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Ubuntu should zig to Apple’s zag | The ByteBaker
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I’m not a UI or UX designer. I’m sure there are people at Canonical who have been studying these areas for longer than I have. But I am a daily Linux user. In fact I would say that I’m a power user. I’m no neckbeard, but I think that by now I have a fair grasp of the Unix philosophy and try to follow it (my love for Emacs notwithstanding). The longer I see Ubuntu’s development the more it seems that they are shunning the Unix philosophy in the name of “user friendliness” and “zero configuration”. And they’re doing it wrong. I think that’s absolutely the wrong way to go.
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That’s not to say that Canonical shouldn’t be innovating and building good-looking interfaces. But they should play to the strengths of both Linux the system and Linux the user community instead of fighting them. Linux users are power users. In fact I think Linux has a tendency to encourage average computer users to become power users once they spend some time with it. I would love to see Ubuntu start catering to power users instead of shooing them away.
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Archive for October, 2011
My daily readings 10/30/2011
October 30, 2011My daily readings 10/29/2011
October 29, 2011-
Social Consumers and the Science of Sharing [INFOGRAPHIC]
If you’re buying a car, do you check Facebook? Or do you read up on Kelley Blue Book values and scour the company website for every spec, from horsepower to miles per gallon? What about music — do you check Top 40 radio charts or scope out what your Facebook friends are actually listening to on Spotify?
Social media has infiltrated the purchasing funnel, helping consumers make informed decisions, from what to have for lunch to where to go on vacation. Depending on the decision, sometimes you turn to your social graph, and sometimes you turn to Google. So, as a brand marketer, you want to know what online channels you should be targeting in order to reach the perfect audience for your product.
My daily readings 10/28/2011
October 28, 2011-
Microsoft’s vision of the mobile future is astounding (video) | VentureBeat
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Not only do these touch-screen devices help keep families in constant communication through text, voice and video, but they also make big contributions to business and education. A girl is seen doing her homework on a tablet-like device, while two businessmen work on an engineering project with the computer helping along with several steps.
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Updated Springpad Clipper Simplifies Saving Things from the Web « Springpad Blog
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- Auto-detects the type of thing you’re trying to save, from a bookmark to a recipe to a product
- Allows you to re-categorize what you’re saving
- Includes any text that you’ve highlighted when you open the clipper
- Lets you choose a photo thumbnail from the page you’re clipping
- Allows you to add tags & file directly into a notebook
- Works with any browser
We’ve updated the clipper to allow you to save things to Springpad with fewer clicks. And, we’ve kept your favorite clipper features intact:
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- “Pop-out” the clipper to open it in a new window, allowing you copy content from the page you’re clipping into the thing you’re saving
- When you define the page as a product or movie, we’ll automatically save the related information without you doing any additional work
Plus, we’ve added a couple of new features:
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My daily readings 10/26/2011
October 26, 2011My daily readings 10/22/2011
October 22, 2011-
Jobs Told Google’s Page to Cut Bloat to Avoid Becoming Microsoft – BusinessWeek
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“I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the company from getting flabby or being larded with B players,” Jobs said of the meeting with Page this year in his living room. “Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft.”
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“I will continue to do that with people like Mark Zuckerberg, too,” Jobs said. “That’s how I’m going to spend part of the time I have left. I can help the next generation remember the lineage of great companies here and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very supportive of me. I should do my best to repay.”
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“My intuition told me that joining Apple would be a once- in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for a creative genius,” Cook said. “Engineers are taught to make a decision analytically, but there are times when relying on gut or intuition is most indispensable.”
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我从小一拉肚子我爸立刻给我塞这个。。RT @sanwolfy: #wolfymed 不知普通推友有多少人知道18岁以下患者不能用“沙星”类抗生素。我朝抗生素滥用严重，在药店可以随便买到，所以有必要提醒大家，未成年人拉肚子可不能根据大人的经验吃氟哌酸，影响骨骼发育，导致骨骺过早闭合
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Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant | Hacker News
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Yeah, the trick to getting some people to go along with something is getting them to think it’s their idea.
Leaving parts out so they can provide input and fill in the gaps is a way of guiding them down the path — you’re essentially manufacturing buy-in.
