New Age Appliances

I'm pretty excited about the latest consumer tech products I've seen from Apple and Microsoft. Although they seem to target slightly different segments, both have new offerings which push user interface and interaction to a new level.

iPhone

Early this year, I watched the Macworld video where Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. I was blown away. It was easy to see the new possibilities offered by this device. I mean, the phone I have now offers many advanced features that are clumsy and frustrating to use (web access, email, text messaging, etc) . The iPhone makes these tasks intuitive (and it looks fun). As the average user gets a hold of this, I'm guessing we'll see a spike in web traffic as mobile computing goes mainstream (sort of like what the iPod did for digital music). It will forever change the way people interact with the Internet and our products.

Microsoft Surface Computing

Yesterday I watched a video demoing Microsoft Surface Computing. I don't know if I'd want one of these in my home, but the retail possibilities were unbelievable. Having a system that can recognize objects from the physical world (credit card, phone, camera, *wine glass*) and appropriately interact with these objects is astonishing. I can't wait until one of these devices make it to a retail outlet near me... or I could plan a trip to Vegas.

Common Ground

Technology-wise, both products leverage similar technology - multi-touch displays and stunning user interfaces. Where they both excel, though, is in delivering an incredible user experience - and that's what will make them successful.

Discussion

What new technology or user experiences have you excited?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FRail :include

I really like developing with Rails, but I've been frustrated the last few days by some things Rails should do quite easily, yet doesn't. I've already written here and here about some of my struggles with Rails :include clause. Here's one more... Let's say you have a has-and-belongs-to-many relationship. If you :include this relationship in a find query, Rails will automatically create the join clause including the lookup table! That's cool. Unfortunately, it looks as if only the :include clause provides this piece of functionality. Why isn't the same functionality provided via the :join clause or through a general purpose module? This doesn't make any sense to me! I'm working on a database application where I don't need to display a lot of data, but the data displayed is heavily filtered by it's connections to other information in the database. I need to join a lot of tables to perform the filtering operation and using :include
Read more

Performance Tuning JCAPS - Part 2

It's been close to 2 months since my first Performance Tuning JCAPS post. Since then, we've noticed our servers running out of TCP connections under heavy load. Researching this problem, we learned that the JCAPS' JMS server makes heavy use of TCP in implementing Request/Reply queues . We approached Sun for guidance and they assured us that they've had success implementing high throughput applications using the JMS request reply solution... but how? It appears a multi-step solution is needed. First, running out of TCP connections in a scenario like ours is a JCAPS bug addressed in an ESR (110348) and rolled into JCAPS 5.1.3 Update Release 3 . We installed this update and noticed a marked improvement. Running my simple 75 user simulated test, transactions took 2521 ms to round trip (compared to the previous time of 20128ms). While this is great improvement, an average of 2.5 seconds is still really slow for this simple transaction. We reported our findings to Su
Read more

I Believe...

A recent reorg at my company left me with a new manager - and a different approach to software development than my team had been previously following.  Our new approach is one that I don’t necessarily agree with, but it led me to think about - and reevaluate -  those tenets of software development that I think are important and that I believe lead to increased quality and productivity. This post will consist of fairly high level discussions about how to organize code, teams, and projects - but contain very little actual code. Many of these ideas will not be my own.  They are mostly ideas I’ve learned from others and their willingness to share their experiences with me.  They are, however, ideas that I’ve practiced and hardened as I’ve worked to build my own ideal environment for delivering value through software . Many of these ideas I now take for granted as commonplace (even though they aren’t).  I felt a need to document them anyway - so people can understand what to expect (a
Read more