Archive for category Gadgets

$5 Amazon gift card if you recommend a printer that doesn’t suck

May 24

I’m trying to buy a replacement all-in-one printer for my mom and dad (they have G4 & G5 Macs, an iPad, and two iPhone 4s), and all the ones I’ve investigated (including those sold by Apple in their retail stores, which I take as an endorsement) have had one or more of the following problems:

Wifi advertised as a connectivity option, but doesn’t work, works flakily, or works for printing but not scanning (and you can’t activate both wifi and USB at once without redoing factory setup)
Gobbles ink, perhaps deliberately, and/or refuses to print or do ANYTHING when ANY of the ink cartridges is low; and increasingly, they can’t be refilled because they are chipped
Printing quality sucks

I’m looking for an all-in-one that has the following properties. If I end up buying the one you recommend, I’ll send you a $5 Amazon gift card.

MUST HAVE features:

Works seamlessly with a Mac, without having to install obtrusive vendor software, which is usually among the worst quality software out there (we have 3rd-party scanning software such as VueScan already)
Can function with OS 10.5.x (doesn’t require ?10.6)
Ink consumption isn’t deliberately rapacious and eco-hostile (can’t refill cartridges, can’t print at all when printer decides cartridges are low)
Decent print quality for photos—consumer grade is fine

HIGHLY DESIRABLE but not dealbreaker if absent:

Wifi connectivity that actually works and can be setup by mere mortals
AirPrint (print photos directly from iOS devices)

The UI on Amazon’s Kindle Fire is an embarrassing abject failure

Apr 10

Posted by fox in Books & E-books, Gadgets | 2 Comments

I don’t get it.

Amazon’s mission is to be the world’s most customer-focused company, or something like that.

Did they even try to test out the Kindle Fire UI on any of their customers before inflicting it on us?

I’m really, really trying to like this device (our lab bought a couple to test out). I’m a committed ebook fan and Kindle owner: I already own three Kindle hardware devices, not counting the Kindle Reader apps I have on my Macbook Air, iPad, and iPhone. So I am predisposed to want to like this device.

If I download (buy) a book from the Kindle store, it shows up under Books. If I sideload or download a PDF book, it shows up under Docs. If I sideload or download a true ebook (.mobi file) not purchased on Kindle store (e.g., purchased through Pragmatic Programmers, SitePoint, or any other of a number of technical publishers that distribute their ebooks directly off their site), it shows up in Docs.

When I go to Apps, my choices are “device” or “cloud”. OK, I want to search for a new type of app, so I tap Cloud, and then Search. No results. Oh, I see, I have to go to the “store” to search for new apps. That’s different from “cloud”. In fact, the Search button seems to do something different and inconsistent in every context in which it’s available.

I have not found a decent free app for Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Reader, or Gmail. Weird given that Google is the company behind Android, the Fire’s OS. (I know it’s an “Amazon adaptation” of Android, but it’s almost like they went out of their way to make it even more clunky and unusable on the Fire than on other Android tablets.) Yes, I can use the Web versions of those apps, but they don’t work particularly well on the Fire’s smaller screen.

The popup keyboard is unusable. It’s too hard to describe why; try using it and you’ll see. Auto-correction doesn’t work. Different softkeys pop up at different times, so the softkey that was a left-parenthesis a second ago is now some random other thing, because you mistyped a word. The key that means “shift” sometimes turns into the key that means “make the keyboard immediately disappear with no obvious way to bring it back.” I have an iPhone and use the autocorrect all the time, and it’s graceful enough to give up and not correct your word if you “mistype” it twice in a row. Fire’s autocorrect will correct your “wrong” word the same way again, and again, and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again, until you just want to punch the device’s GorillaGlass screen.

The reading experience isn’t good. I talked about this already in an earlier post.

The one and only thing this device has going for it—and the only reason I still try to use it at all: when reading in bed, its backlight means I don’t have to turn on a reading lamp. This is important for my spouse, who doesn’t read in bed. If it were up to me, I’d use my black & white Kindle 3G or Kindle DX exclusively.

I never thought I’d say this, but someone has come up with a mobile device experience that is worse than any version of Windows Mobile I’ve used, and I’ve used Windows Mobile since back when they were competing against the original PalmOS.

