Yesterday I launched new web application – Coco Tracker (www.thecocotracker.com), an application which tracks and aggregates all the various Conan O’Brien themed twitter accounts out there.
The idea was born when, as a Conan fan, started following all these new Conan themed twitter accounts (like @ConansSquirrel), which seemed to spawn to life whenever “The Big Red” tweeted about something (ConansSquirrel became live when Conan tweeted about him interviewing a squirrel). When I was following all these accounts, the became quickly clear that most of the interesting interactions these accounts have together, is lost into the jungle of non-related tweets, thus the Coco Tracker was born.
It’s still in it’s beta stage (as most web apps) but I’m hoping it’ll become better as I’ll keep working on it (release early, release often. Right?). Oh, and if I’m missing an account, or two, let me know.
Hello there, internet. Time for a bit of an update.
After Austria, and back in Finland, things have been hectic as hell (writing thesis, thesis project, seminar, two to four simultaneous projects at the same time – all this in 6-8 months) and finally, yesterday we got one of our big projects done. Freedom!? Well…
That (big) project was a concept design for real-estate business, revolving around future solutions. And yes, it is now done (for now, at least). The whole job was for big Finnish media corporation, and as such it was really interesting project to work on, specially the future aspect of it, which enabled us to fully go outside the box. Also, a demo platform was created, which was somewhat of a mad rush.
However… Lately I’ve also gotten myself involved as user interface designer, in a startup working on a social mobile platform. This is going to be interesting as it is the first time I’m properly involved with mobile platform UI design.
Today Apple unveiled the much rumored iTablet called iPad. The abilities of the device (or lack of) have already caused lots of conversation out there. I naturally decided to concentrate just on user interface of the device. So, how does the Apple’s new toy go around the bends? I’ve made a quick analysis via Engadget’s hands-on video, and the pictures I’ve seen since the launch. The pictures in the article are also from that same video.
Now, granted, I do not have an iPhone here and do not possess the greatest of memories, so some of this stuff might have been already on current version of iPhone OS but, nevertheless, I’m addressing the issues still.
The Groundwork
The iPad is running new version of iPhone OS, version 3.2, so for iPhone owner the basic UI should be rather simplistic experience: few desktops, side by side, full of icons and few “permanent” icons down at the tray. Tap any icon and the application launches, simple as apple pie. Since it has no multitasking, the application handling is also as easy as it gets – There simply is no such thing. You’re either in or out from the application.
The Basics
The basic navigation within applications is simple enough – if you drill down within an application (think of artist -> songs) by tapping the top left corner of the screen, the OS always takes you back one level, to the state where you were earlier. Simple enough. This is the basics of tried and true iPhone OS. However, it’s after this foundation where the things start to get hairier.
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Just to clarify, I mean Google Crome and here’s why: I was poking around in the Internets, clicked a link and was greeted with “Access Forbidden – You’ve been temporarily banned.. because you were hitting the site too quickly.” Now, I know Google Chrome is quite swift of a beast but to be so fast that sites mistake you as a bot and ban you? (even being very temporarily)
Ok. So, it’s fast. Now, if it only would work. Case in point: Can’t seem to be able to add the screenshot to this very post, of the “Access Forbidden” -page, in Wordpress, as the Add an Image -button is only giving me an empty frame. And it’s hardly the first time it fumbles and fails, as I would think other heavy Chrome users would know. Does all the speed justify the fact that it’s still a spork; awkward tool that kinda does many things but just fails. I guess it does since I’m still using it, it’s just too frustrating to find yourself in situations where the tool of your choice just doesn’t cut it. …nor even nibble.
Aaaaand, there we go. Fired up Firefox and successfully added the picture.
This article goes about to paint a hypothetical future where megacorporations rule the world, plus just how that might happen. Today’s subject is Apple (includes some speculation of new product release).
First things first, what is a Megacorporation?
