Guilt Over Complications of the Heart

This morning I'm feeling a bit guilty about something from last night...

In the evening, Leena came to me in a panic thinking she might be having a heart attack.  She said her Apple Watch was telling her something about "heart rate complications," and she knows she's at some risk as both of her parents have had heart attacks...

I guess while I know the Apple Watch has heart beat monitoring stuff, I don't know how much to trust it.  I asked her if maybe she'd had the Watch on too loose.  She didn't really answer, and I asked if maybe it was too tight?  Or maybe not aligned on her wrist properly or what.

Leena's not one for answering questions, as she doesn't like feeling like she's being interrogated and rebels at the idea of just simply answering.  She prefers talking and still kept saying stuff about "heart rate (or beat) complications".

Eventually I got out of her that she hadn't even been wearing the Watch.  She was holding it, and it was in some mode for configuring what gets displayed on the screen.  And it was giving her "heart rate complications".

Ah, that clarified things...  "Complications" in watchmaking means features on a watch beyond merely time keeping.  I only learned that a few years ago, through work, with our associating to a grey market luxury watch dealer.  I asked Leena if she was familiar with the term, since her family all has luxury watches, but she hadn't heard of "complications" in the horological sense.

Leena's older Rolex with a date "complication".

Here are some random Heart Rate Complications screen shots I just grabbed via Google:

I thought it was all resolved last night when I went to bed.  But this morning, thinking about it, I feel guilty that when Leena first told me she might be having a heart attack, I didn't even think of it as a medical emergency, I didn't think to call 911, that she might really be having a heart attack.

We're lucky this was just a misunderstanding of an obscure watchmaking term.  What'll happen if we have a genuine medical emergency in the future?

Microsoft Screws Up Scroll Bars

I finally figured out why despite years of using Windows (i.e. since version 1.0 in the mid-80's, and mouse-oriented apps going back earlier to my Apple //e) I'm having so much trouble using the scroll bars on my relatively new, fancy Windows 8.1 desktop machine at work. I click in the scroll bar and unexpected scrolling happens, or sometimes nothing at all happens.

In this photo with two windows, one is scrolled to the bottom, the other is scrolled to the top.

The problem is the Windows 8.1 default style is for the "thumb" of the scroll bar to be a dark grey, with the empty part to be a light grey, almost white. But one idiotic software vendor decided to override that with their own distinctive style, the "thumb" being white and the empty part of the scroll bar a dark grey.

No, wait...  They're both the same software vendor...  F*ckin' Microsoft!

MTA Apps are Whiz Kid Certified

Lately the subway trains have had ads posted on them by the Metropolitan Transit Authority, who runs them, about the various improvements they're making to New York City's transit system.  As one says "a city is only as good as its transit system."

One of them admits that they didn't create their own apps, "Our apps are whiz kid certified.  Instead of developing transit apps ourselves, we gave our info to the people who do it best."

Now, as what they would probably qualify as a "whiz kid" I don't think I'd certify the app based on the screen shot they show.  From a UI perspective it looks awful.

A quick glance at it and I'm confused.  Those are definitely subway lines, but if I was looking for one, they don't seem to be in any order.  The rectangle in the upper left makes sense, 1 2 3 and 4 5 6 on the next line.  But why is J between 3 and 7?  That makes no sense!

My first thought was maybe they were ordered by their routes, although that might make sense for someone who really knows the whole system, knows that 2 3 4 & 5 all run pretty near each other for long distances.  But if that was the case, why isn't J by Z?  J and Z run perfectly parallel their whole routes and are so tied together a famous singer even used the J & Z lines as his stage name...

Or maybe I should make an allowance for half the screen being cut off from the ad?

Hopefully it's not made by the same people who wrote the software that creates their status alerts on their home page.  During last week's blizzard one had this:

MTA Service Notice

Due to ongoing snow related conditions:

There is no train service between the Astoria-Ditmars Boulevard Station and the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue Station in both directions.   

There is no train service between the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue Station and the Whitehall Street Station in both directions.

Please allow for additional travel time.

Ok, sounds reasonable.  One of my coworkers, who very, very rarely takes the subway, went to the Q station nearest her and found out it was closed.  She thought it was running.

I did, too.  Until I looked at a route map.  Turns out Astoria-Ditmars and Coney Island are opposite ends of the lines.  Basically, that Q notice translates to "there is no Q service" because it's not running from the stations at each end of the line.

My guess is the MTA must have some application which lists the lines and they just check the first and last stations that are out of service and it generates the message for their web page.  But it doesn't recognize that if the first and last stations on a line are checked, then the whole line is out of service.

UI Design Skills, Here and There

While us software developers in general don't have a good reputation for user interface design (and I'm no exception, either), I've found that developers in India are a bit worse than developers in the U.S. or U.K. (but I don't mean incapable of picking it up).  After nearly a decade in India I have a good idea why, too...

It's because of what we grow up using.  My generation and recent ones grown up with computers as kids, while India is still a bit behind on that, so we've had more years of experience both using computers and helping our older relatives do things on then than Indians have had.  More time to learn and understand what is really usable and what isn't.

