Perfect Phone Menu

Apple engineers think about UI's: they don't always get them right, but they think about them. This one they got right.

If you called an Apple store any time after the MacWorld keynote the first option in the automated menu was "For information on availability of products announced at the MacWorld keynote, press 9". The first sentence after you pressed 9 was "The Intel Core Duo iMac will be on display at Apple Stores starting January 17th."

Update: it's all a big lie. We went today and didn't see any Intel iMacs. :o(

Search Engine

Yeah, yeah, I know: Google is the Second Coming. But it's not perfect.

Things I really, really want:

• Regular expressions. There's no excuse. I don't care how expensive wildcard searches are—I want them. (Update: Yahoo allows "stem:run" do find english words with stem "run". A step in the right direction.)
  
• A way to get those ridiculous dynamically generated "here are the best sites on 'frog cardioechograms'" sites out of my results for "frog cardioechograms".
  
• Search Cheaptickets, Jet Blue, Southwest, Travelocity, Yahoo! Travel, and Orbitz all at the same time...
  
• ...with date and airport bracketing for international flights...
  
• ...and a "just gimme the cheapest flight from A to B, I don't care when" option. And, no, Kayak doesn't quite do that yet. (Update: travelocity now does international flexible dates!)
  

Things I'd like:

• Powerful personal filters: no matches from .geocities.com, or a higher rank for matches from .edu domains, or a lower rank for things that look corporate, or for web fora, or for blogs. Search only sites that report Apache as their server. Search only blogs that run Movable Type. Search only sites not yet indexed in the Google directory.
  
• Click-through enhanced ratings. Is this easily done with cookies? I don't know. Check what the last site is a user checks from a list of results. That is, mark down sites if a user hits back and comes back to the search results and clicks on a new site in the results. Presumably the last one clicked is the one that contained the desired information. (Yes, that's a half-bogus algorithm, but not entirely bogus. So I want it. Gimme.)
  
• Unified Friendster-Orkut-Tribes-&c. search; like the airport thing, but not as pressing.
  

Things that'd be cute in a "wow, it's a miracle this works" sort of way:

• Hum a tune to search for a song.
  
• Upload an image to search for similar ones. (There kinda is something like this now: Riya.)
  

Random search challenges:

• Enter a list of items in your pantry and return only recipes that can be made from those items.
  
• Find all places (cities, villages, tourist attractions, valleys, atols, whatever) which have low humidity and average daytime temperatures between 20 and 30 centigrade in July and August and which are within an hour's travel of an international airport serviced by Northwest Airlines or one of its partners.
  
• Find all cities in the U.S. with more than 10,000 inhabitants which are more than 5 miles from the nearest interstate.
  

DVD UI's

I wasn't going to write about DVD UI's, because they're all so bloody terrible, but then I watched The Incredibles (both the main feature and the special features disc) and, damn, they almost got it right. Go Pixar!

Things they did right:

1. No annoying animations that slow down menus
   
2. Everything has subtitles
   
3. Animators' commentary is fairly interesting
   

Things they messed up:

4. Special features menu is inconsistent in depth and breadth. You can't tell how many levels there are under a specific option. Are you going to another menu or directly to a featurette? Is this an interactive slide show or a movie you're about to watch?
   
5. Brad Bird is an annoying git, and is all over the damn' second disc. I suppose it's hard to not have the director involved somehow.
   

Screwing up #1 is popular, and I would not have bothered to mention it were the rest of the thing not so close to perfection. Apparently the people that design DVD menus do not use computers with GUI shells. Xerox PARC solved this problem ages ago: make files look different from folders, and while you're at it, make different kinds of files (slide show, movie, text) look different from each other. Stick a little (not too little, please) icon next to your menu entry and you're done. You can be more elegant, but this will do.

While I'm ranting, here're the lists for the Scrubs Season 2 DVD's:

Things they did right:

1. Episodes are uncut (unlike The Cosby Show ones).
   

Things they messed up:

1. Menus torture user with animation.
   
2. No subtitles for special features (including commentary)
   
3. Commentary cannot be turned on with audio channel feature of DVD player: you have to go to the special features menu to do so. As a result, there's no easy way to switch back and forth between commentary and original soundtrack. Stupid.
   
4. Not all episodes have commentary—but then again, the commentary that's there is mostly pointless.
   

#1 always makes me wonder whether the people that designed the menu actually watch DVD's.

Not really very perfect at all: mobiBLU Cube

Only at Walmart.

It's an iPod shuffle with an FM tuner, voice recorder, and tiny OLED display (no, not LCD).

