Media Center - no more :-(

In Denmark we have now officially dumped analog TV broadcasts. Even though this has been pretty thoroughly announced (so much so, that even my father in law who has no interest in these things what-so-ever, knew what was going to happen), it escaped Microsoft. Or rather they've chosen to ignore this and hope I will upgrade the by now old Windows XP MCE machine to Windows 7 so that I would be able to receive the new channels (oh! and the old ones too which seems to have disappeared). Well - no such luck for the guys in Seattle.

I've gone Team MediaPortal which is an open source project. It works (for the wife and the kids) pretty much the same way as MCE did. However, it did require a few long nights from my part fiddling with codecs and other strange stuff. But now we can get all the new Danish Channels (even HD), and we've got back subtitling as well (something we've had to go without in MCE). But user friendly setting up? Nah! Could have been a lot worse though, and I'm deeply thankful that a lot of people all over the world are spending time coding Team MediaPortal.

American peculiarities

Having just returned with wife and kids from a trip to Florida (to soak up a bit of sun, dolphins and alligators), I thought about a few things on the plane. First off: To lock a public restroom you just press a button on the doorknob. Pretty cool and easy to figure out. But why don't I get any indication that it's actually locked? In most places in Europe a small red tab will show itself on the door somewhere to indicate it is occupied. I felt quite insecure and certain that someone would barge in on me anytime.

Another observation: I was a bit worried that the car we rented didn't have GPS navigation. As it turned out, I needn't worry at all (interesting that we've come to this: in the good old days (10 years ago - i.e. pre-Garmin and TomTom) I was never worried that I should get lost). We got a map from Hertz which basically just showed the major roads in Miami (something like this)- and I thought that we would be totally lost because details on the map where sketchy at best. All roads where clearly marked and even showed numbers corresponding to the map. How is that for user friendly?

On a side note which has got nothing to do with user friendliness but everything with user experience: Our hotel in Miami, was quite nice, as was our somewhat cheaper stay in Sarasota in Holiday Inn on Lido Beach. The more expensive Miami hotel charged for internet access!!! $5 an hour!!! When will these people learn? I never make phone calls from the hotel room because they over-charge. And now this. If I was travelling on business I might have considered signing up, but frankly this hotel was not a business venue (as far as I could tell from the location). Ridiculous - I just waited for the next (and cheaper, mind you!) hotel where internet access was free.

PS: I finally got my hands on a touch screen device for own personal abuse (iPod touch). Will get back to you on that.

On-hands demo (Cycling computers and more)

A year ago I bought myself a new cycling computer (I wanted one where I could see altitude meters as I've begun bringing my bike to some mountains around Europe and riding up these mountains). I ended up buying a Sigma BC 2600 (price was a factor too - otherwise I would probably have gotten myself a Garmin, which would - in theory - ensure that I didn't get lost). Anyway - Sigma has this cool feature where you can "try" the computer in your browser - click various buttons and see what happens. Pretty nifty.

So I'm wondering - given that many of the mobile devices we use are built on some sort of platform, how hard is it to port this to the web for us common folks to try out before to see if we like it? I'm thinking mostly of the plethora of new touch screen devices. It would be so cool to actually try out how it works before buying it (and not in some store with a sales clerk breathing down your neck). I realize that some of the more quirky motions would be hard to emulate using a mouse (e.g. "pinching" an image), but just to give the general idea it would be great.

Writing for the web?????

In a recent series of articles Jared Spool & Co. (www.uie.com) has given useful tips and tricks of Breaking up Large Documents for the Web. They are a much more hands on "how to guide" of Jacob Nielsens by now age-old research findings of how people read on the web (and on computers), but not much new is seen (as far as I can see).

I find myself reading my news of the web more and more (rather than just the newspaper). But I *really* miss the more thorough articles from the newspaper on the web. In Denmark we have two national broadcasters who just so happens to also be worthy news sources, but they (like the newspapers online versions) have taken the short and sweet motto to the extreme (I've got a feeling that they just get a feed from Reuters and publish this completely unedited). When reading news I want more. Not 7 pages more, but definitely more than 5 lines. Am I the only one?

What I'd like from my real estate agent ...

Wouldn't it be cool if I could check out which houses where on sale when I passed through a nice neighborhood? Maybe I can (but my phone does not have GPS). Oh! And on that note until recently I had a Palm with a GPS built in. Pretty cool. I was cycling in Italy up this really nasty mountain and wanted to find out how far from the top I was. All I got was a grey map with a dot on because the darn thing used the mobile coverage to download the maps (and there was no mobile coverage at that particular point). Pretty un-cool. What if the phone downloaded the maps needed for say a 20 km radius when I last checked the maps and used those if no there's coverage? Now I just use my cheap Nokia (without GPS) and Google Maps. Works for me ... :-)

PS: Blackberry sucks. Big time. I never got used to the strange operating system (what's with the two options when reading mail: "More ..." and "More All ..."? - btw. normally "..." after a menu item indicates that a separate window opens up :-)). Also I can type faster on my Nokia with spelling turned on than on the crummy keyboard on the Blackberry.

