Hans de Zwart: Technology as a Solution…

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about things we cannot live without. The restriction is that the things should have a hierarchical relationship where the lowest level of hierarchy is the microprocessor and the highest level is the Internet. Each thing should be described in 100 words. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

Please don’t take the title of this post too literally: yes, even I realise that I will be able to live without these things. Instead consider this a tribute to these five things. Also be aware that the title is not “The 5 Things I Cannot Live Without”, there are many other things that I find way more useful and crucial (think bed, dishwasher, etc.).

So here goes, in a loose hierarchy from local to global:

CC licensed by Flickr user Stéfan

1. The Microprocessor
What do you know about the microprocessor? If it as much as I used to, then it will be very little! Did you know that the first microprocessors appeared in the early seventies and that they were mostly used for calculators? Did you know that their capacity follows Moore’s law? Did you know that microprocessors not only integrated in computers, but also in cars, toasters, TVs, dishwashers (again!) and most other electrical equipment with some advanced functionality? Finally, did you know the Wikipedia article for Microprocessors needs additional citations and references? Why don’t you get to work and fix it?

2. My iPhone
I don’t think I have yet waxed lyrical about my iPhone. First of all I am late to the party: I have only bought one last December. This is because I resisted buying a closed down Apple product for as long as possible. I really really wanted to buy an Android phone, but all the ones that I tried were seriously less capable than the iPhone. So why is it that much better? Because thought has been put into every single element of the software and hardware design. Nothing is accidental, everything is considered. No other company is there yet.

3. Xs4all
My Internet provider is XS4ALL. There are a couple of reasons why this will be the case for the foreseeable future (even though their price/speed ratio is not competitive):

• XS4ALL is consistently the best provider in the Netherlands.
• Their corporate values and activism are excellent. See this campaign for an example.
• They have repeatedly shown they have a backbone. Their support of Karin Spaink in her Scientology case is the best example of this.
• Innovation is important to them.
• When you call their helpdesk (at a number which has normal rates), you get competent staff.

4. Google Services
Over the last couple of years I have come to rely more and more on Google’s services. So much so that it has become increasingly hard to even list all the Google services that I have an account for or use regularly otherwise. As an excercise I have used this Wikipedia page to list all the products I use regularly (on Ubuntu or iPhone): Chrome, Sketchup, Gears, Calendar, Gmail, Product Search, Reader, Apps, Feedburner, Youtube, OpenSocial, Maps, Aardvark, Alerts, Translate, Groups, Image Search, Scholar, Web search, Analytics, Gapminder, Trends and Zeitgeist. Couldn’t be bothered to link them all: Google them!

5. The Internet
It is a cliché to call the Internet a “game changer”. However, it cannot be denied that it is the most disruptive technology out there. It creates feasibility spaces for social practice (thank you Benkler) and it forces you to rethink traditional ways of doing things. In the field of educational technology for example it has led to, among other things, new course paradigms, an Edupunk movement and deep critiques of the learning function. We cannot fathom what the near future of the Internet will look like as the pace of change is continually accelerating. I cannot wait for it!

P.S. This post was inspired by Techcruch’s Products I Can’t Live Without.

The Strida unfolded

As regular readers of this blog might have noticed: I love great technology. When I talk about technology, I push the concept slightly further than most web aficionados might do. It is not just gadgets that I like, but any well designed tool that can make my life easier is much appreciated. A great blog to see examples of what I am talking about is Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools blog.

I have a many pieces of technology that I really like and use often. Some examples: a Leatherman Juice Cs4 multitool, a Brabantia bin ,a Samsung NC-10 netbook running Ubuntu, a Solis Citrus Press, a Victorinox Trevi 17 briefcase or a Microplane Grater). All of these products have one thing in common: they have been extremely carefully designed for the task at hand. Every element has been consciously put in place and considered. This is refreshing in a world of more and more crap. One of my favourite books on the topic of design is Donald Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things. He outlines some design principles that many products violate which consequently makes them hard to use. What he does not address is the creative inspiration that is needed for truly great products.

The Strida folded

My latest technology acquisition does have this creative inspiration. It is a Strida folding bike. This brilliant piece of engineering will help me get to and from the train station every day. The Strida was featured on Cool tools a little while ago and I completely agree with everything the reviewer writes there.