Apparently the Kindle Fire UI was designed by the same team that designed the unusable “Manage Your Kindle” page on Amazon. In an era where Google and others have shown how tasteful use of JavaScript can make for a responsive and compelling UI, Amazon has figured out a way to make JavaScript so obtrusive that it makes the UI worse than if only HTML and Web 1.0 technniques were involved. Don’t take my word for it; try it yourself. I have about 140 items in my Kindle library, and “managing” them on Amazon’s site is just a joke. It’s unusable. There are bugs that cause random popup div’s with raw JSON to appear; the page is slow, and you can’t click on anything until it finishes loading because everything is re-rendering out from under you; no matter how many titles you own, you can never view more than 10 at a time, cannot filter the view, and cannot select multiple titles to perform a batch action (say, batch delete); you cannot manage “collections” and have them sync to your Kindle devices, as you can do with playlists in iTunes; I could go on. If this UI was a class project at Berkeley it would get a C.

Thank heavens for Calibre. It’s not perfect, but it’s by far the best overall ebook management app out there now. And it’s free. I couldn’t help myself, I sent a few tens of dollars as a donation to the author. You should too, if only to get him on Amazon’s radar. Amazon: buy this person, throw away all of your horrendous ebook “management” pages, and replace it with Calibre somehow. Heck, rebrand and redistribute it and make the author rich. He deserves it.

I know it’s possible to buy 2 Kindle Fires for the price of one iPad, but it’s also possible to buy two cans of dog food for the price of one sandwich—I’ll still take the sandwich. Holy crap, does this device suck. Too bad, because it would be good for customers if the iPad had some serious competition. This device could have been that, but isn’t.

Kindle Fire: probably good enough

Nov 25

Posted by fox in Books & E-books, Gadgets, Teaching | 2 Comments

Since Dave Patterson and I have signed up to offer the first 5 weeks of Berkeley’s CS169 Software Engineering class as a free online course using Stanford’s ClassX, I feel the pressure ratcheted up to finish the textbook we’ve been preparing for use with this course.

We’ve always intended to deliver it primarily as an e-book, and while we have a very promising prototype of a highly interactive tablet version, we recognize that in the near term the mass market for e-books will be the Kindle format.

We‘ve been assuming many (most?) people will use the free Kindle Cloud Reader since it displays color and can take advantage of a larger screen than the Kindle hardware devices. So we were excited when the Kindle Fire was announced—a color e-book reader that doubles as an Android tablet at an attractive price point ($199) might be something that gets real student uptake. We ordered a couple to evaluate internally.

First, people are invariably going to compare it to the iPad. I’d say there’s no comparison. Besides Fire’s smaller size, its user experience is downright clunky compared to iOS. (I’m new to Android, but if this is representative of the gap between iOS and Android, they’re two different products.) Using the tablet is far from intuitive. Not all of my books appear under the Books tab; some appear only under the Home tab. And the Home tab is different from the Apps tab. In trying to review the apps I have, there’s a bunch on there I don’t even understand (hidden apps that came with the device but aren’t visible on the Apps screen), and I can’t imagine how a nontechnical user could figure out what to do with them. Frequently, dialogs will pop up that require typing, yet the on-screen blind-up keyboard will cover some of the fields, so that it’s impossible to see what you’re typing except by repeatedly hiding and re-showing the keyboard. There are ever-present buttons along the bottom of the screen for Back, Home, and Search, but these buttons don’t work the same way (or at all) in every app. For example, I downloaded a YouTube viewer app and was puzzled when the Search button didn’t present a search bar. Turns out the app had its own Search function that doesn’t use the Android-standard everpresent search button. Big lose.

I didn’t try the media-consumption features (watching TV/movies, downloading songs, etc.), but they’ve gotten only lukewarm reviews from others.

The touch interface is flawed. The multitouch hardware is fine, and the build quality of the device feels solid, but the sensitivity to actual gestures is badly off. It’s nearly impossible to open a book from the “carousel view” without flipping past it. Page turns are oversensitive, and you can’t hold the device in just one hand because every part of the screen responds to touch and you end up turning pages without meaning to. (The original Kindle had this problem with button placement. It’s amazing they didn’t learn from that experience.) The page turning animation is jerky rather than smooth, and if you balk partway through the page-turning gesture, it’s quite hard to detect whether the page was actually turned or not except by actually re-parsing the words—big lose.

So it’s not an iPad—is it a better Kindle? Maybe. I have 3 other black-and-white Kindles (1st gen, DX, and graphite-colored 3rd gen), and my position has always been that those devices are one-trick ponies, but it’s a really good trick. The 3G in particular is ultralight, can be read in bright sunlight, can be easily held in one hand, is no strain on the eyes, has a battery that lasts for days or weeks, etc. In contrast, the Fire is too bright to read in a dark bedroom, even at the lowest brightness setting; eyestrain sets in quickly. You can’t hold it in one hand, not only because of the misdesigned UI that results in gratuitous page turns, but because it’s just too heavy to hold comfortably despite its small size. Its battery life is a few hours—by the end of my playing around with it on the first day for a couple of hours, it was down to 60% charge. It seems to combine the disadvantages of the iPad with the disadvantages of a smaller screen (about 7”, or only slightly larger than the 6” screen on the 3G).

