I’ve rocked both a Canon A620 and Nikon D70S for about two years now and love them both like children from two different mothers however the Canon is a consumer camera and thus makes significant compromises. (sort of like the slightly [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Friday, April 4th, 2008
Categories: Photography, Technology, We love | No Comments »
Coming up with creative URL’s seems to be part of a business plan these days. Starting a company? Check the URL. Got a new product? Go get the URL. Going to launch a campaign but not have an online presence? Unless you want someone el [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
Categories: Branding, Technology | No Comments »
It’s not new to the web, but it’s new to me. Check out Rsizr (Resizer if you put the vowels back in). Its promotes itself as an app that “lets you intelligently resize your images” and actually works pretty well. It [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
Categories: Photography, Technology | No Comments »
The importance of Corporate Branding has been extensively discussed but personal branding is a topic that can often fall by the wayside. Jonathon Snook just put up a great short article that sums this up nicely. Most of it seems like common [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Monday, March 17th, 2008
Categories: Learning, Technology | No Comments »
Interface Design is arguably the primary concern for the interactive world these days. If something isn’t designed well and intuitive to use, it won’t get used. Books like The Design of Everyday Things and Designing Interactions [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Friday, March 14th, 2008
Categories: Interactive, Technology, Websites | No Comments »
So I just tried to comment on another post on here and our own Captcha system rejected me. TWICE! Captcha is one of the easiest and best ways to prevent spam on contact forms and blog comments however is often annoying to the user and is so [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Friday, March 7th, 2008
Categories: Technology, We love, Websites | No Comments »
I’ve blogged about Code commenting before. I like it. It makes me smile. Sometimes people leave jokes, or witty comments their code which brings amusement to an otherwise dry topic. Around the office we’ve been checking out Logo [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
Categories: Advertising, Interactive, Technology | No Comments »
As a in-the-closet geek I love discovering fun and practical apps that make my everyday surfing more interesting. PicLens is a must have, FREE plugin for any user who enjoys viewing images in facebook, flickr, etc. and don’t have the [...]
Posted by: Steph Co on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Categories: Fun, Interactive, Technology, We love | 3 Comments »
Much has been made already of the websites of Hillary vs. Obama. (spawning countless “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” comparisons) but a new site has sprung up in an effort to save a campaign that, by many accounts, is going do [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Categories: Interactive, Technology, Websites | No Comments »
With the “sQuba,” the world’s first real submersible car, the movie fake now becomes reality for visitors of the Geneva Motor Show (March 6th - 16th, 2008). Rinspeed boss Frank M. Rinderknecht (52) is known for his extraordinary automotive creations. The acknowledged James Bond enthusiast and Swiss automobile visionary kept revisiting this scene in his mind over and over: “For three decades I have tried to imagine how it might be possible to build a car that can fly under water. Now we have made this dream come true.”
Rinspeed create concept custom cars. They push the boundaries of what is possible. Take a look at their concept cars.
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Thirty years after the movie thriller ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ hit the silver screen sQuba is the first car that can actually ‘fly’ under water. “Dive it again, James!” If the situation gets too hot for the secret agent he’ll go [...]
Posted by: Matt SamyciaWood on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Categories: Design, Technology | No Comments »
So it has taken quite some time to make my first post but here’s just a small rant from my passing observations. Ben has been itching for that gun metal MackBook Pro that will likely never see the light of day, so for those of you [...]
Posted by: Simon Cranwell on Friday, February 15th, 2008
Categories: Inspiration, Technology | No Comments »
Our clients at Nokia have outfitted our team with some fancy new phones recently and each day I discover some new feature that I love. Today I discovered the power of Google Mobile. Not only is the entire suite of Google services such as Se [...]
Posted by: Mark Busse on Friday, February 1st, 2008
Categories: Technology, Tips | No Comments »
Our recent designer Leigh Peterson (who we miss dearly) and her partner, software developer Jeremy Karlson, recently launched a free Mahjongg Solitaire game called Ivory Mahjongg for Mac and Windows. After hunting for a decent free version [...]
