I like the idea of not having to open up another IM client to talk to my friends who use Google Talk instead of Windows Live Messenger. Until Microsoft actually implements cross-protocol IM like they said they were going to back in the day, I stick with using both Google Talk inside of Gmail and Windows Live Messenger.

The Problem

The problem I have though, is that I don’t like my instant messengers beeping at me when I get messages. I prefer visual cues, like how Windows Live Messenger makes the taskbar icon flash. Unfortunately, Google Talk in Gmail does not do this! Back in the days of XP and Vista, the problem was solved by changing the title of the page from “Gmail – …” to “New message from contact” or something to that effect. This would cause a sort of blinking animation in the task bar – as Firefox’s taskbar icon title just shows the title of whatever site you’re currently on.

However, since Windows 7 doesn’t display window titles in the task bar by default – and I rather like this setting – I have no good means of determining when a message has arrived for me. Sure, due to the translucent nature of my window decorations, sometimes I notice the blinking title bar anyway – but its not reliable.

The Idea

Gmail Labs rolls out new features that users can opt into all the time! If one of these new features were to make the browser icon in the toolbar flash when a new message arrives – similar to Windows Live Messenger does – the problem could be solved. However, I’m not entirely sure that’s something a browser lets you do, so unfortunately a plug-in might be required. Either way, the people behind Gmail Labs are smart, and I’m sure they can solve the problem as long as they’re aware the problem exists!

It was a very interesting talk – which I may get into in more detail in another blog post – but my interest was piqued on another topic before our guest speaker even took the stage. While waiting for everyone to take their seats I was socializing with a few of the other attendees. In advance, if either of the two ladies I was speaking to tonight end up reading this – I’m very sorry I forgot your names!

During some light conversation about our interests in user experience related fields – one of these ladies (we’ll call her Alice) wanted to add the other (we’ll call her Brenda) to LinkedIn. Alice asked Brenda if she was on LinkedIn, and after Brenda said yes, Alice proceeded to pull out her BlackBerry to look Brenda up.

It was at this point that I asked them “won’t it be interesting when your phone will have opened up LinkedIn and already searched for Brenda because it heard our conversation?”. We all kind of laughed, and commented on how that technology was not quite ready for that yet with big smiles. Phones reacting to your conversations? Sorcery I say!

However ridiculous this concept sounds, we might not be that far off.

Technologies such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Kinect have (as I’ve heard) very intelligent voice detection – to the point where it knows the difference between the voices of the users in the room. It’s not a stretch to imagine Microsoft putting similar technology into their newly launched Windows Phone 7 to enable this very sort of thing. It would be a very interesting shift in user experience design for applications to know what you want to do before you’ve decided to do it.

This is a guest post by Dana Harrison. Check up on his other activities at The Linux Experiment and his other posts on audiophonik.

Hi, all!  You may have noticed already by reading my slightly different name, or perhaps you’ve heard of me over on the wildly popular site I co-founded, The Linux Experiment, but I am not the usual Phil.  My name is Dana, and I’m a young professional working in Information Systems for a large insurance company.  I work with Phil and also had the pleasure of founding The Linux Experiment with him.  This is my third guest post for audiophonik.

This time around, Phil has asked me to do another review for an application available on Google’s Android platform: the shiny and efficient ChompSMS, now running on (yay!) Android 2.1 as my carrier – Rogers – has finally pushed out this update to my HTC Magic+ hardware.

ChompSMS: Sounds tasty

ChompSMS is an Android-only (and decidedly rather handy) replacement to the built-in ‘Messages’ application used for sending and receiving MMS / SMS / pretty much any other kind of MS / on the Android platform.  To give you an idea of how stone-age their own messaging application is, I can’t notice any change between its current iteration – on Android 2.1 – and the one that was on my phone last week, using Android 1.5.  I’m almost tempted to root my phone and slap on Froyo, just to see if there’s any difference in the stock messaging app.

Old and busted...

...new hotness.

