Nicholas Chen

One of the apps for the iPhone that I’ve been anticipating for about a month is Realmac Software’s Clear. They’ve so far released a demo on video (their latest Twitter updates says it’s currently under review):

I’m interested in it for several reasons. From a personal productivity standpoint, I’ve been looking for an elegant way to make lists for my daily work goals and to-dos. I think I may use it for shopping lists as well, but I’ve often found myself browsing FoodTV at Wegmans searching for inspiration, so I’m not sure.

From an HCI perspective, I’ve long observed a tension between using the best interface for a particular application and keeping things consistent with the OS conventions (and oftentimes other applications). The research I’m  currently doing with some students involves adding discoverable and logical gesture controls to a iPad based reading environment. We’re still undecided how radical a change the touch gestures and commands should be from the UI convention Apple provides.

Since Clear is re-thinking gestures in iOS, I am interested in testing out the touch interactions in the app. Perhaps the gestures are similar enough to standard iOS interactions (swipe sideways to erase/archive) that Clear will simply piggyback on existing conventions. On the other hand, if the gestures are a big departure, I foresee difficulties harmonizing the different gestures across the many apps that will attempt to jump on the custom gesture bandwagon.

SOPA/PIPA blackout day. There’s been a slew of news articles about Wikipedia and Craigslist going offline today. In my opinion, far more interesting are the “How to get around the Wikipedia blackout if you really need to” stories that are popping up. These articles perfectly illustrate the response we should expect when SOPA/PIPA kicks in and things start getting blocked: people will quickly let each other know how to circumvent the blocks. Right now these blackouts are self imposed. Tomorrow they might  be government imposed. Regardless, people who are sufficiently motivated will find a way to get at what they want, which leaves us holding only the unintended consequences of the laws.

Ironically, we might look to China—copyright backwater that it is— as a guide. China has far more sophisticated and draconian Internet blocking measures in place and I would argue that they are far more invested in making sure that blocking is enforced and working. There, the government isn’t doing the blocking for some corporate lobbyists, but for it’s own self preservation. Now, if my mom , who is as technologically average as you can get, can figure out by herself how to bypass those measures to read the news and look at my Picasa photos when she’s in China*,  I think that says quite a bit about how little internet blocking measures like SOPA/PIPA/Great Firewall will actually do to curb the trafficking of information, be it pirated movies or inflammatory news articles.

* via VPN tunnel. I am so proud of her.

Recently, I came across an article claiming that Siri was largely hype. In that article, the author cites his declining use of the voice control system in his car as evidence that Siri will likely suffer a drop off in use as its novelty wears off. First, using oneself as an experimental sample of one generally leads to pretty inaccurate predictions. But, that’s not what this post is about.

Whether Siri becomes a core part of the iPhone experience remains to be seen. However, one thing that has bothered me for some time is that many people seem to be confused about is what is actually new about Siri. The confusion probably persists because Apple’s product info and ads focuses on what Siri does and not how it does it. Apple’s strategy is fine: for the end user the only thing that matters is the overall experience. However, for those discussing the technical merits of the system and prognosticating its adoption, it’s important to know how it differs from other voice recognition systems.

What most people overlook is that Siri is unique from other systems featuring voice control because of its use of natural language processing (NLP). Using Siri, one isn’t restricted to saying the voice command a specific way. On most systems, one has to say the command just so or else the computer balks. With Siri, there’s a bit more flexibility. I can say, “text my mom” or I can say “please send a text to my mother” and both will produce the same behavior. Although the sorts of things I can do with Siri are similar to that of other systems, there is a difference. Siri makes it so that the user doesn’t have to conform to, or think like a computer. By reducing the need for users to think before using the system, Siri fades into the background and frees the user to focus on the task at hand. It’s important to point out that the situations for which voice control is most frequently employed are precisely those where our attention is focused on something else.

Siri is a pretty big improvement to the user experience of voice control systems. As such, it should not be discounted because Apple has repeatedly shown that an improved user experience can elevate something from being a mere novelty to indispensable.

As Google rolls out their ICS update, there is currently a lot of discussion about which devices will be able to run the new update. That many existing devices will not be able to run ICS makes me think that Android “updates” are a departure from traditional notions of software updates. With most software there is an implicit expectation that if I already run one version of something, I should be able to install the update. Otherwise, how is it an update rather than “new”?

When we think of the install base for most software, we rarely differentiate between version numbers. I think this is because there is an assumption that one can quite easily update to the newer version. Consequently, it seems that few people make any distinctions between the different versions of Android in the world (unless maybe when one is shopping for a phone); they all just get lumped together. However, if a large body of devices cannot run the latest version of a platform, is it accurate to count all of these older devices as belonging to that platform?

Researchers at UIUC have created self-healing wires for circuits that automatically fill cracks and gaps in the wire. Two thoughts:

1. Probably shouldn’t use this on your prototype boards in case you need to cut traces.
2. I knew Gushers(tm) would inspire a major advance in science. Your turn, Capri Sun.

