Handful of Nothing

By someone else. Actually someone with what I think it is something like 2456x more voice then the one who writes here. Joel (from Joel on software) reviews the E71 just like I imagined to do but time didn’t let me.

He knows the importance of the iphone. He notes that the iphone is a masterpiece of design and interaction design. He knows the 3G version problems and he HAD needs not fulfilled by the iphone.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/08/22.html

It seemed very sleek. Smaller than the iPhone, all metal, nothing chintzy… with the best keyboard I’ve ever used on a phone.

This is true. The keyboard is a funny experience, once you look at it you think: small, fat keys, this will not work. But once you start using it, those fat babies just fly with your fingers. Also one of the things that annoyed me more on the S60 phones was the slowness. the E71 seems to pack the right amount of RAM to avoid that and it just works great when you need.

The drawback now for me was that I was not able to use the built in client to send messages to my openbossa (google apps account) but I always use google’s j2me app, so no big deal. Apart from there, it has been quite a ride. Let’s see if the device can survive more than 3 months with me without making go back to the iphone due to the superior browsing and music experiences.

http://www.dw2-0.com/2008/08/market-share-is-no-comfort.html I got to the article via Bernardo’s share on google reader, and had this roller coaster of agreements levels with what was written.

It’s sure worth the reading, and I specially like some of the his points like”

Despite what some critics have said, these innovations aren’t (all) easy for other companies to copy. The “look” can be mimicked, but the “feel” is the result of countless small design and implementation details, that are anchored in a sophisticated underlying software system.

That is of course quite obvious once you use any samsung or lg touch phones. I also would love to not see this happening from Nokia (with the Tube) but it will, based on the already available youtube / photos out there.

And finally his comparison of Nokia to Microsoft when crushing the Netscape, which I totally agree that COULD happen, but the only thing I see is :

Netscape was much more present on the market (the shake!) and thus made MS move to win the battle. I think the market share problem is here. Within the iphone Era, Nokia has increased it’s marketing share, thus minimizing the impact that the iphone should have on it. Of course people inside Nokia must know the importance of the iPhone, but here comes my fully disagreement point with the article:

Symbian nor Symbian foundations are not even near to the solution to this scenario. I could go into details here, but to open source symbian does not fix it’s biggest problem: it’s 91 architecture and “bloatness” created over the years. To add a fancy transition engine also doesn’t solve the problem. The solution is inside the article itself. Can you figure that out?

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Also:

I already talked about the smartness of some US analysts, when looking at the market as US-like one, but this is a little too much. Come on, fan boy? I think we got some new breed of Apple lover here. Way beyond fan boy.

Read here the Forbes article and the article on dw20 commenting on it here

here’s the quote :

“I believe that Nokia and Symbian are irrelevant companies at this point.”

Can you truly believe that someone that has “voice” said that? yes. Oh my, oh my.

What I think: iphone is selling a lot now with cheaper prices, and a great user experience. But I can also tell you: a lot of early users are starting to fell really disappointed with the phone. The whole problem is that Browsing has become really important and no other phone has a nice experience like the iphone. But that is easier to change than believing that a manufacture can clone the WHOLE experience in 1 or 2 year. Doing that requires a company mindset change, from engineering to design oriented and this is not going to happen any time soon to any other manufacturer.

A couple of people have asked that to me before: “Now what… are you guys going to rewrite Canola again with QT?”

No way :) And this shows how our UIs are going into QT with no changes on it’s code :)

this is just great :) and we had a small contest here :) ok ok, we used some zoom to make things more exciting for the audience :)

But it was written after, and it’s way clearer and more on the topic than what I was able to express in my 10 minutes writing :

http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability

If you read the past post, please take your time to go through the items. This is by far some of the most arguments that I agree most.

Updating: the article was commented also by Celeste Lyn from KDE and I think her opinions are really worthy a reading. For example I agree with her on defending the release early, release ofter. We are running the projects with scrum, so the only difference was to make sure the Design team works ahead of the development team one sprints. Also I have been planning and now doing (2 universities) something that has the same goal as the Season of usability, which by the way is just great. I will see if I can take the approach to the Brazilian universities and really start breeding the interest in User Experience design from the core.

I want to quote her specially in this part of her writing :

The problem is no one trusts anyone who opens their mouth and says “usability”. This is a cultural and social problem more than a process problem. Open source is a meritocracy, and it’s easy to prove you are a competent developer because you have other competent developers available to judge them. You can’t do that with designers (at least very easily) and so the only way to get past the cultural and social problem is to start with small contributions just as a new developer may start.

I will take the time to do my version also of the comments slowly but this is important. It is easier for a Usability guy to help with small bits on a already existing project. Because you can find a lot of small problems and good fixes are indeed quite small. But here comes my side of the analyzis: I am really more interested on bringing User Experience. Interaction Design on it’s core to the table on the earlier stages. Like she said, first define the audience, the user and from that point create the experience that will be the best for him. Usability will be the tool to prove and to improve that experience. (to discuss what is what is another topic).

Thank you Matthews and now Celeste for such incredible compilation / explanation of the challenges in the Usability / UX in the open source / free software software.

via: Salvetti : Thanks dude | sorry for the mess. Coming from vacations my head still out of control :)

So Glauber’s entry was selected as the new logo for the Maemo.org community. I am of course really proud of his work, and I am also happy to see a lot of people saying that they like it too.

But, as anything related to design, there’s the ones who are not satisfied, and they have all the rights to do so. I have been following branding processes re-branding and all kind of visual representation work. There’s just no way on earth to please everyone, and its part of the designer’s skill to deal with that. People are really different and go beyond the minimum common denominator is a must, because it’s better to have something nice, representative that brings attention to it’s target than having something too simplistic in the sense of “we do not want to offend anyone”.

In the end : I believe Maemo.org’s new logo is a clear evolution in all aspects, my favorite was another one, but now the chosen one is of course my favorite as my work is solid related to this platform.

I am in the Airport returning to Recife. Second half for sure will bring a lot of joy in my work endeavors and I hope to help OpenBossa Labs to improve the experience on Maemo, hope to see the guys more and more active in the community - Need someone to hlep me there - and with that construct more and more nice experiences for the tablet lovers.