Chrome - re-visited ...

One year has passed since I downloaded Google Chrome to check it out. It's now my default browser. Can't really explain why, as most of the features (if not all) are in IE also. It just seems faster. Some of the reason is because they don't steal screen real estate at the top (or bottom) of my screen as much as IE does. And I love the ability to search directly from the adress bar (although you can also do this in IE). Interesting note on this: I tested a client app that was a Document Management System and we'd made one example using this approach (i.e a more or less blank screen and then an adress/search bar at the top. Only one of 8 users found out how it worked unprompted. The rest where stuck in the old "filing cabinet mode". Would be fun to test this approach in 2 or 3 years.

User behaviour when taking photos

Have you noticed how people now a days always hold the camera in front of their face (between 20-40 cm)? On our recent summer holiday in France a friendly person offered to take a picture of the whole family (normal photographer included), and he did exactly that. Problem is, we've got a digital SLR camera, which means that you can only view the picture on the screen on the back AFTER the photo has been captured. He never even thought of putting his eye to the finder on top of the camera. 10 years ago this would never have happend. Interesting how our habits change due to usage patterns without us even noticing.

Plumbing

This weekend I've moved a water faucet 2 meters and stopped another one (as part of a minor wash room project). I'd prepared meticuously and gotten all the spare parts needed. But I know how it is - so I started early saturday morning knowing that I would probably need to go to the shop to buy something extra. After dismantling most of the old stuff I needed to put in a 90 degree angle thingie. And sure enough - the one I bought didn't fit. I had bought a ½" and the one sitting there was made for a 18 mm pipe. Down to the shop I went - and it turns out there was no direct subsitute with what I bought. I ended up having to do all kinds of ugly go-betweens to make it fit. Now someone tell me why we don't use a standardized size of piping - I don't get it. And it sure ain't userfriendly!

Danish drivers

Having just spent 2 weeks in France on summer vacation (even got some cycling sneaked in), we got back to the ferry and had to wait in line (a long one) to get ticketed. To cut a long story short: our line broke down and we had to merge in to the line next to us. This line (as most of them) were of course full of Danes like us going home from summer vacation. No one would let us in. We even got yelled at. 2 weeks of driving in France and you're always let in (not to mention they always stop for pedestrians to cross the road), and then back to road rage Danes. Depressing.

Todays lesson: this is why you can't generalize usability findings across cultural differences!

SharePoint 2010

I've just had a sneak preview online of the new SharePoint 2010 (MOSS). If Microsoft keeps their promises, this is going to be the best ever! They've ported the ribbon (long live Silverlight or AJAX), and it just looks sweet. But then again demo's often do! :-)

Check it out: SharePoint 2010 Overview Sneak Preview

Twitter etc.

I'm not sure what I think of this. Although I've become hooked on lancearmstong. Not that it's particualry interesting, but I keep coming back ... strange. I suspect it's the same reason we love to read gossip about the VIP's of the world (Oh! And don't deny it - you do it too).

From a usability point of view there isn't all that much to remark. It works - even though tinyurls suck without a title (but that's not twitters fault).

Blackberry

I've had the mixed pleasure of being the user of a Blackberry the last 9 months. What a piece of crap! The menus suck and seems like in the "good old" WordPerfect days to just have grown and grown without ever being completely re-thought.

The browser works pretty decently I must admit, especially on sites built for mobile devices, and at least as good (if not better) than most of the Nokia's I've tried out.

Best of all when you read your mail, you don't always get everything in the mail (if it's too big), and you can the choose between "more" ... and "more all". "More all" - c'mon!

Although - other phones could learn from the watch feature which actually gives you the opportunity to use it as an alarm clock (you can choose to use the alarm time on weekdays, or everyday - which means that you don't have to set it every night - pretty smart).

And then there's the keyboard - what can I say? I don't even have "fat" fingers (many will testify to this), but find it close to impossible to use.

In conclusion: If ever I get the choice, the blackberry will be pretty far down the list of preferred mobile devices. Although the Pre looks "kinda slick"

OpenOffice.org - 5 minutes in to it

Long time no blogs - been busy, and not very user focused :-)

Anyway - I'm polishing up my resume and as the home laptop does not have MS Office (only MS Works which sucks big time - I suspect it's MS Write and Calculator dressed up a bit), I've had to try out OpenOffice.org. It ROCKS. I've now spent 5 minutes with it and already created a "copy" of my meticulously formatted MS Word version (from scratch, mind you!). Try it out - it's free.