Top: An Ambassador, for decades the most ubiquitous vehicle in India, thanks to the British Empire. Bottom: A Tata Nano, the cheapest car in the world
The Tata Nano is the cheapest car in the world at just 1-lakh Rupees ($2,500, £1,277). Mr Tata unveiled it today, saying:
I observed families riding on two-wheelers - the father driving the scooter, his young kid standing in front of him, his wife seated behind him holding a little baby. It led me to wonder whether one could conceive of a safe, affordable, all-weather form of transport for such a family. Tata Motors' engineers and designers gave their all for about four years to realise this goal.
More here.
Wii product design detail: It comes in two numbered 'drawers', with isotype-style icons clearly demarcating contents (some background reading on isotypes). Otto Neurath would be proud. Aside from a lovely piece of design, it's great fun. Nintendo gets gaming in a way Sony and Microsoft can't even hope to. Now all we need is the release of Katamari Damacy for Wii. I'm waiting...
Julian wonders at my desktop-as-bucket methodology. My desktop gets scrubbed periodically, everything on it is temporary and I don't spend any time ordering it or cleaning up. Accessed from the command line, the number of files doesn't really bother me, and on the whole I feel pretty good about this use of the 'desktop'. In contrast, my actual desk is usually clear of objects:
OK casual blogosphere cruisers, Twitter loiterers and general ADD infected youth: The executive summary here is that Zim is an outliner, and if you're lucky enough to have fired up this blog entry in Firefox, you can try out this working demo.
And for the rest of you (all 3 of you), let's talk why Zim:
Over the past couple of years, the most important personal productivity tool I've used has been OmniOutliner on OS X. The open-ended nature of the tool means I use it for a range of things, from task lists to meeting notes to presentation plans. It works well with my brain, to the point that I rarely actually think about the software, I just find myself using it in all sorts of situations. Most excellent functional design strikes me as 'boring' to talk about (there's not much to say about something that works so naturally), and OmniOutliner is no exception. If I were to describe OmniOutliner I would say it is
Quadratisch. Praktisch. Gut.
Which also happens to be the tagline on these little quadrilaterals of brilliance I eat daily.
The personal productivity tool of choice for Mac users right now is OmniOutliner Pro with a GTD plugin called Kinkless. I find the whole thing fiddly, opting to stay with an ancient version of the original OmniOutliner, which on the face of it contains nothing more glamorous than the ability to add multiple columns and export your lists in a couple of formats.
Over the last couple of weeks i've been playing with the idea of a browser-based Outliner not unlike DECAFBAD's XoXoOutliner. So here's a working demo of Zim (Firefox only), and here's the javascript source. Right now it's all pretty basic, so bear with me. I'm building it for a few reasons:
- To come up with javascript design patterns that don't suck.
- Because OmniOutliner is proprietary.
- Because I live in my browser.
- Because I use multiple computers daily.
On the short-term todo list for Zim you'll find such nuggets as:
- Proper undo feature
- OPML import/export
- Drag'n'drop node functionality
- web/email publishing (good for sharing meeting notes)
And longer term daydreams include:
- Hyperlinks and rich-media support
- Actual user accounts
- Multiple columns & column types (e.g. 'date')
- Multiple projects
- Overview page with 'next actions'
Zim will never be an application with many features, and you can expect it to come together slowly - it's a 'weekends' project after all - but with a few social touches and some attention to detail, it could grow into my substitute to OmniOutliner in the long run. No public trac/svn for now but I will shout here if it does happen.
Hard to think one company could come up with design excellence like my old handycam as well as design crimes such as the jewel case (what an environmentally damaging design, aside from its aesthetic and functional problems), all in one decade.
I have a phobia of jewel cases. I had to encode all my CD's to digital format just so i could throw them away.
This handycam features a single battery pack that plugs into the 8mm tape player, the camera and the battery charger as well. That's modular design. The whole kit comes in a metal handycam briefcase. Testament to what was arguably a golden age in technology product design.
Still works to this day (more than 20 years of use). Try saying that of your Sony Cybershot in 2026.
