John Gruber:
12-word review of “A Serious Man”: So much for the Coen brothers never having made a bad movie.
Where by “review” Gruber means “140 characters of obnoxious drivel.”
(truth be told, I haven’t seen A Serious Man yet, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to riff on a recent DF post title 
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Running into undefined_method errors with Thinking Sphinx and sphinx scopes?
Make sure you define your sphinx_scope after the define_index block, instead of before.
Simple, huh?
In other words, make sure your ActiveRecord classes look like this:
class ContrivedExample < ActiveRecord::Base define_index do has :something end sphinx_scope(:something_cool) { :with => {:something => 10} } end
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The name is terrible. Would Windows 7 Phone have been so bad? Really? The fact that the videographer talking with Gian Wilson from Microsoft can’t pronounce the OS’ name doesn’t bode well for anyone else. Everyone I know who is not a consummate techie—and even some who are—call the Apple iPod touch an iTouch, because iPod touch is just too damned hard to say. Windows Phone 7 Series is an order of magnitude worse.
The lock screen is totally illegible. Undoubtedly, part of the problem is the camera that’s being used for the interview, coupled with the phone’s glossy screen, but there simply isn’t enough contrast in the lock screen’s background image and the white text to make this work. At least for Barcelona, the MED group responsible for setting up their demo phones should have used a background image with darker colors. From a feature perspective, the text should have a drop shadow or something to ensure that the bajillions of photos that *look just like this* will work with (ahem) Windows Phone 7 Series.
Also, unlocking the phone isn’t particularly intuitive. iPhone: press the power button, swipe the thing that says ‘SWIPE ME.’ Affordances are great, baby! Windows Phone 7 Series: slide the image up. Wuh?
Start Screen
“Here’s the story/of a lovely lady!” First thought: wow, that looks like the Brady Bunch title screen. Second thought, this looks pretty good. A heck of a lot better than the one from Windows Mobile 6.5. Why are the content margins so wacky? There’s a huge gutter on the right side and a teeny tiny one on the left side.
Animations on the Start Screen
Super slow. The swooping tiles effect is super pretty, but looks like it takes forever to complete. Just launch my damned app already. For a phone that’s supposedly about getting out of your way and letting you live your life, I think it places too much emphasis on whiz-bang-for-the-sake-of-whiz-bangerry effects.
Xbox Live/Games
I really like the fonts used across the interface. I’m not really fond of the Zune’ish ‘let text run off the screen’ thing. Seriously, guys, please tell me that the word “Games” getting clipped on the right side of the screen is an honest to god bug, and not someone’s idea of cleverness. The gutter issue mentioned above shows up here, again. Another issue I noticed is that the word “Games” doesn’t move off screen when Gian starts scrolling down. Yes, I know I’m in the Games app. Why do I need to keep staring at a reminder in 80pt Segoe when all I want to do is look at my games?
Finally, why does the app’s icon call this Xbox Live, while the app itself is referred to as Games? This should be consistent. Not to mention that, yes, I still know exactly what I clicked on when I left the Start Screen.
Navigation within the Xbox Live/Games app
Oh my god! You can change screens on both the X and Y axes. That’s totally undiscoverable! Where the heck are the affordances? Why couldn’t you just put a tab bar at the bottom of the screen like Apple? Also, on the Spotlight screen, the word ‘Games’ is now clipped on the letter ‘G.’ Maybe this is supposed to somehow tell you where you are in the app. “Hey, I’ll look at which letter in the title is clipped, and then slide my finger in the opposite direction in order to see more stuff!” Yeah, that’s intuitive.
Notifications in the Xbox Live/Games app
Pertinent notifications related to my use of apps really should not require multiple swipes into an undiscoverable piece of UI in order to find. That’s just braindead.
People Hub
OK, they’re doing the freaky clipped title thing again. I’m getting the feeling that this is intentional. And it’s utterly terrifying. Also, why does that first guy’s picture take 2-3 seconds to slide up? Why do I want his picture to slide up? Don’t I just want to see his picture? Finally, maybe it’s a result of the video quality, but the contrast between text and background color on this screen looks incredibly low again (i.e. stuff looks like it’s hard to read).
