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27 February 2005 |
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StarDock have the solution in the form of a wonderfully complete package of UI tweaks called Object Desktop. Object Desktop gives you "WindowBlinds" for themeing Windows as a whole, "WIndowsFX" for setting up custom animations for window moving, hiding, and resizing (among other things), Object Bar which can be made to look and behave just like either the Longhorn Bar or the MacOS X bar, and Object Desktop. Object Desktop for me is just awesome. It's similar to Tiger's widget system where small tiny applets can be quickly built that stay resident on the desktop, and which can be brought up and hidden at any time with a single keypress. I have widgets running to show me the weather in my new home, the time, and a calendar. You can get widgets to display a bunch of other stuff too from network connectivity information, to webcam shots, to real time stock quotes and graphs. It's fantastic. It really transforms the tablet from a "Windows PC with a pen" into a portal into everything. The suite as a whole though is not without it's problems. If you enable every single feature for example, don't expect the tablet to maintain it's usual snappy performance; you need to be a little judicious in your choice of graphical goodies to experience. On my M200 I also found that installing everything then stopped certain tablet features working, like screen rotation and the pen buttons on the right hand side of the screen. A quick re-install of the latest drivers from Toshiba soon sorted that out, but I was worried for a while. Finally, some applications just hate the WindowsBlinds themeing operations. Thankfully you can tell WindowBlinds not to theme certain apps which gets around that problem. In fact I have certain apps set up with the theme and colour scheme that I use for screenshotting in the book so that I don't need to keep unloading WindowBlinds when I'm writing. That's a great feature. Well worth checking out.
9:32:43 AM 
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Now that I'm working for "ME" (best spoken in a Dick from Third Rock From the Sun stylee), I have the freedom to make my tablet look and behave the way I want it to. First port of call then had to be the user interface. Windows is OK but it gets a little samey after a while, and I found myself craving features from MacOS X "Tiger", notably the widgets feature, and of course the start bar. |
We've all been there I'm sure. You slave away researching, reading, prototyping to come up the slickest, most cost effective solution you can to the current IT dilemma in facing your project only to be told that the Boss' golfing partner/bridge buddy/poker pal says XYZ is cheaper, faster and more scalable. What you need is case studies! I've made quite a few visits to Microsoft's case studies areas recently to overcome similar situations, showing how key components of the enterprise architecture I'm working on do work, and are in use at companies far bigger than my customers. Aside from that though many of them make interesting reading showing how other companies have achieved great things with Microsoft's solutions. They've also been quite useful for the times of late where Microsoft's own staff and sales people have been less than enthusiastic at actually showing us the products working - what's up with that?? Just head on over to www.microsoft.com, and in the search box at the top right of the page key in the product name followed by the words "Case Studies". Obvious I know, but surprising just how many case studies they have.
9:21:43 AM
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One thing that really caught my attention though was them talking about how they tested the original Mac U.I. Apple was one of the first IT companies to actually undertake user testing, where non-techies were simply put in front of the Mac, given minimal instruction and then asked to accomplish small tasks, like opening files, saving them and so on. The interesting bit is that the very early tests of the Mac U.I were actually video taped. Where are those tapes now? Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to see the first real user reactions to the world's first commercially available graphical user interface? I'd get a kick out of that. Interestingly, even Apple gets U.I things wrong sometimes, and those early tests through up a dilemma when users were actually getting annoyed at pop-up confirmation dialogs. the dialogs had two buttons - Cancel and "Do It!". Problem is, some users saw "Do It!" as "Dolt" and got angry that the computer was calling them a moron for inciting the dialog in the first place. So it was that the ubiquitous OK/Cancel dialog was born, despite Steve Job's concerns that "OK" was far too colloquial a term to use in a user interface. Personally, I'm rather fond of the Cylons "By Your Command", but that would make dialog buttons quite large I guess.
9:03:05 AM
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Andy Hertzfeld, Apple employee number four hundred and change, has published a great book called Revolution In The Valley |
The Oculas is a total immersion system. It comes complete with a 5.1 sound system, ultra comfy chair, built in ventillation and can be equipped with a computer, monitor and all the other trappings of gaming. Jump in, close the hatch and you are completely immersed. No light or noise enters from the outside world whatsoever, leaving the foetus like occupant completely absorbed in their gaming experience. It doesn't have to be gaming either. Oculas claim the system is ideal for watching movies (yeah right - if you have absolutely no friends at all), and can also be equipped with a shiatsu massage chair and rigged for a relaxing light and sound show to deliver an oasis of peace in today's overcrowded stressed out world. Personally I can see the attraction, but it is a little scary too. I can't handle Doom 3 on a 17 inch TFT monitor for example, so there's no way I want to be locked away with Id's hellish creation. On the flip side though, what a great replacement for the hells that are the open plan office and the cube farm this would be.
8:49:42 AM
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I've long had a fascination with things that make gaming more immersive. I have a Track-IR device that tracks my head movements in the real world and translates them into head movements for my virtual pilot. I had a Cougar flight control system as well, and its predecssor, the Thrustmaster FLCS. In fact, yes, I am so much of a geek that I have been actively planning the building of a cockpit for either flight simming or mech driving (Steel Batallion rules) when we finally move into our new home. But, there's always someone out there that can do it all better. That someone is Oculas. |
To counter this growing problem, Olganon (On-Line Gamers Anonymous) has formed A non-profit organisation that has received sanction from Alcoholics Anonymous to use their same 12 step recovery program, Olganon's site is packed with information about just what addiction is, the symptoms of it, and the treatment of it. Scary stuff indeed.
8:39:49 AM
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Video games have been linked to addiction in a medical sense for some time. Playing games can release chemicals into the brain and cause mental states that are every bit as addictive as the same reactions triggered by a drug. Just like with drug addictions though, most of the gamers out there that have a serious addiction based problem don't even realize it. Take the case of the young American chap for example that was so enjoying Everquest that he quit his job to play it full time. Naturally he stopped paying his bills and attending to real life, the end result being that he was addicted. That didn't stop him playing though. The thing that did was when his amorous advances towards another Everquest character (not the player of the character, but the character itself) were spurned. At that point the young man took a handgun and tragically blew his brains out. That's addiction. Last update: 02/05/2005; 10:14:50 .
