Archive for the 'The Daily Geek' category

Dell Streak Out-of-Box Experience and UI

Aug 17 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product, The Daily Geek

I finally found time to power on the Streak to run it through the initial user set up.

This out-of-box experience (OOBE) is what distinguishes the Dell Streak from the other Android devices I’ve seen so far. As you will see below, a simple OOBE application runs the first-time user through the different components of the user interface.

This is the boot up screen:

The boot time is a little long and disconcerting because other than an initial sound effect, nothing really happens at this stage. Is the system dead?

When the system finally comes up, you get to select your language:

Then you have a quick introduction to the various buttons etc:

You also get an introduction the menu bar, which is the bar at the top of the screen. The icon here drops down a panel to access all the applications:

“Additional views” here actually refer to additional desktops that you can create, above and beyond the 4 that are already created for you:

The notification area is a section of the menu bar:

Explanation of what information status area contains:

The ubiquitous Android “back” button. You can see that it is designed in such a way that the orientation of the device during normal use is expected to be horizontal (landscape mode).

What the “menu” button is about:

What the “home” button is about:

The last screen of the OOBE contains more tips:

This is the home screen:

This is screen #3. The theme of this screen is communications (contacts, messaging and Gmail):

Screen 4 is the social, media, entertainment center:

Tapping on the arrow will drop down an abbreviated menu with a set of commonly used applications. This fixes one of the usability problems of the Android application list: that there are too many icons to scroll through if you need to look for a particular application.

Clicking on “more” will get you the full list of applications:

View of the web browser with the keyboard:

So how does the physically large screen help the web browser experience? The resolution here is 800×480. Unfortunately, most modern websites are designed with a screen width of 1024 in mind. Here is an example of this blog on the Streak. Notice that the right column is cut off.

The same webpage on an iPad which has a 1024 pixel wide screen.

And there we have it. I will continue to use the Streak and post my observations on Twitter: @benchong408

Comments are off for this post

Firefox 3 RC1 is out!

May 19 2008 Published by Ben Chong under The Daily Geek

Yay!

I fell in love with Firefox 3 beta 3 for its speed (compared to Firefox 2) on the Mac and started using it almost exclusively.

Then beta 4 came out and it was slooooow! And crash-prone too!

Now that RC1 (aka release candidate) is out, I am in love with Firefox again. It’s as fast as beta 3 and hasn’t crashed on me yet.

Well, okay, once bitten twice shy. So I’ve upgraded and will use RC1 but I’m saving the love for later.

The RC1 is available for download here.

Comments are off for this post

The Craigslist Police

Apr 16 2008 Published by Ben Chong under The Daily Geek

Craigslist or Craig’s List is a free, online classified ads website that is eating the lunch of traditional printed classified advertising.

The first time visitor might be tempted to think that you can find anything on Craigslist. Just like on Ebay (famously illustrated by that scene in Men in Black 2). Nothing is further from the truth.

Craigslist is a pretty small outfit so employees themselves don’t do the policing.

Instead, the site depends on the “community” (i.e. users) to “flag” inappropriate ads.

To put it unkindly, the community police are like your nosy neighbor. You know, that guy down the street who is always peering through the window blinds and who calls city hall every time you park more than 18 inches away from the curb? I used to have a neighbor like that and he denounced everyone living in the street to the point where he had no more friends. During  WWII, these people would have denounced young Jewish girls to the Nazis.

The good thing about Craigslist, is that they use a democratic system for removing posts. They don’t depend on complaints from just one single, cranky person. Instead, a post needs to be flagged many times before it can be removed. Which is nice. I wished the San Jose city hall would do that.

Obviously, to be removed, a post needs to violate posting guidelines. I had a post removed once and it was in violation of some very obscure rule which even the Craigslist community forum folks had trouble figuring out. Which goes to show that some people need to get a life that is outside of memorizing Craigslist posting guidelines…

Anyway, the reason for this post is that I found out the office hours of the community police.

Some Craigslist newbies tend to put up the same car ad multiple times, listing them as being sold in different cities/counties in the SF Bay Area. This violates one of the posting guidelines: thou shalt not put up multiple posts to sell the same item within X hours.

At 7am this morning, I found multiple violations which had not been removed. Wow!

At 7.45am, the posts had been removed.

My guess: folks wake up at 7+ in the morning, turn on their PCs, make coffee, skim Craigslist. And start flagging ads for removing.

So if you are a newbie advertising on Craigslist, put up your ads early in the morning. Preferably before 7am.

The problem is: the people you are targeting probably keep the same hours as the Craigslist community police…

One response so far

Utter stupidity and the Windows experience

Apr 14 2008 Published by Ben Chong under The Daily Geek

Last Friday, I left a Windows Vista notebook running over the weekend because I needed to download an ISO image.

For the non-techies, an ISO image is a copy of a CD that exists as a file your hard disk. You can use the ISO image to re-create a copy of the CD. ISO images tend to be very big. The one that I was downloading was more than 600MB in size.

This morning, when I came into the office, the notebook had been powered off.

What the….!?

I found out that Vista had downloaded an update and had automatically powered off the notebook after that update.

Needless to day, my download was 95% done when that happened.

Think of this: the download was for work. Now I have to restart the download and WAIT for it to complete. Think of how much money this is costing my company in terms of manhour costs.

Multiply that by the number of Vista users and you can imagine how much Vista is costing businesses in wasted time.

This automatic-shutdown-after-an-update feature of Windows is of a monumental stupidity.

I have had that happen to me while I was running virtual machines on another PC: the host operating system (which was XP) shut down by itself after an update. All this without first shutting down the guest operating systems that were running on the virtual machines. This is like powering off a PC without first shutting down the operating system. A big NO-NO.

I cannot imagine what must be going on in the heads of those people in Redmond when they came up with this scheme. Were the technical aspects of “doing it right” so daunting that they had to take such a shortcut?

For this is an engineering shortcut. There is no doubt about it.

Unfortunately, it just kills the user experience and wastes everyone else’s time and money.

Comments are off for this post

« Newer posts Older posts »