Sony Ericsson take on Android UE?

This is supposedly a prototype of a user experience Sony Ericsson is working on for a phone codenamed Rachael. You can see the points where they've jumped from the current Android UE, integrating social graph more deeply into the home screens. It looks very nice, but I wonder how well the stacking card metaphor works when you have hundreds of connections? There are definitely ways to solve that...

Klein family in Seattle

Klein family shot
Originally uploaded by sircoolio

A family photo of us on our recent 4th of July visit to Seattle. We're on the balcony of our friend Ari's office.

Consistently explicit

No, this isn't a rant about getting the explicit tag each week in the "Ain't Your Dad's Java", even though we stopped cursing a few episodes back.

I've been playing a tremendous amount of Fallout 3 recently. Role playing game in a gritty, post-apocalyptic environment. The game is based around quests that focus your exploration through what is otherwise an open, unfettered world. For the quests to work, the game has to tell you a specific thing to quest for. Get XXX, Kill YYY, etc. XXX has to be very specific so in a wide open world, you know what to do. If the game told you to find a "medium build, sorta handsome ghoul somewhere in world", you'd have a hard time completing the quest. The quest has to have an explicit goal. An explicit goal is "locate the character Bob in the Arlington Library".

The challenge for game developers, and for this game in particular, is remaining explicit throughout the experience. As you interact with explicit goals, you gain the mental equivalent of muscle memory for this. When the game issues the quest "find ink to bring to character x", you learn to find ink and ink only.

I've found that Fallout 3 became lax with these goals later in the experience. In the example I just cited, while the game asked me to find ink, the actual item to be discovered was an ink container. I found the ink container, but spent a good hour looking for the explicit item, ink, to complete the quest. The trap here was that the item I found was confusing, because it could contain ink. Later the game asked me find a particular character, but when I found them, the actual task was not to "find", but a different explicit verb.

My comment to (game) designers is that if you use an explicit goal system to drive users, you have to remember to stay consistent to that explicitness, because users grow accustomed to and rely on that consistency for the experience to work. You can crutch this by alerting users when a "soft" goal has actually been accomplished, but if you want to focus users on exploring the world in great detail by defining tight, explicit goals, you have to remain explicit throughout the experience you are creating.

An amazing video on happiness

This video from The Atlantic covers a Harvard study on happiness that I find absolutely fascinating!

Making CE wiring just a little simpler

I'm a geek. I love the challenge of wiring together whacky AV components from different manufacturers in dusty, cramped spaces. But let's face it, most normal people don't ;-)

Wouldn't it be cool if when you purchased AV gear you could enter the make and model of the gear you already own, the store POS adds what you are going to buy, and out comes a list of common things you might want to do (watch TV, play Xbox 360), what cables you need to make that happen, and most importantly, where to put all of those wires?

It's like the Logitech Harmony remote setup, except for AV cabling. Cabling for real people who don't understand what HDMI or component is, let alone what hole in the back of the receiver to stick it into!

Dynamic, robust pointers inside of business cards

I wrote this idea down on October 17, 2001, when I was just getting into the groove at Palm.

"What if you exchanged Bluetooth MAC addresses and Bluetooth friendly names when you beamed business cards to someone? This would imply bi-directional card exchange when beaming, which in itself is an obvious? idea. If you cached these names, you could significantly cut down discovery time for Bluetooth, assuming many of the devices you interact with are on a repeating, frequent basis."

I'm still hugely enamored with the idea of electronic business cards, made popular, for a short time, by Palm handhelds. I can't tell you how many paper business cards I get at conferences, etc, and what a royal PITA they are to deal with. Exchanging business cards, aka contact information, is a time honored business tradition, but the tradition has not caught up with our technology. In a digital world, why do I get little paper scraps all the time?!

An electronic business card today, however, should be more than the static contents of a vCard. Electronic business cards need to be a handle to a dynamic location in the cloud, which in turn is a series of pointers to my social graph. Where I am, who I am, and how to reach me across the myriad of social channels I maintain. Dynamic links are the key, and pointers to all of my addresses. Plaxo and others tinker with this idea, but I don't think the idea has been taken to its full capability.

Love, Laugh, Live, Learn

I need to laugh again

I need to create

I need to remember the value of money

I want to love more

I need to teach the kids what I know

I need to teach the kids how to learn

I want to shed 40+ years of bad habits

I want to learn new habits

I need to feel the "fire in the belly" again

We bought everything we need to let go of everything, so let go...

JavaOne 2009 Mobile Keynote

I had the distinct privilege of representing the Java Mobile and Java TV teams last week at JavaOne 2009, delivering the Mobile Keynote on Wednesday afternoon. Streaming video below. The teams worked incredibly hard over the last few weeks to get the content and demos ready for this session, and I can only hope I did their work justice.

I started off flying, literally. I tripped on the top step heading for the stage, riveting the crowd with my clumsiness! From there it was all a blur from my perspective, but hopefully you will enjoy the content, speakers, and innovation created by the Java Mobile and TV teams!

Interesting definition of a casual game

Here is an interesting post defining (postulating?) what a casual game is. I was intrigued because it uses the characteristics of the game, not the target demographic, as the defining attributes. I'm not sure I completely agree, especially in the arcade category. Is Robotron a casual game?!

+1 reason the Republican Party looks quite moronic right now

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn has for me yet again summarized why the Republican Party is in such disarray today. In this video she launches a not so subtle attack on Al Gore's character by inferring that his promotion of climate change legislation was for economic profit. Wow.

Couple of questions:
0 - Who was the aide in charge of researching this before she launched her mis-guided political gambit? Marsha clearly was not in command of the facts around Mr. Gore's business before she starts this endeavor.
1 - Who in the Republican Party blessed this junior congresswoman's assault on Al Gore? She might have been flying rogue, but it makes the whole party look bad. If, and I'm not saying you should, want to attack Al Gore's moral character, you'd better send a veteran into the fight, not a rookie.
2 - Since when did the Republican party go anti-capitalism and anti-business?! When Al Gore is using the economic system and venture capital to confront Global Warming and the Republicans are attacking that, the world has gone topsy-turvsy.

Ill-advised, ill-researched, and ill-orchestrated political maneuvering yet again backfires on the Republican Party. How did a party with near complete control of the American legislative, executive, and judicial branches just a few years back fall into such disarray?

Time for a reboot, Republicans. The Democratic Party can take a vacation from politics and the Republican Party would still lose mindshare and votes right now. The problems are internal. Purge and reboot. This is embarrassing. For all Americans.