As I found out today, one major usability drawback of the new iPod touch could be the fact, that you’ll need two hands for interaction: one hand holding the thing, while the other hand does the fancy music selection.
On my way home I noticed how easy I can switch albums on my iPod nano by only using one hand. Pull the player out of the pocket, a quick look at the screen where I am, two or three thumb moves on the click-wheel. Done. Artist, album, playlist or podcast changed. No need to stop walking (or cycling).
I don’t even believe all other basic features, like adjusting volume or go to next/previous song, can be done easily with one hand. And those things are really essential in my opinion, at least for my everyday use much more worth than any fancy touch screen navigation.
So I guess I’ll stick another while with my good old nano. It still covers everything I expect from an mp3 player.
There is a lot of legitimate criticism around: closed and not extendable, missing software, poor hardware features, little storage, over-prized, etc.
But,
the usability of the new iPod touch is simply sexy.
Watching the demo video instantly produces this must have feeling in me…
Who needs ArcGIS Network Analyst and TeleAtlas Multinet when you can ask Google Maps with a few lines of JavaScript?
The new Google Maps feature adds drag&drop to routing: adjust start, end or any point on the route as you like and Google Maps recalculates your route on the fly.
Apart from the amazing usability, I think for small and middle sized companies who are dealing with the traveling salesman problem, the Google Maps routing API is in the meantime quite an interesting option to licensing and maintaining full GIS routing applications and the databases behind.
Apparently Apple focused Safari development on gaining milliseconds instead of improving their web browser. According to Apple’s marketing department Safari 3 outperforms every other available browser. And you really need those milliseconds to compensate the time you loose while using Safari caused by the lack of new and innovative features, compared to other popular web browsers.
E.g. the implementation of a simple but very handy feature like bookmark keywords and the wonderful %s for adding search functionality:
In Firefox or Camino I simply
- type a bookmark keyword followed by a blank and the search term into the address bar – just like “wiki Apple” for looking up the word “Apple” on Wikipedia for instance
- and hit enter
That way I can possibly search every searchable site on the internet very fast and easily.
In Safari I use
- the Bookmark Bar or Bookmark Menu to
- find the right bookmark,
- click on it or type the site address into the address bar,
- wait until the page loads – btw, in Safari it really loads blazingly fast now!
- figure out where the searchbar is on the site,
- click in it to activate it – now I think you even can resize text input fields in Safari, and be honest, we all anxiously waited for this feature!
- type in my search term
- hit enter or the search button.
You see what I mean?
Search is one of the most important features on the internet, a web browser should therefore ease the access to search and information.
By definition beta software is feature complete and ready for testing. So that means I’ll have to wait for Safari 4 until I eventually see more features…
Camino 1.5 was released today, a Mac OS X browser based on Gecko, the rendering engine behind Firefox and Mozilla. But unlike Firefox, Camino doesn’t feel like an alien on Mac OS X regarding visual appearance and features like access to the system’s Keychain to store passwords for instance.
One feature of Firefox which I couldn’t find in Camino’s feature list but as I just found out does work in Camino too are “search bookmarklets”. They work as follows:
E.g. for searching Wikipedia I save a bookmark with the location http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s and add the keyword wiki to it. Then I’m able to search Wikipedia by simply typing the word wiki followed by a blank and my search term into the address bar. %s stands as placeholder for the search term in the bookmark address. An easy and very convenient way to quickly access any available search site.
Another example: for quickly looking up a location in Google maps I assigned the keyword map to the bookmark http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s, so typing map mylocation into the address bar will return me a Google map showing mylocation.
In Firefox you can add a search bookmarklet for any searchfield you see on a website by a simple right click on the search field. Camino unfortunately doesn’t offer that, so I have to find the search parameters to create a valid search command for a specific website. Maybe it’s an upcoming feature of Camino.
Wired News:
Livin’ la Vida Google: A Month-Long Dive Into Web-Based Apps
Full ACK. Especially Gmail’s web interface – had to switch to it a few weeks ago because FON is experiencing some troubles with Gmail’s pop servers and therefore I couldn’t download emails using my local email client any longer – is one of the most convenient ways to handle and manage emails I’ve seen so far.
Google Reader too, it helps you to easily oversee a large amount of feeds and posts (even if it’s the only Google application that still lacks of a search function).
My main concerns are of course about privacy. I really don’t care if Googlebot parses “buy tomatoes” in my Google Notebook and shows me a tomato ad at the next available AdSense spot, but I never ever would put confident or sensitive data on Google’s servers.
Parallels is making it around some news sites today, for mainly two reasons:
- Parallels 2.5 RC2 is out and brings again some improvements, and
- Microsoft’s VISTA EULA forbids running of Windows Vista Home versions in virtualization environments such as Parallels, while allowing an install under BootCamp. Isn’t that weird? Btw, Apple’s EULA apparently contains very similar things about virtualization of Mac OS X…
After the update of my Parallels installation I found out that in Coherence mode I can drag&drop files between Windows Explorer and Mac OS X Finder even from and to external drives not visible in Windows. Pretty cool, didn’t know it before. I always shut down Windows, added the drives to my Parallels Windows set-up and rebooted Windows again to access them.
If you have been on 24th of June 2005 taking a sunbath somewhere here in Vienna, there is a good chance that you can find yourself now in the online city map: today the city of Vienna added new aerial imagery to it, all taken on that one sunny day and providing a resultion of approx. 0.5m.
Still, the usability of the online city map could need some improvements too…
The recently launched Austrian public transport directions search named Scotty (german only) has been slightly updated (via Interaction Blog):
By clicking the buttons Karte right next to the search form fields, a map will open where users are able to pinpoint their start and end addresses. So no need to enter the addresses any longer, keep your hand on the mouse and ask Scotty by clicking on maps.
I prefer that method a lot over entering addresses and then getting options of possible addresses because of misspellings or double street and place names.
There is still some potential for usability improvement left: it would be easier to merge the currently two necessary steps into a single one by showing only one map where users can pinpoint both, start and end point. And of course, a bit more fancy AJAX mapping would be nice in 2007 too…
