Geekularity

It doesn’t fit the melody very well, but in my head I sing this to the tune of “I’ll be Home for Christmas.” Here’s a great article on washingtonpost.com entitled: “The Computer Geeks Who Saved Christmas” concerning all the techno-savvy family members out there who spend about one day of their vacation fixing the computers of family and friends. Most funny, was this passage:

“In families blessed with more than one alpha geek, fixing a computer is a matter of pride. When antivirus expert David Perry finds himself at home with his computer science PhD brother and his computer engineer brother-in-law, it can turn into a bit of a showdown. Correctly diagnosing the family computer’s ailments becomes “the geek holiday sport” he said.”

Not that I am complaining, I just thought it was a good article.

Happy Festivus,
Sean

(Photo Associated Press)

Three days left in 2005 and it seems that I can’t let this year slip away without chastising Sony at least one more time. Recently reported in the San Jose Mercury News and on the BBC World News website, Sony has commissioned Graffiti art in at least seven major cities to promote the Sony Playstation Portable during the holiday season.

I really want to give full attribution to the person or persons who created this page, but alas there’s no name on the site or on the WHOIS domain registration. So, Dbeyr, if you want credit, let me know who the heck you are. In the meantime, I’m going to link to this site because I thought the ideas and images were pretty funny! Link

A Microsoft GUI designer discussing the latest version of their navigation system in the auditorium of the company from which the original version was essentially stolen 25 years ago.

I’m not trying to stir up the Xerox/Apple/Microsoft UI controversy. In computer time, 25 years is archaeological history! But I did chuckle to myself as I sat in BayCHI’s monthly lecture, held at Xerox PARC where Jensen Harris, project lead for Microsoft’s User Experience Team outlined the new “Ribbon” interface that will debut in the next version of the MS Office. To Jensen’s credit, he too saw the irony and made mention of it towards the end of his presentation.

What is the Ribbon?

First get rid of the menus and toolbars as you know them today. Also, do away with the right-click option dialog boxes that we’ve all become used to. Now create a region at the top of the window that contains context-aware tabs that present visual queues of the result should you click on one of its elements. These visual representations are very rarely an icon as we know them today. They’re more like in abstract view of what your document will look like if you click on it.

If the little abstraction isn’t enough to explain what the result will be, then just pause the mouse over the element, and your document will change to a live preview of what it will look like if you use that feature. It lets you see the results before you click, saving you the hassle of trying each feature and then click on the undo button. Jensen called it feature browsing and it’s Microsoft’s interpretation of Jakob Nielson’s “Result’s Oriented Design” philosophy.

Excel 2003

Excel v12

The screen shot of the ribbon above doesn’t do justice to this new UI. You really have to see it in action, or better yet use it yourself because it’s a big departure from the menus and toolbars we have used since the early days of graphical UIs. It will impose a steep learning curve for most users since, to date, Microsoft does not plan to offer a legacy mode to fall back to. The chasm between the two methods is just too vast. So the next version of MicrosoftOffice will involve a leap of faith that I believe is worth it.