Got a Logitech Performance MX on “special” at Best Buy this weekend (80$ for a mouse… what a slaughter) because I just have a laptop mouse and am tired of not having anything to rest my palm on. At first, it’s great. Looks like a race car, good performance, nice receiver, rechargeable on the fly etc. Then, something feels off… something uncomfortable. I turn the mouse over and the fatal flaw. The sensor isn’t placed at the center of the mouse but almost under your thumb…

Then I reconfirmed my discomfort. Since the box says that it’s the best mouse the “mice experts” came up with after making a billion mice, I figured I must be able to use it at the zenith of comfort. I closed my eyes and made the most natural horizontal draw (ie, rotate around a point on the wrist which is placed on the table such that the instantaneous motion of the mouse is the tangent of the arc I’m drawing). I look and the cursor is moving diagonally on the screen.

In order to produce the intended horizontal move, I had to either lift and move my wrist (very uncomfortable) or continuously extend and retract my wrist (very uncomfortable as well). You can also resolve this if you hold the mouse differently. If instead of putting the thumb into the intended groove, you rotate the mouse to compensate for the vertical move, you can also draw horizontal lines at the cost of having a gap under your palm.

Overall, it’s a sexy sleek black mouse but not necessarily ergonomically superior to the 2$ mouse you can get at any random stores. In other words, if you want to pay 100$ for it, you’d have to be willing to buy the different look, not rationalise it with ergonomics.

Used a NumPy array. Doesn’t work if the diagonal+1s are white of course.

import Image
from numpy import array, zeros, uint8
 
line = Image.open('wire.png')
# third dimension is for colours
a = zeros((100, 100, 3), dtype=uint8)
 
step = array([0, 1])
position = array([0, 0])
count = 0
 
# continue until when the next spot expected to be unfilled is filled
while not max(a[tuple(position)]):
	# paint colour
	a[tuple(position)] = array(line.getpixel((count, 0)))
 
	# if reached a wall
	if max(position + step) > 99 or min(position + step) < 0 or max(a[tuple(position + step)]):
		# change direction
		step = (abs(step) ^ 1) * (-step[0] if step[0] else step[1])
 
	# advance
	position += step
	count += 1
 
# convert to image
Image.fromarray(a).save('swirl.jpeg')

As a gadget enthousiast and as a mobile developer, here’s some thoughts on the Google Android HTC Dream / T-Mobile G1 phone at the time of Android 1.6 ‘Donut’

Physically, the phone can be said to be bordering normal phone size, creeping towards smartphone size. In the pocket, it takes less volume than your typical blackberry.

The trackball is a nice alternative input choice for those who prefer not using big hand gestures on the touchscreen. But its reliability can leave a bit to be desired. Scrolling fast is a bit of a trouble. The G1 tend to not be able to track as fast and sometimes the action of taking your thumb off or the action of clicking the trackball can cause undesired movements.

The design choice of not putting a 3.5mm headphone jack is simply ridiculous. Period.

The top screen moves on 2 hinges connected to the bottom part. When you swing the screen to reveal the keyboard, the screen can be a bit wabbly. Pressing on the screen can cause movements. Even pressing on the screen while the keyboard is under the screen can cause movements. Therefore, the G1 definitely loses points on the solid feel department. You can hear the non-solidness when it’s vibrating with the keyboard out.

The presence of a physical keyboard however is definitely godsend. After a year of typing with virtual keyboards, the G1 makes me feel like sending SMS to everyone. However, 1, the virtual keyboard can take a bit more work to make it come out. For instance, to search for a contact while the physical keyboard is away, I have to press 3 keys before the virtual keyboard comes in. Using the virtual keyboard is amazing though. I don’t even have to make an effort and try to get the right keys. I can just randomly tap in the general direction of the key I want to press and Android will figure it out for me!

Added to difficulty of getting the virtual keyboard started however is the fact that the physical keyboard is very hard to open and then use with one hand. It’s almost impossible to use while charging. It’s also very easy to press the volume up/down buttons while holding horizontally

On the software side, the Android is like a full blown mobile OS, but lacks some of the key accessibilities typically in a mobile OS of this scale. There is no task manager, there is no file manager, there is no terminal. Sure it makes the OS ‘transparent’ to the user and lets him get on with using programs and not the OS, but sometimes you just need to know. For instance, there’s no way to figure out what programs are consuming the CPU cycles. You don’t even know which programs are running in the background because you can’t switch between applications. ‘Opening’ the application again will take you back to the way you left it however. But if you have an application that’s gone rogue (maybe an application you’re writing), there’s no obvious ways of shutting it down.

The quality and UI of the apps definitely doesn’t compare at all with the iPhone at the time of 1.6. Most feel like VB6 apps from 1998, even the most solid games on the Android doesn’t compare to the slickness of iPhone apps.

Besides that, the Android is one sleek system. In other reviews, I’ve read about a general slugginess of the UI. Let me tell you, I have seen way worse. A bit of lag is sometimes detectable, especially around the contact list, when you wake the phone and start typing names to search right away. I’d say even that the worst bottleneck of the entire system is the dialling screens. There’s a decent 1 second lag between the time you press dial and the time when you’ll get a graphic feedback of some sort. If you called the wrong number and want to hang up and dial another one, you’ll be stuck looking at the screen for another 5 seconds. A solid work has been done with the integration with Google and of the applications with each other. Google map can benefit from the address you have sync’ed from Facebook and from your GPS data to show you the best way to a friend’s house for instance. Google might want to be a bit more firm on its UI standards however to better enforce consistancy in the interfaces of 3rd party apps.

