What I finding particularly alarming at the moment is the term UIWOW, which is a term typified by a recent Nokia document called mobile design showcases. UIWOW seems to mean, “cool moving and cross fading goodness…yay”. From what I gather, UIWOW is measured on a scale between 0 and 10 nerdgasms per second.
Now I’m all for exploiting the aesthetic usability effect, which supposes that in two UIs which behave the same (in terms of clicks and key presses); the more attractive UI will be perceived as easier to use. But having engineers bolt on UIWOW for the sake of eye candy, is not really a good idea.
I can sort of relate to the term UIWOW, because “WOW” were my words when I first saw a Silicon graphics workstation with its rotating 3D menu structure. It was so incredibly fluid and smooth. My main thought was that the hardware was so powerful that it could waste time on animating UIs. It’s cool for a while, but actually the delay between screen transitions is too long and it gets a bit frustrating.
I found a video on youtube, skip to about 4:20 to see the menu, it’s very impressive for a system conceived in the late 80s.
My objection though is the use of UIWOW to mean “Better UI”.
UIWOW was also pioneered in the game industry. Every console game had their own fonts, and fancy rotating menu display and almost all of the designs inconsistent, showy and frankly quite rubbish.
Animation and motion can be powerful tools for highlighting a change of state and for assisting in establishing a narrative for a UI.
The original iPod is a fantastic example of an affective use of motion. Each level of the menu slides from the right sliding screen combined with a button which always takes the user back ‘up’ a level. Without the screen slide effect, there flow from menu to sub menu is disrupted and the result is a poor user experience.
As a corollary, imagine on your PC that every time you launched an application, the screen goes dark and fades back in once the application has opened. You then have to guess what the changes to the display were. In fact this is almost what windows vista does when it queries for user granted privileges.
Designing a UI effect which is consistent with the application model can really improve the usability and flow of your application. But, as my mate Nigel says, if you can’t do a smooth transition (synchronized to the LCD refresh rate), then don’t bother. Get advice from someone who is experienced; don’t rely on UI WOW as garnish, it’s distracting and often embarrassing.
One of my favourite books on design is called the Universal principles of design; it’s a reference book with one key idea per page/two page spread. It has sections on the golden ratio, Fibonacci, symmetry, grid, aesthetic usability, Fitts’s law etc.
3D UIs, “UIWOW” have been around for decades, and so have good design principles.
As a follow on from my post entitled “What’s the Frequency”, I was reminded by a friend that Ofcom have a service for locating base stations. He also pointed out that it’s Voda and O2 that would have got the lion’s share of the 900Mhz frequency.
In my post I complained about signal strength indoors for T-Mobile, while using the same device, Vodafone worked perfectly and wondered how much influence the frequency had in penetrating bricks and mortar.
Here are the all the base station within a couple of miles of my parent’s house in the valleys of Wales:
The data confirm (for this location) that there is a general split between Vodafone, O2 with their 900Mhz GSM band and Orange/T-Mobile with their 1800Mhz.
Vodafone’s cells are indeed further away whilst providing a better signal/call quality indoors, but it’s hard to draw any concrete conclusions.
I was talking to a network operator employee a while back and mentioned that they should sort quit playing with widgets and music services and sort out basic infrastructure issues like the fact that I still can’t get a signal in my parent’s house in Wales. A lot of houses in the valley require you to go out into the garden to make a phone call because the signal strength registers a zero bar.
I knew that my Vodafone SIM worked pretty well from the kitchen, but on the same phone T-Mobile and O2 had me out in the garden in my dressing gown.
I’d always assumed it was mainly due to the distance to the nearest base station and that Voda had invested more in infrastructure.
While that may be true, the net op man mentioned that Vodfone and Orange had a certain advantage being first on the scene by taking most of the GSM 900mhz licenses, leaving the late comers to settle with 1800mhz.
I’m not a physicist, but I do know that FM radio stops in a tunnel where as Long wave continues uninterrupted. And so in general the lower the frequency, the further it will carry.
