Microsoft’s videos to help us get started with Windows 8 Consumer Preview are pretty slick and clearly illustrate the fantastic benefits of the Metro UI.
I can’t help but thinking though that Mouse and keyboard interaction in what appears to clearly be a touch screen UI is odd. And the file system user experience seems to be just Windows 7 with a fancy wrapper.
I can’t wait to get time to try it out though, a rethinking of desktop UI’s is long over due in my book.
The summary of AV Test’s March 2012 Malware Protection for Android Tests includes the following:
“Close to two thirds of these scanners are not yet suitable for use as reliable products and identify less than 65% of the 618 types of malware tested”
Though I think the most damning quote was about one of the large number of “free” - mainly ad supported – services:
“…showed no detections in our tests and crashed several times. The advertisements worked properly”
Disclaimer: In my current role I promote Lookout Mobile Security which was in the top 7 tested applications
If this lady had a few more emus, she would have a mob.
I learned yesterday from a twitter friend that one of the collective nouns for jellyfish is fluther. Isn’t that a wonderful word? That got me thinking about all of the interesting group names for animals. A wake of buzzards. A murder of crows. And at the opposite end of the spectrum is a…
The report from the inquiry into the Australian Media landed yesterday. A summary by Alan Knight told me:
- Of the existing self-regulation measures, only one or two newspapers have appointed an ombudsman or readers’ representative.
- Online news publications are not covered.
- The Australian Press Council has neither the necessary powers nor the required funds to carry out its designated functions.
- Publishers can withdraw from the Australian Press Council when they wish and alter their funding as they see fit.
- Australian Communications and Media Authority’s processes are cumbersome and slow.
- If legal proceedings against the media are called for, they are protracted, expensive and adversarial, and offer redress only for legal wrongs, not for the more frequent complaints about inaccuracy or unfairness.
One of the proposals in the reports was that online news media sites as well as more traditional publishers would be covered by a News Media Council. But that a minimum of 15,000 “hits” per annum would be used to decide if a site was worthy of the interest of the News Media Council.
This blog sometimes touches on Australian news, politics and the media, and may at some time have more than 15,000 hits per annum. But most of my commentary here isn’t about those topics.
Because I’ve hardly the time to read the report, perhaps someone can answer these questions for me;
Assuming the Government accepts and implements even one recommendation from the report, these and more questions need to be answered so I and others like me can more clearly understand any changes to the environment we operate in.
Mozilla’s Robert O’Callahan warned that the pressure to provide DRM in browsers might lead to a situation where major browser vendors and content providers attempt to push forward a suboptimal solution without considering the implications for other major stakeholders.
They prefer Flash because it supports DRM, but see the web going HTML5. And are now trying to patch DRM into the solution to protect their position.
Note the W3C stakeholders who are promoting this.
When Google were just a search company, they made the web one of the most usable things ever. Life was great and everything was a Google away.
Today, as they face the challenges of Facebook, Apple and potentially Microsoft in the turf they made their own, they’ve changed their search algorithms so much that finding a good result can be a challenge at the best of times on a desktop browser. Though surprisingly in the Safari browser on iOStheir results are more like the “good old days”.
So like many other companies who either fail to disrupt themselves or whose attempts at disruption are less successful than expected, they’ll do whatever it takes to maintain their lead. From next week they will make your Google Web history available to it’s other products. A bit like when Microsoft integrated Office into Windows, perhaps?
Because they still have a lot of soul, they at least make it very easy to prevent them from gathering said web history.
Well before the recent discovery Google were compromising, without permission, the privacy setting I had chosen in my browser, I’d already mostly stopped using them for search in the last 6 months. There will still be the odd time what is still the best search engine on the planet has to be used. But, for now, I prefer the growing ability of DuckDuckGo and other services to answer my queries.
DuckDuckGo sounds like they don’t want to be evil after all.
When I use Mail on my iPhone, I always drag down to update. It frustrates the hell out of me that Mail doesn’t support this great feature. After all, it seems like it was in the dawn of time that Loren Brichter first implemented it in Tweetie 2.
Similarly, if the system supports an ‘Open in Safari’ feature, why would you hide it behind multiple steps? Tweetbot, by far the most usable app on iOS implements this and other functions as a one click action. Long Press on any link, hashtag, username etc. and the user is presented with a list of applicable options.
It’s great to know these things, and it’s great to share them so people can remove their frustrations. They’re happier, I’m happier and the person who did the hard work of designing and implementing the function gets their just reward.
Is there a little known function on your platform of choice which others might benefit from that you’d like to share?
Lesson: learning the difference between empathy and sympathy
empathy: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner —Merriam-Webster
sympathy: an affinity, association, or relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other —Merriam-Webster…
In a transport system which, while being cheap and reasonably convenient, is hardly good value, it’s probably no surprise that investment in enforcement appears to be higher on the agenda than investment in easy access to ways of paying fares. That City Rail Transit Police are glorified ticket inspectors dressed up as paramilitary police and have been known for overplaying their hand more than once doesn’t help my attitude toward them.
I won’t be sorry to see them go, but I hope the dollars which have been wasted on them are used to create a more convenient transport system for people in Sydney. How many integrated ticket systems would $34 million a year build and maintain? Instead I imagine those savings will be recouped by a State government whose promises are a year in the making with no solutions yet on the horizon.
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Mind you City Rail are not alone in the idea of building services to cover the exceptions rather than the rule. It’s not a bad idea to aim for great customer experiences for your users. But I’m firmly of the belief you should focus your investments on making services easy to access, use and pay for rather than spending your money on prevention, retention and convention.
Every system will have a small percentage of so-called corner cases. While you want to make the customer experience of those events as pleasant as you can possibly make them, the last thing you want to be doing is spending unecessary amounts of time and money building complex systems to deal with them. Often a good dose of common sense is all that is required, but the fear of losing the customer appears to blind good investment logic and instead funds are diverted to build expensive systems to manage those case. And this has to be to the detriment of the majority of your users from whom you might derive a greater benefit by retaining them with better products and services.
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Speaking of good customer experiences, it seems Path finally either understood what they did wrong or were pushed to do the right thing. I suspect the latter reading between the lines of their mealy mouthed apology.
As with other peoples money, other peoples privacy are things you never make mistakes with. One day a Social Network will come along which gets that without first taking advantage of their users. That other apps on the iPhone also access contacts data without advising users is also concerning. But just because the pecan pie is cooling on the windowsill, doesn’t mean you should take it.
Either way, expect Apple to soon issue an update to iOS restricting access to the address book. Is it an error on their behalf they allow such unfettered access now? Possibly. Does it show that some bright young things can’t be trusted with the family car? Absolutely.
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One of my friends sites has a ranking for the best smartphones around. It was a surprise to find the worlds most popular smartphone only coming in third. Though it was probably not unexpected considering one of the key decision points was the size of the screen – as opposed to far more valuable metrics like screen quality, usability and battery life.
Anyway, just like with BetaMax, it looks like despite being only third best, the modern day VHS of the iPhone is winning. Not just on sales, but on revenue, and value retention. Why are consumers always wrong, don’t they know this is the future of the Smartphone?
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On an upbeat note to finish, today saw the launch of the fabulous new version of my favourite twitter application. As with any great application, Tweetbot kept it’s core functionality and added some little tweaks which make such a big difference to the experience. And it’s on the iPad now too. Such a disgrace though that we have to spend all that extra cash to get the same app on another platform though.