As of the activation process. You don’t necessarily have to have the phone unlocked or have a data plan to start using it as a PDA. There are instructions everywhere for downgrading the G1 to RC29. Once flashed and the G1 activated over Wi-fi, it will stay this way after you upgrade to 1.6. You don’t have to be on T-Mobile to get the OTA either. I got mine on a locked G1 with no networks. As long as you have internet on Wi-fi, it should be fine.

This is a criticism of the Garmin GPS product Nüvi and most importantly its software.

While in the fields of physical design and graphical interface, Garmin has outperformed TomTom, it seems that Garmin hasn’t bothered to pay any attention to the human-computer interaction aspects of its product. As consequence, that simple but powerful omission made the Nüvi overall THE worst commercial electronic gadget I have ever used.

The “home” screen

Very simply put, the “home” screen serves no purpose. Once you turn the GPS on, it shows a legal disclaimer. Completely useless. The car doesn’t ask you to accept that an accident can happen while you’re driving. Neither should the GPS. It’s simply time wasted every single time you use it.

Then past it, there is the “home” screen. From there, you choose to either plan a trip or show the map. But that also means that after pressing power, you need a minimum of 2 presses for the GPS to actually do anything. TomTom requires 0. Again, time completely wasted.

The screen could completely have been removed by directing the GPS to the map screen after boot. If he wishes to choose a rout, then he can press a “go to” button. This way, the user makes 1 press or 0 press depending on the case instead of 1 press always.

Worst even, is the fact that this is the hub screen to every other screen. In other words, every other screen stems from this root screen. That is absolutely retarded. The root screen should be the map. If then user is already in the map and wishes to make a change, he has to press “Menu” and then choose to plan another rout or go back to the map. What? If the only choices are “go to” and “map” (where I already am at). The only reason I would press “Menu” on the map screen is to plan another rout.

WORST even. Once you go several steps into the rout planning screens and want to go back to the map, well, you can’t simply press cancel or back. You can’t even repeatedly press back to get back to the map. Because you’d end up in the home screen where the choice to go to the map is in the middle of the screen instead of where the back button was, in the corner, where you can press without looking. Again introducing an additional step that is not logically necessary and wasting time. Time that you don’t have while driving. Nor did they make the “go to” and the “map” button to occupy the full half of the screen, making it even a worse case of usability according to Fitt’s law.

The dialog boxes

First of all, dialog boxes have no place in a GPS. The purpose of a dialog box is for the user to stop all other activities until he acknowledges an information or makes a choice. No such situation exists in the usage of a GPS.

The Nüvi displays a dialog box when the battery’s low, when satellite reception is lost, and when the power plug becomes unplugged. All abuses of the usage of dialog boxes. Because when the GPS’s battery level does effectively drop low, the Nüvi simply ends its purpose until you press it. That is again an additional step required for the routine use of the Nüvi and absolutely absurd. A car doesn’t lock its wheels, block its windshield and end all its purposes when its fuel becomes low. A cellphone can have a dialog box shown when its SIM card becomes removed because the cellphone cannot function without the SIM card and requires user intervention. That is not the case with low battery. A temporary pop-up or a warning symbol suffices.

Same for the satellite reception. A dialog blocks all other functions of the device when it couldn’t reach the satellites for a period of time. Fun information but what value is added by this step? What’s the point and when is the time to pressing “Ok”? If connection is made in the meantime, the device still requires the Ok press for it to be useful. If the user doesn’t press Ok, what does the GPS do? No feedback. The GPS should simply be always looking for the GPS while its on. That is the purpose of turning on a Global Positioning Satellite device.

If the user unplugs the power while the GPS is on, it shows a dialog asking whether the user wants to turn off the device or leave it on. If the user doesn’t interact in 30 seconds, it will turn off. In the meantime, it will fulfil no purpose. Again a design reflecting stupidity. It should simply have a non-modal button saying “Keep on” at the bottom of the map instead of showing a dialog. Consider all 3 cases. If you wish it off immediately, it’s easier to press a hard button (the power button) than to press a soft button. And in the modal case, the GPS is useless until you do so. If you wish it to close by itself, it requires the same action from the user (nothing), but in the modal case, the GPS is useless until you do so. If you wish it on, you press one button in both cases. But in the modal case, the GPS is useless until you do.

While these seem like small problems, it’s actually comparable to having the GPS turn off at various times during its use and simply makes this device frustrating, awkward and dangerous to use. I would take a TomTom any day.

Unlike what the intuitive impression might reassure, the new Unibody Macbook is just as fragile as the old white Macbook as discovered rather violently today only 2 weeks after my purchase.

I have dropped my old vanilla white Macbooks non-severely a few times in the past from table height and nothing too permanent in terms of cosmetic damage. Although sheer tension on the Macbook makes it feel unsafe when it skews while holding from a corner and the new Macbook feels completely solid, the reactions to drops draw to completely different conclusions.

So my Macbook was in a poorly designed side-loading camera/laptop bag, and in a rush I forgot to zip it up (shit habit since I never did on my messenger bag), out comes the Macbook from my torso height. Instead of resolving the resulting energy through shattering or denting or scratching though, the aluminium deforms and twists.

Too bad I have no pics since I had the poor Macbook immediately airlifted to the nearest Mac store but if the ethernet port was originally a tetris cube, it’s now a tetris Z angle shape. The screen doesn’t even lift open since the bent metal on the screen assembly blocks the rotating path.

Two weeks later, after getting a fix from Apple for just 200$ (they felt bad for me because I just had it for 2 weeks and charged only labour), exact same scenario. Dropped it again on the driveway coming out of the car… It was on the front side and the unibody was bent along with the battery inside and the trackpad which is now unclickable. Another trip to the Mac store costed 300$… Although none of these drops felt violent, the damage certainly was.

Moral of the story, metal laptop is still a laptop! Be nice!