james & internet

just awful

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:29:13 +1000

just awful

tommy's tenacious tumblr: What I've Learned About Smart People.

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:56:46 +1000

tommy's tenacious tumblr: What I've Learned About Smart People.:

I can of course make no authoritative claims here, but I have noticed one overarching theme among smart people: they ask questions. When someone explains something new to me, I’ll usually just nod my head like I know what they’re talking about. If I don’t understand something, I’ll just Google it later. After all, I don’t want this person to think I’m a moron. Smart people are different.

Question everything.

Microsoft makes legitimate point about Google, promptly blows it

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:23:42 +1000

Microsoft made an internal video last year entitled ‘Gmail Man’. It basically made fun of how Google scans your email for keywords, and delivers targeted advertising against it. WIth Google’s recent privacy changes, they’ve now taken it a little further and put it up on their official YouTube channel.

Fair enough, right?

Well, no. Not really.

Here’s a page on Microsoft Advertising extolling the virtues of targeted advertising in Hotmail. Hotmail uses 2 types of targeted advertising; domain advertising, and industry advertising. From their site:

Domain targeting allows you to target Hotmail ads at those receiving your own emails, giving you control over the environment in which your email appears, increasing visibility and driving opens, click-throughs and response rates.

Through Industry targeting, Hotmail ads reach those consumers who are signed up to receive emails from your broader industry sector. Targeting Hotmail ads in this way allows you to increase brand profile amongst a pre-engaged audience and ensure that your message is front-of-mind at a key point of influence.

Domain targeting seems to be relatively harmless. It basically allows you to put Pepsi Max ads in Hotmail when someone gets an email from @pepsi.com. Fair enough.

Industry targeting seems to be a bit more nebulous. It seems like Hotmail is making a decision behind the scenes about what industry sector your email belongs to, and delivers relevant ads against it.

Here’s a case study on how the clothing label OTTO used Hotmail targeted ads. From the case study:

Commercial email targeting displayed OTTO’s 160x600 skyscraper ads within users’ Hotmail inboxes whenever those users received a retail-related email. This ensured high-impact exposure for the swimwear range amongst an engaged group of consumers who had opted to receive retail emails.

How does Microsoft make a decision about what constitutes a ‘retail-related’ email? It seems pretty unclear to me. They don’t explain it on the site. As a certified armchair pundit, it’s hard for me to imagine how they’re achieving this other than some form of email scanning.

That’s not all the options available for people who want to sell ads against Microsoft’s properties, though. There’s far more, and according to the site, “Available for all brand campaigns running on Microsoft media properties including MSN, Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger.”

Options include:

Those in contextual-ad glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Thorsten Heins, New RIM CEO live blog @ The Verge

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:20:41 +1000

11:24 pm “We have fantastic devices and a fantastic ecosystem that we’re building on.” He restates that RIM is about its network and its strength as a cohesive whole. He won’t split anything up.

11:24 pm “If it makes sense strategically and tactically,” he’s open to licensing BB10.

*11:25 pm But his “focus 1” is to develop RIM’s own products. It’s the same focus that “another fruit company” has.*

11:25 pm “You’re successful when you have the biggest value contribution” to your customers.

Thorsten Heins, reinforcing my pet theory that any modern CEO can’t resist comparing their approach to Apple’s, even if they have no idea what that actually means.

Monster Cable wants to be Apple, has no idea how to actually do that

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:35:00 +1000

“We’re competing with ourselves,” Lee (Noel Lee, Monster Cable CEO) says of the Beats products he’s trying to outdo. “We can be the Apple of the headphones space, with or without Beats…”

“…He showed off the company’s offerings, which became available for preorder to distributors on Jan. 9. One $200 pair of in-ear headphones bears the name of the ’70s soul act Earth, Wind & Fire. A Miles Davis line has earbuds shaped like trumpets and a volume controller that looks like piston valves. In all, there are eight new lines in 50 different styles. “We hope people will recognize what we’ve done in terms of sound with the Beats products,” Lee says.”