Signal strength coverage maps (such as those on operator web sites) always refer to outdoor, on the street signal strength. Obviously if your house is a faraday cage, then it’s not the operator’s fault.
So while the operators’ coverage data to work out if your garden has a signal (and presumably how far to the nearest base station), the ability to penetrate through stone, wood and plasterboard may differ depending on who your contract is with.
Presumably that explains why my battery runs dead each time I visit my folks. (the weak signal means that the phone ramps up its power output).
If anyone has any details about this topic (particularly 3G), or can point me to some interesting physics which describe electromagnetic wave penetration through different materials, then I would be grateful.
Look alikes always make me smile. The idea that you could go your whole life being a bum, but then at age 70 happen to look a bit like Sean Connery and finally become a some body. It’s the parasitic american dream.
The idea of hijacking an identity can have its quite obvious seedy sides. For instance a De Niro impersonator apparently got free meals at restaurants, discount hotels and bedded many gullible women before he was threatened with a ??????2 year sentance. And who can forget the Michael Jackson impersonator who seems to match his idol 1:1 for plastic surgery operations in a bid to be the premier look a like.
Two of my recent faves:
Perfect for an office Christmas party:
And I can’t believe that Howard has a look a like. Surely the real thing is just a tenner more to hire?
Sometimes you look at large, late, over budget IT projects like the NHS computer system upgrade project and wonder how hard it can be to store something simple as data about an individual. Surely it’s a database entry with a primary key composed of a hash of full name, DOB and a few other details to uniquely identify a person and then an outsourcing effort to digitise existing records.
There are lots of technical, managerial and political reasons why IT projects run over budget, especially in the public sector. From a technical point of view it’s not hard to imagine the tedious digitisation, complex data structures, the migration tools, shim layers and glue. But overall with Internet access a commodity and secure systems such as on line banking rapidly becoming the norm in consumer banking. It’s often hard to imagine it being that difficult and costly.
Admittedly due to the extreme sensitivity of NHS data, it faces the same sort of dual use problems as the military when adopting ‘civilian’ technology.
When a roll out works well, it really makes a difference. I was quite impressed that in the time that I broke my leg and had two six month follow-ups at the Royal London hospital, they had moved over to computerised X-Rays (the exposed films were scanned into a PC).
This actually works really well as a migration path, because the x-ray plates are still processed as usual and can be kept in case the system goes down.
I asked the consultant what he thought of the system, he said “well, we don’t lose x rays any more which is good, but I do miss throwing them on the light box and drawing on them with a pen”.
A recent encounter however, made me appreciate that even a simple task such as storing patient data can have some unexpected use cases.
Over Christmas while staying at my parents, I developed an abscess in my tooth. It was total agony even after giving myself the maximum dose of codeine per kilogram of body weight (adjusting for the turkey coefficient). Luckily the hospital in Cardiff runs an emergency dental clinic and so I drove to the hospital and plonked my John Merrick like face at the reception.
After a few questions, the receptionist (or senior front line administrator), asked me if I had been treated at the hospital previously. I said no, but mentioned that I was born at this hospital. She stopped, and said “oh we can’t create a new entry for you, because you can’t merge two accounts at a later date”. She had problems finding me on the system, and asked if knew what my address was at that time I was born. I did not recall where I was living when i was two hours old, so I suggested that my name was pretty unique and that it would probably be easier to search for.that. Strangely it turned up no matches.
After a bit of Q&A, we realised that most babies are discharged from hospital fit and healthy before the parents fill in the birth certificate with the final choice of name. Usually the name would be updated on the next visit to the hospital, but I had not been there for 30 years.
She suggested that it was probably recorded as “Baby Davies”. It made me smile to think that for 30 years a record has sitting there entitled “Baby Davies”.
In the end the queue behind me was growing, and so another record was crated and continuity was lost. This was on the same computer system. My new record was updated as I received treatment and Baby Davies’ record was orphaned, I felt IT had failed that poor baby.
