I was in the middle of doing something today when I came across a prime example of good user interface design. If you’re on Firefox, open up this page – it’s the one that distracted me.
While scrolling down the page with my mouse wheel, I become fascinated with how the focus of scrolling changed from the page to the text boxes. Sometimes you want to scroll up and down the page, and sometimes you want to scroll only within the boxes. It may seem like a simple problem, but let’s analyze how the problem is dealt with:
If you keep your mouse outside of the boxes, scrolling is focused on the page. As you scroll down your mouse will pass within the text boxes, but if you don’t move the mouse while it’s within the boxes, the scrolling focus won’t change. This makes sense, since you don’t want the scrolling focus stolen by a potentially long text box if you’re not paying attention to it.
If you move the mouse cursor when it’s passing by a text box, the focus is given to it instead. As long as it stays within the box you can keep scrolling it. Focus is also changed if you click within a box, or linger over it for a period. The focus will not change if the page is still in motion.
If you’re scrolling down and the text box is already at the bottom, it will not take focus, even if you click within it.
If you scroll to the very top or bottom of a box, the focus is still trapped within the box for a period of 2 seconds. This is important, since you don’t want to fly down the page when you hit the bottom of a long text box.
If you move the mouse cursor at this point, focus immediately changes to the page – although this only happens if you scroll down while at the bottom of a text box or scroll up while at the top of a text box. The cursor doesn’t need to exit the box boundaries for this to happen.
After a stationary 2 seconds at the top or bottom, scrolling focus will automatically change back to the page. This doesn’t happen when you’re in the middle of a text box, since you’re likely not done reading its contents and will want to scroll further.
This kind of nuanced behaviour can be a big help in making software more useable. And you often won’t notice it, apart from getting a better “feel” from the program. Good user interface design gets out of the way and enables more intuitive control of the program.
Just a quick tip if you’re trying to sync your bookmarks (favorites) in Internet Explorer with your iOS device – make sure the “favorites” folder is in its default location. I was getting a message saying “Your bookmarks have not been updated recently. iCloud will automatically try again in a few minutes” from the iCloud control panel and a yellow exclamation mark on the tray icon. I tried all the troubleshooting steps on Apple’s website to no avail.
Then I remembered that I had moved most of my user files – including the Favorites folder – to a second hard drive so the main one was free for programs. The default location for bookmarks (in Windows 7 and Vista) is C:\Users\(username)\Favorites and I had moved the folder to D:\. I moved the folder back to its default location and sure enough, my bookmarks immediately started syncing.
It works perfectly now and any bookmark changes on my iPhone are reflected on my computer within seconds and vice versa. I actually don’t use bookmarks that often, and I use Internet Explorer even less so I probably won’t get much use out of this feature. It was just bugging me that it wasn’t working.
So I decided not to get an iPhone 4 after trying for awhile. Going by the normal iPhone update schedule, the 4 would have been halfway through its life cycle at that point, making it more worthwhile to wait for the next model. Turns out the launch of the next model (the iPhone 4S) is happening 2 months later than everyone was expecting, but whatever. The reason I hadn’t managed to procure the mythical iPhone 4 was because I didn’t want to spend my time hunting around for stock (which was invariably nonexistent whenever I called around, even months after launch).
This year, all the Canadian carriers with the iPhone introduced a reservation system online so people wouldn’t nuke their call centers trying to get an iPhone. I’m with Fido, so I think great, I’ll just reserve online and that way I won’t have to call around for stock. Reservations opened today at 6am EST, and I actually got up to make sure I could get my order through before the system got hammered (the siren call of the magical iPhone).
Fido’s system went live a bit before 6, and I quickly completed my registration — almost. Each time I tried, I could get to the last step where I would be greeted with a blank confirmation page. No confirmation email sent. Fine, I think. Their system’s obviously busy, but I’ll keep trying. Blank confirmation page after blank confirmation page later, I check twitter. People reporting success. Is it just me? Half an hour rolls by. Now I’m getting an error message: “An unexpected error has occurred” and it tells me to sign out and back in again. I check twitter again. More people reporting success, also people reporting their reservation queue numbers. It’s already past 100. I try different browsers to no effect, I just wait a while to no effect. Now I see people reporting the same issue I have. Phew, it’s not just me. But why are we the unfortunate ones? What have we done to raise the wrath of this uncompassionate reservation system?
Nobody knows. Tech support is working overtime replying to the angry mob, telling people they’re listening, the team is working on it, send us your account info. They handled it very well actually, I’m sure it was a rough day to be in customer service. Meanwhile, I see more people tweet about their procurement of The Golden One. They’re #200 in the queue, #450, #1034.
Well eventually someone sharp solves the problem – If your email address is not entered in your account beforehand, the reservation won’t go through. I check my account and sure enough, my email’s not there. This is very strange, since I get an online bill regularly through that email address. Maybe billing is separate from account info or maybe my email address was deleted at some point, I still haven’t figured it out. But here’s the kicker: when you preorder, there’s a spot to put your email address in. You would think that’s enough, right? Nope, apparently it needs to have an existing email address. But it doesn’t even use it! It says right on the flaming page you can enter any address you want and it will ignore your stored contact info!
