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One of the things we discussed was about how simple user interfaces should be. For example, not having a filesystem that you can browse on the iphone. Or having a simple browser-only interface like ChromeOS. The discussion led to me thinking a lot about how user interfaces should be. Bad examples of user interfaces, and how we could fall into a dangerous trap when trying to be simple.

I think the big problem is when someone tries to get a simple interface, they sometimes miss out a lot of features, or a lot of power that could be within the application/os. But also vice versa. Let’s take some examples.

• Compiz Config Settings Manager

I will assume that most people reading my blog will have heard of compiz. It is the beast of 3d window managers for linux. But the problem is that you can have either no changes in your config, or you get the monster that is CCSM. For those who haven’t seen ccsm, I’ve put a wee screenshot of it here.

Now, I use this all the time for configuring my compiz, and I have learnt where everything is. I have learnt that if you want to use the cube, you disable “desktop wall”, enable “desktop cube” and “rotate cube,” and then make sure you have 4 desktops by changing the “desktop size” which is in “general settings”. Then you need to go into “rotate cube” and make sure the zoom setting is turned up to about 0.1, so you actually see the cube when it goes around.

Phew…that was a lot of work just to get the cube working. And if you don’t know how to do they, that is insane. The first thing to change in this would be to have a generic Desktop section where you can enable or disable the cube, decide if it is a cube, cylinder or sphere, and then enable or disable the desktop wall etc…

But of course, there are loads of settings in here that people don’t need to know. Have you ever looked in the “Animations” plugin? You can change absolutely everything about each animation. There is so much you can do, so much that even I don’t touch (and I spend a lot of time customising my compiz settings). So, ccsm should have possibly a simple and an advanced version. But apart from that, this for the advanced version would still be too complicated.

• iPhone

I know it is very common to bash the iPhone. It is quite often the most popular thing that people bash (windows, iphone, etc…). However, I am going to explain why the iPhone is good (shock horror) and bad. Now, we know that the iPhone is absolutely the epitome of user experience. Now, I don’t like the iPhone, but lets be honest, even I cannot pretend that it isn’t very userfriendly.

The problem is, however, that the iPhone has sacrificed power, and configurability to get this simple user experience. There are so many things on the iPhone you cannot do. And it is always going to be a hard thing getting the right balance of usability and power, that not everyone is ever going to be happy.

I think the main things about User Experience that we should take away and use in designs is that things should be simple. Users should not know what a filesystem is. And, lets be honest, users shouldn’t really even have to use “.exe”s or anything. Computers should just do what they want. However, you cannot then sacrifice power and useful things. For example, I still want a decent filesystem on a phone, even though another user should never have to know what it is. I want to browse even the system files and everything on my phone. And there are people like me. But you should only encounter stuff like that if you know what they are or want to learn about them. Not if you don’t want to. You shouldn’t have to deal with it.

best…promo…video…ever

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• Amazon buys “TouchCo”. Touchscreen kindle in the works? One might wonder if they are going to be using this company for just that. The other question, however, is “If it is made, when will it be available in Britain?”
• Symbian is officially opensource. Symbian^2 (previously S60) is now open-source. It turns out the #symbiancountdown was the number of packages left until Symbian was totally open source. Well done Symbian. Now you need to step up and make sure than Symbian^3 is amazing and it better really step up and do what Symbian^2 hasn’t done. It needs to do a lot to be any good.
• JooJoo near launch. Fixes lots of problems that would make you not want an iPad (except the price).
• With or without you: Arm Ceo to Microsoft. The market will grow with or without Windows arm support. Good news for linux?
• Sonic 4 in production. A blast from the past, in high definition. Thats right, Sonic 4 is being made and will be available in the summer on PS3, xbox and wii. On PS3 and Xbox it will be in 1080p. Thats great!!!
• Apple yet again show how pathetic they are, by turning down an app because it is “not interesting enough”.

So, theres just a few bits of random news that I thought I would share with people. Have a great weekend guys!

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What the iPad is not:

• E-book reader

The iPad is not an e-book reader. At all. Why would you buy an e-book reader rather than a laptop/netbook? The e-ink screen. It is nice to read, and it is very low power. Weeks of battery life and no strain on the eyes are the main reasons why you would buy an e-book reader. Now lets look at the iPad. No e-ink screen, wouldn’t be good in sunlight (I’d imagine) and would cause strain after reading lots. And battery life – 10 hours. That is not even a full day. It has less battery life than my phone, but it has a similar processor. Therefore, the iPad is not a replacement for an e-book reader. Don’t buy it to read books.

• Netbook

The iPad is not a netbook. Why would you buy a netbook? It is cheap, and almost as functional as a laptop or desktop computer. The iPad is not cheap, and is not as functional as a laptop or desktop computer. There is no advantage to an iPad over a netbook. Expecially if you get one of the new netbooks that can turn into a tablet with a keyboard dock. Yeah, sounds good. £200 please instead of $600. Eeesk.

