or buy you genuine friends. If you need gadgets to fulfill your life or give you some sense of identity then you REALLY are missing the point.

Greg, have a nice time in the line, if this is how you wanna spend your days good on ya, interesting people make the world more interesting.

And then the story takes an interesting twist. It appears that Greg Packer is pretty good at waiting in lines and getting media attention. One of the commenters on his blog points to an article in Wikipedia about him, which reads, in part...

Greg Packer (born December 18, 1963), an American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, has been quoted in more than 100 articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a person on the street rather than a newsmaker or expert).

Packer’s status as a frequent interviewee came about due to his hobby of attending public appearances of celebrities and other media events and being first in line on such occasions. He has consequently had the opportunity to meet people ranging from Mariah Carey to Garth Brooks to Dennis Rodman to Ringo Starr, and at least three presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

According to a 2002 article about Packer, “He was first in the line to see ground zero when the viewing platform opened at the World Trade Center site December 30, 2001. He was the first in line in 1997 to sign the condolence book at the British consulate when Princess Diana died. He slept outside in the snow in Washington in January 2001 to be the first in line to greet President George W. Bush after his inauguration.”

Now, while the Wikipeida article could always be fabricated I suppose, the article history seems to extend back at least a year or so, so it doesn't appear to be made up in the last few days. At least on the outside, it does seem that Greg Packer is a professional Line Sitter and Public Media Person.

So yeah... I'm not sure what I find most bizarre in this whole thing. The fact that a huge media ecosystem has sprung up surrounding a new cell phone release. Or that someone is willing to spend 5 days of their life sitting in a line waiting to get one. Or that this person does this sort of thing all the time to get attention. Or the fact that so many people go to so much effort commenting on his blog with such indignation at what he is doing.

Or even that I just spent an hour reading and writing about the whole thing. What on earth did we do to amuse ourselves before the Internet came along?

technorati tags:apple, iphone, greg_packer

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Apple, User Interface No Comments

9Jun/070

More Tagging, Less Bookmarking

I had a little spare time tonight so I decided to do a job that I've been meaning to do for a while... cleaning up my bookmarks collection. (What's up with that? I can live in a house that's messy, my desk at work looks like a bomb has hit it, but my hard drive is really well organised... go figure!)

I mentioned recently that I've been using Flock as my main browser these days... mainly because it has a bunch of wonderful built-in features that seem really sensible, but I can't help wondering why the bookmark organisation is set up like it is. One of the many nice things about Firefox, or even IE for that matter, is that you can arrange your collection of bookmarks/favourites into folders and subfolders. This is largely a very good thing, although I did notice I tended to get just a little over-organised at times and I had a large number of folders that had only one item in them, which is perhaps getting just a tad granular.

But I did have a lot of top-level folders with subfolders in them and it was, by and large, quite well organised. So for example, in the folder labeled "Education", there were subfolders for, say, "Literacy", "Contructivism". "Gifted Education", and so on. The problem was that I often tended to forget what I put in these folders, and that sometimes I would find an interesting site and go to bookmark it for later use without realising I already had a sub folder catergory set up that was suitable. Over time, this led to quite a bit of duplication and disarray.

Flock however, does not support this subfoldering approach. Although Flock can imports bookmarks directly from Firefox, when you go to the bookmark organiser you only get a top-level folder for each category you imported, (including the stuff that was originally in subfolders). In other words, every folder, no matter what level it was when it was imported, now becomes a top-level folder. This meant I ended up with LOTS of top level folders, in fact way too many to be sensibly managed. I've been spending some time tonight going through them and realising that many bookmarks have been linkrotted, some are just plain irrelevant, and most can be found quicker on Google than I can find them in my bookmark collection.

I'm finding that Google has changed the need to bookmark everything. If I want to find a site that I am after, it's usually a simpler proposition just to Google it.

I'm also learning that tagging a bookmark is generally better than filing it, but I must admit I'm still really just starting to get my head around the tagging concept. I mean, I get it, but I'm still figuring out excatly how to organise things to get the best leverage out of the tagging system.

The really big plus for using Flock as my browser is that it has a very seamless integration with del.icio.us, so I can bookmark both locally AND to the web. Firefox can do the same sort of thing by using an Add-On, but I do like the way it's organised right inside of Flock.. that, and the built in Flickr uploader and web clippings make it a really useful tool.

