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Obamart

Obama. Whatever you think of US elections, the US, or elections in general, the name resonates.

And it inspires. Today, I saw this video of French artistes “La Chanson du Dimanche” on Smaran’s tumblelog.

But Obama has been inspiring designers and other graphics artists as well. Notably so. The funny thing is that when it comes to McCain, most stuff you get to see looks like this.

Ugly and traditional. It’s almost like a Microsoft versus Apple thing, because when you search for Obama artwork, you get the most fascinating results.

Here are a couple examples.

Apple's 1987 Vision for the Future, It's Here

An interesting read on Counternotions that I didn’t get to until today deals with why Apple doesn’t do concept products (as in ‘concept car’ or ‘Microsoft Surface’).

Most fascinating is the video that shows one of Apple’s rare (is it the only ever?) concept products: the ‘Knowledge Navigator’, a laptop-style device that connects to a proto-internet and scrapes and organizes data from various (‘online’?) sources.

It’s interesting to see how most of these notions have by now been implemented, either by Apple itself or by various other hard and software providers.

Notebooks

Laptops, notebooks and subnotebooks – they’re everywhere these days. And they’re getting smaller, thinner and lighter. We now have the MacBook Air, the EEEPC and recently the new Dell Mini 9 – among many, may others.

Email, calendar, todo

We get all our productivity tools online these days, from web-based email to AIR apps or widgets for our todo lists. With GMail, Basecamp, Remember the Milk… we often don’t know what to do first – nevermind the social media networks.

Make sure to take in that upper right icon: does it stand for ‘multimedia’? If nothing else, our current computing environment is based on almost soley that.

Search

Well, does this need clarification? Although… intelligent search has seen some interesting advances, based on the concept of semantics, ranging from Cuil’s new magazine-style interface over Powerset‘s new algorithm for searching Wikipedia, to the amazing Freebase Parallax.

Maps

Google maps is old news, Google Earth looks great, but it’s mashups that are talk of the town, such as Twittervision. But think of combining those… in your GPS.

Or how about mashing Surface with WorldWide Telescope, and Google Earth 3D with PhotoSynth… Maybe it would get you something like this:

It’s nothing less but handheld augmented reality but on your iPhone: excited yet?

Touch

This is an area in which concepts abound, but real products are still scarce. We’ve seen the Minority Report-style interfaces and Microsoft’s Surface, but those are not widely available, for now. Closest we’ve come today are the iPhone and the HTC. Obviously, rumours of a MacBook Touch abound…

Video and chat

Video is everywhere, as are video video chat, and online video streaming. Now micro blogging has been heading towards video as well – think Twitter meets YouTube – in services such as Seesmic, and it’s gone mobile with Qik.

Apple may not ‘do’ concepts, but if this was their vision of 2008, you’d certainly want them to do more of those.

Chrome and Privacy, Downright Scary

So there have been numerous posts about Chrome in the last 24 hours. You’ve been living under a rock – nay two rocks – if you haven’t heard and read about the new Google browser.

A lot of the concerns that are being voiced , it seems, have to do with privacy – something I’ve never been too occupied with. To me, it’s not about people knowing what I’m up to, but about what they’re allowed to do with that information.

Yet, what I noticed today, however, made me actually think twice about Chrome and its take on privacy.

Earlier today, someone sent me a link to a website that will be needing a design soon (which I’ll be providing). When I clicked the link (in Chrome – which I’ve been using by default to try it out at work) I saw this parking page:

Makes sense, because One is the provider this site will be hosted at and there’s no content or design there yet.

I was interested in the deals that One had to offer, so I clicked through to take a quick look at the rates there. Then, I went back to work and a bit later I read up on a couple feeds.

I tend to hit J at an alarming rate while reading feeds, so at first I didn’t notice. But something lingered in my mind all of a sudden. So I hit K (i.e. back) a few times.

That’s when I saw this; an advert in one of the feeds:

In case that’s not clear enough (yes, it’s an ad for One), here’s a closeup.

Now, I know all about how online ads are served sometimes, based on IP and where you are located and all that. And I know that Google already tracks my history, but still. This just seems too much of a coincidence.

Did what I think happened here, happen? Did Chrome track that I visited One, then serve me this ad?

I don’t know. But it sure creeped me out. Maybe I’ll revert back to Firefox sooner than I thought.

Debunk! Debunk!

Cool factoid for skeptics everywhere.

A Dutch public broadcast TV show that deals with consumer rights has aired an episode that exposes the ‘astrological consultants’ of another (commercial) TV network as frauds.

Obviously, that wasn’t hard to do.