Eight new lines, 50 different styles. Ah yes, that’s the Apple I know and love.

(via Business Week)

I'd Like To Try a Galaxy Nexus, but I Think it Would Drive Me Nuts

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:09:00 +1000

…Where it all goes wrong is with the space bar. It sits right above the system’s home key:

I find when I’m really on the move skating, I’m always hitting that home key by mistake rather than the space bar and so exit out of what I’m typing. This never happens with the iPhone or the Droid Charge, because they use “hard” menu buttons that you have to physically depress. You can’t accidentally push them.

A someone who is constantly pressing the dictation button on iPhone instead of the space bar, getting yanked out of an app for an accidental keypress would drive me mental.

(via marketingland.com)

Aged to Perfection

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:17:00 +1000

Love that old 1st-gen iPhone. I read in the Steve Jobs bio that he thought that a stainless steel finish (like the back of the iPod line) aged really well over time. That scratches & dings in the material really added to the device’s character, and that covering them up with ugly cases stopped that from happening.

Can’t help but think that the current line of iPhones has no way to age well that I can see; there’s no finish that is really susceptible to aging like the iPod & original iPhone. Even the newer plastic-based 3G/3GS models don’t age particularly well.

(via designmind)

Android Loses the Magic

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:34:29 +1000

Andrew Munn:

“A laggy UI breaks the core affordance language of a touch screen. The device no longer feels natural. It loses the magic. The user is pulled out of their interaction and must implicitly acknowledge they are using an imperfect computer simulation. I often get “lost” in an iPad, but I cringe when a Xoom stutters between home screens. The 200 million users of Android deserve better.”

A long, but really interesting discussion on why Android is still laggy, and why it won’t be fixed until they do a major overhaul of the entire operating system. Also of note is this quote:

“Beyond the perception issue, lag is a violation of one of Google’s core philosophies. Google believes that things should be fast. That’s a driving philosophy behind Google Search, Gmail, and Chrome. It’s why Google created SPDY to improve on HTTP. It’s why Google builds tools to help websites optimize their site. It’s why Google runs it’s own CDN. It’s why Google Maps is rendered in WebGL. It’s why buffering on Youtube is something most of us remember, but rarely see anymore.”

This is a great point. For a company who crows over optimising search results by mere milliseconds, who introduced displaying search results before you have even finished typing, it seems bizarre that this hasn’t been priority #1 for the Android team.

Google engineers: less face unlock, more dedicated UI rendering thread development.

Victorian high school deploys Android tablets

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:19:00 +1000

Renai LeMay from Delimiter:

“I’m betting that Acer have given this school a massive fat discount to roll out Iconia Tabs instead of iPads. To put it bluntly, I think the choice of an Android tablet instead of an iPad for students at this point is a foolish one. I don’t yet regard Google’s Android platform as being a mature operating system for tablets, with it needing at least another year to become fully baked into this form factor.”

I’d say Renai’s prediction on this is absolutely spot-on.

Education is all about the apps. And it’s an interesting area, because it’s not really about the breadth of app selection, but the depth of app selection that’s critical.

Breadth is important for the standard consumer. Does the Android tablet ecosystem have a Twitter app? Does it do Facebook? Does it have Angry Birds? Does it have an app for reading books? For playing music?

Depth of app selection is an entirely different notion. For example, you might have an app for teaching spelling in K-12 schools. The app for teaching spelling in Grade 1 (drag out letters, phonetic sounding, spell CAT & a cat leaps out etc) would be an entirely different experience for the one focused on Grade 4 (could involve typing, multiple word meanings, multi-syllabic words etc).

For education to work well, you not only need a good selection of apps as a whole, but you need good selection within the niches.

That’s where I think the iPad is years ahead of their competition. They’ve been filling out those app niches since launch. I don’t think the Android tablet ecosystem is even close.