Edublogs now has a neat plugin tool that lets me embed my del.icio.us feed directly to this blog page. I've currently added it as the last webpart on the right column, so scroll down a bit and you can see a list of the last few sites I've bookmarked. I'm not sure why sharing my favourite websites with the world is a good thing, but I guess I'll do it anyway.

Anyway, I'm off to figure out how tagging works!

technorati tags:delicious, bookmarks, Flock, tagging

Blogged with Flock

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Blogging, Google, User Interface, web2.0 No Comments

31May/070

Not even scratching the Surface

Ok, I must admit I'm impressed by Microsoft's new table-like project called Surface, which Bill G has been showing off lately. It's a multitouch capable computer that works in a table form factor. There are some obvious uses of it, like restaurants, casinos, etc where transactions take place largely on a table. I don't know how commercially successful it will be but I think it's a pretty cool technology!

Watch the video and check it out for yourself... I particularly like the way it interacts with devices like digital cameras and PDAs. I presume those devices would have to have some form of wireless interconnectivity such as Bluetooth or Wifi? Very cool though!

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Microsoft, User Interface No Comments

13May/070

Touch me there… and there.

You probably know about Single-touch screens. If you have ever used a SmartBoard, Tablet PC or any other sort of touch sensitive device you will probably have noticed that you can only have a single point of contact. If you try and draw on a SmartBoard in two places at once, it takes an average of the two locations and draws the line halfway between the two contact points. Getting used to writing on a SmartBoard without touching the screen is a bit disconcerting at first but most people pretty quickly adapt.

Likewise, the reason that you can't write on a Tablet PC with just your finger and why it requires a stylus pen is that it's really the only way to give the screen a single contact point, allowing you to interact with the panel using the stylus tip while having it ignore the rest of your hand resting on the screen while you write. Basically, most of the touch devices we are familiar with will tolerate a single point of contact only.

So what we really need to move forward is a multi-touch screen. I was rather impressed when I first saw Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone at the last MacWorld Expo, especially the way he was able to interact with the screen by touching it in more than once place at a time. The shrink and expand gestures for images were particularly fascinating; the way you can resize an image by stretching or pinching it with your thumb and finger. Very cool stuff.

Apparently the multi-touch technology was developed by a guy named Jefferson Y Han. You can see a video of the touch screen technology being used here... watch it all the way through, as it starts off with just arty farty stuff, but gets into some very interesting deveopments with the image handling...

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

Apparently, it seems that Han originally developed the technology and was approached by Apple to go work for them, but he declined. Seems like Apple managed to licence the technology from him though for use in the new iPhone. I don't really know any further details of that deal and I'd only be speculating if I tried, but it certainly seems an interesting development and one which could bring some cool new ideas to the traditional user interface over the next couple of years.

Technorati Tags: Multitouch, iPhone, Jefferson Y Han

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Apple, User Interface No Comments

18Apr/070

Life in the Office

I have spent a large chunk of my computing life in Microsoft Office. As a teacher, I think it's hard to avoid. Tools like Word, PowerPoint and Excel form a sizable basis of the sorts of tools we use every day to create and present stuff to our kids. I even have a few "qualifications" in Office, from a bunch of Brainbench certificates, to an International Computer Driving Licence, and even a few units from the Microsoft Office Specialist certification program. I mean, if you're going to spend a lot of time in these apps, you may as well know how to use them properly, right?

I recently had to create a few teaching resources using Microsoft Office 2007. Office 07 is a fairly radical rethink of the interface for the Office suite. The trouble with previous versions of Office is that they had so many features and tools that most users never found them. Many were buried so deep in the interface that the average user simply never stumbled across them. I even had an semi-heated discussion with a guy at a technology trade show once who was telling me that certain features would be really neat to have in Excel, and when I told him that everything he was wanting was already there, he argued back that I was wrong... these tools simply didn't exist in Excel. I showed him, he was amazed that he had overlooked them. even though he considered himself a "power user", he had never found some of these must-have features, some of which I thought were pretty obvious. After I showed him they were there, he was a happy camper again.

So the goal in Office 07 was to bring as many of the available tools right out to the front of the interface. That's a big ask, since there are literally hundreds of tools and features in there, and while there will still be people who criticise the new interface for being too cluttered, too different to the previous versions, too whatever, I must say I think they've done a pretty good job of taming a rather big animal. I found the new Office easy to learn (though I will confess to being a power user of Office software to start with) and the new Ribbon UI seemed pretty intuitive to me. I'm really looking forward to see what they do with the Mac version...

