Experience Points

"Have you wondered what $1.2 billion in airport security gets you? The TSA has compiled its own..."

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:59:40 -0500

“Have you wondered what $1.2 billion in airport security gets you? The TSA has compiled its own “Top 10 Good Catches of 2011” […] not a single terrorist on the list. Mostly forgetful, and entirely innocent, people.”

- Schneier on Security: “The TSA Proves its Own Irrelevance” Airport security is beyond a joke. It’s ineffective and offensive. Air travel is all together miserable as is (that’s for another post), but the TSA is on a whole other level.

specialdark: thisistheverge: Intel Nikiski laptop prototype...

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:56:54 -0500

specialdark:

thisistheverge:

Intel Nikiski laptop prototype with see-through touchpad hands-on pictures | The Verge

This is wild.

Ingenious.

I’m really psyched to be the first (I hope) to mention this, but:

This is definitely going to solve that huge problem I have where I can’t see my dick while using a laptop.
Also, I can’t wait to close the laptop and accidentally send dickmails to people.

Experience Points: nothing but class.

Seriously, though, it looks awesome and will probably be completely terrible to use. You know all those times you’re carrying your closed laptop around and need to reply to a calendar request but don’t want to take the 2 seconds to open your laptop and just do it there? Or those times you need to view a website in a very wide and narrow window? Or wish you had a trackpad that was appropriately sized for your gigantic 12” wide hands?

Yeah.

It’s great for traveling, all those times you need a summary but don’t have an iPhone or iPad or an Android whatever HD 4000 and for some reason your laptop isn’t inside a case because you’re stupid or something.

Dear Every Company at CES:

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:38:22 -0500

Apple’s design aesthetic is one right way to build hardware, not the right way to build hardware. People don’t love aluminium and black and a very specific corner radii, they love devices that exude quality, simplicity, friendliness, and class. Stop ripping off Apple hardware and start ripping off Apple design philosophy. It’s the why, not the what.

The recently-announced Ubuntu TV, via PC Pro. The highlighted...

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:19:00 -0500

The recently-announced Ubuntu TV, via PC Pro. The highlighted row becomes white with white text? Why are some of the boxes glowing? What does that orange dot on Waybuloo mean? What time, exactly, does Teletubbies start?

The video on their homepage shows a user searching for “up”, scrolling past a dozen or so results to Pixar’s Up - which, I would assume, should be the first result since it is an exact match - and selecting “Buy”, which automatically adds it to “My videos” instead of “Movies” for no apparent reason. (I’m going to let it slide that the user didn’t need to confirm the purchase, let alone provide any billing or authentication information, before buying. Surely the release version will have safeguards in place to prevent kids from buying willy-nilly.) The 4 categories I see on the homescreen are “What’s hot”, “My videos”, “Movies”, and “TV”. TV is in the name of the product, yet receives the lowest billing.

Cluttered. Ambiguous. Confusing. “TV for human beings”? Not even close.

Very clever “meeting” icon by David Pache via...

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:58:00 -0500

Very clever “meeting” icon by David Pache via Dribbble.

Why Don’t Smartphones Have A “Guest Mode”?

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 13:48:00 -0500

Why Don’t Smartphones Have A “Guest Mode”?:

I’ll be honest, I do hate myself a little bit for linking to TechCrunch in my first real post. But, Mr. Kumparak makes a good point. Coincidentally, the top commenter, Francois Mathieu, is a friend of mine, and he also makes a good point:

Is there a guest mode on a toothbrush?

Perhaps one shouldn’t hand over a device with personal information to someone they wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing that information with? This sounds like as much a social issue as a technological one to me. That said, there are some good reasons to share your phone with someone: letting someone make an emergency call, asking someone to take a quick snapshot of you and a pal, or showing off a cool new app, for example.

My solution would be the ability to “trap” the phone in a specific app, almost like a Kiosk Mode. The majority of the time, a guest only needs to see one specific app anyway. “Hey, can I see your phone real quick?”, as the author suggests, doesn’t imply the need for multiple apps or a sterilized device. In this Kiosk Mode, pressing the Home button would prompt for a passcode instead of exiting, and any user-specific data inside the app would be hidden. While a true Guest User mode would be useful, it would be incredibly memory-intensive for both the OS and the apps themselves. Overkill for solving the problem at hand.

This is just the sort of problem I hope to discuss here at Experience Points. Mr. Kumparak’s problem is, “I don’t feel comfortable potentially sharing the personal information on my phone with others,” but his solution is to take an example from desktop computing and port it directly to mobile devices, without taking hardware limitations or real use-case examples in to account. It’s a quick and dirty solution—one Android has already sort-of implemented, apparently, which says a lot right there—but isn’t the best way. I think we should try to do better.

Hello, world.

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 12:00:00 -0500

Let’s make things better.