What an incredible amount of time and money wasted over such a simple thing. For the ENTIRE DAY tech support was supposedly looking into the problem, fielding angry phone calls, angry emails, angry tweets, letters with anthrax before a customer just happened to figure out the problem. If someone had just had the foresight to imagine the possibility that the customer’s email address might not be correctly stored, and put in an extra line of code THAT BLOODY TOLD PEOPLE THAT WAS THE PROBLEM, many headaches could have been avoided. A message saying “unexpected error” is about as unhelpful as a screen door on a submarine. Apparently it even stymied the people running the thing.
So at the end of the day, I’m #2372 in the queue for an iPhone 4s. Had I been able to reserve successfully at 6 am, I would have been under #100, maybe even under #50. And it’s not that I’m so important I need one before anyone else has one, it’s just that I kinda feel entitled to a better spot. Imagine trying to line up for a movie but the staff won’t let you in and they won’t give you a reason. Nobody else knows why either, until someone figures out they’ll only let you line up if you’re wearing black socks. So you go put some black socks on, but by this time the line’s so big you have to wait for the next showing. You’d feel a little put out.
Luckily there aren’t a huge number of people with Fido and my 2372nd position is nationwide, so that number probably isn’t as big as it sounds. I’m just amazed that a company this big (Fido’s owned by Rogers, who have the same reservation system) could miss something so huge. And not know what the problem is, until one of their own customers figures it out.
It’s that time of year again. Yeah that’s right, all us kids are going back to school. I’m heading into my fourth year of undergrad at Carleton University. This is the year I do my honours thesis as well to complete my program requirements for Cognitive Science.
Around this time last year, I was a lot more distressed. Even after three years of university I still felt unprepared for the coming workload and all the preoccupations of university courses. Just thinking about it made me want to curl up in a hole somewhere and hide. I knew I could do the work, but the thought of actually doing it filled me with dismay.
Well it turns out the amount of work thrown at me (mostly through essays and barely comprehensible scientific papers) was almost as bad as I had imagined. I was averaging 3-4 small essays per week with larger ones thrown in every so often and I was sometimes reading through 80 pages. It felt like about twice the workload of the previous year. Now by no means is this extreme or even unusual for university students, but to me it was a damn lot of work.
I had been used to cooling off periods between assignments where I could reassemble my motivation before plunging into the next one. But with my arrangement of deadlines it was a near constant schedule of attend classes, read a bunch of papers, write up an assignment, day in day out. Weekends were spent guilting myself into reading far enough into next week so I maintained a decent sleep schedule. It sometimes worked.
But after the year was over, something interesting had happened. I had absolutely had it with writing papers and seriously reading anything… and I felt no dismay about the next year. That feeling has persisted up until the start of this term. It’s like I’ve determined that last year was the worst it could possibly get, and there’s nothing I couldn’t get through for this year. Throughout all the assignments, I had focused my worries (and sometimes hatred) on the problem at hand and I stopped thinking about future assignments. Or rather, I stopped generating distressing feelings when thinking about future assignments.
Added on to that, I had found an honours supervisor and a possible research topic by the end of last term, two very big mental monoliths that had loomed over me for most of the year.
This year I know the workload will be high; there’ll be the extra pressure of doing my honours thesis plus the normal level of assignments for fourth year courses. But the cognitive obstacles have grown smaller. Everything seems less significant, like the monsters in your closet that eventually dwindle in size and disappear. Famous last words maybe.
I finally decided to take the plunge into DSLR territory and get my first serious camera. I looked at a lot of models, and I finally decided on a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2. I’ve owned it for a week now so I’ve had some time to get used to it and test out its performance. This is really the first SLR-style camera I’ve even handled – it’s definitely a big jump from point & shoots. The body and lens put me back about $1350, which is pretty reasonable for what this camera can do.
In researching camera models my main concerns were image quality, portability, and good video capabilities. Oh, and a price point that wasn’t in the upper stratosphere. The Micro Four Thirds format excels on these points. The image sensor is a little smaller than traditional SLRs which allows for less weight, smaller size, and more compact lenses. This format is only a few years old, but in that time quite a few MFT size cameras have been released along with lenses and (importantly) lens adapters for use with non-MFT lenses. Panasonic was the first to market this format with the Lumix DMC-G1 so they’ve had some time to see what works.
Coming from a small Canon point & shoot, initially the thing seems massive. You won’t be putting it in your pocket, especially not with the kit 14-140 mm lens. By DSLR standards it’s quite small though, and it feels like a good size when you actually start using it. The center of gravity is at the base of the lens so it’s natural to hold with one hand cradling the lens and the other on the body. Another difference is the lack of a power zoom but it’s easy to adjust to a manual one. You get much more control over the zoom range.