I’m glad not to have to commute much currently, but last year I used to travel to Staines from Hackney each morning and back. The bus journey is quite nice, passing St Pauls, the Old Bailey and the houses of parliment and I certainly got through a lot of podcasts. But yes, not again.
Here is my homage to the cross town commuter.
Photos taken on a Nikon compact camera, music is “Paris Hilton” - by a manchester based band called Mu.
I was kinda peeved when video adverts started to appear on the escalators on London underground. These are LCD displays which rotating animated adverts and replace the posters for Les Miserables and whatever saucy tango troupe are playing at Sadler’s wells this month.
Aside from depriving gum chewers of humerus targets for their spent juicy fruits (some people like to put chewing gum around the nipple area of posters), it’s just another example of visual noise pollution creeping into our daily lives.
I was travelling up the escalator at oxford circus this afternoon (just as some guy got stabbed outside) and to my delight realised that my Lozza sunglasses were polarising the LCD displays causing all the screens to appear black. After a bit of experimenting, I realised that the sunglases polarise along a diagonal line on the lenses, which happens to coincide with the angle I cock my head when standing on the escalator. Excellent I thought, my very own portable add blocker.
One of the reasons why this works well for me is that the screens they use are landscape orientation displays which have been rotated 90 degrees in software to appear like tall portrait posters.
I think most sunglasses polarise diagonally. I’m not sure of original reason, but it certainly makes sense that with the head in a natural position, LCD displays for example iPods, mobile phones and GPS displays in cars are highly visible.
Here’s how my glasses work with LCD displays:
Shades only partly polorising in the same plane as the LCD.
shades polorise in the opposite plane as LCD (blocks both vertical and horizontal light)
On a similar theme. The new platform display at waterloo is completely unreadable on sunny days. It takes the form of an array of LEDs screen spanning a good few meters. The bright light from above makes it impossible to read the display unless you are directly in front of it. I’ve noticed that this causes a lot more pacing with and collisions as frantic commuters now have to walk parallel to the row of displays to read each screen (as opposed to the old mechanical flip displays which were visible from all angles).
My head hurts. For some reason the mobile industry loves to confuse something really simple like a screen sizes.
There are three aspects to screen size.
Pixel dimensions - on an LCD display, this is simply the physical number of columns and rows of pixels which make up the display.
Resolution - Pixels per inch/cm. Two values for x,y tell you how far apart the rows and columns of the display are from each other, the density.
Display size - A ruler measure the physical width and height of the screen.
It’s possible to have a 1024×720 display the size of a postage stamp if the resolution is very fine.
This can get confusing, but explicitly using “Pixel dimensions”, usually clears up any misunderstanding. The problem is that pixel dimensions are often specified in esoteric video terms such as 1/4VGA. Here are some of the “resolution” labels which I’ve encountered at work in the last week.
Pixel Dimensions
Width
Height
Number of pixels
QCIF
144
176
25344
QVGA
320
240
76800
CIF
352
288
101376
1/4HD 720p
640
360
230400
VGA
640
480
307200
D1
720
480
345600
HD 720p
1280
720
921600
The names are a mish mash of video standards and display standards and the disjointed nomenclature also makes it hard to compare dimensions. I forget if a QVGA is larger than CIF, or a VGA larger than 1/4HD.
I wonder if we could save a lot of hassle and just use the actual numbers. “320×240″ is not that much more to write than QVGA and has the advantage that landscape orientation can be indicated by switching the numbers to “240×320″. Crazy diagram: - Wikipedia::DisplayResolution
In cell biology, a difference between prokaryotic cells (bacteria), and eukariotic cells (plants an animals) is that eukaryotic cells are compartmentalised into structures known as organelles.
The compartmentalisation allows eukayotic cells to participate in many more complex metabolic pathways than the prokaryotes, because some reactions require acidic conditions, some require particularly high concentrations of a compound which may be toxic to the cell as a whole.