Yet, as a result, the commercial station cancelled their show, claiming that they’re “investigating how the production company selects and hires these consultants”. No taking the blame then, but at least this crap’s now off the air.

This will no doubt upset the dozens of viewers who paid inordinate amounts to call in and have their problems analysed and receive bogus ‘advice’ in return.

The upside however is that this creates another precedent in the ‘war on malignant daytime television’.

In the past, similar fraudulent programmes have been widely criticized and cancelled, or at least augmented so viewers stand a fair chance and won’t be scammed. This one means another win for the cause.

Only one English article so far covers the story.

To read more on debunking and astrology, visit the James Randi Foundation or Phil Plait’s excellent pages on astrology.

In all likelihood related: The End of Television

Creating Good User Guides

Part copy editing, part technical writing and part training, creating good user guides may be one of the hardest kinds of writing. Creating a user guide that works for anyone – no matter their technical skills – and presenting that content in an elearning or online environment is even harder.

It’s what I’ve been trying the past year or so.

Simple 1, 2, 3

Recently, I’ve been looking into new ways to present this kind of content. In itself, that’s not hard. You describe simple steps in the simplest way: click here, go there, do that.

In practice though, things are not that easy, and there’s a lot to take into account, such as terminology and consistency. Also, using numbering or bullets, evidently seems the way to go, but what do you number? Every action, every click? And speaking of: what exactly is an action?

Also, think of what a tutorial should look like. Type, spacing, indenting… The way you design a manual makes up for half its efficiency as well.

Click that thing

Say you’d have to explain someone how to open a simple app, such as MS Office’s Excel.

As soon as you try for yourself, you’ll notice that there are lots of ways to do that. The question is: which one is standard, which one is the simplest?

Moreover: how do you put into words things like ‘go there with your mouse’?

Or something like:

start typing the first letters of the app’s name or a part of its name and wait a bit because your search box will automatically suggest a number of possibilities and the more you type, the shorter that list becomes so it’s easy for you to make your choice and, oh, making your choice can be done either by clicking or hitting enter…

See? Definitely not that easy.

My Way?

For now, I’m using the simplest method I can think of, like here for opening that app:

But I wonder how this would pan out when trying to describe distribution lists or pivot tables?

Or the Apple Way?

While researching this, though, I came up with one of the best manuals I’ve seen in a while. Accuse me of fanboism all you like, but evidently it’s from an Apple user’s guide, in this case iWork.

Luckily, all our courses have screenshots and screencasts as well. But that doesn’t mean the procedural bit shouldn’t work either – and work at its simplest and its best.

Have you ever written or tried writing any of these? What’s the best/worst manual you’ve ever seen? Links and screenshots would be welcomed.

5 Things That Are Wrong With Firefox

Disclaimer: I didn’t make these up. Dutch tech site Webwereld (Web World) did. They’re interesting enough though, so I’m listing them here. First paragraph sums up their post, second is my opinion. Fair use, right?

1. Firefox is owned by Google

Not using IE because it’s a product of mega global biz corp Microsoft, but using FF instead because it’s supposedly independent, is an invalid argument. The greater part of Mozilla’s income is based on Google ad revenue. According to Mozilla’s financial statements, that figure is as high as 85%, Webwereld points out.

I agree, but then again: every organization is “owned” by someone. Even the foundations and the not-for-profits have to bow to some industry rep some time. It’s part of wanting to play the game: you gotta get in to be part of it. Or: can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em – sad but true.

2. Firefox is unsafe

Right, you thought you were using this cutting edge, sub-underground piece of software that no hacker would ever be interested in, but by now FF is popular enough for the trolls to pounce on. Webwereld refers to the recent vulnerabilities in version 3 that were exposed only hours after its release.

We’re bound to see this with every piece of successful software. The days that OS X was used by only a couple of happy few are long gone already. And it wouldn’t surprise me if it were to happen to some of the more popular Linux distros as well. Hell, even Twitter gets spammed to bits and no one I know has ever heard of it.

3. Firefox neglects older OS’s

FF3 won’t run on any Windows version prior to 2000 or OS X before 10.4, simple as that. Opera, Webwereld claims, will even trudge along on Windows 95.

Obviously, this is part of how fast FF is evolving these days. Look at all the features of the latest version and you’ll soon realize that some of these tools weren’t even available a few years back. You can’t expect backward compatibility of new technology to an infinite extent. On the other hand, they’re right: Camino for instance, even runs on 10.3 – not a lot of software does that.

