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.
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 noticed just last week that the buttons and microphone on my Apple earbuds had stopped working. The earbuds themselves were fine, no problems playing music through them. So I figured it must be a software issue caused by updating to iOS 4.3.2 a little while ago. So I hit up Google with “iPhone headphone buttons not working” and the first hit I get is this, which traces the issue to lint stuck in the headphone jack.
“No, really? But I always keep the jack free of lint.” So I shine a flashlight down there and see a little bit of stuff compacted at the bottom. Then I stick the sharp end of a file down there and find out it’s actually a LOT of stuff. “Huh.” I cleaned it out until I saw the bottom of the inside of the jack, and plugged my headphones back in. Lo and behold, the buttons and microphone immediately worked again. Apparently just a few millimeters of lint is enough to cover up a crucial contact down there. So if you’ve got nonfunctional headphone buttons, first check the depths of your headphone jack. The colour should be black or white, not pocket lint blue/grey.
Incidentally, this also applies to the 30 pin connector. If you’ve got a cable that refuses to stay attached when charging, check the bottom of your phone. Chances are there’s lint clogging up the attachment points for the cable.
This is an interesting time for storage tech. SSDs are just becoming economical enough to be an option in consumer PCs, although they’re still pricey. At this point in time, you can easily get two 3 TB hard drives for the price of one 256 GB solid state drive. As SSDs become more widely used that price difference will close, but in the meantime Intel’s introduced a neat feature in their Z68 chipset.
Called Smart Response Technology (otherwise known as SSD caching), it allows you to allot up to 64 GB of an SSD to cache frequently used files stored on the hard disk. This significantly speeds up read and write times producing faster boot times and program launches. The big advantage here is that you don’t have to decide which of your programs or files should go on a (currently) space-restricted SSD and which to leave on a slower – but larger – hard drive. The chipset will give you near-SSD performance with all of your stuff still stored on a cheapo massive hard drive. Read a good review by AnandTech here.
The Phantom Flex camera can shoot 1920 x 1080 res video at 2,570 FPS. It can also shoot 10,750 FPS at 640 x 480. There are only a handful of cameras in the world that can do this, hence the pricetag of $50k – $150k. This is what happens when you have access to one in your hotel room at 2am.
So way back in the summer, I was going to upgrade from my iPhone 3GS to an iPhone 4. I figured the upgrades, albeit small, were worth the money — better display, camera flash, HD video… enough to merit an upgrade since I use my cell every day. Well apparently half of Canada thought so too since it’s been impossible to get. Every so often I’d call around and see if any stores had iPhone 4 stock, and the answer was always themes and variations on “no”. Now I didn’t exactly try that hard to find places that had them. I figured stock levels would replenish themselves eventually (sooner than months later) and I’d be able to walk into a store and get one. If I was desperate I probably could have bought one full price and forgot about my carrier’s upgrade discount.
But here it is, 6 months after its launch in Canada, and I still don’t have one. But now I’m not looking. Because we’ve surpassed the half life of the iPhone 4, and getting one now makes little sense when the next iPhone will be launched in another 6 months or so (following Apple’s previous launch dates). I’d actually be buying old hardware for a premium price. If I upgraded to an iPhone 4 now I would get a worse upgrade price than if I skipped a generation and waited to get the new iPhone.
So I’ll stick it out for another few months and try a different strategy this time, scouting out places to preorder, or at least get put on a waiting list. I don’t have to have one the day it launches in Canada, but planning ahead will hopefully get me an upgrade without having to chase stock levels around the city.
So a couple of years ago, Carleton University got new monitors for all their computer labs. That’s great, the old ones were looking distinctly early 2000′s and were in need of replacement. However, the new monitors are widescreen. The computers themselves are still running Windows XP, and have always been locked down so you can’t change the screen resolution. That wasn’t really an issue with the old 4:3 monitors, but when you move to a widescreen monitor getting a 1024 X 768 signal, guess what happens? Yup, everything’s stretched.
Figure 1: What your pictures should look like (left) and what your pictures should not look like (right)
This always irks me. There are thousands of computers at Carleton that are displaying stretched images! And I can’t believe it would be that hard to set them up for a widescreen resolution.
Sadly, this still seems to be a common issue, even though it’s been several years since widescreen monitors became mainstream. I see it all the time with people who figure they’ll finally replace their old CRT monitor and get an LCD, which just happens to be widescreen. They’ll plug it in and leave the resolution as is, perhaps wondering in passing why everyone in their photo library has gained so much weight. In a couple more years this probably won’t be an issue — it’s hard to find non-widescreen monitors now, and once everyone upgrades to Windows 7 or newer (which handles widescreen resolutions much better than XP), 4:3 screen ratios will be a thing of the past.
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EDIT: As of the fall 2011 semester (September-ish), Carleton upgraded their labs to Windows 7. Voila, proper aspect ratios.
**Update:My laptop has been repaired. See the info at the end of this post.
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Well, I thought it could never happen to me, but isn’t that the way we all feel when misfortune befalls others.
