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Innovative Design: puppy-style

When Lucas joined our household, I knew he’d make a great working dog. His sire was a steady, dependable sort who is used for picking up, and Lucas took immediately to retrieving. Not only do I like the idea of having him with me in the field, but I can also see just how much dogs seem to enjoy the challenges working to gun seem to bring. But I knew it had to start somewhere, so I ordered a few training dummies that had caught my eye at a game fair last autumn. I thought these woiuld be a better size for him, since they came as either partridges or pheasants, and I had started the pup out pretty early to work off some of his unlimited supply of energy.

When they arrived, I was surprised by the dummies themselves. They were made to a very high standard, with a pleasant shape (they fly really well off their toggles!). I’ve since discovered that they float, can take just about as much munching as Lucas can give as he stumbles up hills, and last much better than the other one I bought (which, if I recall, was actually more expensive). I was interested in why they seemed so well-thought-out, since they’re essentially just a bag on which to practice retrieving. I quickly found their weak-point, however, when the dummy landed toggle-side down on a stone: the shiny molded plastic shattered! My interest with the company, however, was further piqued when I ordered a few more, and I found the toggle to be a made of hard rubber, which bounced and gripped even better in my hands. This was iterative design, working to make an ever-increasing standard without changing the price or making a feature of general improvements. Being so impressed, I contacted the makers (the Working Dog Company) to find out their story:

Ian has been working his Labradors for a number of years. One of them had a particular problem delivering the standard type of dummy to hand. He either held it by one end like he was smoking a big cigar, or he tossed it around his head by the toggle flap. I spoke to a number of people and gun dog handlers about this problem and it seemed not to be unique to me or my dog. I could not find a dummy on the market that would help me, so I discussed the problem with my daughter who is a designer for a top country clothing retailer and supplier. We decided if we were going to start from scratch, lets change the shape to more closely resemble the shape of a game birds body. Make it softer for the dogs to hold and reduce the size of the toggle flap so that the dog would not be tempted to take hold of it. We came up with this design, offered it in 2 sizes: the Partridge to be utilised as a puppy dummy and the Pheasant to make a dog open its gape and carry as we would expect it to hold a shot bird. dummiesWhen I retired after 30 years service in the Fire Brigade Jill and I decided to set up The Working Dog Company Ltd, the web site went live in August 2008 and the new dummies were launched (pardon the pun) at the Midland Game Fair in September 2008. They have proved very popular, demand has been high and we received 2 very good reviews in the shooting press, namely BASC Nov edition magazine and Shooting Times. To view these testimonials visit our web site. We are now providing to a number of gun dog training clubs, professional handlers and shipping out to Scandinavian countries where gun dog training and handling is almost a national past time.

I really like seeing innovation in things that often go un-noticed. I can say that my little pup definitely prefers retrieving the Working Dog Company dummies. In fact, it’s difficult to make him retrieve the other if he’s allowed his preference! It’s certainly a success story so far, and I wish the WDC great luck in future.

 

Saturday, April 25th, 2009   Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Category: Pup, like, perspective, review   View Comments

over-engineering disappointment

Fool’s Gold

As a child in Colorado, I have a distant memory of finding a nugget of pure gold, bigger than the tip of my thumb. I instantly became the richest kid in America! I thought I could buy a husky (with a sled) and a Tama Starclassic Birch studio set with a full range of Paiste cymbals, and maybe a house or three. I could move out on my own, I could—so many expectations; so many promises.

My dad took a quick look and said something like: “Wow, you’ve found iron pyrite. Fools Gold.”

The disappointment! All those things to which I was looking forward disappeared, and the lump of cold angles suddenly seemed a reminder of what could have been.

I have recently had a similar experience with some fools coffee.

Coffee Suppositories?

I was asked by Miele to trial a high-end coffee machine for three weeks, and give an honest account of what I found. I was thrilled, since the last time I got to play with a 5-figure espresso machine was during uni working as a barista. I built up a few images in my mind; imagining pulling perfect shots of central-american Cup of Excellence blends, practising my crema, and tasting half a dozen different coffees to see which worked best with the £1,000 set up. My interest was only piqued further when a colleague at work described Miele as “the Rolls Royce of appliances”.

About three weeks ago, a courier arrived as I sat working from my home office. He delivered a box big enough for a springer spaniel to sleep in, and heavy enough to make the manly nonchalance I affected while carrying it away from the door quite difficult indeed. Nonetheless, I left the box packaged and wrapped up in the hall until the evening, looking forward to the reward of an espresso or six after work.

As I worked my way through the layers of packaging, I gradually unveiled a stainless-steel, microwave-like appliance that dwarfed anything else my kitchen held, except—just—the oven. I scanned the quick-start guide and with a single word, my expectations instantly disappeared: “nespresso”. I lost the will even to unpack and set up this monstrously-large contraption.

