feature creap

back to blogging.... just a small thing i found in youtube

book club

Don Norman has a new book out.

I haven't read it yet but it is sure to be a best seller since he is probably the best known thinker of the new usability\design age.

here is a link to amazon

and an interview by Bruce Tharp. from core77

cheers

itai

elements RSS feed

to all who asked for an RSS feed...

use: feed://www.uxelements.com/feeds/posts/default

have fun

itai

Why 2008 won't be like 1984 …

1984 was the year of the mac and was also the year apple lost the battle on the desktop. Much has been written and told about those times… the superior system, high price, closeness of the mac system… I have nothing to add to that historic analysis. What I am wondering is … are we facing a re-run ? Same Apple, a wonderful product (mac = iPhone) and a cheaper well backed array of companies …OHA (Open Handset Alliance) also known as GAF (Google And Friends)

Ok let’s look at the similarities.
Apple is all alone, producing both hardware and Software for a new and innovative system. (Allowing only an SDK = apple basic).
Apple is putting a lot of time and effort to get things right, from perfect icons to fast response time.
Against apple is a group of companies, each doing only one thing, some hardware, and some software. They will probably not get their products to the level of fineness apple has achieved but the cameras on their devices will have video, zoom and much more then the iPhone’s 2MP, the battery will be detachable, they will have tones off applications and they will be available and compatible with all the devices around them.
Could apple lose another war in the compatibility battle field?
I’m not sure… but the current situation does ring a familiar bell …
What should apple do? Well that’s harder to say, for one I would seriously consider creating an iTunes store app for the new android system. That will show that apple is not closing their eyes and sticking their heads in the sand. Allowing apple software to run on other platforms has already proven itself with iTunes and Quick time, could apple pull it off with the iTunes store in the mobile arena? Will we see a win mobile device and a gPhone exchanging music via iTunes ?
Another possibly bolder move would be to create an alliance of their own with several ODMs to produce iPhone clones, but that will probably happen 5 minutes after hell freezes over and pigs learn to fly.


But there is another way to look at it … (known as “the way Apple sees this”)
The cell phone market is very different from the PC market; compatibility is much less of an issue as it was back in the PC day’s. People are not looking for software to install on their devices, its all about the service and experience these days… can a group of companies (co-ordinated as they may be) defeat apple which excels at giving end to end service and experience ?
Will the cheaper price and availability of software win against the end to end service apple is offering?
Will apple collapse in a feature war against small and motivated ODM’s creating feature packed android devices?
Judging from the first round that was played this year in the mobile music store battle field this seems to be the decade of services and not software …
RIM, MS, Nokia have already figured it out and are moving at their own individual pace to provide end to end services…

Only stupid people give predictions (or people that believe that no one will come back to check them)
In the past, markets have come from being controlled by the innovator (apple ,palm, IBM) to being controlled by a well positioned supplier of common technology that allows verity (Microsoft). I don’t see apple stopping this natural flow… unless they can step up the pace of innovation

In any case we win!

itai vonshak
elements

Nokia deep into the touchscreen trend

The Finnish mobile giant is making his first releases on the touchscreen area, and they promise us great technologies and head-to-head battles between the big ones...

The first announcement, almost a month ago, looks to us more like a hysteric response to the market trend: a stylus based S60 competing the iPhone on "user experience"? come on...


But the entire picture is just starting to be disclosed... Nokia's Haptikos revealed by The Red Ferret Journal sounds like a real step toward a touchscreen feedback solution. Now we just need to lie back and wait for the other giants response...




Alex Rapoport,
elements

B sides

rock artists (once they are successful and rich) release B sides of their biggest hits,
B sides are like drafts and milestones of the final song. Hearing the B sides, you as a fan, can get a deeper understanding of the artists motivation and the process that brought them to releasing the final song.

Unfortunately fanboys of Apple, Sony, Nintendo etc don't usually get B-sides of mac os, walkman and wii.

So i guess we will be happy with pictures of them. Look at this wonderful article in folklore.org:

"The Macintosh User Interface wasn't designed all at once... Like any evolutionary process, there were lots of false starts and blind alleys along the way. It's a shame that these tend to be lost to history, since there is a lot that we can learn from them. Fortunately, the main developer of the user interface, Bill Atkinson, was an avid, lifelong photographer, and he had the foresight to document the incremental development of the Lisa User Interface (which more or less became the Mac UI after a few tweaks) with a series of photographs. He kept a Polaroid camera by his computer, and took a snapshot each time the user interface reached a new milestone, which he collected in a loose-leaf notebook. I'm excited to be able to reproduce and annotate them here, since they offer a fascinating, behind the scenes glimpse of how the Mac's breakthrough user interface was crafted"
read the full thing

itai vonshak