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(1) Steve Yegge – Google+ – Last week I accidentally posted an internal rant about…
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But they also listened, which is super cool. I probably shouldn’t talk much about it, but they’re already figuring out how to deal with some of the issues I raised. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, though. When I claimed in my internal post that “Google does everything right”, I meant it. When they’re faced with any problem at all, whether it’s technical or organizational or cultural, they set out to solve it in a first-class way.
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So. Without retracting anything I said, I’d like to paint a more balanced picture for you. I’m going to try to paint that picture via some true stories that I’ve never shared publicly. Nothing secondhand: it’s all stuff I witnessed myself there. I hope you’ll find the stories interesting, because it’s one hell of an interesting place.
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I mean, imagine what it would be like to start off as an incredibly smart person, arguably a first-class genius, and then somehow wind up in a situation where you have a general’s view of the industry battlefield for ten years. Not only do you have more time than anyone else, and access to more information than anyone else, you also have this long-term eagle-eye perspective that only a handful of people in the world enjoy.
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Okay, I love your honesty and sincerity, but seriously, like Sergey said in the Web 2.0 Summit video, if you want people to read your stories, you need to cut them down to a screen or two at most. Although I’d love to read about Amazon, it’s a bit late at night so I will wait until another time to tackle the epic.
“Back in the mid-1800s …” 
I see I am not the only one who find that hilarious. LOL -
Google rocks! Google Rocks because you & +Sergey Brin spoke publicly about this in the interview on Web 2.0, and because +Steve Yegge is still at Google, and because Google is seriously examining & incorporating stuff he suggested.
That is a strong sign of a well-managed company with senior management comfortable with the concept of examining criticism with critical thinking skills instead of gut emotional responses.
That makes me proud of a company I have invested a few bucks (damned few bucks) in.
Google doesn’t do everything perfectly, I have my own gripes, but Google does an excellent job of self-correcting: Yet another sign of mental maturity.
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The Golden Rule of Economics: Incentives Matter. The Golden Rule of Presenting: Brevity Matters.
Over the years I’ve had my share of really spectacular presentation ‘crash & burn’ moments. During the recovery periods as I leaned heavily upon the healing powers of the fermented grape, I came to a realization of senior leaders similar to what I read here about one Mr. Jeff Bezos: these folks are really f’ing smart. In any presentation, by the time I’ve spoken the first word on a PowerPoint page, these people have not only grasped the entire subject but they’ve already found what’s missing and are either 100 thought-years ahead of me or pretty much already know how the presentation will conclude, or both. Like Steve, I expect I’ve missed something. My only fear is of when will it occur and how many times will it occur. But in the end, I realize I literally only have a few minutes of the senior exec’s precious time.
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Why Is It Still Web 2.0? | TechCrunch
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Since Hoffman famously holds that we’ve already surpassed an era defined by social sharing straight into an era defined by the implementation of the data generated by social sharing, why still call it Web 2.0 Summit?
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In an earlier interview, conference host John Battelle described how Web 2.0 could contribute to Web 3.0 as such, “As an industry and as a society we need to have a conversation about what it means to have all of this information, created, applicable, leveragable [and] exploitable.”
The most important conversation topic at Web 2.0 Summit? Ironically, Web 3.0.
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Videos Not Interactive Enough For You? Make Them Go Up to 11 With Viewbix | TechCrunch
Education need interactive videos very much, for example, for quiz.
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AppleInsider | Apple director says Steve Jobs told team not to ask “What would Steve do?”
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Among Job’s inventions, “I actually I think his greatest work was Apple itself,” Gore said, echoing sentiments that have been voiced by numerous analysts and industry watchers. “He created an organization, and inspired it, that literally creates technology that people love.. and that’s going to continue.”
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“[Jobs] used to talk about initially about how after Walt Disney died, the company always got in trouble about asking “what would Walt do in this situation.” And he made it very clear “I don’t want that,”” said Gore. “He made it clear to Tim Cook and everyone else “Don’t ask what Steve would have done. Follow your own voice.””
