Motorola Unveils a ‘Dumb’ Phone

It seems almost painfully obvious, in a way, but some people don’t actually want more features, doodads, gizmos, or gewgaws sticking out of their phone (admittedly, I’m not one of them: I still want GPS, 3G data, Wi-Fi, and a qwerty keyboard on my Windows Mobile phone). For them, Motorola has just unveiled the Motofone, which features such battery-saving novelties as an e-ink screen, while still retaining a good bit of Moto’s recent aesthetic awesomeness:

[Motorola] hopes the design will help win new customers in large emerging markets, such as India, where there isn’t yet a “signature product” equivalent to the Razr…The phone may also appeal to new users in countries such as the United States, he says, or to anyone who just wants a simple phone that works well.

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October 31, 2006

Emerging Fully Formed from Steve Jobs’ Forehead

Steven Levy has one of the most sycophantic and interesting articles about the iPod I’ve ever read up on Wired this month. The article sheds light on a number of interesting and new-to-me aspects of the iPod’s creation, like this anecdote about power buttons:

When one of the designers said that obviously the device should have a power button to turn the unit on and off, [Steve] simply said no…From Jobs’ point of view, all that was needed was forward, back, and pause buttons, arranged around the circumference of the wheel. (After much effort, his team eventually convinced him of the necessity of a fourth button, called Menu, that would move you through the various lists of options.)

Anyway, the article goes into a fair amount of detail on how the product came about. It’s really worth reading if you have any interest in hardware innovation, Zune, or Apple.

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October 30, 2006

Letterman rocks

You’re trying to put words in my mouth just the way you put artificial facts in your head.

Crooks and Liars has the Letterman interview of Bill O’Reilly up. Good stuff.

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October 29, 2006

HTML to be incrementally improved

Apparently, the W3C just isn’t getting enough uptake on XHTML, because it’s simply too hard to shove people in the right direction:

The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn’t work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn’t complain.

As a result, the W3C will be making incremental improvements to good, old HTML for a while yet. Thankfully, they’re also planning on updating the HTML validator.

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October 29, 2006

Flash Lite 2.1 Preview for Windows Mobile 5

Apparently, I’m late to get on the bandwagon, but I just found out that Adobe released a preview of Flash Lite 2.1 for Windows Mobile 5 last month. I think this is a pretty big deal. With this, you’re now able able to deploy Flash content on Symbian, Windows Mobile, BREW, NTT DoCoMo i-mode, and (duh) Windows and OS X. With the increasing prevalence of 2.5 and 3G data around the world and in the United States (finally…), I think we’ll see a dramatic rise in rich content on mobile phones.

I’m hoping to find some time to play around with this stuff as soon as I finish up the other three or four active projects on my plate (which doesn’t include that whole day-job thing). There’s a great deal of potential here, and I’d love to see what the platform can really do.

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October 29, 2006

Cheer up, emo kid!

I dyed my hair black for halloween earlier today. I also bought black eyeliner and the world’s ugliest button up sweater. I am, god’s word, being an emo kid for halloween. In a few minutes, I am going to wander over to QFC and buy a six pack of PBR to fully accessorize the outfit. Scary, huh?

Also, I’ll be posting my pictures from Greece before too long. Life’s had a bad way of keeping me occupied for the past week.

Update: I am a scary amalgamation of emo kids. Black eyeliner, ugly button-up sweater, black hair and pale skin, black chucks, and a plaid short-sleeved shirt. For the sake of still being me, I have also affixed a sticker of Colin from the Decemberists to my sweater… I am terrifying. Amusingly, I feel like I look like a very poorly dressed Brandon Flowers.

You scored as chick emo. you are into chick emo. if you are a guy…it’s okay…it just means you are sensitive, and probably getting laid more than the other guys…or dumped….either way, you listen to copeland, dashboard confessional, and the postal service. you like to cry, and do romantic things for your girlfriend.

depressed emo
85%

chick emo
85%

geek emo
80%

metal emo
50%

poppy emo
50%

hardcore emo
50%

what kind of emo kid are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

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October 28, 2006

Unexpected value in paper prototyping

Jan Miksovsky talks about unexpected value found in ‘crude’ prototyping:

A counter-intuitive principle of soliciting early design feedback is that people reviewing a highly polished design may concentrate on superficial details and overlook fundamental issues.

For as long as I’ve been doing Ux work (about four years, now, since I was in college and an intern in the Microsoft MacBU) I have found Jan’s words to ring absolutely true. Getting stakeholders in your project to provide useful data to you about core interaction and visualization details in your work becomes more and more difficult as you apply more polish to your work.

If you’re interested in learning more about paper prototyping techniques, you may want to check out Carolyn Snyder’s book, cleverly titled Paper Prototyping. I haven’t read it, but it comes highly recommended by Joel Spolsky.

Additionally, I’d love to see a piece of software that could generate paper prototypes for me on the fly. I know some exist, but I’ve never seen one that integrates into Visual Studio. That would be hot.

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October 28, 2006

The other 90%

One of my favorite adages in software development is that the first 90% of your project takes 90% of the time; The last 10% takes the other 90% of the time (my other favorite is “time, quality, features: pick two”). I discovered this firsthand a little over three years ago when I was deathmarching towards the release of my first piece of commercial software: iRooster.

It’s pretty easy to slap together a piece of software that fits your needs. What becomes complicated is when it must have the polish and refinement expected of commercial software.

In the case of iRooster, it took me all of a week to create the skeleton of the application: UI, data persistence, alarm system, iTunes object model, etc. It took me a couple months (part-time) to add in an application icon, eSellerate registration, proper alarm modification, useful error messages, keyboard shortcuts, attractive gradients, website and everything else that creates an enjoyable user experience. I’ve invested hundreds and hundreds of hours into iRooster over the past three years.

I’ve been working on a new Windows app for the past few weeks, now. It took me all of 35 minutes to hash out the basic functionality for the app. It’s probably taken me one hundred times that to get it almost ready for shipping. Thankfully, I should have it ready to ship by mid-to-late November exclusively for Windows Vista.

I thought it was tough to get an app polished enough to ship in the Mac world. The Windows world bears significant burdens I didn’t expect, like the cost of creating an installer. I’m using WiX to create my installer, which is far tricker than handing users a gzip file containing your app, and saying “here ya go, party on.”

You will spend an inordinate amount of time polishing your v1.0 application before release. Arguably, if you don’t, then you’re doing something very, very wrong. I’d love to be proven wrong, though. Please let me know if you have an example of a MicroISV’s v1.0 product cycle where fit-and-finish work was effectively integrated throughout. My belief is that there are just a ton of little nit-picky things that you’ll never expect until the product finally starts to jell, which is when you discover that you still have another 90% of the way to go.

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October 27, 2006

Six years, one face

A guy I work with just forwarded this onto me. It’s a bit outside the scope of “UI Design,” but still interesting. Noah Kalina has taken pictures of himself everyday for the past six years, every one of which is archived on his website and also in video form on Motion Abbey.

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October 26, 2006

Suing for Accessible Surfing

From the Associated Press:

Last month a federal judge in California allowed the [National Federation for the Blind's] case [suing Target Corp. for an accessible web site] to proceed, rejecting Target’s argument that its Web site wasn’t subject to the Americans With Disabilities Act, a 1990 law that requires retailers and other public places to make accommodations for people with disabilities. Target argued that the law only covered physical spaces.

This is a big deal.

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October 25, 2006