But also, when it comes to other household and workplace user interfaces, in the U.S. we've become accustomed to better design.

Take light switches as an example, since that's a technological UI almost everyone uses...  In the U.S. if there's a bank of light switches you can usually rely on the order of the switches matching the location of the lights.  Not always, but usually.  Often there isn't a bank of switches, but one switch wherever it's appropriate for the light.

Not so in India...  Electricians in India are typically uneducated, low-paid laborers, who like most other laborers require a supervisor to scream and yell at them to get at least the minimum work done and simply aren't paid enough to care to do a good job.  That means that usually a switch will turn a light on, but there may not be any logic or pattern as to which switch works with which light, and getting an electrician to make a switch turn on a light may end up with another switch not turning anything on.

Time and again I've seen lots of people at their homes simply flip all the switches on and off until the right light comes on.  Even at my in-laws' house most of the family turns on the lights in the living room when they want the fan, then get up again when they notice and turn off the light and turn on the fan.

For example, in the Weikfield office bathroom (don't worry, I won't go into the gross details of bathrooms) there are a couple of stalls with the light switches on post between the two stalls, but the left switch is actually for the right stall and the right switch is for the left stall (in a simple ASCII art drawing, which doesn't draw perfectly right in the preview...):

+---------------+---------+---------------+
|               |         |               |
|  +----------+ |         |  +----------+ |

|  |   left   | |         |  |   right  | |

|  |   stall  | |         |  |   stall  | |

|  |          | | +-+ +-+ |  |          | |

|  |          | | |R| |L| |  |          | |

|  |          | | +-+ +-+ |  |          | |

|  |          | |         |  |          | |

|  |          | |         |  |          | |

|  |          | |         |  |          | |

|  |          | |         |  |          | |

|  |          | |         |  |          | |

|  +----------+ |         |  +----------+ |  

|               |         |               |

+---------------+---------+---------------+

I find it confusing.  Even more so because between the other pair of stalls the switches for the stalls are in the logical order, except there are three switches and the one farthest left is actually for an overhead light outside the stalls.  When I'm done in any of them, I always get nervous turning off the light because I don't want to inconvenience any other user of a stall in case I forget which switch is which, as they're not in the most logical locations.

The switch panels in my flat in India are even worse, they're much larger, with multiple rows of switches to control lights, fans, outlets and some "nothing at all," and they're organized even more randomly with no consistency between any of the rooms.  All the rooms have a pretty similar array of lights in the same places, although some rooms just have bare wires because the builder never actually fitted lights in those spots, yet the switches don't match at al.  Since I live here I've managed to simply memorize the key ones that I actually use.

So for those who grew up in India and are used to this, the expectation when using some sort of high tech interface is to just bang away until it does what it's supposed to, because the ones in daily life aren't arranged or designed in a logical, intuitive manner.

Chat - Going back in time

I hate chatting on instant messaging system. Sure, they're fine for light stuff:

Kevin: Can I bum a ride home?

Vehicle Owner: Sure, I'm leaving in 5 minutes

Kevin: Perfect.

But when you get longer things and you see something like:

Other Person: Thank you

With a message at the bottom "Other Person is typing a message" and you wonder, "are they still typing? That 'thank you' seems the end. Do I wait? Do I type?" What do I do?

Maybe with the new, modern technology we should go back to "over" and "out" to indicate when someone's finished, sort of like on radio communication. It works there, and chat really is structured like two-way radio, only typing instead of talking.

This would be useful, too, when someone's fired a complex or multipart or series of technical questions at me via instant messaging. Sometimes I can't tell if they're done or still adding more on. And then when it looks like they're done and I begin typing a reply, my replies are usually long and detailed, they start off quickly with "r u there?" because I don't send back an instant, fast but wrong or incomplete answer.

Or they ask one question, I begin typing the answer and then they start sending more before I'm done. How do I then keep my answers tied with the specific, unnumbered, unstructured questions?

At least an "over" and "out" would clarify who's turn it is to talk. Or maybe we need instant message programs to use a token, whoever has the token can talk, and when they're done they pass it. This can keep the conversation structured for easy reading of questions and answers.

On the other hand, I prefer email. For just those reasons. For things with complex answers, email is just a lot easier to keep structured. Questions can be bulleted or numbered, answers along with them. Text can be formatted and doesn't have to fit some arbitrarily small number of characters.

Yeah, much prefer email over chat.

War Game Potential on Microsoft Surface

In a Skype based interview the other night, the interviewer wanted a quick idea of how I'd go about solving a problem so he asked me to begin designing a Monopoly game, asking what entities I'd make, what functions on some of them, etc.

For the Player object I said we'd need a rollDice() method.

But then I got to thinking about dice games. I've played a lot in the past and was a keen war gamer in high school, and the physical act of rolling the dice was definitely part of the fun. Even knowing that it won't really affect the randomness, there's still an aspect of blowing on the dice, talking to them, "oh yeah, c'mon 6, 6, c'mon!" and trying to throw them with a different wrist movement because you know you want a different result than the previous roll...

But with war games on computers, it's not as much fun to simply click a "roll" button on the screen. Even if the program makes a noise like dice banging together and shows the roll results like a pair of dice, it's just not the same.