ChompSMS is supposed to offer a lot of new features and generally ‘beef up’ the stock messaging options available on Google Android, and comes with a huge list of things it supposedly does better than Google.  Among them:

• The UI has been changed to mirror that of the iOS platform – which I could really do without, but it looks better than stock
• The ability to send SMS / MMS over the ‘ChompSMS’ network with the purchase of ‘credits’, for a much cheaper rate than your provider
• A host of new notification options for you to choose how you’re notified about received (or even sent!) messages

Now, that’s certainly a lot to claim: let’s see how ChompSMS stacks up against its supposed abilities.

Finger-Chompin’ good

Now, I can honestly say that I haven’t personally purchased credits or paid for ChompSMS in any way.  While it does tout itself as a ‘free program’, there is a premium version available for a few bucks that will remove the streaming advertisements from the program’s main window.  In all honesty, they’re pretty out of the way, but I have accidentally tapped on one or two while attempting to select the top name on my messaging list, mostly due to my own poor motor skills.  If ads are the sort of thing that really piss you off though, go for the paid version; I’m seriously considering it.

The first three things with which I immediately fell in love using ChompSMS are as follows:

1) Notification options

Seriously, this should just be available in the stock version of the Android messaging application, but apparently Google has not yet looked that far into the future and gleaned that much information from its search engine users.  ChompSMS grants me the ability to use either my LED (located near the earpiece) OR the trackball (which pulses white) – or BOTH! – to notify me of texts.  On top of that, I can even select what colour I want the LED to flash, and it’s much easier to select any of my usual songs as a notification sound – no silly messing about with folders on the SD card.

2) Truncated message strings

On top of the fact that it just handles message strings more beautifully – much more intuitively than the stock application – one issue I ran into several times with the stock application is the fact that, well, some of my message strings get rather unwieldy, and I don’t want to have to delete texts to use my application.  For example: before erasing my phone for the big Android 2.1 update, I had over 3000 some messages with my girlfriend that I didn’t particularly want to get rid of.  Trouble is, every time I opened her string in the messaging application, it would take forever to load all of those messages.

This is where ChompSMS comes in handy: it only loads the last ‘so many’ (I say this because I haven’t counted) messages immediately, with the option to ‘open older messages’ at the top of the string in button form.  As it turns out, this has been a total lifesaver in that I’m now not waiting forever for my messages to come up, and the application itself actually has a smaller footprint as it’s not loading every single text in the history of mankind into memory.

3) Replies from the lock screen

This is honestly a no-brainer.  The quick ability to reply as soon as a message comes in – even right from the lock screen – is just about the handiest and simplest thing they could have thought of.

The ugly

The only things I’ll complain about with ChompSMS are as follows:

1) It shouldn’t have to mirror the Apple iOS UI for texts in order to remain functional and pretty.  They should really try to ramp up development of their own, better-than-Google-and-Apple UI to distinguish themselves from the rest of the garbage out there.

2) I hate ads. Honestly, you would think they make enough from people purchasing their damn ‘credits’ to send texts over their network to be able to remove ads from the free version of their program; I’m totally torn about whether or not I want to shell out a few bucks for a messaging application, or just remove it and use the stock one again.  Or just toss a few Google ads on your site – nobody would even mind!

The closing statement

All in all, ChompSMS is almost a necessity for someone who texts as much as me – I almost regularly come close to my 1000-text-per-month cap on my plan with Rogers, but am usually careful not to get too close to the top because I know how much they love to bleed me for money.  If you’re a more recreational, or less frequent, texter then I would imagine you can stick with the stock application and be just fine, as long as you’ve paired it with something like Swype.

Go to your Market, get ChompSMS, and be happy – you will thank me later.  Here’s a handy QR code for Android users!

This is a guest post by Dana Harrison. Check up on his other activities at The Linux Experiment and his other posts on audiophonik.

Hi, all!  You may have noticed already by reading my slightly different name, or perhaps you’ve heard of me over on the wildly popular site I co-founded, The Linux Experiment, but I am not the usual Phil.  My name is Dana, and I’m a young professional working in IT for a large insurance company.  I work with Phil and also had the pleasure of founding The Linux Experiment with him.  This is my second guest post for audiophonik.

