John Topley's Weblog
October 2003 Article ArchiveUnfinished eXPerienceThursday, 30 October 2003When Microsoft launched Windows XP in late 2001, they made a big deal about the changes to the user interface, which were the biggest revamp since Windows 95. I found it surprising, coming barely a year after the mature and evolved Windows 2000 interface. The changes were controversial, with many people hating the new “Fisher Price” appearance. Personally I quite like it but then I'm fortunate enough to have a 17" TFT screen, which means that it doesn't look so cartoonish running at a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels. And the Windows XP Start menu is a big leap forward in usefulness. Talking of the Start button, someone in the Windows shell team has been reading about Fitt's Law, which states that the time taken to acquire a target is a function of the distance to, and the size of the target. This means that the Start button now extends all the way down to the bottom left hand corner of the display area, so you can slam the mouse down there in an approximate fashion and be guaranteed of hitting the button. Previous versions of Windows left an annoying two pixel gap around the edge, meaning that this didn't work. Interestingly, if you switch to the Classic theme under Windows XP, there's still the two pixel gap, but the mouse pointer will actually snap to the button even if you're not on it. Which is a hack but it works. I think the Windows XP UI was a bit rushed. When time is tight, attention to detail usually suffers. I present my evidence below. Exhibit A: The Welcome Screen
—It seems using Fast User Switching leads to multiple failed logon attempts. How Puzzling. Don't forget to undo the changes you made using the Group Policy Editor unless you want the security log to eat your disk. Exhibit B: The Help and Support Center
Exhibit C: Window Widgets
Exhibit D: Notepad
Exhibit E: Calculator Icon
Exhibit F: The Start Menu Context Menu
Exhibit G: Disk Properties
—This visual bug has been present since at least Windows NT 4.0. Those NT guys may know how to write an operating system kernel but it seems the Windows 95 team had the edge on pie charts. Exhibit H: Windows Explorer
Further Evidence Windows XP: rough around the edges. Summing Up The Windows 95 user interface was a comprehensive and successful attempt to put right many of the irritating inconsistencies and annoyances (and there were many) found in Windows 3.x. I can't help feeling that successive paint jobs in the guise of Windows 98/Me/2000 and now Windows XP—and also a distracting flirtation with trying to turn the desktop into a Web browser—have taken away from this original aim. There are many things that Windows XP gets right, and I shall be writing about some of them in future. That said, the Windows XP user interface feels rushed to me, as I hope I've illustrated. Microsoft need to re-focus for Windows Longhorn and pay much greater attention to detail. No More Heroes Any More?Saturday, 25 October 2003It's the end of an era. Concorde, that magnificent feat of engineering and that disastrous example of economic planning, has retired. There is no longer a supersonic civilian airliner. In the not too distant future, there will be no one alive who has walked on the surface of the moon. What does this say about the age we live in? Development work on Concorde started in 1959 and yet over forty years later it's still a technological tour de force in so many ways. The computer-controlled air intakes for the engines remain state of the art. They slow the incoming air down by over one thousand miles per hour in the space of about fifteen feet. The pilot's seat cost £80M to develop, although that probably belongs in the realms of disastrous economic planning. The BBC have just finished the deeply absorbing “Seven Wonders Of The Industrial World” series. It featured stories about monumental engineering feats such as the construction of the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam. Both seriously large, very difficult and impressive projects. Where are today's great engineering projects to inspire and fill the observer with awe? Although there are undoubtedly still great works being undertaken in the world of civil engineering (the Channel Tunnel springs to mind as a recent example), I think we have to look to the world of software development for further examples. Much of the software produced today can hardly be said to have been engineered—it is of such shoddy quality—but nonetheless, heroic feats of engineering are being performed every day on large software projects. The efforts of hundreds, if not thousands of software developers are somehow co-ordinated and combined to create operating systems, relational database management systems and other complex software. Fred Brooks' famous “The Mythical Man-Month ” is about his