Kindle Fire Usability Findings

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 09:24:00 +1000

“Using designs intended for a full screen on a 7-inch tablet is like squeezing a size-10 person into a size-7 suit. Not going to look good. But that’s what the Fire is trying to do. Accessing full (desktop) sites on the Fire was a prescription for failure in our testing. Users did much better when using mobile sites.

Using sites optimized for 3.5-inch mobile screens on the bigger 7-inch screen felt luxurious — somewhat like using a regular website on a 30-inch monitor.”

This is something I noticed when I saw the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab, but reading this study has reminded me again of this problem.

Most websites are designed with 2 sizes in mind — desktop, and mobile. When you’ve got a 7 inch screen, you’re trapped in a usability middle-ground. Desktop designs end up with tap targets that are far too small, and mobile designs looks sparse and unwieldy.

The question seems to be; will designers start to build websites optimised for all of these screen sizes? So far, we have:

3.5-inch screens (iPhone, iPod touch & many Android phones)
4 to 4.7-inch screens (More modern Android phones, some WP7 phones)
7-inch tablets (HTC Flyer, Kindle Fire, PlayBook, Galaxy Tab 7.7)
10-inch tablets (iPad, Galaxy Tab 10.1, HP TouchPad, Acer etc)

My sense is that designers & companies will target the 3.5-inch & 10-inch sizes for their market popularity, and the rest of the devices will work, but ultimately but either awkward-looking, hard to use, or both.

HP’s design team talking about the MacBook Pro-alike, the...

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:15:43 +1000

HP’s design team talking about the MacBook Pro-alike, the HP ENVY. The 46-second mark is amazing:

“The second one [goal] was a level of honesty that was really, uh, a key goal. The materials that we used were, um really, true to this core attribute of honesty. We wanted the aluminium that was there in the design to come through.

…..

The last one [goal] was really key, as we brought Beats audio into the Envy landscape.”

So very many things wrong with the above sentences. I don’t even know where to begin, other than to say that when ripping off an Apple design, ‘honesty’ is the last thing on their minds, and Beats is still retarded audio snake oil.

Galaxy Nexus Beeps

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:47:00 +1000

“It’s a chewer of battery power par excellence. Again, not a huge shock; this is a big screen phone and I spent a lot of time testing it yesterday, and then letting it sit on the charger once it started plaintively bleeping at me that power was low.”

Why in the name of everything holy would any phone manufacturer make a phone beep when its battery is dying?

Best case scenario: it beeps, you go ‘oh, hey, my phone is beeping annoyingly, I’d better plug it in to the charger’. It stops beeping. You are ambivalent about your phone.

Typical scenario: it beeps & you aren’t near a charger. It annoys you constantly until you are near a charger. You hate your phone.

Worst scenario: it beeps somewhere in your house, waking you up in the middle of the night. You can’t get back to sleep. You stumble out of bed, wander into your living room in the dark, trip over the shoes you kicked off hours ago, fall & impale yourself on a surround sound speaker stand. You actively hate your phone, & it has caused you physical pain.

Makers of consumer electronics — A phone is not a dying child. Never make an electronic device make noise when its battery is low. EVER EVER EVER

OpenClass — First Impressions

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:40:00 +1000

OpenClass is a Learning Management System built by the Pearson Publishing group. It currently one of the newest offerings in the LMS space, and comes with a number of unique points of interest. Most notably:

Super-tight Google Apps Education integration
It’s free (more on this later)
It has a new, social-focused course structure

Looking at Pearson themselves for a second, you may know they already have an LMS called Pearson LearningStudio. They claim in an interview at Inside Higher Ed that they serve different markets; LearningStudio is the ‘fully online programs at scale’ product, while OpenClass is the ‘campus market’ product.

What that exactly means, I don’t know. I must confess I’ve never used LearningStudio — I’m diving into OpenClass as brand-new to any of Pearson’s online offerings. Personally though, I’m not a huge fan of those types of product differentiations; they almost always end up as an arbitrary distinction, and usually just serve to confuse.