Problems

Ok, so I have gone over what the iPad is not. Now, lets go on to say what is wrong with the iPad.

• No multitasking.

Yeah, I know, it has been beaten to death, but it is a HUGE issue. Why on earth don’t they have multitasking? Is it Job’s normal speech of “It isn’t powerful enough to run more than 1 app at once.”. Come on Steve, don’t be stupid, my Nokia 5800 can run 3 apps before it starts complaining and it has 128MB of ram. And you are telling me the iPad can’t run more than 1 app because of hardware? Seriously? Well, in that case focus on putting more in it. If you have built something that size that can only run 1 app on it then you need to do more than that. People need multitasking. Want to listen to music and browse the web? Tough… Have a twitter app running while you are reading your email? Nope…

Steve, please listen to people, if my device can only run a certain number of apps, that is fine, let me find out for myself. Don’t say “It isn’t possible.” just let me open as many apps as it is able to. The Palm Pre Plus can run over 50 apps. Are you saying your tablet is less powerful than the Palm Pre Plus? Ok, useful piece of information.

• No camera

Ok, we all know why this has no camera. It is so they can release the iPad 2 at Christmas. Not much they have to change and suddenly everyone who buys the first one will buy the second one as well. And a bunch of other people who didn’t buy the first because it had no camera will then buy it and they will suddenly have more than twice the number of sales they would have to have. If they put a camera in this one, then SHOCK HORROR they would have to innovate for the second iteration of the device. No way…innovation…

O wait, sorry, there is a camera, but it is an external camera you connect via the dock…spending another £30. Wooooooooo!

• Keyboard

Lets be honest, that is a rubbish keyboard. I want to hold it up and type on it. Nah, not gonna work. Unless you hold it with one hand and type with 1. But, that is rubbish. Ok, well lets put it on the table and type. But that won’t work either. Because it has a curved back. So, it’ll just rock backwards and forwards. So, the only way to type on this is to have it on your lap, or connect the keyboard dock (ok, that is another £30 spent). And the keyboard dock looks like it is going to break off…

• Homescreen

Why, when you have a screen that is nearl 10″ instead of 3″, do you then keep the same number of homescreen buttons? You would at least have a few more. The homescreen just looks stupid.

• iPhone apps

You can run your iPhone apps on the iPad! That is great! Except that you get a wee iPhone-sized app running in the middle of your screen. Or you can maximise it, but then it looks like rubbish. So, the iPad has 140000 apps that look like rubbish…

Also, you can only install apps that Apple let you install. Such as firefox, google voice, google maps, kindle e-reader app. Oh, wait, no you can’t. Ok, Yeah, some of those apps don’t exist yet, but the point is that if they were to be made, I would very much doubt they would get into the app store. Hence why they haven’t been made.

Conclusion

So, I have ranted for a while about the iTampon. And I will leave you with a few thoughts. What would you think is the best web-browsing experience? A 10-inch ipod touch, or a core i7 machine with a 30″ monitor, and really nice keyboard and mouse? What would you think the best e-reading experience is? A 10-inch ipod touch, or a kindle-like device? (See my thoughts about them at the top of this). Why are Apple giving statements that have no basis in fact at all?

My final thought is…I’m not buying one of these. I may buy a tablet in the future, but not this device.

What do you think? Pretty nice in my opinion. Not a huge amount of information about it yet, and I’m assuming it’ll take longer to actually get over here to britain. But it shows that my perfect e-book reader is getting closer and closer.

Looks beautiful doesn’t it. The screen looks amazing. I’d have to see it in real life, but it looks like it could be as good as OLED. And in that case, it would be much better because OLED is rubbish in sunlight, e-ink is nicer on the eyes, and e-ink lasts much much longer.

It also is a really nice size. 13.1 inches is amazing for an ebook reader (about the size of an A4 piece of paper), and look at the size of that border, it is tiny! None of this 7″ screen with 2″ either side of border. Well played. It also has wifi and 3G connectivity, although no details on what networks you can use with it.

A couple of things I want to know about this:

• Battery life. How does colour change the battery life? Is it much shorter?
• Refresh rate. How fast is it? Fast enough for video?
• Video. Related to the last one, can it play video?
• Content. Are there any content providers with this? What can I view on it? Can I view pdfs and epuds?
• UK availability. It only says that it will be available in “Q2″, which I assume is just in US.
• Price. There are no details on price at all.

