Matt Law

What will it be our old fashioned minds will never understand?

Everyone has had an elderly relative incapable of handling some kind of electronic device. The now outdated talk of how only kids know how to program video recorders is legend. One story I heard is how it is because of the way older generations' mental  models of technology have developed and then crystallized. They grew up in age of mechanical dials.

By and large, outside of high tech labs, each control, button or lever, had only one function - you press something and it affects some real life mechanical or hydraulic system. As a consequence they just couldn't get their heads around how one control can have multiple modes of input, which is standard fare in the modern electronic age. By this I mean, press the button and one thing happens, alter the state (say by cycling through a menu using another button) press it again and something else happens. 

It seems simple to us children of the seventies and eighties, but to your average 50 year old, this is mind-bogglingly complex and unknowable like trying to imagine the fifth dimension.

It seems interesting to think about how technology will develop over the coming 50 years and how we might just not get it. Perhaps it will seem incredibly alien to people that you won't always be contactable, or that people don't know where you are, or to have an instantly accessible library of information about everything you see and do.

Our quaint little button pressing ways will one day seem hilariously outmoded I am sure.

Photo from wimmulder on Flickr, via the inestimable No ideas but in things

Why you don't see Flash on the iPad or iPhone

Inevitably there was disappointment this week over the release of details of the iPad. This is standard procedure for Apple launch announcements – frenzied speculation, incredible disappointment, good sales. Don't buy it though, never buy the first generation of any Apple product. You pay the Mac tax plus the early adopter tax for a substandard product.

That's another story though, what I meant to write about is the discussion around why Adobe Flash is still not on the Apple mobile products, when clearly it could be. On the face of it, it's a no-brainer, you can't watch YouTube, or iPlayer, or the news on any of the main sites or any of the other millions of things you do on the internet all the time on your desktop.

It's simple.

Flash would rip the heart out of the apps marketplace. Apple makes a fortune by completely controlling the experience you get on your iPhone. The apps are actually tiny up-sells each time you want access to additional functionality.

Remember, apps are the internet for idiots. Many of the things you can do with an app, are actually not very difficult web applications, but the asence of certain technology (flash, javascript, in-browser java) has meant that up til recently, you needed to create a separate standalone mobile app to run on the mobile device.

If you could run a flash app on a web-page, full screen and have it work on any phone with flash on it there would be no further reason to ever download an app again. Given the Apple have made untold millions on the 3 billion or so apps that have been downloaded, they have a substantial disincentive to let Flash run on their devices. The other manufacturers are probably following the same logic.

True enough, the latest release of Abobe Creative Suite has an app development toolkit, so you can output flash applications as mobile apps, but much of the web is enabled by flash players. 

If I were Nokia or Sony Ericsson right now, I would be pushing through Flash enabled phones as fast as my little workers could pack them into boxes. Free apps for everyone would be a sure-fire way of reducing the Apple appeal just a little.

If I were Apple, I would be trying to come to some sort of arrangement with Adobe to enable some sort of crippled version of their software to run on the phone. Something that would allow web users to say watch videos, but not to do complicated functionality.

It will be interesting to see it develop. Apple has a strong historical dislike for open systems, and has made up for it with a very compelling user experience and design aesthetic. Flash has been instrumental in the development of the internet over the past 10 years and its owner Adobe is going to strongly push for it to remain that way. A clash of civilizations is approaching.

Update: since writing this last night, Robert Scoble has written an interesting piece on whether Flash is doomed or not. Worth a read

Augmented reality demo video: from architecture student

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

http://vimeo.com/8569187

Radical and amazing redesign of UK plug by RCA student

The Royal College of Art's graduate show has opened, and this year, the show-stopper was a plug. Min-Kyu Choi impressed every passer by with his neat, apparently market-ready plug that folds down to the width of an Apple MacBook Air. "The MacBook Air is the world's thinnest laptop ever. However, here in the UK, we still use the world's biggest three-pin plug," says Choi.

I hope this guy makes a lot of money. This is a really wonderful piece of design. So well thought out. Check out the way he would do a multi-plug:

 

Original article on iconeye.com

BMW z4 augmented reality card thing live on the streets of London

Just found this YouTube film which was the hidden gem of Dare's BMW z4 augmented reality project from last year. Directed by my old mucker Dave McNulty it is a really great piece of content, and ironically an indication that the content itself isn't enough to make it a 'viral', you need some money behind the seeding too.

The future of magazine publishing?

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Beautifully made mini-documentary both deconstructing magazine design, talking about adapting this to digital magazine design. Hearteningly, the page turn effect is comprehensively debunked.

"The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up immersive stories."

Are apps the internet for idiots?

This weekend I had an interesting chat with some pals who somehow had all come to buy iPhones at exactly the same time. Obviously they were raving about them and were discussing which apps were good to download. Being 60% of the way towards becoming a grumpy old geezer I unleashed an ill-informed rant about how apps are the stupid person’s way to use the internet. Barely a week seems to go past without another news story about how many billions of app downloads from the Apple store, or how many apps are available for sale there (around 90,000 at the moment I think).

However, it’s quite counterintuitive that apps have become so important in the mobile content market. BlackBerry (RIM) and the manufacturers are desperately trying to catch up with their own versions of the App Store. If someone offered you a programme for your home PC, which you can download and it will show you the weather, or give you travel updates and what is more, it costs £1.99 you would politely invite them to piss off. That is what the internet is for, and you download one programme – an internet browser – to look at all the myriad different types of content online.

In a way, the mobile manufacturers and networks are the architects of their own predicament. The market that evolved between them set the stage for a single minded player to enter and create something well arranged for the users themselves. The mobile telephony and data market has been characterised by the manufacturers and the network providers each trying to ‘own’ the user’s experience. No-one wants to become the ‘dumb pipe’. Can you imagine how stifled the fixed line internet would have been if each of the players – telephone company, modem manufacturers, computer manufacturers would each have been able to block or change the end users experience of the internet. That is something approaching what happened over the last ten years, and is why the much vaunted ‘year of mobile’ hasn’t happened yet.

Apple were very acute in seeing a way through to avoiding this rat’s nest and having a direct relationship with the customer, as well as being on top of a very large distribution network.  Apps certainly have improved the user experience, but as people become used to using the mobile internet, and as open systems tend to win out over closed ones, over the long term apps will probably start to die away in favour of using the internet the way it was intended.

Drumming robot

 

This little fella finds a surface then drums on it with the ear of a connoisseur. It will:

• Navigate around, collect some data, avoid obstacles, until it
• Finds something "worth playing on" (a single isolated object or a wide flat surface that it can find an angle onto)
• Snakes into place
• Plays some beats on what it have found, and samples this, checking it has a "good sound"
• Based on data collected in the area, and sample just made, then compose a little rhythm, and plays this along with the sample

Check it out at let's make robots

Robo-keeper

Three cameras, a radar, and a robot goalkeeper. Almost impossible to beat on toughest setting. Although why they didn't put Yul Brynner's face on it - Westworld style - I can't imagine.

Check out the video at robokeeper.com

Dare FC have been using this in preparation for our grudge match with BBH tonight. Bring it on.

Wired - Greatest Gadget of all time

Great little game (?) on wired.com, a series of heats to find the best gadget ever. And yes, I may be a luddite. Ask me in 20 years what the iPod did. The bic was revolutionary. Didn't someone say that technology is only those things that are invented after you are born?