'peopleready' is Microsoft's latest marketing campaign. Balmer wanted to call it 'users users users' but the younger heads wouldn't let him. They blushed and left the room. Once at their desks they booted up their Ubuntu/OS X dual boot Powerbooks, the ones with the DELL stickers to block the glow, and got on with some real work.
Isn't it funny how Apple's HCI guidelines have over the years become a landmark piece of technical literature whilst Microsoft's guidelines (pictured above) don't seem to get referenced at all?
Microsoft have some good products, but people-ready (or user-centric) is not a term you can use to describe their software design practices. Feature-centric is a more apt adjective.
To paraphrase Spolsky (once a program manager on the Excel project, one of MS' most notable success stories) - empathy is the hardest thing to teach a programmer. The MSFT/AAPL divide, in terms of software engineering attitudes, is an instantiation of this fact on a massive scale.
Try this for over-engineering - Windows Vista ships in 5 editions, including 'Business', 'Enterprise' and 'Ultimate'. They should add a 'Leviathan' edition to round it off.
An example of a small company keeping their concepts simple, their service great, their values clear and their end product tasty. Hummus Bros is on Wardour Street and i recommend you stick around for dessert - the brownies are excellent. More on their background and hummusychology here.
Getting your head around all the WS-* stuff is like trying to eat an elephant.
- Joe, commenting on Loud Thinking.
So David has pointed out the reality split between the industry led WS-* 'standards' pap and Restian principles. I deal with XML-RPC & Soap API's on a daily basis, and i find our Soap calls in particular over complex. The move from procedure call to state transfer is in sync with the natural architecture of the web. It forces you to think about your web application as an open data architecture from the offset (e.g. Delicious) and that can only be a good thing.
Did i say simple & open?
In a network, simple & open standards always win. This is true at all levels of the stack - from protocols to data architectures to data formats. This is the lesson. We are learning it.
A few bits'n'bytes i glared at this evening:
My reading was prompted by Sun's announcement of it's royalty-free digital rights management initiative, which at first glance seemed absurd to me. The EFF (Doctorow) has called it a "walled garden" and that's what it looks like from where i'm sitting.
And it's Doctorow's talk that is the pick of the reading too. I'd recommend anyone interested in digital media read it if they haven't already. I agree whole-heartedly with this observation,
Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utlititarian one.
And the whole thing is well delivered, including some good points for you eBook non-believers (you know who you are!); speaking of which, i'll probably be compiling my fiction to PDF in the near future.
A call to bloggers. Start writing 'how to switch from MS ____ to ____' articles. Simple. Effective. Some ideas:
- How to switch from Hotmail to Gmail
- How to switch from MSN Messenger to a Jabber account
- How to switch from Office to Open Office
- How to switch from ie to Firefox/whatever.
- How to switch from Entourage/Outlook to Mail/Thunderbird (ahem) *
- How to switch from Frontpage to Notepad/BBEdit (um)
- How to switch from Windows to Linux (uh, perhaps a list of links here will do)
- How to switch from Intel to PowerPC (quick! in the next 12 months)
* I'm doing Entourage -> Mail.
They should cover data import/export and the enhancements that come as a result of the switch. They should cover both Mac/PC users if applicable. Screenshots would be nice.
This all sounds basic to developers, but the most important thing here is that MANY PEOPLE are still locked on MS software, mainly due to having an abundant amount of information zipped up in it. I'm amazed every time I see a perfectly smart person using Hotmail. They are often unaware that some software in the world is designed with the user's well-being, flexibility and freedom in mind. All they need is a little guidance and they'll happily switch. Tutorials exist, but this iniative could be useful if approached the right way.
It'll take a developer 30 minutes to knock up an article. It could switch dozens of people. You will sleep soundly for an entire week. Come on, don't tell me you're busier than me. I won't believe it.
The deal is to aim this at a completely non-tech audience without patronizing people.
Everyone can obviously post on their own blogs but I'll try to aggregate links here. The idea is to synchronize the posts to go up on an MS Reshuffle date. I'm suggesting an MS Reshuffle date of 15th July, 2005.
If you know anyone who might be interested in participating in this please direct them here.
Update - New Ideas
- Windows Media Viewer to VLC
- .NET to Open-source architectures