This time around, Phil has asked me to do another review for an application available on Google’s Android platform.  This time, it surrounds my new (I use that phrase loosely) HTC Magic+ phone on Rogers, sporting Android 1.5 because HTC and Rogers are too damn lazy to have updated me yet to Android 2.1.

Swype: An Introduction

Swype is a multi-platform, and rather kick-ass, replacement to the usual hum-drum keyboards offered with today’s touch-screen smartphones and other devices.  It offers gesture-based text entry for all of the usual applications included with these devices, like e-mail, messaging, and web-browsing.  Here’s a nifty screenshot:

The idea behind Swype is simple: instead of individual key presses on a QWERTY or T9-based keypad, the user simply slides their finger around on the screen, covering the keys for each word they want to type.  The sequence above could correspond to “or” or “our” – in this situation, both options would show up on a prompt.  To better simulate “or”, you could slide your finger up and around the other buttons, stopping at “r”.

Sounds awesome – how about in practice?

While it takes a bit of getting used to, Swype works beautifully in real-world applications.  It’s intuitive, quick, and incredibly accurate – more than once have I randomly scribbled my thumb over a few different keys, and nine times out of ten it gets the exact word I was thinking of.  Getting used to single-thumbing a full QWERTY setup can be challenging, after only two days of full Swype use I’m sure that I’ve improved over my previous typing speed.

The only real ‘issue’ I’ve encountered is actually with my phone itself.  I’ve found that having a second-generation Android device can… lag, at times.  Word choice can take up to a few seconds to show up, depending on how badly I’ve butchered the key gestures.  On the upside, I can continue typing along, hoping the whole time that the proper words are going to come up (before they all do at once).  The screen on the HTC Magic can also get a little… moist at times, which will sometimes cause sliding motions to skip over the screen, missing letters.  Maybe I’m just a sweaty bastard, I don’t know.

The Verdict

Swype is a fantastic, easy-to-use, and super-fast alternative to the standard keyboard of any touch-screen device.  While the public beta is closed for now, I’m sure it’ll either be up again shortly or pop up on the Market for several mobile devices in no time.  I suggest you get it as soon as you can.

Screen captures to follow – video, if I can manage it – as soon as I figure out how the hell to get it to work on Windows.

Recently, I’ve been reorganizing my computers based on their usage. My old HTPC, has resumed its duties as my primary desktop/server, my Mac Mini has been attached to the my desktop through Synergy, my server was given to my brother for personal use, and his old computer – a nettop – is now being used as our new HTPC.

After a painful decision making process – a topic for another time, and another post – I decided that this nettop, named Apollo after the Greek god of many things including “music, poetry, and the arts” [as close as I could get to entertainment],  should run Ubuntu 10.4 with XBMC as the media center app. After testing it’s media playback capabilities from a local file, I was rather impressed. I set out to add a SMB share from within XBMC, and was prompted to add a username and password.

I wasn’t really expecting this, because Leviathan – my desktop/sever running Windows 7 – has public sharing turned on, as well as a guest account. I entered in my credentials, and was asked yet again for a username and password. After trying multiple times, I decided to quit XBMC and see if I could get Ubuntu to connect to the share. Here too, I was prompted for a username and password, again and again.

Next I headed to the terminal to run smbclient. This didn’t work either, as I was shown a message saying smbclient failed with “SUCCESS – 0″. I guess success shouldn’t be zero, so my next move was to attempt mounting the network share using CIFS. Again, I was met with repeated defeat.

Begrudgingly I took to the internet with my problem, only to find that there were many people unable to connect to their Windows 7 from Ubuntu. The suggestions ranged from registry hacks to group policy administration, none of which worked. One repeated suggestion however, was to un-install the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant. However, as a user of the Windows Live Essentials (Wave 4) Beta that was recently released – I had no such program. I did however have a similar application called the Windows Live Messenger Companion, which I chose to uninstall – again, to no avail.