Posted by: Mark Busse on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
Categories: Fun, Inspiration, Technology, We love | No Comments »
Vancouver, BC has been chosen as the official host city for the annual SIGGRAPH conference in 2011. This is a huge win for the city and is the first time the conference will venture outside the United States. The conference should prove a s [...]
Posted by: Mark Busse on Saturday, December 29th, 2007
Categories: Associations, Events, News, Technology, Vancouver | 1 Comment »
But then Pogue gets into the phone’s software, built on Windows Mobile 6 which he succinctly describes as “a mess.” He describes the dozens of taps required to make the phone go, the wait times between screens (wait times on a phone!?...), bad navigation, hidden menu choices of important items, counter-intuitive functionality…in short, says that “it’s a shame that such bloated, baffling software runs a phone whose hardware is so close to perfect.”
The review is clever and cuts to the heart of the matter.
So why does this matter to me?
Because I’ve been reading Getting Real, by 37signals. And one of the things they hammer home is that it’s better to deliver half a product than a half-assed product. They argue that leaving features out in favour of delivering something simple, smart and coherent is critical. Don't try to be all things to all people. Get a few things right.
I think that the Shadow phone Pogue describes is the sort of fully-featured, half-assed product 37signals had in mind. It's loaded with everything a user could want and a lot more, but its navigation is so dreadful that it’s likely to be impossible for them to find what they are after, let alone use it. Whether this is the fault of the software built on Microsoft’s platform or of the platform itself…well, I’ll let you decide once you've read the review and handled the phone.
Now, consider Apple or Palm products for a minute…
Palm (and later, Handspring, then Palm again), for all its faults, for an operating system and products that some have described as “stale” in recent years, got it more or less right the first time around: deliver something that works as a phone, syncs perfectly every single time, and delivers single button access to the four major functions. To do this, they dumped a lot of functionality and kept things simple: no multi-threaded operating system, heck, there isn’t even a “Quit” button in most Palm applications. Palm explicitly told its developers that they shouldn’t use one, that they didn’t need one. They told developers to keep important, frequently used things on top, one click away, put less important things in menus or secondary screens.
And Apple’s products: plug in an iPod and it syncs. There’s no button to push, it just happens. Plug in a camera, iPhoto starts. Simple…not simplistic…just simple and smart.
The complaints about the iPhone have been loud and long – that it lacks features that are “obvious” like GPS, no flash on the camera, no picture messages, no file organiser, no Flash support. I can’t help but wonder if Apple chose to leave all these out to make sure they delivered a phone with half the features, fully realised, instead of a fully featured, half-assed phone.
You can stack complexity on Apple’s products; witness the number of developers running MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Subversion or a hat box full of excellent development environments that find a happy home on OS X. But that’s not where you start with Apple; you start with Safari and Mail, iPhoto and iTunes, simple, smart applications.
You've seen lots of terrible software and bad interfaces, as have I. I confess to having a very personal beef with an LCD display in the light and fan control in an overhead stove vent ("...Light...is...off..."). So there is no shortage of examples for the issues raised in Getting Real. But the clash between the sleek simplicity of this phone's hardware and the transcendental awfulness of the its software really got my attention.
Perhaps simplicity is what separates passing fetishes from disruptive technology; witness Facebook, My Space, iPod, GMail, Flickr and others. I also think that this might be what's driving the market away from Microsoft Vista. Start with the fact that you have to choose which version of Vista to use. We don't want to think about versions, antivirus, antispyware, firewalls. We don't want to play the whack-a-mole game with the interface. We don't want to think about the interface. Rightly or wrongly, we want appliances -- plug it in, insert bread, push the lever, wait, and toast pops out.
Thanks to Mark and Amanda for putting Getting Real on my radar.
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Sometimes ideas come together in a collision, creating sparks. And for one, brief moment, you can see something in a new light, something you may not have seen before. This afternoon, I read David Pogue’s review of a new phone offering, t [...]
Posted by: Andrew Ball on Monday, November 12th, 2007
Categories: Interactive, Learning, Reading, Technology | No Comments »