The Good

• it plays music
  
• it's tiny
  
• it has an FM receiver
  
• it has a voice recorder
  
• no stupid free software, no driver needed
  

The Bad

• it feels cheap
  
• the radio sucks
  
• the display is very cluttered
  
• no ID3 tag support
  
• the free headphones are crap
  

The FM receiver is really awful. It uses the headphone wire as an antenna, and as you move your head around, the signal will drop in and out. in general, the signal is just ass-poor. Too bad, but really, I do not listen to much radio anyway.

The display has high geek factor (oooh...organic LED's!) and it's readable at night...sort of. It is so insanely cluttered that you have a hard time making out what's what. Boo on that.

What really gets me is that the cube doesn't read ID3 tags; instead, it scrolls the file name across the screen, extension and all. I have not tried WMA files from the Walmart music store. Perhaps it manages to be clever and extract embedded data in their case -- I don't know.

On the good side, it connects with a minimum of fuss and talks happily to any OS you want: it shows up as any USB solid state drive. The (Windows-only) software it comes with lets you zap the firmware, but is not necessary for daily use. (Hell, it's not necessary at all. The disc mine shipped with had an older version of the firmware than my player. The mobiBLU website had my player's version. Sort of pointless to ship the (mini-)CD, really.)

More goodness: you can select a portion of a track and make it loop. Good for drilling foreign languages or figuring out Michael Stipe lyrics -- which are pretty much the same thing. More badness: no way to fast-forward or rewind within a track.

In all, yes, it's the same price as Apple's iPod Shuffle, it's even smaller, and yes, you get a voice recorder, and an OLED screen (don't expect to get a radio). But in the end Apple wins, because they understand that how something feels in your hand and how easy it is to use is what counts. UI over features. The mobiBLU feels like a toy, about to break apart. The buttons are not easy or "desirable" to press (no satisfying click). The screen is cluttered to the point of useless. The radio is a joke.

Unless you need to play DRM'ed WMA files from the Walmart music store, just get a Shuffle. Better yet: save up for a nano.

The Perfect Camera

It's close.

Full 35 mm sensor (Wide! I can go wide!), 12.8 MP (Crop! I can crop! -- At the expense of some of the "Wide!", of course.), blahblahblah. It's a 10D/20Dish deal with a bigger sensor, or a 1D(s) without the weatherproofing and "feel free to throw me at a tank, should you feel the need to take it out" sort of construction found on professional cameras.

Why is it only close?

1. It weighs two pounds, without a lens
   
2. It costs $3300, without a lens
   
3. It does not have AF assist, without an external flash (ooooh...syllepsis?)
   
4. It does not have a square sensor
   

About the square sensor: Hasselblad has argued for generations that 6x6 is a superior format (not just to 35 mm, but to other medium formats) because it does not waste glass. Round lenses throw round images. To make sure your rectangular bit of film (or digital sensor) is within the image circle, you need a bigger, heavier lens than you do for a square bit of film of equal area. The rectangle "wastes" more of the image circle.

In film, you could make the case that square film required wider rolls, which are unwieldy, or that changing the standards is hard (APS didn't really take off, did it? -- Nor did Kodak's earlier attempts like the disc camera.). Digital cannot make these excuses. You could claim that people prefer rectangles -- that they're aesthetically more pleasing. Hogwash. The 35 mm format is close to the Golden Ratio, but not quite. 645 is closer, I think. Besides, you can always crop a square image -- and it's easy to crop on a computer. Average consumers don't want to crop? Fine. Give them rectangles. But give the serious photographers squares. We don't want to lug around useless glass.

Hasselblad announced a new camera -- the sensor? 37x49 mm. What the hell, people? If you won't make square sensors, who will? And yes, I realise I can get a digital back for a Hassy and get square shots that way. But c'mon, now. There's gotta be cheaper and easier ways. Do rectangles perhaps more efficiently fill a round silicon wafer? I doubt it, but I have not sat down to prove it yet.

Gimme my square!

NTFS Recovery Software

I lost an NTFS volume because Windows is a pathetic excuse for an OS. Most likely the MFT got some garbage written to it (because Windows is a pathe...). The IT folks at work managed to restore 500 MB of the 90 GB on the drive. I figured I may as well try to do better.

Hard Drive Mechanic

This looks shady. The whole Higher Grounds Software site screams "if you know anything about computers you'll know we're not what you're looking for". I did not actually try the Mechanic, as there is no free trial and the epinions reviews indicated the company isn't as accomodating with their money-back guarantee as they claim. Boo, you.

DiskInternals NTFS Recovery 1.2

Sees the drive, but reports its size incorrectly (it's a 250 Gb monster). Windows 2000 reports the size properly (just doesn't see the file system), so it's not a BIOS problem. Finds 755 files and 53 folders. There were more than 20,000 files on the drive, so this isn't exactly a staggering victory. At least it's free. And doesn't do scary things like attempt to write to the busted drive without my asking it to.