What about the rendering of actual Kindle books on the Fire? It seems to be identical to the rendering in Kindle Cloud Reader, which isn’t great news since the layout possibilities are extremely limited. (They would be on a small screen anyway, even with more powerful layout facilities.) The Kindle Format 8 is supposed to improve on this, but I’ve been on their mailinglist since the preannounce and nothing has been announced to developers on what new formatting is possible in KF8. For the moment, though, the device I’ll always throw in my bag is still the less-expensive black & white Kindle 3G.

Having said all that, the Fire will probably sell well. Android phones have sold well even though the user experience is clunky compared to the iPhone. Windows killed Apple on the desktop even though its user experience is a far cry from Mac OS X (or for that matter Mac OS 1 through 9). Both sold because they were cheaper and because they looked good enough from afar, until you try to really get intimate with them. As some technology columnist recently wrote, the Fire doesn’t have to be better than the iPad—it just has to be good enough.

I miss Steve Jobs.

My Web 2.0-enabled weekend

Jun 14

Posted by fox in Gadgets, Urbanism & Transit | Comments off

I did an impromptu trip to Washington DC this past weekend to see a spectacular production of Follies, and I was struck by how differently I managed logistics compared to doing a similar trip just 10 years ago.

Instead of shopping for a hotel room, I used AirBnB to find an inexpensive place to stay (and made a new friend). Instead of picking up a Metro map, I relied on the DCMate iPhone app to navigate DC public transit and estimate arrival/departure trip times. Instead of a Metro farecard, I used a contactless SmarTrip card (like Clipper in the Bay Area), which I’m going to hold onto for my next trip. Instead of picking up exhibit maps at the Smithsonian museums, most of them now have mobile-friendly online exhibition guides. I had planned a trip to the historic Civil War battlefields near Manassas (which ultimately didn’t happen because the incompetent United Airlines had aircraft maintenance problems and moved me to an earlier flight), and rather than rent a car I was all set with Zipcar to grab one for a couple of hours. (Having our lab’s Verizon Mifi unit really helped—I was like a walking access point.) And if I’d had another half-day to bike around DC, rather than renting a bike from a bike shop I could’ve used Capitol Bikeshare—borrow and return bikes by the hour at hundreds of bikestations, which you can find using an iPhone app.

The only thing that worked poorly was United, which cancelled both my outgoing and my return flights due to “aircraft maintenance issues” (apparently they were unable to resolve those issues even at two of their hub airports). At least they’re advance enough to have SMS notification of these problems.

TiVo vs. AppleTV for Video on Demand

Dec 10

Posted by fox in Gadgets | Comments off

I’ve had a a TiVo Series 2 for years. Its user experience for selecting, recording and watching TV shows left everything else in the dust. So when TiVo teamed up with Amazon a year or two ago to offer video-on-demand movies and TV shows via TiVo, I had high hopes.

These were quickly dashed. The Amazon VoD UI embedded in TiVo is unresponsive, clumsy, cumbersome and unpleasant—everything the TiVo UI itself is not. When one chooses “Video on Demand” from the TiVo menu, one arrives at a menu screen featuring something like 8 different VoD vendors whose delivery medium is TiVo. Never mind the fact that as a movie watcher, I could give a flying fork whether “Jaman Movies and Shorts” or “Disney Video” or “Blockbuster” or “Amazon Video on Demand” supplies the title I want to watch; as a customer, I’m focused on content, not content vendors.

Yet amazingly, not only is the TiVo UI organized by something as meaningless as vendor, but each of the vendor submenus takes you to a different, yet uniformly awful, user interface. Here are some misfeatures common to all of them:

Each button press on the TiVo remote has a UI response time between 700 and 1500ms. Yes, that’s right, it can take more than a second to get any visual or auditory feedback that your button-press actually did anything. This is far above the established thresholds for perceptual causality (~100ms). In contrast, when using the “native” TiVo UI, it feels snappy and responsive.
Each VoD source has a different menu-driven UI for search, “top titles”, browse by genre, etc. The user has a simple goal: “I want to find (or browse) movies.” Yet each submenu has a different structure, for no defensible reason. As a user, what do I care which of the vendors is providing the content?
The GUI is not only entirely textual, it is designed in such a way that less than 50% of the already-scarce screen real estate is actually devoted to browsing. The rest is devoted to TiVo templated elements and blather from the VoD vendor about how thrilled I should be that I had the wisdom to select them.