One interesting facet of the OpenClass launch has been Google’s involvement. Pearson’s initial press releases hammered on about how their relationship with Google was a ‘partnership’, and so many people were under the impression that this would finally be the moment Google jumped into the LMS space. Upon closer inspection this is not really true. To quote ZDnet:

As it turns out, sources close to Google made it very clear that there was no “partnership” between the two companies. As one source noted, that would be like saying the my company had partnered with Apple just because we announced an iPad App.

So if you think that OpenClass is Google’s leap into the Educational space to blow up & remake the whole LMS universe, it’s not.

Install & First Impressions

Installing OpenClass on an existing Google Apps stack is very simple. You find it in the Google Apps Marketplace, then hit ‘Add it now’.

(By the way, Google Apps Marketplace is one of the best admin features of the whole Google Apps stack. Integrating a new system with your existing Google Apps is literally a single click. Then you’ve got single-sign on happening for your profile across systems. Suddenly, cats and dogs are living together. It’s freaking crazy.)

Here’s what it looks like once you’re into the Dashboard:

Almost immediately you can see the Google Apps integration; Gmail, Docs, Calendar & Chat are prominently displayed on the top bar. In that respect, the OpenClass Dashboard could definitely be a nifty, no-effort portal to your entire suite of services. These are more than mere links too; the icons display notifications for unread email, upcoming events, docs & chat.

I can see this being a major advantage if your staff & students are already using the Google App services. If you’re not though, it could be a bit clunky. I tried switching off Google Talk to see if it would remove the icon, and that didn’t work. So OpenClass kind of assumes you enable all those services, which (especially with Google Talk) could be a mistaken assumption. So that’s something to consider.

I like the idea of having the activity feed front-and-centre too. Actually, OpenClass takes a lot of design & user interaction cues from Facebook, and this influence is felt all over the place. If Facebook is the social network, and Yammer is the corporate social network, then OpenClass could definitely be seen as the course-based social network. Here’s the Course Home:

It’s definitely cleaner than almost all LMS systems I’ve seen in the past. There’s no Moodle-esque myriad of tiny icons to click, and no Blackboard-esque ‘Action bar’ dropdowns next to every heading or menu item. There’s no ‘Switch to Student view’-type button either. You are what you are.

Missing Bits

Make no mistake though, this is a very immature product in comparison to other established (weather-beaten?) LMS platforms. A few things off the top of my head:

No analytics (they’re coming soon via 3rd party tools)
No API (again, coming soon)
No integration with a Student Information System. If you want to do that right now, it’d have to be at the Google Apps end, and it certainly wouldn’t pass student data (like grades) back & forward
No rubrics
No conditional releases
The file upload tool is pretty crappy

A lot of these things are features that come with time & experience in the educational space, so I can’t beat them up too badly about it. This is a pretty solid v1.0 featureset, but it won’t be a system that you can swap to from a traditional LMS without dropping a ton of tools.

Two more quick impressions about the system as a whole:

It uses URL redirects A LOT. I don’t know if that’s a by-product of a Google Apps system or what, but it makes OpenClass feel kind of janky to use. I’ve also encountered blank pages during these redirects, which just flat-out won’t load. That’s definitely not something you want students to experience. Sometimes it also gets your session confused and makes you log back in too, which is annoying.
It’s disappointingly slow to load. It looks like it’s using the HTML5 Canvas element to generate a lot of the visual elements, which I like in principle (no Flash, no Java = win!) but it chugs. I think there’s definitely a lot for them to tighten up performance-wise. No idea whether this is a front-end issue, or whether they need to throw some more servers in the mix.

Cost & Future

This brings us to the price — it’s a free, software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. That means no hosting costs, no licensing costs. So how are Pearson making money on this exactly?

