Computers

Markus Renschler sent this in: “We bought a new external hard disk (WD MyBook). What I was completely fascinated by is the fact it’s not only compatible with Vista, XP, MacOS and USB2.0, but, according to the package, with Google as well.” [Thanks Markus!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Quote 1 source, quote 2 source, image source.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Via Reddit.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

As the Windows operating system progressed, so did its icons, like the folder icon displayed above from Win 3.x to Vista. Or rather, they’ve become more pretty and realistic over time. But is realism more effective? I don’t think so. Street signs are a good example of pictograms where quick recognition is crucial, and there’s a reason they did not evolve towards more realism.

(Some of the operating system icons additionally have to have flexibility to efficiently cope with different modes: a folder can be open or closed, full or empty, write-protected or not and so on.)

   
A street sign, and the Chinese sign for “hill.”

Also, the more abstract an icon, the more it can represent a group of things vs one specific thing. And if you use specific pictograms long enough, they turn to written language itself. Chinese characters too, for instance, evolved out of pictures – but they evolved in the direction of becoming more abstract, not more realistic, as this allows fast recognition and thus reading. (Not necessarily easy learning, though.)

However, people don’t just buy the most usable operating system. The decision to buy something can be dependent on factors vastly different from everyday usability – because to measure everyday usability, you already need to have acquired the program. The decision to do so, however, must be made before actual usage, and can be influenced by such things as “how beautiful does it look?” Even when you read a review to make a more educated choice before buying, the reviewer may not have used the program for that long.

There was an interesting episode in Malcom Gladwell’s book Blink. People who made the Pepsi vs Coke test on the street by sipping a bit from either drink – without knowing which brand they were tasting – significantly preferred Pepsi. Pepsi was able to utilize this fact in an advertising campaign. However, when people were made to take a few bottles of a drink of either brand home for a while, in order to give it a longer test run, they would later more often prefer the taste of Coke. The reason for this, according to Malcom Gladwell? Pepsi is sweeter, so people prefer its taste for short sips (like during a street test) – but they would prefer less sugar when drinking something on a more regular basis.

Windows icons – and Mac icons, for that matter – have definitely become sweeter over time.

Can icons be made “prettier” without sacrificing recognition then? Yes, I think there are some ways. (Perhaps designers of some of the modern operating systems even tried these ways, though I don’t think they were successful at all times.) The basic pictogram layout would need to be designed first. It must be robust enough to be sufficiently different to other icons. It would be able to “survive” it being blurred, or reduced to shades of gray, or resized to a tiny resolution. You would need to be able to recognize it even by just looking at its silhouette. You would be able to recognize it even when it’s shown only part of a second.

Applying the silhouette test to an old vs a new “dual-state” Mac trash icon.

Now, once the base design is stable, very soft decorative shades could be added to the icon. Edges can be anti-aliased. With each iterative decorative step, the effect of the decoration must be so subtle as to not take away from the base design. The icon would still be further away from abstract language (including “operating system grammar”) now, but it might be a compromise between allowing the program to be easily marketable while still being highly usable.

From language to reality, and from “any folder” (including yours) to “a folder” (excluding yours).

[Bottom right folder photo CC-licensed by XXC.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

• Google Desktop is now available for the Mac too if you have OS X 10.4 or higher. This means Google added another platform to deploy Google Gadgets (after OpenSocial, iGoogle, gadgets in external sites, and Google Desktop for Windows).
• Google released Google Maps My Location, an update to Google Maps for the phone which tries to automatically position the map to your location. Google says, “The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map – it’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average).” If you do have GPS, that is supported too though for more precision.
  (The update was loading here on a Windows Mobile OS with Midlets support, though I had to uninstall the old version first. My location was also found, but then I received WinInetHttpError 0 12002 and the program closed.)
• Google started an open source contest for pre-university students. “If you’re a student age 13 or older who has not yet begun university studies, we’d love to see you help out these projects,” Google states on the homepage of the “The Google Highly Open Participation Contest.”
• Head of Google webspam team Matt Cutts gives a video explanation of search result snippets; most interesting part might be the explanation of those site navigation links some results show. Matt emphasizes that mostly everything is algorithmical: no one at Google hand picks the kind of site links added to a snippet.
• There are some photos of what seems to be Google Russia offices – St. Petersburg and Moscow – available on Picasa. Watch out for the picture of Google Soap. (A Google office is the McDonald’s of technology: no matter which country you’re in you always know what to expect from it.) [Photos by Aengus’ Scroll via Slav Ben Ari.]
• Gmail received an updated version of their chat client, now allowing group chat and emoticons as well (just like the existing Google Talk gadget; even less reason now to install the desktop client Google Talk). On a side-note, why does Google almost hide the Talk gadget in comparison to the downloadable Talk program on the Google Talk homepage?
• The US Republican debates, moderatd by CNN with help from video questions submitted to Google-owned YouTube, were taking place yesterday, with some heat among the candidates, apparently.

Discussion of specific items is in the forum.

[Thanks to all who submitted pointers!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]