experiences whilst working as the project manager on IBM's OS/360 behemoth for their System/360 mainframe in the 1960s. It's widely held up as a classic text on the problems faced by large projects. The book “Showstopper” is a good read that details the pain the development team at Microsoft went through over five years to create the first version of Windows NT. It's a tale of long hours, personal conflicts, broken relationships and above all, the almost superhuman effort to create what at the time was probably the most complicated computer program ever written. And Windows NT 3.1 was a lot smaller and less ambitious than its successors were. We may have given up on supersonic civilian flight or going to the moon for the moment, but engineering in the large is definitely still going on and most of us are touched by it every day, often without realising it. iPAQ Pocket PC h1910 ReviewedSunday, 12 October 2003This will be a review of two halves. First I'll tell you about the hardware and then I'll discuss the software. I'd been considering buying a PDA for a while and decided to buy the Hewlett Packard iPAQ Pocket PC h1910 (to give it its full title!) after playing with one in a shop at Stansted Airport whilst waiting to fly to Sardinia. I'd been considering a Palm T2, but the Pocket PC impressed me with the quality of its screen and its small size. I have owned a PDA before—a few years ago I bought a US Robotics Pilot 1000; which changed its name over the years to the PalmPilot and then just the Palm. And US Robotics became part of 3Com. Enough history, what about the iPAQ hardware?
The 1910 (as I'll be referring to it) is at the bottom of the iPAQ range but nevertheless, really is a beautifully engineered piece of kit. It just feels like a gorgeous silver object as you hold it in your hand. Most of the front is taken up with the 240 x 320 pixel TFT screen that can display 65,000 colours with a vibrancy and clarity that has to be seen to be believed. The brains of the thing are provided by a 200 MHz Intel XScale processor, that is actually faster than the CPU in my first desktop PC! In use it feels responsive. There's 64 MB of memory, although it's actually 46 MB because the rest is taken up by the Pocket PC software. Although you wouldn't notice that this is a budget iPAQ from the device itself, compromises have been made in the overall package. There's no synchronisation/charging cradle. Instead you get a power brick that plugs into a special adaptor plug for charging the battery, or plugs into a slightly different adapter for syncing data and charging. In short, it's a messy tangle of wires. Better to save up for the HP cradle, which at least has the neat feature of being able to charge a spare battery if you're saving up for one of those too. You'll also need a case of some sort—I opted for the aircraft-grade aluminium hard case from Proporta—and you really should budget for buying a decent sized memory card too.
The 1910 includes Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer, which is a bit odd as this particular iPAQ has no Internet connectivity. I guess freeing up some memory by creating a special build sans IE of the Pocket PC 2002 operating system just for this device wasn't high on Microsoft's list of priorities. I did manage to copy this website across and browse it—just because I wanted to see how it looked. The good news is that my accessibility work paid off and it was all quite readable on the small screen. The supplied “Getting Started” leaflet is pretty thin and after you've read that you're left with a reference guide, which comes as a dreaded PDF (Adobe Acrobat) file. I found out by accident that holding down the power button puts the device into some sort of standby mode and as this isn't mentioned at all in the reference guide, I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to the level that it's pitched at. Microsoft ActiveSync 3.5 is supplied for synchronising data with a desktop PC. Unfortunately the installation depends on Outlook being installed and the companion CD-ROM even comes with a “complimentary” copy of Outlook 2000. I had Office XP installed but without Outlook, for it seems to be one of the most insecure pieces of software ever written and I've just never really got on with it. This was where the trouble started. I installed Outlook 2000 which was fine but had the effect of permanently deactivating my copy of Office XP. Maybe I should have installed Outlook 2000 into its own folder. After lots of cussing I uninstalled ActiveSync, Outlook 2000 and Office XP and manually deleted all the detritus the uninstaller left behind on disk and in the registry. I thought Microsoft's installers were supposed to be better behaved nowadays? Then I re-installed Office XP, this time including Outlook 2002 and then installed ActiveSync and I could finally connect to the 1910.