Nonetheless, I did set it up, removing all of a counter-top from usable space. My disappointment, if anything, grew as I laboriously set up the menu through an achingly-complicated process involving the use of arrow buttons and “OK” to calibrate a dizzying array of possible settings. Throughout the next two hours, I played with settings, opened all the openable compartments and tried several of the coffee suppositories. My thoughts follow:

The Miele CVA3650 is a giant appliance which costs £1,000 (c. $1400). It looks impressive, with a stainless-steel finish and various accoutrements, including backlighting, obviously included as talking features. It would not feel out of place in a posh flat in Kensington—fitting in like an addition to a designed suite of expensive appliances. Indeed, the lasting impression is of a lifestyle rather than coffee. Browsing the Miele site, I found many photos of kitchens, appliances, and artfully-arranged mugs sometimes held by comfortable, rich-looking models. The only thing missing from these photos?

Coffee.

Nespresso tastes worse than I thought it actually could. I’m not saying that to be snobbish about my coffee, and I was genuinely curious to know what the little, coloured “pods” could produce. The result of every single “brew” was a flat, metallic, suspension of frankly disgusting, tepid liquid. Some aspect of the extraction produces an interestingly-contrived crema every single time, so the drink (I can’t call it coffee) certainly looks impressive. My wife recoiled after the first sip, and I left more than one completely untouched. The terrible “flavia” machine in my office makes better-tasting coffee than this!

The Miele machine is touch-button automation at it’s most falsely economic (time-wise). Sure, it’s convenient to press a button and have an espresso (ahem!) within 30 seconds, but that does not account for the half-hour (no joke) of programming every time the machine is re-plugged back in. I’m afraid I’m green-conscious enough to flip the switch at the wall after every brew, so this makes it ridiculous to use. The menuing system is cumbersome enough to make my eyes water. Two arrows, and “OK” to make every selection. It takes a huge amount of patience, and its… just… aweful! So many features, so few necessary or even useful. You can, for example, programme 9 different “user profiles”. Why? It’s a pod of shite coffee, which will taste EXACTLY the same, no matter which button you push. Why go through dozens and dozens of beeps in order to have a user-specific nescafe?

The only part of this machine which is convenient, is the actual making of a drink. For that, it is fast! It produces a coffee of your choice (out of 5 different capsules) very rapidly (provided it’s been programmed and has already been switched on, obviously.) It will then automatically rinse itself, and let you make another soil infusion very rapidly. You only have to remove the spent capsules periodically from a tub within the machine, and fill up a water reservoir whenever it’s low (though, this is fairly frequently, thanks to the rinsing).

Final Words

Before writing this post, I sent Miele’s representatives a quick heads’ up, with a brief summary which I think works well.
I understand its premise of being a super-convenient means of having a sophisticated-looking hot beverage, but I much prefer my coffee to be tasty, regardless of time. And the amount of time spent scrolling endlessly through menus isn’t really conducive to suiting busy people like myself as a domestic coffee machine. [in reply to the statement that it might prove to be] I’d be much more likely to advise people invest in a cafetiere, grinder and decent beans. For the £1,000 they could have spent on this, they could have many scores of kilos of excellent, locally-roasted, hand-sourced beans, and enough left over to send a thank-you bottle of single malt to the coffee roaster.

 

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009   Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Category: perspective, review   View Comments

Windows 7: Vista-II

Reviews of new Windows releases always seem to say the same thing, depending on what kind of person writes them. Mac enthusiasts say it’s yet again stolen more MacOS features. Microsofties defend the new-found stability and the speed compared to last editions. Non-techies say how pretty this one is in comparison with the last, et cetera.

Well, I’ve got a preview build of Windows 7, and I’d like to give you a three-way look at it.

The Good

Windows 7 already feels stronger and faster than Vista. It installed easily using Bootcamp, and is happily running on my MacbookPro. When I got all the drivers working (to be expected running on an Apple, I suppose) it’s robust and more or less respectable. This particular build/driver combination is particularly nice, because it’s got some special Apple drivers which let it play nice with my keyboard and F-button settings (volume, keyboard and screen brightness, eject).

Windows found my external display fairly quickly, though it would not use it’s full resolution at first. Then, randomly, it let me do so (though nothing had been downloaded or tweaked—it couldn’t; I had yet to connect to my network!). This was a nice surprise, but I kind of wish it would let me choose what’s going on instead of hiding its preferences and features in the background (more on this later).

A slight improvement over Vista is the ease by which Windows 7 seemed to handle getting online. It’s a breeze to select a wireless network and get connected. I also like some of the more subtle things they’ve done with 7, which make it a bit more pleasant to use such as the way they’ve layed-out the control panel settings, and the better file-layout in the navigation panels of explorer windows.

