Archive for September, 2007

The Next Generation GUI

Published by christian on September 30, 2007 in Technology. 3 Comments

Leading on from a previous post of mine (http://www.mollerade.com/2007/01/22/itunes-8/) i’m going to be spending some more time with iTunes 8 mock up development.Music Management is data management, so what ever user interface we come up with for iTunes 8, i would like us to make sure it is capable of handling any type of data, not just music, and audio. I believe we are past the point of needing seperate applications to manage and sort through various categories of data. Yes i want to be able to choose a cateogry of data i’m looking for, but i don’t want to jump from one application to do so. If i can make a playlist of my favourite songs, why can’t i do the same for my pictures, spreadsheet or any other document? I’m searching for an imersive environment that categorizes data in a multitude of ways, whilst displaying it to us in the most simple and visually appealing way possible. I want advanced features, but i don’t want to see them clutter the interface unless i need them. With that view perhaps this new iTunes 8 mock up shouldn’t be called iTunes at all, but a Next Gen Graphical User Interface (NGGUI) mock up.Over the next few weeks, i will attempt to design the building blocks of the NGGUI. Your feedback will be appreciated, so please come back and comment on the developments.Initial thoughts are as follows;

1) All open applications must be visible at the touch of a button.

2) Entertainment applications like Music and Video must by preference be able to sync with each other, eg, music stops playing when you start video, visa versa.

3) Pausing Audio, Video, presentations, slideshows, turning on and off screen should be possible by a single key, further functionality like skip, fast forward, stop should be possible by movement commands. (Intergrate Wii functionality).

4) Clutter free. Only see what you need enviroment, advanced functionality is possible, but not by default.

5) Enhanced functionality by installing function widgets. A function widget is capable of giving you additional functionality that would normally be a laborious manual task. (actually a good way of making money - give the application away for free and sell function widgets, allows everyone to benefit as the basic platform would concentrate on being secure and stable rather than adding functionality tools which would be driven by demand).

6) Easy Themes. What ever the design, a widget should be capable of changing any aspect of it.

7) Access to the database. I’m talking about creating a NGGUI that is being fed by a database. Give the user access to the database, so they can manipulate their data at source if they wish too.

8) Available online. Easy VPN access through a central online portal to your desktop.

9) multi views of data. Give users the ability to see their data represented graphically by various categories, which display the connections between the data, alla 7 degrees of seperation.

Right now its off to the drawing board to do some mock ups. *Update - The First Mockups have been completed and are available here.

Individual Language and Mass Language by David Grossman

Published by christian on September 13, 2007 in Politics. 0 Comments

This is cutout from page 7 of a speach given by David Grossman for the International Literature Festival Berlin, available in full here.

Individual Language and Mass Language
(international literature festival berlin, September 4, 2007)

Perhaps it is only in this global reality, where so much of our life is lived in a massdimension, that we can be so indifferent to mass destruction. For it is the very same indifference that the vast majority of the world displays time after time, whether during the Armenian Holocaust or the Jewish Holocaust, in Rwanda or in Bosnia, in the Congo, in Darfur, and in many other places. And perhaps, then, this is the great question that people living in this age must relentlessly ask themselves: In what state, at which moment, do I become part of the faceless crowd, “the masses”? There are a number of ways to describe the process whereby the individual is swallowed up in the crowd, or agrees to hand over parts of himself to mass-control. Since we, here, are people of literature and language, I will choose the one closest to our interests and to our way of life: I become part of the “masses” when I give up the right to think and formulate my ow  words, in my own language, instead accepting automatically and uncritically the formulations
and language that others dictate.
I become “the masses” when I stop formulating my own choices and the moral compromises I make. When I stop formulating them over and over again, with fresh new words each time, words that have not yet eroded in me, not yet congealed in me, which I cannot ignore or defend myself against, and which force me to face the decisions I have made, and to pay the price for them.
The masses, as we know, cannot exist without mass-language—a language that will consolidate the multitude and spur it on to act in a certain way, formulating justifications for its acts and simplifying the moral and emotional contradictions it may encounter. In other words, the language of the masses is a language intended to liberate the individual from responsibility for his actions, to temporarily sever his private, individual judgment from his sound logic and natural sense of justice.

iPod Touch

Published by christian on September 5, 2007 in Technology. 1 Comment

ipod touch

I was disappointed that the iPod Touch only had 16GB of Flash storage, but then i saw Apple was kind enough to offer an enhancement to the iPod Classic, of 160GB and it all became clear to me. Apple are a business, that is trying to play fair. In business especially with stock holders, you need to make profit. I don’t care how much my customers ask for something, if it can’t make a profit, i can’t afford to deliver it.

Stick with the iPod classic, if all you want is massive amounts of storage and the old film/tv series on a classic screen. But if you are willing to manage your music and video, using your home pc as your data wearhouse and only uploading what you need for a particular trip, then i would go for the iPod Touch. 16 GB is still a lot of room for the 100 odd songs i listen to at any one time. My 5000+ songs can stay at home. Anyway i have a web browser and if i’m really clever i could alway VPN to my home computer connect my iPod and swap some songs and video whilst half way around the world.

I would also like to point out that this is a clever move on Apple’s part. Of course they will entice you to buy an even better product in 12-18 months time, with more storage (not a massive amount more, perhaps 30GB max although that might be stetching it). Apple must and will make a profit, and that alone isn’t clever, its obvious. What i find potentially clever ( i say potentially as they might not have done it on purpose), is that buy creating a high demand product with technically superiour Flash Storage over hard disk based storage, they are encouraging manufacturers of Flash based chips to reduce the costs, and increase its capacity. Being technically superiour, they can then, once its storage capacity has increased sufficiently, use Flash storage to create instant on laptops, and iMacs.

If indeed Apple is looking to create demand for Flash Storage then it is a true innovator. Perhaps not in inventing new technology, but certainly in working the market to bring its vision to light.

My next question would be, how much of this is Steve Jobs, and how much of it is others at Apple? If you don’t the vision, you can’t see the picture.