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(11) How will technology effect learning by 2020? – Quora
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The Edtech revolution that is currently underway will have made available a myriad of choices for both content organization and interactivity. The real power of this will be in sharing of data about student misconceptions between teachers around the world. A discerning teacher will be able to organize standards-based content around vetted, ranked, interactive audio, video, and text resources that can be organized into curricular units that allow students to pursue mastery cooperatively and individually. With shared data about student responses, teacher will be able to choose the best course of action in the moment, given what they learn from their students from instant feedback.
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My daily readings 10/21/2011
October 21, 2011My daily readings 10/20/2011
October 20, 2011-
How to Tweet Your Way to Good Customer Service | Hacker News
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Roboto is a Four-headed Frankenfont | Typography Commentary | Typographica
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But he’s not just a skilled designer. Matias can talk about his designs in a way that people understand. Not only understand, but get excited about. He’s effusive, brilliant, and very focused.
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“Coming in and being put in charge of the design and UX for this enormously successful platform that now has years of legacy behind it. It’s completely unlike getting behind the steering wheel of a zippy, agile little car. It’s more like driving an aircraft carrier.” He gestures as if he’s pushing a button, “Okay guys, turning left! Are we turning left yet?” His point is that it’s a big machine.
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“We’re designing something bigger. We’re designing a showcase product for people that says ‘okay, this is what you could build,’ but then we’re also designing the Lego system that people build those products out of, and we have to do both of those at the same time. And we can’t really cheat and cut any corners and do anything with our product that couldn’t build out of this system.”
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Matias explains further, “Honeycomb was like: we need to get tablet support out there. We need to build not just the product, but even more than the product, the building blocks so that people stop doing silly things like taking a phone UI and stretching it out to a 10-inch tablet.” It’s obvious that products like the original Galaxy Tab, with a bastardized version of Android for phones, annoyed him.
“So that was the mission, and it was a time-boxed mission. Any corner we could cut to get that thing out the door, we had to.”
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“I want to set expectations. Android’s growth, because it’s got this legacy, has to be an evolutionary growth.” He’s asking me to lower my expectations — something he repeats throughout our interview. “What I’m going to show you here is something I’m really proud of. But the device I’m going to be giving to everybody this Christmas, the Android phone I’m actually feeling good about people carrying — my Android phone — it’s not the end of the journey.” His Android phone. Noted.
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“The question we were asking was not ‘what’s the milestone for the next release,’ but ‘what’s the vision for how we want to evolve the platform,’ and this is the pithy question we asked. Aspirational. Challenging.”
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“Android is the new machine. It represents that new type of potential for computer / human interaction. Mobile is exciting because it breaks us out of this stodgy stuff that we’ve been looking at for two decades,” he’s worked up, “Two decades of windows, and cursors, and little folder icons!”
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“I don’t think anybody ever asked about the soul,” he answers in a very matter-of-fact way, “This was my question, it was the question I challenged the team with.”
“I think people had very clear and concrete visions about Android and its strategy, but from a holistic design perspective — not just the look and feel — what does it mean in your life? Why are we doing the things that we’re trying to do. That was the question I wanted to ask.”
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“A lot of what we found confirmed what I thought for years. At Danger, we had this idea that smartphones were not for a certain kind of person. They were for everyone. Smartphones were the way phones were supposed to be.”
“What we heard from everyone we talked to in the study was that they love these things [smartphones], they are a part of their lives. They’re incredibly passionate about them. They can’t live without them. That was awesome. But we also heard a lot of things we didn’t like to hear.”
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“With Android, people were not responding emotionally, they weren’t forming emotional relationships with the product. They needed it, but they didn’t necessarily love it.”
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Matias says that the studies showed that users felt empowered by their devices, but often found Android phones overly complex. That they needed to invest more time in learning the phones, more time in becoming an expert. The phones also made users feel more aware of their limitations — they knew there was more they could do with the device, but couldn’t figure out how to unlock that power.
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“We want to create wonder. We wanted to simplify people’s lives. Right now, there’s a common trap that can happen when you load up too much power into a piece of software that’s not that intelligent. Like the junior assistant that you hire, who instead of helping you by taking work of your plate, makes more work for you. We wanted that really senior assistant that really knows how to help.”