The ActiveSync software works well, detecting the 1910 as soon as it's connected and initiating a sync operation. One thing that caught me out was the fact that for any files that you download onto the device, you actually end up with copies of them under the My Documents folder on the desktop PC, and deleting them from there will also delete them from the 1910 the next time you connect. The software also installs an Explorer namespace extension i.e. a Mobile Device icon appears in My Computer, but so far I haven't been able to get it to do anything. Thinking that it was time to get some third-party software installed, I headed over to HP's iPAQ Choice Software website to redeem my free five points. I bought a ZIP file utility program and an interactive route planner/map for London that's actually rather impressive. HP insist on making you install their own proprietary download agent for getting hold of the software you've selected from their site. Unfortunately this wouldn't work the first few times I tried to use it and it seems to be extremely sensitive to any other Internet activity going on at the same time. Oh and it looks like a Windows 3.1 program. Once I did finally manage to download my software, I had difficulty installing it. I run as a non-admin but even using the “Run As” feature to install the software using administrator privileges didn't work. I solved that one by actually logging on as Administrator, and it installed once I'd stopped ActiveSync from trying to set up a profile for another user account. I hope all this stuff will work properly in Windows Longhorn. It's nowhere near as slick as how it was with the (Palm)Pilot, which just worked out of the box, without having to think about anything. And I much prefer the Palm Desktop software to Outlook. The 1910 is a marvel of miniaturisation let down by poorly thought out and implemented software, but I don't regret buying it for a minute. Not Good EnoughFriday, 03 October 2003Technology promises so much but often all it delivers is frustration at its failings. I've been in contact with my bank—Lloyds TSB, should you wish to avoid them—for nearly a third of a year now regarding a bill payment I made to a water company using Internet banking. Without boring you with the full horror, two of my bill payments went to the wrong water company, apparently because the two companies had similar sort codes and there was a keying in error. As an aside, it must have been great when the service industries were nationalised and there was no choice as to who you got your water etc. from. For a while I was actually in the situation of having two electricity companies both claiming that they were my supplier and both trying to charge me! I had to contact a secretive third-party that acts as an arbiter in these situations. I don't know a great deal about back office banking systems but surely it's not technologically impossible to provide a system that doesn't rely on some bored, lowly–paid data entry clerk keying in details for Internet banking transactions? I visited the bank's website for contact details and ended up composing a letter using Word because anything requiring their immediate attention has to be in writing. I've seen organisations like this and I bet they have rooms filled with cupboards filled with dusty files that no one ever looks at. I just know that this bill payment episode is going to run and run and keep coming back to haunt me. The second technological failing that has befallen me concerns an order I placed with Amazon this week. The order was supposed to be delivered to me by Parcelforce in one business day but so far it's taken five! Which is especially annoying as it's a new gadget that I'm eager to get my sticky mitts on (more about this in a future blog entry). I had a delivery slip from them and I visited their website to arrange for the parcel to be re-delivered to my local post office, for which they charge a punitive 50p fee. Unfortunately the website doesn't offer this as an option, so I telephoned them. I was greeted with a recorded message informing me that their systems were being upgraded and that I should try again later, or I could hang on but things may not work(!) At the first attempt I was transferred to several different lines and eventually got a helpful recorded message about different kinds of gas boiler! Undaunted, I tried again and after a while was put through to a message recorded by a man who clearly wasn't having a good day, saying that they couldn't access any of their databases and to use the Parcelforce website. I don't know what I was supposed to do if I didn't have Internet access. I went back to the site and arranged for delivery to a neighbour. Surely we've enough experience with technology in this day and age to be able to offer a better service than this? And if you're going to offer multiple ways to access your services, don't make some services available via one method but not the others! None of this is good enough. I feel like Michael Douglas did in Falling Down. |
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