I’ve been the happy owner of a Dell XPS M1330 for two years and one month. Around the time that I bought it, I had seen rumblings about problems with the Nvidia 8400M GS that shipped inside the M1330. People were reporting that their machines were suddenly bluescreening, shutting down, and throwing out weird graphical errors. The video chip, plagued by inadequate cooling, would fry itself and render the computer unusable. Here is one of the threads where the GPU issue was first discovered.
I figured it was an isolated issue, and that these cases were within the normal failure rate. Well, apparently not – shortly after purchasing my M1330, Dell was forced to extend the warranties of computers with certain nVidia chips by a full year. Not so much an isolated issue.
My experience with the problem started about a week ago. While browsing around Google Earth, my laptop suddenly displayed a memory parity error like the one above, and I had to force a restart. When it booted back up, all seemed to be fine for a few hours. However, in the middle of a video I was playing it locked up again with the same error, and this time it refused to boot up again normally. The problem didn’t manifest itself until it actually booted into Windows, and I found that it worked alright in safe mode (although often with thin lines running across the screen).
During my attempts to find the source of the problem it eventually devolved into a rave-like display every time I started it outside of safe mode.
At this point it’s pretty clear that the video chip is the problem. Now it won’t get past the Windows welcome screen. It immediately starts displaying flashing colours and checkerboard patterns across the display. This video is pretty much what I’m getting, but without the aurora borealis-like stuff that happens at the end.
But at least in my case, the chip hasn’t failed completely (yet?). In safe mode I uninstalled the Nvidia drivers and had Windows fall back to the default VGA drivers. Now it will work starting up into Windows normally, although without hardware video acceleration. This seems to be working for the short term, until I can get it shipped back to Dell for repairs.
In retrospect, I had been getting a bunch of “The display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has recovered” messages in the days leading up to the final meltdown. I thought it was just driver issues with my version of 64 bit Windows 7, but I guess not.
Just doing some quick searching reveals a widespread problem with the M1330′s video chip. There are some possible “solutions” such as modifying the GPU’s heat sink or even underclocking the GPU, but it doesn’t really get to the issue, which seems to be bad design. The 8400M GS puts out a lot of heat and laptops aren’t that great at cooling hot components.
Unfortunately, the standard fix of replacing the motherboard + GPU doesn’t really fix the issue either, since the replacement parts are the same as the old ones. So really you’re just getting another few years before it might fail again.
In any case, I’ll be calling Dell to get the repairs done and I’ll update this post with the details.
**Update 1:After resuming my laptop from standby, I got pretty vertical lines like a lot of other people have had.
**Update 2: I called Dell tech support. The technician I got had me do a few tests so he could confirm it was the video chip that failed. First he had me test the display by pressing D + the power button. I had run this test before, and it ran successfully again, so the laptop screen is fine. He then had me connect an external display via VGA to see if the same graphics problem showed up there. It managed to display the desktop, but there was significant corruption, exactly like the image below.
This was enough to convince him the GPU was at fault, and he said I would get a box within 2 business days to send the computer back to depot in. I also confirmed that my warranty was extended by a year (for GPU related problems only). When he said that the motherboard + GPU would be replaced with parts that shouldn’t fail again, I asked him what changes were made to the design. He said there was a problem with the thermal pad that sits between the GPU and the heatsink (for all M1330′s ever manufactured up to when Dell discovered the problem), causing the graphics chip to overheat.
**Update 3: I got my box, 2 business days later.
Inside the box: A sheet of paper where you can describe the problem, when it happens, etc., and the return postage sticker. Once you put your hardware in, you call Purolator and schedule a pickup.
**Update 4: Fixed! I just got my M1330 back via Purolator, 5 days after I had it picked up. I think that’s pretty quick, considering the 2 day transit time to and from the depot.
The motherboard + the gpu has been replaced. It looks like the original heatsink is still attached, which supports the technician’s comments about the faulty design of the thermal pad. The fan might be running more with the newer motherboard, but I won’t know for sure until I test it out for a while. It wouldn’t surprise me since that would keep everything a couple degrees cooler.
The hard drive was also replaced and the old one was sent back to me, even though there was nothing wrong with it. The reason might be that I had Windows 7 installed on the drive and the system is supposed to come with Vista. Replacing a motherboard isn’t always as simple as just dropping in a new one, often you need to reinstall the OS. So, since they would have had to nuke my Windows 7 install to put Vista back on, I guess it was easier for them to drop in a new drive with Vista on it. Dell returns the old one (you can only keep it for 10 days, then you have to send it back) so you can get any files you need off of it. I’m not complaining, I’ll take a newer drive over an older one any day.
All in all, it was a smooth process from calling tech support to when I got my computer back. I was only without it for 5 days in total. Yes, it’s too bad Dell shipped out computers with major defects that caused them to self destruct over time, but Dell’s support is good. If you have a problem it shouldn’t be difficult to get them to fix it in a reasonable amount of time. Whether the new parts are going to last longer than the replaced ones is anyone’s guess, but I sincerely hope Dell has gotten enough flack over the issue to make the GPU problem go away. Negative publicity just ain’t good for business.
**Update 5: Thanks to a class-action lawsuit, U.S. buyers of certain laptops with Nvidia GPUs may be entitled to financial compensation if they’ve had video problems. No love for Canada yet.
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 