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The company has created a new typeface for Ice Cream Sandwich dubbed Roboto, designed in-house at Google, something the company has never done before. It’s clean and modern, but not overly futuristic — not a science fiction font. Matias says that it’s been designed for “high resolution mobile displays” as “a complete typeface, in a great many more varieties than have existed for Android before.” He adds “It’s a modern typeface, it’s trying to take a point of view and is not ashamed to do so.”
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But the device is only half the story. The interface of the phone is completely new. It looks a lot like Honeycomb, but also shares much in common with Google’s new aesthetic that it’s been pushing for its web products. It’s clean and modern, and the company has removed the overly masculine, Tron-like feel to the OS.
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He’s on a roll now. Clearly Matias has spent a lot of time thinking about what he doesn’t like. “If you look back at the web, people did the same thing. All these cartoony things hanging off a page. If you tried that today, people would be laughing, unless you were doing it in a kitsch, poking-fun-at-yourself, retro art way.”
But what about Microsoft and their “authentically digital” design? “The problem with going too starkly systematic, forcing everything into this completely constrained, modernist palette, for both of them, you’re not leaving any room for the content to express itself.”
“The incredible diversity of applications and content providers… that’s the reason people have these machines. Not for the five bundled apps and the beauty of the OS — they have them for the hundreds or thousands of games, or books, or movies.”
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“Instead, I offer the web. Here there’s beautiful examples of very customized, very different feeling websites.” Matias flips through slides in his deck, a variety of websites, some news-focused, others which are services or shopping sites. “These look completely unlike each other, but people understand how to use them because the right things are standard conventions, and other things are flexible.”
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“Gestures are much more fun than hitting buttons. Touching and moving things; way better than buttons,” Matias says while moving around the device. Even the calendar app didn’t escape the touch treatment; you’re now able to pinch-to-zoom on your schedule to expand or contract the view, which seems incredibly helpful.
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Applications like Gmail have been completely redesigned. Gone are hidden menus — they’re now replaced by contextual menus which change with your selections, similar to Honeycomb. But on the phone things feel more complete, easier to reach, they make more sense. “We’ve taken all the hidden stuff away,” Matias says. You can swipe left to right to move backwards and forwards through your messages. There’s a new inbox selection chip at the top of the screen, but still no unified Gmail inbox. “It’s harder than you think,” he tells me.
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“I came here because they’re winning, but also because I could not stand the thought of there being another decade of being trapped in one paradigm, of being trapped in the past just because somebody manages to grab maximum marketshare, and then that’s the thing everybody uses with incremental evolution.”
“I thought ‘okay you know what, I’ve tried to win so many times before,’ and it’s been shown that it doesn’t matter how great a product you have and how revolutionary the product is… distribution and marketshare are the things that matter.” Matias smiles, “Now I’m going the other way around.”
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My daily readings 10/19/2011
October 19, 2011-
The Web Content Creation Spiral
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1. Publishable: Publishable means you can put your thoughts out in public
2. Findable: Findable means your audience can find your published contents easily
3. Curateable: Curatable means you allow your audience to do more curating work than one-click sharing
4. Shareable: Sharable means you audience can share your content to their friends easily -
Most of people just share contents with their friends by clicking the Facebook Like button, Tweet button, or “share this” grouped buttons on the webpage they are currently viewing.
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Curating contents is not original content creating, it means recreating new contents based original creation. Curating contents requires more time and skill than simple one-click sharing. As I wrote a post here early, there are at least eight kind of actions of curating: translating, highlighting, editing, ranking, re-formating, collecting, embedding, and designing.
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My daily readings 10/18/2011
October 18, 2011My daily readings 10/17/2011
October 17, 2011-
Ten things I want Siri to be able to do for me | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog
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How about being able to shop with Siri? Integration with Amazon.com would be wonderful: “Find the lowest price for a 3 TB FireWire 800 disk drive.” Once you see the specs, Siri asks “Would you like to buy this item?” Answer yes, and you’ve purchased it, answer no and Siri asks if you’d like to look at other similar items.
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Healthcare providers could also make life easier for their patients. My provider, Kaiser Permanente, has a wonderful online system for making appointments, contacting my doctor, and getting refills on prescriptions. Doing that by just saying “Order a 90-day refill of my Zantac” or “See if Dr. Healey has an appointment time available tomorrow,” and then being able to pick from a couple of open appointment slots would be a time saver.
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