The only thing about Office that is irksome is the price. At around AUD$1150 for a full copy, it's just way too overpriced, and it is little wonder that piracy is such a huge problem in the home market. Fortunately, there is a Student and Teacher edition (which is basically the same as the full version) that can be had for a few hundred dollars, and there is even a promotion happening at the moment over at It's Not Cheating, where Australian university students can buy a copy for only $75. Not a bad deal, and probably well worth it for a clear, piracy-free, conscience. Makes you wonder about the sort of profit margins in the software though when you see these sorts of discounts being offered. I guess Bill became the worlds richest person for a reason...

The other interesting development in the Office space is Google's recent announcement to add a presentation module to the already existing word processor and spreadsheet modules in Google Docs. Sure, it won't have all the bells and whistles that MS Office has, but like I said, most users never use the more advanced features anyway. For the majority of users, if they can type and format a document, calculate some numbers or keep a list in a spreadsheet, and do a basic presentation for an audience, that's most of their computing needs right there. Add in the Gmail and Google calendar features, and Google Docs is starting to look like an interesting proposition. It also has two nice extra features... it can enable online collaboration on documents, and of course it is free. Free is good. Free is hard to beat. At school, we just renewed our Microsoft licensing agreement for the year and it cost us about $18,000. That's every year. As I say, free is good, and Google Docs is starting to look very attractive, especially now you can even brand it with your own domain name using Google Apps for your Domain. I'm sure Open Office and some of the other open source office stuff is also worth a more serious look these days.

The downside of Google Docs of course is that it requires a user to be online all the time, with a fairly fast connection if it is to be at all usable. But that's becoming more the norm, and is probably not a big issue. The flip side of that is that it makes all your documents available online, anywhere, anytime, which can certainly be a good thing in a Web 2.0 world.

For me, I will keep using Office for now because I do tend to regularly tap into many of its more advanced features. But I can see a day in the not too distant future where even I might start to seriously rethink my attitude to the alternatives.

Technorati Tags: Google Docs, Microsoft Office

Popularity: unranked [?]

Filed under: Microsoft, User Interface No Comments

21Dec/060

Design Flaws

In the cult classic radio play, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams talked about a fictitious technology company called the Sirius Cybernetics Coorporation, a company who products were so bad that…

"One is blinded to the fundamental uselessness of their products by the sense of achievement one feels in getting them to work at all. In other words, their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."

Does that sound familiar? Ever tried to do battle with a substandard software application? Or a fundamentally flawed Operating System? Or some new gadget that was designed by geeky engineers but is incomprehensibly difficult to operate for the average user? And yet why do we just accept these devices and this software? …"One is blinded to the fundamental uselessness of their products by the sense of achievement one feels in getting them to work at all". Such a poignant statement!

By the way, it's quite astounding when you really look at how Douglas Adams wrote so casually about things that were so far ahead of their time - compare the way he describes the hypertext nature of The Guide itself to the way the World Wide Web works for example… then remind yourself that Douglas wrote this some 15 years before Tim Berners-Lee published the first webpage back on August 6, 1991!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: User Interface No Comments

5Dec/060

The Kaizen of Blogging

Ah, I love this stuff... Edublogs just keeps getting better and better, thanks to the efforts of James Farmer.

First we had a server upgrade a few weeks back and we got all sorts of extra goodies included for adding media files to posts - stuff like Youtube, Flash, Flickr and even video players. We also got a bunch of cool extras like the synthetic voice podcasting plugin from Talkr, and a new backend interface with many more options. The static pages can now be nested to form a hierarchical site structure as well as the regular blog structure, which could be very useful. Then 2 weeks ago James added a bunch of new CSS templates to the list of possible look'n'feel options, all with much tighter integration for the new plugins.

Now, I log on to find yet more new goodies in here... a poll option! I've been having a play with the poll tool - appropriately called Democracy - and as you can see on the left, it works just fine. It's a pretty naff question right now, but I'm excited by the possibilities of being able to conduct polls.

Thanks again Mr Farmer! I think you've pushed Edublogs way beyond what's offered with WordPress itself, and this really has evolved into the best blogging space I've seen. The need to know how to create a webpage using the traditional HTML methods has all but vanished...

I do hope these new tools all find their way into Learnerblogs too!

Popularity: unranked [?]

