Once in a while the Redmond Giant produces something new and very interesting. This time they demo an application called Photosynth which essentially takes your and everyones else's photos to combine them into a fully explore-able three-dimensional space. Make sure you also look at the video presentation.
Thanks to Jakob Persson for the link.
Peter Gautmann, Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland has gone through a lot of documents regarding Windows Vista copy protection (Digital Rights Management). His summary:
"The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history"
One day manufacturers must realize that what is bad for their customers, is bad for the manufacturers.
Jono DiCarlo of Humanized, a company most recognized for making the Enso, a launcher and manipulator in the philosophy of one of the fathers of the Mac; Jef Raskin. In his article, Jono DiCarlo argues that well thought through software works just fine for both beginners and long-time experts.
Rolling out a fresh site, based on a modified version of Wordpress, it still has a few rough edges to iron out in the coming days. This means you will see more updates and more content soon.
A few teasers on what is going on this spring:
Like with many other things Apple has presented through the years, the iPhone does not contain any remarkably new technology. What makes it special though is the way the technology is used: To elevate the user experience. Bruce Tognazzini, usability expert since the dawn of digital graphical user interfaces, has much to say about the new phone.
Donald Norman speaks out on why most consumers want simplicity yet end up buying the complex item anyway. Havenât you ever compared two products side by side, comparing the features of each, preferring the one that did more? I really recommend that you read his column.
Microsoft Internet Explorer for the Mac was discontinued in January 2006 when Microsoft announced they would no longer be providing any support or further development for their browser.
For some this came as no surprise, not only were Apple's Safari and Mozilla Firefox more widely used on the Mac platform, there were also up-and-coming browsers such as OmniWeb which were all better than what Microsoft had produced. People relying heavily on Internet Explorer for their online banking using web sites which were often optimized for Internet Explorer were rightfully worried. The browser also had its' quirks and rough edges that gave web developers everywhere headaches.
Despite all negativity towards Internet Explorer, it was still one of the better browsers when it was new, it also had some really useful features that has yet to be replicated by its more modern cousins. It is those features I want to tell you about.
The toolbar, containing navigation buttons, the adress bar, bookmarks, etc. on the top of every browser window is large. Even when you do not use it, it still blocks prime screen real estate. Few users had screens larger than 1024x768 pixels by then, many had smaller screens. To remedy this, yet not making it noticeably harder to reach such widely used buttons as the back button, the developers at Microsoft created a Collapse feature which would hide everything which was not the web page itself and place the back, forward, reload and stop button on the side of the window, in practice giving you a full screen view of the web page. The only problem here might be that the back button is placed too close to the close button.
The normal Internet Explorer window, collapse button circled.
The collapsed Internet Explorer window, collapse button circled.
Similar to, yet better implemented from a user point of view, than the Web archives that some browsers are able to create today. What was so good about how Internet Explorer handled them was that they stayed in a tray in the browser window and had easily over-viewed information about the archives content. Still today all other browsers that I have used only save their archives to the users file system so that it has to be searched for every time. In Internet Explorer you clicked the Scrapbook panel and Boom! There they are.
The Scrapbook saves web archives so you can go back later and look at exactly how the page looked like when you saved it.
The page holder is a very interesting feature. It held one page, any link you clicked in that page would be loaded in the right part of the browser window essentially giving you a tab to work with. Not only that, it could also remove all unnecessary graphics and display all links and only the links on the held page as text-only links. This was a great feature if you searched a lot and dug deeply into the search results. E.g. you made a search using your favorite search engine set to display 100 results, adding the results page to the Page Holder and clicking the button to make the Page Holder only display the links was great for skimming the titles for usable information. Or, if you found a page with lots of interesting information, you had a quick and convenient way of going back to where you started from.
The Page Holder holds one page and every link you click there will show up in the standard (right) part of the browser window. This is what happened when I typed michelin in the search field and clicked the I'm feeling lucky button.
In the category What Were They Really Thinking About, Konica Minolta just scored very high. You know that bulky copy machine that always jams and nobody ever really understands? Yes, the Konica Minolta team "improved it" by adding trendy pastel colors, LCD screen, stereo speakers, a lamp, three analog clocks, a waste basket AND an expresso machine.
Well-known usability expert Jakob Nielsen has a few things to say about the claims in a study by Pfeiffer Consulting that bigger screen size equals better usability. The study, ordered by Apple concludes that bigger screens will boost productivity. Nielsen claims (rightfully so) that the method of the investigation was faulty.
Good friend of mine Jakob Persson writes about the phenomenon of user-submitted content in the "Web 2.0" world. The problem is that anyones voice will be equally worth no matter what experience lies behind it. There is no way for the reader/user to filter away the uninformed to get to the better content without first having to wade through lots of unnecessary content first.