The bike is very low maintenance. It uses a Kevlar belt instead of a chain, so no grease to get on your clothes. It rides a bit like a sports car drives: the handling is very direct. You sit up straight while riding the bike, giving you a good overview of traffic. As you can see on the Youtube video below, the (un)folding process is incredibly fast:

The joy is in the details: little loops allow you to lock the brakes, so that the bike can’t roll away when standing up and the carrier on the back doubles as a stand when lying down. Even the marketing people did a good job (in general I am not fond of marketeers). They know that people will ask you about the bike in wonderment, so they have provided a case of Strida business cards underneath the saddle that you can hand out.

Answers in a snap

My favourite gadget of all time is the Psion 5MX. EPOC, its operating system, was sheer genius. It had a great interface and was a joy to use. EPOC became Symbian S80 and when the lack of Internet functionality of the Psion became too bothersome I decided to switch to a Nokia 9500, then to a Nokia E90 and now I own a Nokia E71 with Symbian S60 3rd edition.

Suddenly I find myself stuck with a smartphone that has an operating system which doesn’t leverage the keyboard of the device and is in many ways quite clunky (some options are hidden more than five layers deep). However I much prefer Symbian to the other available platforms: the iPhone is extremely nice but married to iTunes and locked down, Palm hasn’t been resurrected yet, Windows Mobile is a joke (using a pen is ridiculous in this day and age), the Neo Freerunner is too experimental, Maemo doesn’t allow me to use a SIM card and all the phones running Android that currently exist have no battery life.

I like to get the maximum potential out of all the technology that I use. I have spent quite a bit of time setting up my phone exactly the way I like it, so that I have quick access to information on the go (see for example the custom mobile start page that I created). In due time I will write a post about the programs that I use on my phone. In this post I want to focus on a small widget that I developed yesterday evening.

A couple of months ago I read a post on Lifehacker about a great service for people who own a mobile device with email capabilities: SnapAsk allows you to send an email to ask – at – snapask -dot- com with a keyword and a query in the subject line. SnapAsk will then reply to your email with an answer to your query. So “wiki Symbian” will return the Wikipedia page for Symbian and “news economic crisis” will return an email with relevant news articles. Some of the keywords are a bit US centric and don’t return proper results for me in the Netherlands (e.g. weather, traffic or flight), others are quite innovative: Know some words of a song, but can’t remember the name or who sang it? Send an email with the subject “lyrics A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of” to Snapask and you will be textually Rickrolled.

Using SnapAsk on my phone proved more difficult than I had hoped. I had to either type in the email address in the To: field or select it from my contacts, remember (the hardest part!) and type the keyword I wanted to use and finally type the query. I also learnt the other day that Nokia has decided to support widget development on their Symbian platform. So I gave in to my tinkering spirit and committed to trying to write a little widget which would make it easier to use SnapAsk on my phone.

I set the following criteria for the widget:

• It should require the least amount of possible clicks
• It should be as close to self explanatory as possible
• I would have to be done with it in a couple of hours

The UI of the widget

At first I thought I would create links for each keyword and an input field for the query. The user would first click on the link with the keyword, then write the query and finally click on a link or press a button to start the email application. Later I realised that I could eliminate one step by making the keywords buttons. This way the user would only have to type in the query and select the correct keyword.

This idea required some Javascript. I have been wanting to try jQuery, so I wrote the initial implementation using that library. When I tried loading the page on my phone I learnt that jQuery seemingly was not supported by Nokia’s built-in browser. I then decided to try and write it with normal Javascript code and this worked perfect. With some CSS I managed to get the input field to be the full width of the top of the page (where the cursor is likely to be). I also made the field higher by increasing the font-size property, so that it is easy to get your cursor on it, in case it isn’t. The only thing I couldn’t manage to do was get the field to auto-focus on load. It seems that Nokia doesn’t want to support that function.

All I had to do, after finishing the HTML file (with inline CSS and Javascript), was create an XML file called info.plist with the name of the widget and its version number and an icon.png file of 88×88 pixels. I then put these three files into a folder, zipped it and changed the extension to .wgz.

The widget as an installed app

The great thing about these widgets is that they install like any other Symbian program and can, by default, be found in the Installations directory on your phone. Ajax can be used and apparently some Javascript methods exist that allow you to map certain functions to the softkeys of the phone.

I really like how standardised web technology is becoming. This widget should run on any other device with a standards based browser and if you keep the structure of the page simple and clean you can expect each individual mobile browser to display the page optimally.