Compacts are moving more towards touchscreens and away from physical buttons, to the point where sometimes all you have on the back is a screen. DSLRs are moving this way too, but not to the same extreme. In this case there’s a good reason to retain a number of buttons and knobs: speed. On the left of the GH2 is a knob just for focus settings, and controls for burst mode and image stabilization are on the body. There’s a wheel on the back right hand side for changing exposure compensation and zooming into photos among other things. These controls allow for much quicker changes to camera settings compared to scrolling through menus.
The screen is another selling point. It’s an articulated screen which is very handy when shooting at awkward angles like over a crowd or down low. It’s touch sensitive as well, which is invaluable for scrolling around photos and setting areas of the scene to focus on. You can use it while shooting video to “rack focus” to different focus distances.
When I first brought it home, the manual suggested leaving the battery to charge for a couple hours. I think I got through 20 minutes before ripping the charger out of the wall and bringing my baby to life.
The first thing I did was to take shots indoors without a flash – actual usable shots that weren’t clouded with noise and motion blur. Almost impossible with a point & shoot.
Next I brought it outdoors where it really shone.
(Check out my gallery here to see some of my pictures.)
The improved colour quality and sharpness are one of the reasons why I went for a DSLR. Everything has better saturation, and highlights are captured much more effectively with less clipping. Larger sensors tend to have more dynamic range which allows for better pictures in high-contrast situations. And then there’s the all important bokeh (no really, that’s a word) – the shallow depth of field associated with larger sensors.
Although that’s kind of an obnoxious example, it can be used to great effect in the proper context:
I had a hard time putting this camera down the first couple of days. I wanted to see what it could do and what kind of pictures I could create. Sort of like getting a new pair of glasses and seeing the world fresh again.
The Panasonic GH2 is highly touted as producing some of the best video of any DSLR on the market, which was a major consideration for me. Although I take many more stills, I’m starting to use video increasingly to capture the complete story when there’s motion involved. After taking some pictures (and properly charging the battery), I got out a tripod and started recording video clips. Here are my first few test clips – make sure to watch in high def.
The GH2 can shoot in both 30 and 24 frames per second, the latter of which gives that highly desired “movie” look. Many independent film makers are using DSLRs for their shallow depth of field, low light capability, and numerous lens options in lieu of more expensive semi-pro camcorders. Seeing a market opportunity, Panasonic has gone all out with the movie options on the GH2. It has full manual control of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings along with a variety of frame rate options. The kit lens has silent continuous autofocus and also stepless aperture adjustment which gives it smooth reactions to changes in light. The video quality is better than many cameras twice its price point. Video is so engrained in this camera there’s even a dedicated movie button right behind the shutter release.
As I soon found out, autofocus is sort of important for DSLRs due to their small depth of field. Unless you’re planning to focus manually shot to shot, a good AF system is crucial to getting what you want to be in focus in focus. With point & shoots this isn’t as much an issue since more of your scene will inherently be in focus. It’s often hard to blur out the background with a smaller sensor.
DSLRs usually sport a fast phase detection autofocus as opposed to the slower contrast detection of compacts. The GH2′s autofocus is very fast despite being a contrast detection system – in adequate light, focusing takes about a tenth of a second. This is one of the fastest contrast based AF cameras on the market, and it surpasses some phase detection systems. It also does a decent job in video mode with continuous autofocus. It’s not as steady as dedicated camcorders, but in good lighting it can track fast moving targets with ease.
I feel like I’ve only touched the surface of what this camera can do. It takes some practice to create good photos and you can’t just leave it on auto if you want the best results. Not that the GH2 doesn’t have an excellent full-auto mode, but you’ll get better results if you get intimate with white balance, ISO, focus modes, metering modes, etc. There are a bunch of scene modes for everything from night portraits to pets and each one will give you slightly different results.
I’ve started playing with raw files for the first time too, and in doing so I found something interesting: For all the slight differences in noise, colour reproduction, sharpness, and exposure between the cameras I looked at, you can basically wipe them all out if you shoot in raw. For starters, you can get WAY more fine detail out of your pictures in raw over the in-camera jpegs. Even shooting at the highest quality jpeg settings won’t capture as much detail as the raw files. Plus you can change white balance, exposure, and noise reduction algorithms after the fact, making an image hugely different than the original. It’s more work to shoot in raw first and then convert to jpeg, but the results are worth it.
So I’m enjoying the GH2, and it’s interesting to experience photography at the near-professional level. Overall it’s an excellent camera for the price point, and if you’re into videography it’s a serious alternative to $5,000 camcorders. Expect to see more photos and videos over the coming months.
I stumbled across this video a couple years ago while reading about Joseph Kittinger. It was my very first introduction to Boards of Canada – and a very nice introduction it was.
Some types of music just end up striking a chord with you. I often find my mental soundtrack resonating to Boards of Canada samples.
message saying “Your bookmarks have not been updated recently. iCloud will automatically try again in a few minutes” from the iCloud control panel and a yellow exclamation mark on the tray icon. I tried all the 