The UI is, in short, astonishingly bad. It is all the more frustrating because this truly awful UI, which makes me want to hurl the remote at the screen, emanates from the same device that gave us the effortlessly superior TiVo UI.

What happened?

Bottom line: when it comes to video on demand, TiVo has provided an unresponsive, inconsistent, confusing and non-thought-out GUI in which various competing vendors of VoD media fight for your eyeballs with unattractive, unintuitive, arbitrarily-different GUIs that violate every basic GUI tenet, including those to which the original TiVo GUI hews so faithfully and well. In contrast, AppleTV, for all its bashing, has a nicely-thought-out, consistent, aesthetically appealing GUI that does the one thing you want to do: find the damn movie easily, and start watching it as soon as possible. The search interface is fast and responsive; the user experience is,well, Apple; and you can usually start watching movies within 1-2 minutes of clicking “Buy”. (The last time I used Amazon VoD on TiVo to watch a 30-minute TV sitcom episode, I had to wait 20 minutes before I could start watching, even though my TiVo enjoys access to exactly the same broadband network as my AppleTV. How is 20 minutes “video on demand”? I could have made a trip to the local video store and been back in less time than that.)

Shame on you, TiVo. DVR hardware is commodity; what had set you apart was your UI. As you continue to add vendors to your hideous VoD user experience, you will start running out of feet in which to shoot yourselves.

TiVo’s “video on demand” UI was designed by vandals in the 80’s

Jun 12

Posted by fox in Gadgets | Comments off

We have a 2nd-gen TiVo DVR as well as an AppleTV.

TiVo is widely and deservedly praised for its outstanding user experience. But in the video-on-demand department, it’s so pathetically inferior to AppleTV that it doesn’t appear to have been designed in the same decade. The great guys and gals who designed the original TiVO UI must have left the back door open when it comes to the VoD UI.

If I select the TiVo “video on demand” menu option from the top-level menu, I get six submenus: Amazon Video on Demand, Walt Disney Studios, Jaman Movies and Shorts, Browse Free Videos, Music Videos from Music Choice, and Home Movies By One True Media. As a user, what the hell do I choose? Why should the distributor of a piece of video be a first-order user experience choice? Wouldn’t most users be more likely to know, say, the name of the movie or its actors rather than the name of the middleman distributor that happens to control the distribution rights for that piece of video via TiVo?

Among those six choices, the submenus are all different. If I choose Amazon Video on Demand, I get choices like Top Rentals, Top Categories & Special Deals, Browse Entire Catalog, Search, and FAQ. The Walt Disney Studios menu item reveals Most Popular, New Arrivals, Browse, and About CinemaNow (whatever that is; the term doesn’t appear elsewhere in the UE). Even in menu items where Search is allowed, it appears at a different spot in every menu. None of the menus or submenus have anything other than a text-only, one-screen-at-a-time interface. It’s like using Gopher before we had the World Wide Web.

Finally, to add insult to injury, the couple of times I’ve actually purchased TV episodes from Amazon Video on Demand, I have to wait an amount of time that is a large fraction of the total playing time before I can start watching. To watch a 30-minute TV sitcom episode, I had to wait over 20 minutes before I could hit Play. Look, I understand about buffering, but AppleTV gets this right–why can’t TiVo?

How does this compare to AppleTV’s user experience? The top level choices there are “Movies” and “TV Shows”. Each choice gets me to an attractively-arranged screen of box-cover graphics with titles (vs. TiVo’s 1980’s text-only interface), or I can search either movies or TV shows. The user experience is identical for both movies and TV shows. If I happen to have rented or purchased movies or TV shows in my iTunes library, I see those as well. I can watch the trailer of any movie instantly and for free. If I choose to purchase or rent a movie or TV show, I can typically start watching within 1 to 3 minutes, in HD and digital surround if available for that movie. Amazon VoD is 1- or 2-channel sound and standard-def NTSC video.

Yes, AppleTV has a far smaller selection of content than Amazon, and the price per rental item is a bit higher. But using AppleTV is a joy, whereas using the TiVo/Amazon UE feels like I’ve been transported back to Gopher in the late 1980’s. Shame on TiVo for allowing this dreck to invade an otherwise excellently designed product. It’s frustrating that TiVo, a device that otherwise has an excellent UE and is by its nature an Internet appliance, falls so embarrassingly flat when it comes to a UE for video-on-demand that isn’t even usable, let alone compelling. Get a clue, guys–the iPod has 85%+ market share for a reason.

Armando Fox

A breadth-first traversal of life