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery

The web site should have clued me in. It's made by CONVAR, which is a data restore service. Hmm. How hard will they try to have me fix my own drive for free?

Not very hard.

The UI is maddeningly idiotic and my NTFS volume is reported as FAT32. Attempting to scan the volume for recoverable files leads to a memory exception. Oops.

Active@ File Recovery for Windows

This is the most serious looking of the four utilities tried to date. It also actually seems to take its scanning task seriously. It does under-report the size of my drive by a factor of two, but I'm not as picky as I once was. Sadly, when done with the scan it merely says "yeah, I found a partition -- please pay up and we'll recover it". No mention of how many files were found, etc. Sigh.

Altoids Sour Chewing Gum

Purchased at Wal*Mart when we went looking for the mobiBLU, which they didn't have in their brick'n'mortar store in Mountain View. Instead I got a tiny skateboard (it's slightly over a foot long) for $4.88 and some Altoids Sour Chewing Gum. Concerning the latter:

Good:

• Cool box -- little metal boxes are neat
  
• Very, very sour...
  

Bad:

• ...for about three chews. No tootsie-pop jokes, please.
  

These things have huge amounts of sourness stored up, but they release it all in one go.

Nokia 3120: Second Impressions

After nearly two weeks of use.

• I have better reception in my apartment than I did before -- Cingular GSM seems to have caught up with, and here surpassed, TDMA.
  
• By default, the phone does not show the current time in the top right corner. Why not? Half the people I know use their cell phone as a watch. (Clock on the microwave...stupid. No clock on cell phone...stupid.) Some poking in the menus made it appear.
  
• The colour menus aren't as bad as I feared. You can select between grid view (messy colour icons) and list (slightly annoying colour highlighting).
  
• You can turn call volume up fairly high, but it does distort a little. I think the 8260 had better fidelity, but lower maximum volume. It's hard to compare this from memory.
  

I still want an N90.

Phone: Nokia 3120

First impressions, more or less in order:

• the buttons aren't easily found by touch -- a big step down from the 82x0.
  
• why, oh why does it have a colour screen? Stupid, stupid. The interface is messy, of course. Designers should not be allowed to use colour until they show they understand its uses.
  
• it's light!
  
• it's about the same size as my Nokia 8260 -- slightly thinner, but not as thin as the 8290 (the 8260's GSM cousin). The Samsung c207 was slightly smaller, and definitely cuter. (And free.) But I'm a staunch believer in Finnish technology. (And web reviews claimed the Nokia was louder.)
  
• it's way light!
  
• the buttons feel hella cheap.
  

Damn', it's light.

Absolutely Not Perfect Phone Company: Cingular

I got raped in the arse today.

That is, I went to the Cingular store to get a new phone & plan. My trusty Nokia 8260 (AT&T TDMA) bit the dust (mic died, most likely) and my parents were getting antsy about not being able to reach me ("What's wrong with e-mail?").

I shall vent:

1. you don't sell TDMA phones, you will only sell me a GSM phone -- fine. Progress, we'll say.
   
2. I agree to change my plan to a GSM one (thereby saving you headaches, I might add -- now there's one fewer TDMA customer to keep happy -- let the towers rot), but instead of falling to your knees, thanking me, and either kissing my feet or offering me a free phone which will make my coffee in the morning you charge me $39.99 for a DISCONTINUED Nokia 3120. No, I don't want the free Samsung. I want the Nokia one. Wait...why is it $40? Online I can get a refurbished one for $10 -- from your own website. Surely you can cut me a deal...for being such a loyal customer and all...even though you've screwed me twice before... No.
   
3. Fine. I'll pay for my new phone. I'll switch to your new plan. But you'll apply my company discount (thank you EMC and Stanford) to the new account, right? Just like the old one? Right? Wait...whaddaya mean it may take "one or two pay cycles to kick in"? I'm selling my soul to you for two years (oh, yeah, that's another thing -- I need to sign a new contract, even though I don't want to change to GSM but am more or less forced to?) and you can't even get the 15% to transfer from the old account immediately? YOU WANT MY BOSS'S PHONE NUMBER TO CHECK WHETHER I REALLY WORK WHERE I CLAIM?!!
   

Dicks.

Giant dicks.

And I've already described which part of my anatomy they were intruding upon. Or in.


It's fair to wonder why I did not walk out and get Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint. It turns out that they all have poor reception around Stanford campus. (Sidewalk lore has it that AT&T (now Cingular) has an exclusive deal with Stanford, allowing them to place towers on campus. In return, Stanford pimps out Cingular wireless plans to students.) So I'm stuck with Cingular.