I’m going to link to this Inside Higher Ed interview one more time though, because I think it’s telling where Pearson plans to go with this product in the market (emphasis below is mine).

QUESTION 6: Where is OpenClass’ service level agreement?

ANSWER: We will provide a level of service consistent with the high level of service that we provide on all of our other SaaS applications. If additional service levels (whether guarantees or help desk or technical services) beyond what is offered with OpenClass are required by an institution those will be made available on a commercial basis.

QUESTION 7: Do we have back-end access to our institutional OpenClass system and data?

ANSWER: Yes, institutions will have access to a rich data set within OpenClass at no cost. They will also be able to access for fee services from Pearson for expert analytics consulting and data analysis tools.

It’s the good old Gillette model — sure, you get the razor for free, but those blades’ll cost ya.

Overall, I think as long as Pearson is committed to the platform long-term it will definitely improve. I like their user experience; it is definitely a new take on the overall LMS experience. I saw an article today on The Australian on how Monash Uni is signing up as a ‘design program partner’ to develop OpenClass. I’m very interested to see how that turns out.

So OpenClass could definitely be compelling if you’re using Google Apps for Education already, because that gives you a pretty amazing set of tools (email, calendaring, documents & more) and a hosted LMS for the princely sum of $0.

It will be one I keep an eye on, that’s for sure.

Stop doing Stupid Shit

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:26:06 +1000

At some point, I caved and made the mistake of asking him what the quickest way for me to improve my chess skills was. What followed was some of the most insulting and profound advice I’ve ever received in my life. He pulled me aside and bluntly said “Josh, stop doing stupid shit.”

After that, I gave up chess for some time, as I was busy working on a piano performance degree while maintaining a healthy competition and performance schedule. Later, after renewing my interest in the game, I took his advice to heart. The impact it had was profound.

I’m going to try this out in Starcraft 2, but it’s definitely one of those pieces of advice that works all over the place.

#MLG Providence

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:43:00 +1000

I’ve been watching bits & pieces of the tournament this weekend, but when I saw Leenock take down MVP this morning after losing 77 drones? Nerd chills.

By the way, I think it’s great that YouTube is streaming these tournaments now. The quality and reliability of the stream is great. Next step? Both streams at the same time.

iPod Phone

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:15:00 +1000

A great article on Patently Apple about the almost-made iPod Phone. Choice quote:

“Jobs called Fadell, Rubinstein, and Schiller to a secret meeting in the design studio conference room, where Ive gave a demonstration of multi-touch. “Wow!” said Fadell. But they were unsure that they would be able to make it work on a mobile phone. So they decided to proceed on two paths: P1 was the code name for the phone being developed using an iPod trackwheel, and P2 was the new alternative using a multi-touch screen.

After six months of working on the trackwheel P1 and multi-touch P2 phone options, Jobs called his inner circle into his conference room to make a decision. Fadell had been trying hard to develop the trackwheel model, but he admitted they had not cracked the problem of figuring out a simple way to dial calls.”

It’s amazing to think that the future of Apple was transformed forever based on the notion that dialing a series of numbers into a click wheel was kind of a clunky experience.

Call of Duty: Rocks the 80s!

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:54:50 +1000

Taken from the front page of callofduty.com:

Exhibit C.

I’m sure I could find many many more examples of this on other games (OH HI EVERY HALO GAME EVER MADE), but for some reason it’s particularly grating with Modern Warfare 3.

Call of Duty: Aerosmith Edition

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:47:00 +1000

Exhibit B.

Call of Duty Elite

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:30:19 +1000

Call of Duty Elite is the Guitar Hero: Aerosmith moment of the Call of Duty series; that whiff of a once-loved series turning rotten before your very eyes. I hate the way Activision treats (or to use their own term, ‘exploits’) their successful franchises.

Android Not @Home?

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:03:50 +1000

Ice Cream Sandwich is nearly upon us, but where’s the coolest part of Google I/O 2011?