My employer has standardised on Symbian smartphones for all their consultants. It should be relatively easy for them to develop a highly relevant widget that will enable me to do my work better and more efficiently. I have to say I am bit puzzled about the fact that Nokia is not pushing this concept a bit harder. Where is the Nokia Widget Store?

I would love for people to use the widget and give me some feedback on whether they like it:

Download the Widget
(or try in your browser if you don’t have a Symbian phone)

If you know of any other interesting widgets for Symbian please let me know!

Segway, photo by oskay

I love Segways. In June I used one in San Francisco and I think it is an amazing extension of your body. Within five minutes riding feels completely natural. All the movements are intuitive, it is a brilliant piece of design.

I am at Learning 2008 in Orlando. I have been thoroughly impressed by how well designed the conference is. Everything seem to be consciously thought out.

The host Elliott Masie rides around on a Segway in between the sessions. I was looking at him and suddenly noticed that it does two things for him:

• It makes him unique. He is the only one.
• It adds height: he is the tallest guy in the room and can pet people on the back while they are looking up to him.

This reminded me of some research that I read years ago about taller people having more authority, being more successful and earning more (e.g. Short Changed).

I (obviously) wasn’t the first one thinking about this. See for example the height advantage.

This begs the question whether Masie is aware of this when he uses his Segway. If I look at how precisely designed the rest of the conference is, I can’t imagine he isn’t (which is fine…)

The Chumby

I have a problem with locked-down hardware. It is not that I don’t like Apple’s products (the iPod Touch is a wonderful piece of hardware), I just don’t like the way Apple’s products treat their customers. I had to help somebody who’s Windows laptop had died. She bought a new Apple laptop and wanted to move her music from her iPod to her new laptop: impossible! It took Linux as an intermediary to get it done.

That is why I love the concept of open hardware. I personally own a Neuros OSD (great when you are on a holiday and want to watch your own videos on the hotel TV) and, since a couple of months, a Chumby.

The Chumby is a computer the size of a coffee mug and made of leather. It has a touch screen, an accelerometer, a microphone, stereo speakers, two USB ports, a WIFI connection and a nice soft button on the top.

So what can it do? I see it as having a couple of distinct functions. It is:

• An excellent alarm clock with an easy interface. You can set multiple alarms and decide whether you want to wake up with music or a tone. You can even set the length of your snooze.
• A relatively decent speaker set for your iPod.
• An Internet radio player. It is full of Shoutcast and other streams.
• A digital picture frame for photos that live on the Internet (e.g. Flickr, Facebook, Picasa). It can display photos from a particular user, but also from a particular tag.
• An RSS reader.
• And finally, an Internet enabled device for any kind of content.

The last point is the important one. You can load your Chumby with widgets. There are hundreds of widgets available. You use a web-based interface to add these widgets into channels. Then you set your Chumby to watch a certain channel.

I have created this virtual Chumby (please click the link, it opens in a new window!) to give you an idea of what these widgets look like. This chumby shows a particular channel which I created for this blog post and has a couple of example widgets. Each widget will be shown for about 20-45 seconds. It starts with some random Flickr images showing my favourite tag: decay. You can interact with the screen to move to the next or the previous tag. Next up is Twistori, this displays recent tweets with the word “believe” in it. If you prefer “love”, “hate”, “think”, “feel” or “wish” then you can click on those words to switch to them. The Chumby will then display recent top news stories from Google news. Next this blog using Chumby’s RSS reader (you might see this blog entry). It finishes off with the weather in Amsterdam (including a forecast), a web cam looking at Abbey Road (do you see people trying to imitate the famous Beatles cover?), some video’s from the excellent videojug and the classic blue ball machine animation.

As you can see the Chumby mostly pulls content in. My colleague Job Bilsen had the interesting idea of using it as a device for pushing content to people. He had visions of companies putting Chumbies on the desks of their employees and sending them important updates about things like compliance, RSI, internal news, etc. I can already see a plug-in for a VLE like Moodle. Imagine doing your homework on your laptop with your Chumby on your desk displaying updates from your courses and playing your favourite Last.fm channel (they are working on a Last.fm widget)!

The best thing about the Chumby: the specifications are completely open. I had to get an European adapter for it and they have the precise information about the power supply listed on their website. You are even encouraged to hack into it! Use it as a web server or log into over ssh? No problem.

Where do you get one? Currently the Chumby is only available in the US. They are in the process of complying to all the European rules and regulations so it shouldn’t take much longer before you can buy one over here as well. Want one now? Ebay is your friend!