Pomme::TAB

I was looking for the Macintosh Human Interface Guideline on Amazon and found this gem (Newton Interface Guidelines)

Though it’s not available anymore, I’d be curious to know how valid it is when developing applications for nowadays PDAs.

Maybe one of the reason the iPhone will be closed to third parties it’s because Apple prefer to have enough experience in developing their own software, before writing an application design guide and open the handheld to external developers.

I think the environment in which the iPhone will evolve is so different than Newton’s.

Now, everything is connected, worms, malware and phishing also spread on mobile devices, on IM. PDA are now expected to be multimedia player while connectivity comes into multiple wireless flavours, all eager to drain the battery’s life (it was an excellent idea to put 2 batteries in the iPhone)

Also cautious users want snappy interface and the shortest time to completion for whatever they want to do because each second spent messing with the UI is another second of exposure to thieves in public transports.

That’s a challenge.

I think it’s a wise decision for the iPhone to starts its life closed to third parties software.

Interesting article about software design methodology: design for one or two typical users, don’t try to satisfy all users.

It makes sense to me it’s a better to make one user happy than discontent everyone.
The trick I suppose is to correctly profile this one typical user.

I think it does apply to any product, not only software.

I wonder how Apple do identify THE user and what is their typical user’s profile (called ‘persona’ in the article linked above). I ask that because I like so much some of their product I feel like they were designed for me alone
Although I like technology It very rarely translates into an acquisition: I still don’t have a portable media player.

It’s only when I need it enough and like it a lot both inside and outside and feel like it was made for me that I may consider a purchase action (that can take weeks or months).

One of the Nokia E-series smart-phone is about to land in the purchase action and the Nintendo Wii has left the parkway for the runway, but I don’t how long is the flight

The other interesting thing is there seems to be a relationship between money earned by product sold and a user’s satisfaction.
It might sound like stating the obvious but not to all company seem to get it.
Apple and Nintendo are making huge amount of money for each product they sell compared to their respective competitor (Sony loses money for each console sold, PC market is sluggish with a industry’s growth far below Apple’s)

Why?

I bet they are a lot of users of Apple and Nintendo who feel like their acquisition was designed for them. It makes them happy and make them in better disposition to invest more into the product (service and software, new versions).

(an interesting comparative read is the “after the honeymoon” reviews for the Wii and for the PS3 at Ars Technica: guess which one of the review feels more positive and transpire reviewer’s happiness at using the product?)

Typically when designing for a subset of the users population, you’ll reach a smaller number of people.
I think that’s called a niche market, but who cares as long as both side of the transaction are happy: Product maker earns money (typically the margin are higher) and the user (notice, I didn’t say consumer) is happy, a perfect virtuous circle.

Now that’s obviously not true for the iPod whose market share cannot really be called a niche.

I think, in addition of an excellent user profiling, I suspect there is the fashion effect. At least here in the UK, I’m sure most people who buy an iPod do so because it’s fashionable, not because they studied what media players are available and selected the iPod because it’s the ONE (by the way, this is how I bought my first mac in 1996, after months of study of what’s in offer by the computer industry at that time).

That said, some of them will find the iPod is not what they wanted, while other will really like it and makes them happy of their purchase. They will explore the possibly of iTunes (software) , buy more songs on iTunes Store (service) and possibly look into other Apple products: the Halo effect.

Transforming a normally niche (i.e: small market share, high margin) product into a mass-consumption product is probably the dream of any company.

Apple has now made it, Nintendo’s got the idea and works on it and Nokia made it long time ago.

The others?

Just too busy milking as many as possible uninformed or misinformed consumers (notice, I didn’t say users) ’till the last drop while trying to destroy each other.

I’m not saying the mentioned brands don’t do that, I’m saying that’s it’s not their main focus and they don’t get carried away by the necessity of a capitalist world.

Disclaimer: I’ve mentioned Apple, Nintendo and Nokia because they made products that I’m happy with, I fully understand that people can be happy with product from other make, we are all different after all It just turns out that, in my opinion, these three are coincidentally particularly good at designing product with specific profile of user in mind, which explains why they excel in their niche(s).

One last message to gadget makers:
If you are desperate to get me buy your product, read my mind (but don’t listen to me) and design it just for ME, then may be I will.

It’s amazing what people can do with a wiimote.

That’s such a brilliant idea:  a AA battery cell with integrated USB connector so you can recharge it directly on a computer. According to the IHT, the company behind the idea plans to implement the technology on AAA cells and 9V batteries
The End User: Batteries that travel - International Herald Tribune

If you can’t wait for it to be released in your region, this is considered by MobileWhack as an alternative: Mavizen MyBlu

All the fuss around the iPhone has probably triggered a wave of nostalgia about the Apple device that created the PDA market.

from the digg summary:
“We were all wowed by the iPhone last week, but back in 1993 Apple introduced a revolutionary product called Newton that defined the PDA industry. Watch this Newton “getting started” video from 1993 and wonder why your 2006 PDA can’t do half the things Newton revolutionized fourteen years ago!”

• http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/2007/01/in_1998_steve_j.html
• http://digg.com/apple/Before_the_iPhone_there_was_Newton

Now that Apple unveiled the real “thing“, This website shows a photo gallery of some fake designs that appeared on the web when the “thing” was still a crazy recurring rumour.

According to Ars Technica, Ford and Microsoft are going to work together on the dashboard OS of some of Ford 2008 vehicles.

I guess we will soon have plenty of illustrations for the old joke (If Microsoft made cars…)

I found this blog article about the bandwidth consumption and thus storage growth for Flickr.
There are graphs of frequency of photo uploads to Flickr and the size of the photos.
The author doesn’t say how did he get his information though.
But the API calls are named in the comments

I use vi daily. I switched from Emacs 4 years ago. Sometimes I reflect with a smile on the fact that I’m still happy and productive with a software written before I was born.

The Birth of vi: “lanc writes ‘Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, tells the story of how he wrote the vi editor. The article at The Register delves into his motives, who instigated the project, and some of the quirks of leaving a ‘gift to mankind’. From the piece: ‘9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore. The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens. So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I’m sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.”