Filed under: Blogging, My Tools, User Interface No Comments

9Oct/062

The 90-9-1 Rule

I've always been a great believer in the Pareto Principle, sometimes more commonly referred to as the 80/20 rule. This principle basically suggests that in any group or organisation there will usually be 20% of the people who produce 80% of the results. This observation generally holds quite true, be it a club, a group, a classroom or even a family... there is always a minority of the people who produce a majority of the results. It may not always be exactly an 80/20 split, but you can pretty much guarantee that the work done by any group will almost never be spread evenly among the workers.

Once you understand and accept this fact, a lot of the frustration and annoyance of life starts to go away as you stop worrying about how you're going to get the majority of the people to do more than the minimal amount that the Pareto Principle says they will do. The fact is, they never will. Those people will never do more than the miminum, no matter how we cajole, threaten, or incentivise them. Like gravity and taxes, some things are the way they are because they just are... Live with it.

So I was interested to see this report from Jakob Nielsen, one of the world's most respected human interface analysts. Nielsen studies human interaction with computer systems and tries to get designers to make systems that work with people, not against them. He tries to identify what you might call "human nature" and encourages designers to create systems that adapt to people rather than the other way around as is usually the case.

From one of his recent studies, he observes that in most online systems, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

From my own experience with online systems (discussion forums, blogs, email lists, etc) as well as real organisations (committees, clubs, etc) I would have to agree with Nielsen. There is always a bulk of the work/traffic/discussion/effort/ideas that is actively done by a relatively small percentage of the users/participants/workers. I wish it weren't that way, but I've always found that it is.

So, how do you interpret this principle in your classroom? What implications does it have?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Kids and Learning, User Interface 2 Comments

18Sep/060

The UI Paradox

As a power user on the Windows platform and a quick learner on the Mac platform, there is something about the difference between the two that has always intriuged me. I've noticed it in many forms over the years, but I was reminded of it when I read this rather silly report on the TUAW site... I'm sure the fellow who wrote it had his tongue firmly in his cheek, but if you browse through the comments under the main article you'll find a very interesting thread of discussion has emerged relating to the Mac's little green zoom button. Seems the zoom button is not without its fair share of controversy and a rather passionate, yet civil, debate is raging there about the differences between the way windows (with a small 'w') behave on Windows (with a big 'W') versus the way they behave on the Mac.

The basic gist of the discussion is about the subtle difference between the user interfaces of both platforms and the author tries to draw an assertion that the UIs actually cause people to work in quite different ways, and he even goes so far as to suggest that the differences in UI design actually attract different personality types. Not too sure about that one...

But it has always intruiged me that PCs - the machines with the DOS heritage, the machines that started life with nothing more than a simple black-on-white command line interface - are these days operated by the vast majority of users almost exclusively with only a mouse. It's interesting to contrast this with the Mac, a machine born of a GUI heritage. The Mac is the machine that revolutioned the world with a point-and-click interface. Yet, in my experience, Mac users are far more likely to be the ones who know all the fancy keyboard shortcuts for tasks. Ask any reasonably competent Mac user how to perform a task on their Mac and in a majority of cases they will answer you with a keyboard shortcut. I just think it's interesting that the machine with the GUI heritage is the one that seems to spawn the user base with the greatest knowledge of keyboard shortcuts - some of which really are quite arcane. The average Windows user on the other hand, drives his or her PC almost exclusively with the mouse. Maybe it's just that there really are so many average (and below) users on the PC platform that they just don't bother to learn these shortcuts... I don't know.

The other paradox, as was mentioned in the comment thread on the TUAW article, is that most Windows users operate in full screen mode nearly all of the time, whereas most Mac users are far more competent and skilled at managing multiple open applications - they have to be because of the Macs UI design - and therefore more skilled at actually using the whole windowing concept. (The commenters to the TUAW article look to blame this behaviour on the controversial zoom button.) I find it mildly amusing that the operating system actually named 'Windows' seems to have a far lower percentage of users that CAN actually deal with multiple open windows.

Does this actually say anything about the types of users each platform attracts? Are Mac users better multitaskers? Or is it more to do with the fact that Windows users have a larger user base, and therefore a larger percentage of clueless users? Or is the average Mac user generally more competent at finding their way around the operating system than the average Windows user? Do the navigational quirks of each operating system in fact encourage a totally different approach to learning and using them? Is the Zoom button a flawed idea or a great idea?

I don't have any answers... I just find the paradox of it quite amusing.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Macintosh, User Interface, Windows No Comments

« Newer Entries