According Wikipedia,
“It refers to a fictional corporation that is a massive conglomerate, holding monopolistic or near-monopolistic control over multiple markets (thus exhibiting both a horizontal and a vertical monopoly). Megacorps are so powerful that they can ignore the law, possess their own heavily-armed (often military-sized) private armies, hold ’sovereign’ territory, and possibly even act as outright governments. They often exercise a large degree of control over their employees, taking the idea of ‘corporate culture’ to an extreme.”
While the private armies are bit of a stretch still, the rest of it just could be possible.
Why Apple?
For all of you haters out there, even though I tend to criticize Apple a lot, this isn’t personal. The whole thing started when I was thinking about a product concept and came to conclusion that there are couple of things that are vital to the concept, and all of those Apple has a stranglehold. Thus, the idea was scrapped and morphed to Megacorporations article.
First of all, Apple has bunch of special traits that tend to tint it towards possible Megacorporation:
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Everyone, or at least most of us, knows how easy it is to make mistakes when typing with on-screen keyboard in todays handhelds: missing tactile feedback, cramped keyboards and so forth. There are countless of problems, but one of them isn’t actually forced by the dimensions and feel of the device, rather than just being an ancient millstone that the industry drags around: the keyboard layout – the QWERTY.
QWERTY
QWERTY -layout for keyboards was designed during mechanical typewriter era, when it was problem with individual characters to clash and jam together when typing rapidly. In 1870’s fellow named Christopher Sholes designed a layout which would position the characters such way that it would minimize the chances of two sticking together, thus making the machine more reliable.
Wikipedia – QWERTY
DVORAK
Later on along came professor named August Dvorak, with his DVORAK keyboard layout. This layout was inspired with efficiency and fatigue problems of QWERTY keyboard and aimed to fix all these issues by studying letter frequencies and hand physiology. Still, as 99.99% of the computers in the world use QWERTY derived layouts, DVORAK has been unsuccessful to gain actual ground on market shares. There are two main reasons for this A) because people are reluctant of learning a completely new keyboard layout and B) because practically DVORAK layout only applies to cases when you type on English language, other languages have different letter frequencies. Also, when you are typing with most of your digits you are using muscle memory, and this increases the effort needed for learning a completely new keyboard layout.
Wikipedia – DVORAK
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It’s always sad how the big players don’t seem to realize that user experience and usability matters. Specially when you want to have user created content on your website. I just spent some minutes reading an article from PC Magazine and decided to comment about the speculations in the post. After scrolling some time downwards I eventually found the (quite easy to miss) “Add Your Comment” box:
Like the picture above would lead you to believe that you don’t actually need to register to post a comment, like in any clever web platform (there are other, better, ways of getting rid of the spam), so I happily typed down my reply and pressed post, only to bounce back from this:
Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot?! I still need to register, even though the form clearly said “Post”. So I let out a deep sigh, let my shoulders slump a bit and press “Create an Account”, here we go. And what do I find? A form long & complex enough (PC Magazine – Member Registration), and full of Dreaded Red Dots *, that it could be a registration form for a bank loan. Needless to say that all it took was few quick glances up and down the form, decide it’s not worth the effort and then just forget the whole thing.
One can only wonder how much more content and discussions there would be if the posting wouldn’t require a process equal to launching a nuclear missile (… Note to self: I hope that it’s not THAT easy, or rather more complicated than that), thus bringing more traffic and revenue for the magazine. Take heed PC Magazine. Take heed.
* Dreaded Red Dot means a field that is required for the registration. Usually not a good thing if you want to have a fluid user experience.
To those who still are interested, here is the reply I wanted to post
“I personally don’t think that this whole FCC commotion is specifically about the Google Voice app being pulled, rather than the fact that Apple just yanked a “random app” from the store and is making the developer to pay all of the refunds for the app, even the 30% part that they are taking from the transactions. In my books, FCC just wants to make clear what are the rules of the app store, so that developers might defend themselves when next time Apple decides to pull apps from the App Store and make the developer pay the refunds.
-Mikko Tikkanen”