However, I soon reasoned that perhaps whatever was blocking people using the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant was now being used within the actual Windows Live Messenger client or the other Windows Live Essentials apps that I’d recently installed. I started by uninstalling everything but Windows Live Messenger – because I really, really like the beta version. Alas, this did not help. Next I uninstalled the actual Windows Live Messenger client and voila – I was able to connect with no prompting for passwords at all. Because that makes -any- sense.

As a matter of interest, I installed the regular WLM non-beta client and made sure that the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant was installed, and tried to connect again. Not surprisingly, I was no longer able to connect to my Windows 7 shares. After un-installing the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant my shares were back up and I was mostly happy. Except that I couldn’t use the new Windows Live Messenger beta.

I can’t be sure if the other tinkering I did also helped clear up my problems, but as a recap here are the steps I recommend to access your Windows 7 shares from Ubuntu:

1) If you have the Windows Live Essentials (Wave 4) beta installed, you’ll have to uninstall all of the applications that come with this. For now, you can install the current version of Windows Live Messenger and the other Windows Live Essentials.

2) If you have Windows Live Messenger installed, or ANY of the Windows Live Essentials programs installed check to see if you have the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant installed. If so, uninstall it.

3) Hopefully, now you can enjoy your Windows 7 shares in Ubuntu

Important Note:

Beta software has this nasty habit of leaving beta status sooner or later. If this issue is not resolved when the newest version of Windows Live Messenger is officially released, you may not be able to use the Window Live Messenger client if you need your Windows 7 shares from Ubuntu. I would suggest using an application like Pidgin as your instant messenger, as it can also connect to the Windows Live Messenger service. Other options include Digsby, Miranda, and Trillian.

Software mentioned in this article:

Windows Live Messenger
Windows Live Essentials (Wave 4) beta
Synergy
XBMC
Ubuntu 10.4
Pidgin
Digsby
Miranda IM
Trillian

It happened when I was looking at an older post on the site, one with links I had already visited, but forgot that I had seen. For whatever reason, the theme used at the blog styles visited links a red colour. Not really a big deal right? Red’s a nice enough colour.

When I considered hitting the link, I noticed it was red. Immediately I changed my mind and kept browsing. Moments later, I found another red link, and was a little irritated. It took me a few seconds to realize why, but thanks to Wikipedia‘s styling, I have apparently started associating red links with missing content.

For those readers who aren’t familiar with Wikipedia, it hosts a bunch of information on basically everything. Each page on the site is full of links to other pages within the site, but sometimes those pages get removed, or links to pages that don’t exist are added to remind someone to make that page later. To help out their users, Wikipedia has styled these links in a red colour, so that readers know that there’s no page at the other end of that link.

Realizing this, I went ahead and clicked the links to find that I’d already seen the content. So what does this mean? For starters, the blog’s operators should probably fix this problem, being as it is a blog for a user experience group and shouldn’t go around messing with people’s mental models. It also means that the next time I design a web-based system I’ll have a new mental model in mind to optimize how my users will interact with it.

I’d like to point out that IxDA Waterloo is an awesome group. If you’re in the Waterloo region and interested in user experience or interaction design, I’d highly recommend joining the User Experience Peer Group at Communitech’s website, joining the local IxDA group, and coming out to their monthly meetings. March’s meeting was on table-top computing, and in April we did a UX Show and Tell where I recently gave a short presentation on Project MORIS. Its definitely worth your time.

Has anyone else noticed they’ve started to treat red links in the same manner? Questions/remarks about mental models or something else I mentioned in this post? Let me know in the comments.

Imagine a sporting event — Natal could know which team you’re for because it sees your jersey, or knows you thought a bad call was made when you yell ‘boo.’ It learns about you and gets smarter to create a more tailored entertainment experience.

The sporting events/their broadcasters could theoretically partner with Microsoft and collect this sort of  information live, and display it during breaks in the event. For example, it could show the precent of Natal viewers who also thought that call was bad, or how many Natal viewers are cheering for the same team as you, and how many are cheering for the opposite team.