4. Firefox is slow

This one speaks for itself. Granted, a lot of this may have to do with running buggy extensions, but apparently Mozilla itself owned up to this fault and promised to bump the Javascript speeds by forty – because apparently it’s really needed.

And I agree. Firefox 1.5 was fast, 2 shuddered, 3 has almost ground to a halt no matter what you say. Again, extensions may be blamed, but that shouldn’t matter. I still love FF on my PC but nothing beats Safari (besides WebKit apparently) on the Mac (or on PC even) – and boy, is Opera fast too – pity it’s so ugly.

5. Addons create instability

This is like shooting sitting ducks: add-ons are the first and foremost cause of any issue you may encounter with FF. And, as Webwereld states, it’s a bitch to fire up in SafeMode and try every extension one by one to discover which one is the problem.

Exactly. And if it’s a combination of add-ons, you’re screwed. But like one of the commenters said on the Webwereld post: “You can’t blame Firefox for badly written add-ons” and I agree. Maybe Mozilla should screen the these more, like Apple does with the iPhone App Store. Or maybe one day, Flock will finally work out its issues and bring us a browser that has it all, right from the box.

Arcade Memories

Listening to my newly favorite podcast The Geekly Weekly, there was an item about arcades and how a couple of ‘older geeks’ were reviving one in their home town.

An older geek would be described as someone who grew up – sadly – in the time before the ubiquity of computing and who had to make do with DOS and BASIC and machines with wires you had to figure out yourself.

It would also be someone who practically lived in arcades before the days of online console gaming, just like Ryan Harvey:

Like most children of the 80s and early 90s, Ryan Harvey grew up feeding coins into machines.

Just like me.

One game that was already a classic in my time – apparently dating back to 1975 – was this Sega shark game.

Technically, it was a video game in the true sense of the word, rather than a computer game. All you got to see was a projection of a cartoon-like shark that you had to shoot with a little harpoon gun. When you hit it, the shark shrieked. That was it.

In 1983, Atari released a classic game, though, that was to be my favorite for a long while. And one that must have cost me tons: Star Wars.

This one was seriously cool.

And in my memory it was as high-tech as nothing before. It may well have been. And, though it’s hopelessly retarded by today’s standards, it still looks pretty neat.

And the graphics, boy, were they awesome too:

Well, perhaps not.

Still, it made sense, as you were not looking at a depiction of your – supposedly real – game-world environment, rather than at what an X-Wing pilot would have seen on their in-cockpit console.

In case you never got to play this, they’re still around and videos of it are available on YouTube.

10 Years of iMac, Same Old

Of course you heard. The original bondi blue iMac went on sale exactly ten years ago. It was pretty and revolutionary and Steve was convinced it would be a hit. And it was.

Here’s the article of that day on Mac Observer. The notable thing is how polite the article is (it seems to come straight out of a school newpspaper).

Also striking is that if you replace iMac with iPhone (or any other cheered new Apple product), nothing seems to have changed:

From the moment we entered you could tell there was a party atmosphere in the store.

One thing that simply can not be overstated is how cool the iMac looks.

We saw so many happy customers walking out of CompUSA with smiles on their faces, it was simply amazing.

This location had 72 iMacs delivered on Friday, August 14th. More than 60 of those were pre-sold before they even arrived, and all 72 had been sold by 11:00 AM.

Don’t you love how things never change?

Oh, one thing’s changed since then though. You can watch it on YouTube.

Mac Meets PC, err Blackboard Meets Woz

I’ve been swamped (and drowning) the past couple days at work in e-learning management systems (called LMSs) and the standards and specifications that come with them.

Think IQT, IEEE LOR, IEEE LOM, SCORM and the IMS GLC Interoperability Guidelines if you want to get an idea.

However, I was pleasantly diverted from hard work when I hit the Blackboard site, a producer of these LMSs and their spoofs of the Mac vs PC ads by Apple.

The story here is that Blackboard apparently just announced their Project NG (Next Generation multi-user software) which relies heavily on ‘new technologies’ like Ajax and ‘web 2.0′. The videos were shown during BbWorld ’08, their annual global users conference last July.

One of the ‘ads’ even has Woz in them, advertising how the new BB software even works in Safari and soon on the iPhone.

For some reason, I can’t view these on the BB site anymore and I’m redirected to this obscure disclaimer. Has Apple swung at the little guys again and sent C&D letters tot the education community?

In any case, you can still watch them on YouTube. They’re not that well-made perhaps, and a bit long, but they’re fun and well-intentioned. Shows how makers of the more ‘boring software’ can have a good sense of humour.

And, since they’re going for the Apple look-and-feel, a sense of style too!