So, all in all, this looks like a really really nice device that I would love to get my hands on. It has note-taking abilities, so it includes almost everything I want in an ereader. Maybe this is the device I will finally buy. Or maybe not…

**EDIT** Spelling mistake – “not” changed to “now”

No, but seriously, I did have a few thoughts about the usefulness of mono, and also the openness of it. So, I’ll take some points that have cropped up in the origional mono debate, and tell you what I think about them.

• “Mono isn’t open”

Yes it is. What is open??? Seriously, if implementing something closed in an open way is not open, then we are in a sad sad way. Does that mean that samba isn’t open-source? What about wine? Noone ever says they are closed source. As far as I know, mono is a completely open source language that is compatable with .net. Don’t tell me that mono is not open.

• “Mono is patent encumbered.”

DISCLAIMER: None of this is total facts. I am not a lawyer, and some of this is just my opinion and not fact. It is what I believe to be correct, but there may be something that isn’t.

Do you care about mp3s because of patents? If so, thats fine feel free to moan about mono. If not, then what is the difference? In many countries patents aren’t valid anyway. For example, as far as I know, in Europe, software patents do not count. So, if you aren’t in a country that has software patents then this is a non-argument.

If you are in the US, however, then you might be worried about this. Well, first of all, as far as I know the patents have never been proved. It is one of these patents that Microsoft say they have, but noone outside the company has seen them to prove they exist. Also, Microsoft have said that they won’t sue anyone that does anything with mono. Granted, this is not a legal agreement, but if they then go and sue someone, it won’t exactly look good in court. “So, you say that Microsoft said it was ok that you could use it? But now they are sueing you? How odd.” Patents are all about use. If you don’t work correctly with them they are unlikely to work.

• “Mono is very bulky.”

True. Mono is very large in the sense that it takes a lot of disk space. But, it doesn’t use much ram as far as I can tell. It is not a lightweight programming language, but noone is telling you that you must use it. Most computers nowadays can handle bulky things anyway. Your computer can run firefox, openoffice and compiz but you don’t want to run mono on it? That is a bit silly. What is the difference? The applications themselves don’t take up much space, it is just the language that takes up all the space.

• “There are no good applications built on mono.”

Gnome-do. Thats all I need to say to be honest.

• “Mono is useful for porting applications to linux.”

Tell me 1 application that has been ported to mono. Oh wait, you can’t? I can’t either. Now, I think it would be a fantastic thing to get people to port their applications to mono, for example mathcad would be great on linux, evernote would be fantastic. But, as far as I know nothing big has been ported. Its all very well and good saying that it is really easy to port applications to mono, but until someone big does it, it is not a reason to use mono.

In the end, I would love mono to be the go-to thing to port your .net application over to linux. I would love to have evernote on linux (don’t tell me it runs in wine, the new version doesn’t) and it would really put linux on the map.

Windows user: “I would love to use Linux but I can’t run ‘application x’ on it, it is written in .net”    Linux user: “Yes you can, it has been ported to mono.”     Windows user: “Ok, I’ll use Linux then.”

So, I’m sure you all know the details, so I will spare you the details. I will give you my opinion however. I think this is a great thing for Google to do. Now, I am not saying that it is good that Chinese people won’t be able to use google services. It is a good thing that Google are no longer just doing whatever it takes to get money. I’m not saying that Google are an amazingly moral company, but it is a step in the right direction.

I’m not sure how the Chinese government will take this, but I don’t think they will just ignore it. They won’t change their ways, but it is quite embarassing to have a huge company like Google to just up and leave when they aren’t happy with the terms of what they wanted anymore. It isn’t a huge thing that will make lots of changes in the world, but it might help.

• Gmail https

Looks like Gmail is using https by default now. This is very good. Means that gmail is fully encrypted. Who can say this is a bad thing, except hackers

• Youtube possibly using html5?

Youtube are redesigning there website, and are asking for your opinion. The most popular thing that seems to be dominating the poll is using html5 with ogg instead of the default being flash. Google officially replied to these and said:

We’ve heard a lot of feedback around supporting HTML5 and are working hard to meet your request, so stay tuned. We’ll be following up when we have more information. We’re answering this idea now because there are so many similar HTML5 ideas and we want to give other ideas a chance to be seen.

So, it seems that HTML5 with ogg will be implemented in youtube 2.0. We don’t know if it’ll be the default instead of flash, but at least it’ll be there. It sounds great doesn’t it.

• Nokia 5800 firmware update

Not many people will be interested in this, but the Nokia 5800 firmware has been updated to v40. It has features such as

• kinetic scrolling
• much better homescreen
• better sensitivity
• new screens for calls

So yeah, I can’t wait till I get this update for my phone. At least it’ll make the phone useable for the next few months, until I can get a new phone. It isn’t the best phone ever, but I’ll survive with these cool updates.

So these are just a few things that have happened recently. None of them get a post of their own, as I don’t have that much to say, but I felt that I needed to give them more than just a tweet.