AJAX (not the oxygenated bleach)

The big rage in web-development right now is Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). From a usability perspective, it's great news for web users. Part of what's propelling Ajax in the web-dev sphere is simply the great applications of it that have already emerged. I'm talking things like Google Maps, GMail, Flickr -- the list goes on.

If your curious about Ajax, as all web-developers and HCI people should be, check out this great "Getting Started" article on it over at IBM's developerWorks.

Microsoft Innovation

This page about Microsoft "Gadgets" attempts to answer the question, "Just how do projects at MS get started?" They have a whole site dedicated to this. I can answer in one sentence:

"By booting up their Macs."

Claire adds: "They could at least have tried harder with the name" (Apple calls them "Widgets")

Office 12

Here's a preview of the toolbar user interface planned for the next revision of Microsoft Office.

My thoughts..

Wow. Um...overwhelming? This just hurts my eyes to look at. There's so much information being presented at once that it really takes a lot of searching to see what's going on.

First you have 4 rows of information here: Window/Document title, hybrid menu bar, section title row, and action icon/text. The hybrid menu bar is weird. It has things familiar to me (i.e., the file menu), but it also has these new "tab" things. But which tab is highlighted? "Insert" and "Contoso Legal" both appear to be...so which is it? Ok, I'm assuming "Insert" since the functions on the 2 rows below it appear to be related to inserting document objects. But then we have some redundant information going on. There's a row for "Pages" in the title row, and then a big icon that says "Pages" right below it. Obviously there's only one thing to insert here (a page), but why is the action space not more revealing. From the arrow on the pages action icon, you can tell there may be options to inserting pages (styles? number of pages?). Why aren't these presented like in the "Illustrations" action space? Instead there's a big blue arrow...great.

Anyways, you can tell I don't like it. I also note some definite Mac OS X influences. The tabs remind me of a refined 10-10.2 OS X tab system (tabs changed in 10.3). Also I feel a little "Aluminum" ala 10.4 Mail and iTunes 5 going on. Further, it just feels like a bad attempt to mimic the iconic toolbars found in Mac OS X and special cross-platform applications (mainly web-browsers).

Overall, it feels cluttered. Hopefully the Mac version of Office doesn't follow suit.

Robots!

I got to play with one of these today.

You control it via WiFi (each PER hosts an ad-hoc wifi-connection) and can basically explore an entire room using an interface that gives you realtime camera images and other pertinent information (exact distance traveled, etc.)

It is being used in Museum exhibits around the world so people can "explore Mars" themselves. Usually the robot is in an artificial terrain box modelled after Martian terrain. We, however, explored the fascinating environment that is the classroom floor. You don't wanna know what showed up when we turned on the UV light to sense organic material.. (kidding! ;))

Verve.

Buy 'em cause they're good..

Verve//Remixed^2 was the first thing I bought on iTunes when the service first started, and I still listen to it. The Verve Unmixed albums are also good.

Did you know?

That ExxonMobile makes ~$110 million per day?

That their net income this quarter is the most of any company ever?

That George W. Bush just recently gave ExxonMobile a tax cut?

Sigh.

Stumbleupon

For those of you who use looking to waste a lot of time (say, if you're a PhD student avoiding work) may I suggest StumbleUpon.

It's been around for a while, but I just got around to playing with it today. StumbleUpon is basically a toolbar for Firefox that recommends interesting webpages to you based on pre-chosen categories that you can then rate to further refine your interests. In addition to being able to find a lot of new content in subjects you're interested in, you can also setup networks of friends and send links to/from your friends. It's a really cool way of people interacting within the framework of the web itself.

I'm not sure why it took so long for something like this to evolve in a usable and convenient manner, but now that it has arrived I find myself addicted.

You can find my StumbleUpon page here. Feel free to add me as a friend.

Excuse me

Has anyone else noticed an influx in the use of the word "pedantic" in the last few weeks? I swore I hadn't heard the word but once before. Then, in only the last 2 weeks, I've heard it at least a dozen times from a dozen different people.

Did some memo go out instructing people on the use of this word? Was it featured on The OC? Am I going crazy?

I don't mean to be pedantic, but I really must know.

Impossibly Small

You've seen it. But here it is again..

So pretty.

What I'm Learning (2)

As I mentioned earlier, I've been re-reading The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin. I'd like to briefly discuss what he calls "elementary operations."

Elementary operations are actions that users perform on content in almost any interface that exists. It's easiest to just list them and describe them as he does..

"Note that content can be:

• Indicated: pointed at
• Selected: distinguished from other content
• Activated: clicked on
• Modified: or used (by means of commands) by being:

1. Generated: modified from empty to nonempty
2. Deleted: modified from nonempty to empty
3. Moved: inserted in one place and simultaneously deleted from another
4. Transformed: changed to another data type
5. Copied: sent to or received from an external device or duplicated at a different internal location"

Think about it for a second. In almost every application you use (games maybe being an exception), you can and do use these elementary operations. The question, then, is why must applications fully implement this functionality on their own?

The ideal interface, in the eyes of many, would be centered on consistency (note that this is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one). Users do not want to learn hundreds of commands for each application they wish to use. The ultimate user experience lies in an environment where a user's gestures map one-to one to actions.

For example, almost everyone is familiar with the gestures for "copy" and "paste" (i.e., ctrl-c, ctrl-v -- apple-c, apple-v for Mac users). Now, almost all applications implement these two commands and do so in the same way. For users, this is a good thing. If I copy some text from a web browser and want to paste it into a text document and vice versa, I can do it with the same exact sequence of keystrokes. That is, ctrl-c, switch apps, ctrl-v. To move text in the other direction, it's the same process.

Imagine now if all applications had different gestures for the copy/paste commands. Remembering ctrl-p was paste in Firefox and ctrl-v was paste in Microsoft Word would be not only hard to learn, but would continually remove you from your workflow, as you have to make note of what application you are using before making a gesture to produce an action. I think most people, even intuitively, can see this is just not efficient.

So since it's obvious that elementary operations should always produce certain actions (relative to the content they are operating on), why is it that applications themselves should define and implement these kinds of commands? Is it not in the user's interest for the operating system to implement these operations? Applications should then be responsible for dealing with these operations (i.e., highlighting text, making an image disappear, etc.) based on the content they deal with specifically.

This is different from the current model in that the application is currently responsible for defining all operations it is capable of, as well as assigning gestures to these operations. That means that as a developer, I can make the gesture for paste in my application whatever I want. As long as the model is as such, there will always be inconsistency in performing elementary operations and, thus, users will always struggle with memorizing gestures and the actions they perform.