Wrap-up

This was a really different semester from the rest of my CSE studies. I was really excited about taking a class with TED Talks listed on the syllabus. And we learned a lot about proper project development, especially in a group atmosphere. The GALLAG concept was really interesting, and I've been thinking about how it can apply to all sorts of aspects of life. All in all, this was a really satisfying class to take after years of hardware classes.

Apple vs. Adobe

Apple seems to be getting in the way of a lot of companies these days, and it's really not much of a wonder why. iPhone users have long complained about their devices not supporting Adobe's Flash, and many have theorized why Apple would not support Flash. To the invested observer, it seems to be a relatively obvious combination of Apple not wanting to rely on another company's proprietary software to enhance their own product, and Apple desiring to push the openness of HTML5 upon the internet at large.

Well, Steve Jobs essentially confirmed all of that in an open letter published last week. He detailed the following reasons:

1. Openness - Flash is proprietary, and any updates to Flash as a whole have to be made on the part of Adobe.
2. The "full web" - Adobe claims that iPhone users cannot access all of the web, since Flash is necessary for a lot of different web applications. Apple argues that this isn't the case, and shouldn't be. Through the proliferation of open standards, Flash shouldn't be the most relied upon tool.
3. Reliability, security, performance - According to Jobs, Flash is the number one cause of crashing on Macs. They also doubt the performance of Flash on a mobile device and claim that despite requests for it, Adobe has failed to demonstrate Flash performing well on a mobile device.
4. Battery life - Flash requires video decoding in software, which is much more costly to power than to decode in hardware. By instead using the industry-standard H.264 codec, battery life on iPhones is twice that of Flash.
5. Touch - Flash was built during an era of using a mouse on a screen. Many of Flash's advantages come from being able to mouseover a Flash object. That is not possible in the touch interface, and would take away from the experience.
6. Flash-based iPhone apps - Adobe wants to allow developers to create apps for the iPhone that are based on Flash. Apple does not want to allow this, because when those apps are allowed on the iPhone, they are now beholden to Adobe.

As an iPhone user, I've never really complained about not having Flash on my iPhone. I understand Apple's reasoning behind it. Apple's entire modus operandi in whatever products they make is to control the development of both hardware and software so that they can provide what they believe is the best overall user experience. Some people don't like that about Apple, and that's fine. But to lambast Apple for sticking to its guns regarding this experience is foolish. Apple wants to be beholden to no one for their products, and it's worked out pretty well so far for them. I, for one, welcome the advent of new and open technologies like HTML5 as well. When people stop and take a look at the reasoning behind their decision-making, Apple's moves over the past couple years all of a sudden seem quite clear.

Apple vs. Google

The growing war between Apple and Google continues as Apple acquired a mobile search app company called Siri. This is a large step into the searching field. But it's not in the same sense as a Google-style search engine, where a massive amount of data is crawled to reveal a result. Siri acts more in a way that fits into Apple's paradigm of user interactivity. The user is expected to ask Siri to accomplish some sort of task (e.g. get dinner reservations) and Siri will operate through some other website's API to return an actual dinner reservation for the user.

This appears to be Apple's effort to counter Google's search monopoly in a way that fits into Apple's iPhone and iPad product lines. By providing a system where a user does not have to navigate to Google, click on a website, hopefully navigate that site in a mobile setting, and get the desired result, Apple is essentially bypassing what Google can offer in that area.

I see this as a good move for the end consumer. In concept (as, of course, application is a different beast) Siri sounds like it would be quite useful for a variety of mobile phone users. For Apple, this is a fantastic tactic. They are entering the search arena, and are finally going into battle against Google. The outcome will be interesting to watch.

Roger Ebert speaks with his own voice again

The movie reviewer Roger Ebert no longer has a voice box or lower jaw. He has had several surgeries to deal with cancer and he can no longer speak. But recently, a company based out of the UK created a way for him to speak in his own voice again. Using recordings of his voice from DVD extras, they were able to patch together a library of his own voice.

This is a really interesting concept. The technology itself is pretty cool, and it's great that he has this ability back in the best way possible with technology, but I think the really interesting concept is how they acquired the voice samples. This is a man who spent his adult life in the public light, and his job was to talk about movies. So it was a relatively trivial task to assemble the audio pieces. But what if someone in the same condition didn't have this ability to look back on a catalogue? I feel like we're fast approaching a time period where a massive DVD library wouldn't be necessary. We are constantly on phones or other audio input devices. How much of that goes through servers where it could be kept and stored (whether by consent or not)? This gets into really interesting privacy issues and how much of our future interactions are recorded. I, for one, really do not want anything I say or do to be recorded without my knowledge and explicit consent. And I hope that at least in the US we avoid heading down that path.

GALLAG and Chesepeake Bay

Watching the news this morning, I saw an interview with Philippe Cousteau discussing the UVA Bay Game. This is a multi-disciplinary GALLAG project aimed at promoting sustainability of the Chesepeake Bay Watershed. According to that site, they developed it in 6 months, and are unveiling the game in a public demonstration April 8.

From the site's description:

The UVA Bay Game is a large-scale agent-based simulation of the Chesapeake Bay watershed that allows players to take the roles of stakeholders, such as farmers, local policy-makers, watermen, and developers, make decisions about their livelihoods and professional expertise, and see the impacts of these decisions on the watershed and on each other over a twenty-year period. The Game is an educational tool for raising awareness about watershed stewardship; a tool for exploring and testing policy choices; and a tool for basic resarch in complex systems modeling.

This is a fantastic example of how GALLAG can be employed for greater good not only of people but the environment around them.

Experience vs. Memory

One question that continues to arise in our group's discussion of Participation TV is the idea of experience in contrast to memory or recording of that experience. There is the question of if we record or place a focus on documenting a performance, will it degrade the performance or experience in some way? Right now, it's hard to find an answer to that until we conduct some actual user studies.

But we can glean some idea from a recent TED talk given by Daniel Kahneman. He discusses the idea of an experiential self vs. a memory self. The idea is that the most important aspect of our memories is how they end, and that will determine how we remember that experience. And in a way, our memory self is pulling along the experience self just so we can get to the memories. He argues that it is important for us to begin understanding how we value experience versus memory.

This is both fascinating to hear, but also surprisingly intuitive. I consider myself a very "happy" person. But I also learned long ago to value memory over experience. I go out of my way to make sure I can remember details of the people I am with, or the performance I am seeing, or the vacation spot I'm at, just so I can remember them later. For me, a large amount of enjoyment comes well after the experience is over. I've always acted on this principle, and I feel it's been a good decision. This can apply to our project implementation as well. With a focus on both the experience and the memories created from it, we can better increase the user's pleasure with the performance and documentation.

In the past week, I've been relying on several Google products heavily to facilitate a group project outside this class. I've never used Google Sites very much before, so I was partly astounded when I was able to create a fully functional and pretty site in less than an hour. It doesn't do everything I would want, but for the amount of effort I put into it, I'll take it.

For our HCI project, we're going to be using Drupal to support the backend of our documentation uploading site. Drupal is very effective in the same sense as the Google tools, because it provides a high level of modularity. My current task is to browse through as many lists of Drupal modules as I can, and hopefully find some ones that might be useful for us to implement. This has yielded some results so far, but the larger question still remains of how exactly we're going to integrate everything together on the website so we can provide the best experience for users to upload and view images and video.