One of the most fascinating of these membrane bound compartments is the mitochondria - commonly referred to as the powerhouse for the cell. The mitochondira enable the cell to participate in aerobic respiration (oxidising glucose to make chemical energy). What’s really interesting about mitochondira is that they have their own DNA, and replicate independently of the cell (dividing as the energy needs of the cell increases).
The widely accepted theory for the origins of the mitochondria is that a bacteria, which was capable of respiration, but not able to get a good supply of glucose invaded an early animal cell. Perhaps a small fraction of animal cells which did not attack the cell gained a small advantage from the boost in chemical energy provided by the parasite - and then through natural selection, a symbiotic partnership was formed. (in the same way as nitrogen fixing bacteria invade legumes today, allowing legumes to grow in plants devoid of nitrates).
To this day, the mitochondria retain their DNA, synthesise their own proteins and carry out respiration for the cell, but have become so integrated that they cannot be called organisms and could never survive outside of the cell. However their processes are compartmentalised so as not to interfere with cell and importantly so that the thousands of other chemical reactions in the cell do no interfere with its important processes.
Single chip
Cost is the chief driver for one chip - but people often underestimate the cost of modifying and maintaining a complex platform. Software asset reuse is massively important to a big hardware company though some are slower to realise than other that software is less malleable than it seems.
It is becoming far easier for an organisation to switch hardware than software.
If you now consider the differences in hardware between a mac and a pc, all the important bits are commodities, yet the OS software and everything built on top of those APIs represents a colossal body of work.
On mobile, there are only a handful of credible 3G signalling stacks in the world, and most of them targeting a particular OS with a particular compiler.
The effort to port to a new hardware platform is not a walk in the park, but as long as the host OS supports a particular CPU (with the same endian-ness), then most of the effort is spent on verification rather than porting.
Porting a signalling stack to a general purpose OS is fraught with challenges, and poses some interesting organisational challenges when it comes to verifying the system as a whole.
In an industry with a long supply chain company semico->OS->UI->partner delivery->Phone manufacturer->Operator. The only point at which the real-time characteristics can be fully verified is at the point that the product is fully assembled.
The hardware world tends to be fairly mature when it comes to estimating Fabrication costs, Bulk order of parts, Failure rates - and cost of returns etc. A $5 or $10 BOM cost reduction over hundreds of millions of devices is well understood.
The long term cost of being tied to a particular software platform however, is very hard to enumerate.
Software though in it’s malleable form, provides a canvas for infinite creativity which allows many solutions to be attempted before it is released and sets like plaster of paris.
One way of hosting a big s/w assets such as a signalling stack is to introduce an OS emulation layer/personality layer. Essentially this what POSIX does by presenting an arbitrary OS with UNIX like services. An RTOS personality layer provides a library of mutexes, threads etc. which emulate an incumbent RTOS such as nucleus. So long as the target compiler has no problems with the code, and the OS can provide the same or better real time guarantees as the OS it’s faking, then the single chip port can be realised.
The disadvantage of personality layer is that you need one for each OS, and each has to be carefully verified.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that real time programming/embedded programming is a distinct engineering discipline - often clouded by the fact that many developers who have written mobile apps classify themselves as embedded programmers. Which means that the skill set required to do the full integration is often is short supply.
Here are some examples of typical layouts:
- The first Symbian phone which I worked on had RTOS and Symbian running on a single chip (back in 1999). Series 40 devices tend to run everything on the RTOS, but “open” OSes rarely attempt to run signaling stacks.
- The iPhone is 2 chip. It has a 2.5g daughter board which could be switched for 3G without having to modify the main ARM11 CPU and peripherals.
- Freescale’s MXC reference design is single chip, but runs most of the signalling stack on a starcore DSP.
When you start adding real time multimedia, virtual memory paging (by nature indeterministic) and a product which is assembled from many many partner deliveries, it takes an enormous amount of effort to verify the integrity of an entire system.
In summary. One chip, one OS is not a synonym for “best solution”. I think the real skill is to consider when strong compartmentalisation is beneficial, and when it is an overhead. (without intending to stir up a debate about micro verses monolithic kernel designs….hows that going by the way?)