What’s New page in People
In order to see what your friends are doing, I counted the following gestures:
- One click to access the People Hub.
- One swipe past Recents to access All Contacts.
- One swipe past All Contacts to access What’s New.
The amount of work you have to do to reach seemingly undiscoverable pieces of content is remarkable.
The ‘Pictur’ Hub
This clipped text thing is obnoxious. Text contrast is awful again. Seriously, guys: drop shadows. I can’t quite tell, but it doesn’t look like the Pictures Hub offers that cool (and useful) scrolling inertia feature you’ll see on the iPhone. That’s the thing where it keeps scrolling, but at a slower rate after you swipe.
Finally…
I find it extremely curious that we never saw the actual phone calling experience, given that the name of the OS includes the word ‘Phone’.
Windows Phone 7 Series looks beautiful. The typography is fantastic. The screen looks vibrant. It looks like a great step forward from Windows Mobile 6.5. But… It feels like a group of really top-notch developers and designers sat down in a room and said ‘what sort of awesome stuff can we do that looks really cool, never mind the usability?’
OK, I’m being unfair. But, the fact of the matter is that I’d have significant concerns about my own ability to easily use the device, never you mind how my 66 year old mother would deal with it.
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[John] Kerry remains furious about Tora Bora today. “They declared Osama bin Laden the world’s number-one criminal, and went out boldly proclaiming, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ and talking about the dangers of Al Qaeda,” he told me recently. “And when they had an opportunity to completely, not only decapitate it, but probably to leave it with the minuscule, last portion of its tail, they never showed up.” His anger is justified. Bin Laden was clearly at Tora Bora, and sending so few troops was indeed a major failure.
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my response:
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“We’re entitled to our own opinions, we’re not entitled to our own facts.”
Al Franken is awesome. Simple as that.
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…I felt that I was trying to describe an unthinkable present and I actually feel that science fiction’s best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going…The best thing you can do with science today is use it to explore the present. Earth is the alien planet now.
—William Gibson in an interview on CNN, August 26, 1997.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, with about 100 pages of Pattern Recognition written, Gibson had to re-write the main character’s backstory, which had been suddenly rendered implausible; he called it “the strangest experience I’ve ever had with a piece of fiction.” He saw the attacks as a nodal point in history, “an experience out of culture”, and “in some ways… the true beginning of the 21st century.” He is noted as one of the first novelists to use the attacks to inform his writing. Examination of cultural changes in post-September 11 America, including a resurgent tribalism and the “infantilization of society”, became a prominent theme of Gibson’s work.
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Captain Blinky has decided to express an opinion about the conflict in Afghanistan. Does anyone know if he ever compensated the US government for all the planes he crashed back in the day?
Hours before the speech, Senator John McCain of Arizona expressed support for sending more troops to Afghanistan but said he opposed a timetable. “Dates for withdrawal are dictated by conditions,” Mr. McCain, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill. “The way that you win wars is to break the enemy’s will, not to announce dates that you are leaving.”
McCain makes a great point here, considering how well this strategy worked for the US in the Vietnam War. Can you imagine where we’d be right now if he’d won last November? Horrifying thought.
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The Twitterati got all hot and bothered earlier today when they found out MINUTES BEFORE EVERYONE ELSE that Tiger Woods was in a car accident.
This is seen as some sort of validation of the awesome amazingness of the “real-time web.” Scoble was, predictably, on hand to pimp his Twitter lists. Devin Coldewey was, predictably, the rational wet blanket interrupting everyone else’s masturbatory reverie.
Personally, I don’t have any particular issue with the whole real time web thing, and find it vaguely interesting. My only major complaint with the TechCrunch goings-on is the excitement over a non-story for the sole reason that it gives a small group another opportunity to talk about themselves and how they’re somehow replacing the traditional media.
Say what you will about the newspaper-based tradmed, but at least they’re decent enough to confine their self-referential wanking to the op-ed page. TechCrunch, in contrast, is pure op-ed in the guise of legitimate journalism. Sort of like Fox News.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/27/internet-twitter-tiger-woods/
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