This kind of new interaction amazes me, but also scares me. I find it really eerie how close this situation is to a 1984-esque world, in which your TV watches you just as much as you watch it. Regardless, the technology is very exciting, and applications like this one will continue to catch my interest.

Let me know your thoughts on this kind of living room interaction in the comments!

Project MORIS was the final project to a directed study on User Interface Design that Tyler Burton, Jon Fritz and I completed in the Fall of 2009 at Wilfrid Laurier University under the supervision of Dr. Angele Hamel.  We decided to analyze the current registration system used at WLU called LORIS. After our analysis, we created a prototype of a new interface for LORIS using Visual Studio with Windows Forms and C#.

For the presentation we spent a few minutes whipping up a slideshow that gives a quick overview of what features of LORIS that Project MORIS was designed to fix. We intended to show a live demo of the application, however we ran out of time (presentations were limited to 6 minutes) so I decided to post both the slideshow and the application on the web. This way anyone who wants can check out the application or see a quick highlight of what we aimed to fix.

You can read a bit more about it on my About page, or just download the files here:

Presentation: Redesigning LORIS [.ppt]

Presentation: Redesigning LORIS [.pdf]

Application: Project MORIS [Requires the .NET Framework 3.0]

Leave your thoughts or questions in the comments and I’ll get back to you!

I started thinking of what else you could do with that sort of technology. The first thing that came to mind was to move information from the dashboard to the windshield: your speed, gas tank’s gauge and whatever else you might fancy.

Now of course, there are dangers to having things displayed on the windshield. The big concern is that they may get in the way of seeing what’s on the road. Having them more prominently displayed might also cause drivers to look at them more often, causing a distraction. Both of those problems can be resolved by having some sort button on the steering wheel that toggles the display.

GM’s examples are even cooler than my initial ideas though: they have the system highlight the edge of the road in foggy conditions and pick out signs along the way and bring them to your attention with an outline. It seems that the system only highlights one thing at a time right now, but it’s not much of a stretch to imagine they’ll be able to do something like full road highlighting to make driving at night easier.

GM's HUD showing the edge of the road in fog

This is a guest post by Dana Harrison. Check up on his other activities at The Linux Experiment and his other posts on audiophonik.

Hi, all!  You may have noticed all ready by reading my slightly different name, or perhaps you’ve heard of me over on the wildly popular site I co-founded, The Linux Experiment, but I am not the usual Phil.  My name is Dana, and I’m a young professional working in IT for a large insurance company.  I work with Phil and also had the pleasure of founding The Linux Experiment with him.

For reasons unbeknown to me, Phil asked me a few months ago to install Slide Screen for Android onto my Rogers HTC Dream – that’s a ‘T-Mobile G1′ for any American readers out there.  Slide Screen is basically a complete home screen replacement for the standard Android interface, and is meant to reduce screen clutter and information overload in a nicely presented, simple, single location.

Installation and Setup

This was just about the simplest thing in the world, as is the installation of most standard Android applications.  Open up the Android Market, search for Slide Screen, and install.

Setup was also quite simple, offering the option of either completely replacing my home screen (which I chose) or running as a launchable application.

First Impressions

I have to hand it to the folks at Larva Labs – they know how to code a nice-looking interface.  The Slide Screen interface is certainly clean if nothing else, but while preventing me from experiencing information overload, I feel I may have been left out of information altogether.

Among other frustrations, I found the Slide Screen application significantly slowed down the all ready slow ROM included on the Rogers HTC Dream.  In addition, the constantly running application reduced battery life noticeably.

The notification widget for missed calls also, inexplicably, did not actually bring me to my call log(s) as expected, but instead populated the number in my phone application for quick dialing.

I also found the ‘simplification’ of information rather strange.  Instead of keeping the information I want in plain view, I found that the application held information I want in inconvenient (ie, having to launch it myself) places.

Final Thoughs

While I can see the merit in this application, it’s not specifically for me.  If the folks at Larva Labs can find a way to integrate more popular applications into the main screen while reducing overall memory footprint, I may explore it again in the future.

For now, I am falling in love with the Sense interface of my HTC Magic!