Since the first time I saw Louis C.K. perform at a comedy club in San Francisco when I was in college, I’ve been following his incredibly hilarious work. Recently, Louis C.K. distributed the recordings of a recent show directly the his fans over the web, cutting out the traditional media distribution players. This has received a large amount of coverage, possibly because the news and media businesses are often one and the same. A lot of what I’ve seen are analyses about whether this was a “one-time-only” phenomenon or if it is a sustainable model for distribution for other entertainers and artists.

My prediction is that the direct distribution model will only get more popular. I see a  a number of reasons that include more favorable pricing, different set of ethics when dealing directly with the creator, ability to cater to niche appeal, among others. However, the most important one is that it’s a whole lot less expensive for the person buying stuff when they don’t need to pay for the big company in the middle and its operational overhead. Many of the analyses have argued that Louis C.K. was an exception in that he was already well-known; lesser known individuals need the traditional media company to help publicize their work. I disagree. The way media goes viral these days clearly demonstrates that the traditional media company is not necessary for building up awareness.

I do believe the Louis C.K. was unusual in the sense that he knew what needed to get done for him to sell his video. Most people do not have this awareness. As a result, I foresee niche industries arising to help support others who lack Louis C.K.’s comprehensive skill set. Things like Kickstarter, etc. that give a platform for publicity and some design patterns for what makes a good direct distribution campaign will have increased prominence. I can also see how communities may arise that allow creatives and business types to pool their talents in order to embark on bigger productions (another argument I’ve seen about why big media production companies need to be exist). Yes, these aspects may eat into the profits a bit, but I’m pretty sure most people will be extremely happy with a fraction of the $200K+ that Louis C.K. has pulled in so far.

For a platform that’s used for a lot of media production, I’ve found OS X to be quite lacking for converting between different video formats. Recently, I’ve had to convert some H.264 to H.263 (crazy video coding requirements). After trying out several tools here are a couple I’ve found. These get the job done in a pinch but there are some pretty unfortunate annoyances to all of these that I’ll also try to cover.

Quicktime 7 Pro

For some reason, Quicktime 7 has decided to crash on startup on my MBP running 10.6.8. This could be my fault, or Apple’s, but regardless, QT7 hasn’t been updated in forever. Mind you, the standard QT7 won’t do transcoding unless you pay extra money for the Pro version. I’m a little reluctant to pay money for a tool from 3 years ago that currently won’t start on my computer.

ffmpegX

ffmpegX is a front-end to the very powerful ffmpeg command line tools. I think the biggest strength of ffmpegX is that it’s (sort of) a download and run application. One doesn’t need to build ffmpeg (the main reason I didn’t just go with the command line tool). The external tools (mencode, mplayer, mpeg2enc)  that need to be downloaded and separately added into ffmpegx take away from the polish of the system as well. The sketchiest part of the install is the box where you need to enter your admin password into the program (rather than using the Mac’s standard privilege escalation box), which I bit the bullet and used even though it made me apprehensive and uncomfortable.

For a quick and dirty conversion using the presets, I think ffmpegX works fine. The annoyances start when one tries to tweak various settings for conversion. When I tried to convert to a 640×480 H.263 3GP file (not possible due to H.263 limitations, I later learned) ffmpegX just died silently without error checking. The only hint that things were amiss were that it was suspiciously speedy and the output file was 0KB. More details were only available through a result console hidden via an icon. Another limitation I found was that ffmpeg really doesn’t support container formats (Quicktime, especially) very well. Unfortunately, a lot of tools that take video as input want things in the standard AVI and MOV containers.

One thing I think all command line frontends can benefit from is a direct entry area that translates the textual commands one would normally type and shows how they map to the GUI frontend. There are many tutorials and instructions about how to accomplish a given task but translating the command line options to the GUI is pretty painful. Moreover, it would make the frontend that much more powerful (and expose advanced functionality) if there was a way to add or modify the actual options that eventually get passed down to the tool.

VLC

I like VLC because it lets me play WMVs and whatnot that I’ve saved from my years working in Windows. I recently discovered that VLC can do transcoding as well. I think the main advantage of VLC is that it’s a clean install and there is minimal fussing with having to deal with managing codecs, etc.. One of the strengths of VLC is that it’s the kitchen sink of video players; it’ll play nearly everything. The wizard interface is also really streamlined. The main problem is that I am still confused why certain container formats work or do not work with the codec choices I selected.

MPEG StreamClip

MPEG StreamClip is a free tool I found after combing through the forums of video annotation/coding tools. Functionality-wise, I was actually successful in using it to convert my video the the desired H.263 MOV file. I was really happy that it exposed the Quicktime codec interface that one sees in iMovie’s video export dialogs. The rest of the interface for the program needs a little bit of work, however. I am still a bit confused about what the thing that looks like the 5 dot side of a die is.

One confusing thing I discovered while setting up my site was that mysql would not restart by itself when the server rebooted. Turns out that Ubuntu 10.04′s Upstart scripts do not play nice with OpenVZ. More info about that here.

One thing to double check is to make sure that there’s a space between the runlevel and the square braces. The syntax parser is very sensitive to these things. For me it screams HCI issue.