So, then I realized, computerizing dice games would be great on Microsoft Surface. The game, board, pieces, etc. could be in the software, but with its cameras under the surface, you could do the physical rolling of the dice on top and it could determine what you rolled. This would work because nearly all six sided dice are standard with opposite paired faces:

1 : 6

2 : 5

3 : 4

That way, the cameras in Surface could read the the side that faces down and as long as you're not using weird, hand-made or nonstandard dice, it would know what came up on top.

As for the cardboard counters, sometimes they're fun to move, but not as much as hand rolling the dice, that's where the real action is. With Surface able to detect where you're pointing, having the counters computerized would still be fun because you'd still be able to use your finger to move them around between hexes. The computer, too, would be able to validate the moves and make sure you're not moving them too far or into the wrong hexes (my friends and I were friendly players and didn't cheat that way, but that isn't to say we never made honest mistakes).

Of course, a quick Google search turns up I'm not the first person who thought of it, either... Most of those hits are for Dungeons & Dragons games, but the same applies. And so this would work pretty well, too for things like my father's favorite game, backgammon and what-not.

I Pad, You Pad, We All Pad for iPad?

All last year, Leena kept asking "what you want for your birthday?" and I kept saying "I don't know" or "no idea" even as my birthday flew past in August. She kept asking me, a few times a week, often prefacing it with "I won't ask again, you'll tell me when you know," as August flew past, September, October, November and December.

Finally in January Apple announced the iPad and I said "I know what I want!" and she thought it was totally cool, too, and the perfect thing to get me for my birthday.

In February some of her Canadian relatives visited and she gave them the cash to buy the iPad when it's released in Canada or they make a trip to the U.S. and can get it there. There's a a friend of Leena's family who travels regularly between India and Canada and said that since his luggage is rarely full he'd be happy to carry it.

March came and went, the iPad released. Then April... Finally in May Leena's aunt said they'd ordered it and expected it to arrive at their house by the end of the month. In the meantime my mother bought an iPad from Cory Comstock, the local Apple dealer in Waldport.

Last week, Leena's aunt apologized for not getting hold of the traveling friend, but they'd been busy in Toronto with other things going on. The traveling friend's phone number isn't reachable to ask what's up. The aunt said she'll try to track him down.

Now it's the middle of June, no iPad yet. I keep seeing my colleagues in Europe mention on Yammer they've got them. None of them are saying they don't like it... The latest comment is making me even more anxious to get it. The conversation goes a little like this:

New iPad owner: Internet on iPad IS different!

Sarcastic response: Different like this: http://bit.ly/aahsvW ;-)

New iPad owner: Nope, not in that sense (i have flash and ad blockers on all my browsers), internet on iPad becomes closer to you, even the same web based Yammer feels different

Future iPad customer: sound like a touchy-feely sort of thing, which is exactly the kind of "experience" Apple was aiming at. It changes everything when you actually "touch" the web with your fingers. Interesting.

Ooooh, I want one even more now that I'm reading things like this.

I'm not too worried about the missing Flash stuff, since I almost always leave pages if it looks like there's going to be Flash on them anyway, too much time for too little value (well, except for the Flash application I work on developing at work).

Maybe within a few weeks?

Bloody Mac OS X Snow Leopard...

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard...

I just got my Snow Leopard

package delivered this week... Leena had a relative pick it up from an Apple store in Toronto, and give it to another friend of the family there to carry it here to India for me....

The install went nice and smooth, even though the main monitor on my 13" MacBook is malfunctioning, making some of the text hard to read.

After installing I switched the desktop wallpaper to the new Snow Leopard picture, since I like kitty cats.

But the bad monitor, because some of the pixels are funny, displays funny contrasts, some colours are indistinguishable, some really stand out, and some are just plain weird (why is the snow purple?)

What stood out in this case, was the blood on the right side of the cat's mouth!

A digital photo of the bad screen itself showing this satiated pussy cat...

While the above picture is a small, cropped part of the original image supplied by Apple...

And the box itself, it looks like it's been retouched so there's no sign of blood there... That image is available at the Apple Store....

Oh well, a quick Google search turns up I'm not the first to notice this, either...

So, Apple, was Windows 7 a tasty morsel?

Wait. Wait. Wait... Did you see it? Did you blink?

My wife has a Plantronics Bluetooth headset and I just saw it charging on the floor and was reminded of how bad the UI for charging is.

The way it works is you plug it in, and while it's charging the red LED will flash on for a moment about once every 15-20 seconds. Not much longer than the blink of an eye. When it's done charging, it no longer flashes on.

What's really wrong with this is that in order to tell if it's charging or not, you can't just glance at it and see, you have to watch it. And even if you feel like you waited enough for the flashing light, maybe you blinked and missed it, so you have to wait longer.

A better UI would be to simply show the light while it's charging. Of course that has the downside that maybe if the light doesn't show it means it's not plugged in, or the switch is off.

Even better is it could flash more rapidly while it's charging and then stay on steady when it's finished. That way you can easily tell. Or two colours, one for charging and one for charged.

The way it is now stinks.