By far, so far, the best thing has been the speed. Windows 7, at this stage, is fast enough to work nicely. I don’t know how it will do after months of updates, registry bloat, and anti-malware software; but it MUST be better than Vista in this regard. Finally, however, is a small thing that I like: Windows Live Writer. It’s great! It’s available for Vista, however, so it’s not new. However, the Live Essentials on this version seem a bit easier to get going and running. Windows Live Writer is the only application that I wish I had on the Mac, and it’s still the best blogging tool out there.

The Bad

Firstly, why is networking with Windows so hard? It found my router, got onto the internet, and updated itself fine. It talks with the Windows Mothership on the cloud easily enough. Would it, however, find my Mac on the same network? My iPhone? Yes… through Bluetooth! When will Windows start to recognise they need to make networking easy for users?

Secondly, this is basically Vista done not-so-badly. It’s, so far, what Vista should have been. Light (ish), easy, stable. But, to me, these are table-stakes. It’s not that impressive to say: “Our operating system doesn’t hang when you use default features! It’s stable, It’s easy!” It should be, why are you so proud of this?

imageThe final reason why this isn’t going to be the best OS out there, however, is that it’s still Windows. Now, before you label me a fanboy or anti-establishmentarian; let me say why this is a problem. There are countless menus and features and settings and objects on this system. There are too many, unconnected settings. Windows Control Panel has 63 icons! OSX, in comparison, makes do with 26. The user also doesn’t often see an immediate effect from a settings change. After several sets of “OK” are pressed, I find out my network adapter’s been disabled, and have to go though a completely different route to get it back. The language used to describe the setup options has always been difficult to follow. Consider the Networking setup: Some based on actions, so you can “set up a new connection or network;” “connect to a network;” “fix network problem” etc. Others are categorical ‘HomeGroup,” “Internet Options,” “Wireless Network Connection” etc… I’ve had to go through every single one of them, and many subsequent menus besides in order to setup my home network. The “wizard” does imagenothing. It’s always been this way with Windows…you are expected to know exactly where the settings are hidden within some obscure menu, but you’re teased with easy options along the way. My favourite screen so far has been one which says: “Troubleshooting could not identify the problem.” Thanks for the help…

This problem stems from always being the Least Common Denominator. What results is that every set of functions is a compromise of some kind.

The Not-Ugly but unfortunately Not-Original

It’s not a new thing to say that this version of Windows is copying Mac. I grew up being told that Windows has stolen every good idea it’s ever had from someone else. While this may have been true with many things, I can’t believe they have never had an original thought. Despite its many shortcomings, Microsoft’s software is the market dominator, and has been for as long as anyone can remember. Sure, they’ve bought companies and talent along the way (so has Google… so has Apple!), but the Live stuff is pretty different, and works decently (except for its annoying insistence that all the services you use should be MS—a characteristic it shares with Apple services like MobileMe.)

Having a look at the promotional video for VistaII—I mean, Windows 7—and I’m struck by how little there is to say about it.

Firstly: “Windows Gurus”? Tell me that’s not a play on “Apple Geniuses”. You can imagine the board meeting that chose that name: “Right, we need something of an authority on the matter that sounds brainy and starts with G, but isn’t ‘Genius.’ Wilkinson?” “Uh, er, guardian…guarantor…general… guru?”

imageThey seem terribly proud about how the windows all have previews and there’s a brilliant new thing called a Task Bar! Windows has had a taskbar for years, this one just works a bit more like the Dock in OSX. That’s it, move along.

They’ve renamed the “Workgroup” the “Homegroup”, and it does the same thing. It’s tweaked, supposedly, but it’s just a network. I find myself wondering if this a reaction to the “I’m a Mac” ads? “This isn’t work, it’s home. We’ve renamed it, HOME, cause it’s not at work. Get it?”

IE has had a few features added, called “accelerators” which essentially allow for interaction with the web through the browser. It could be a great step, except that there are Firefox folks doing it so much better. Bit.Ly plugin allows for a huge range of interaction with data on the screen through Firefox.  Ubiquity on Firefox is a genuinely new way of blurring the web, our human interactions, and our machines. “Accelerators” just seem like a glorified right-click or contextual menu. There’s also “InPrivate Browsing” which turns off cookies and history. Guess what Safari has called this? “Private Browsing”. Go figure…

I know this is a preview release, but my overall impression is that Windows 7 should have been launched in 2006. This is great, for a Windows release, it works and pretty well so far. Aside from the basic problem that it is Windows, and works by being everything to everyone, it’s OK. But it’s not exciting, it’s not THAT new, and it feels a bit like we should be seeing a real breakthrough by now.

 

Monday, January 12th, 2009   Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Category: Apps, perspective, review, tech   View Comments

Glue Sticks Stuff Together

So, the web is full of interesting stuff, right? Gadgets, people, blogs, books, tips, wine—all good things. At least, the web is full of interesting pages about these things. In a single session, you might read a mate’s blog (maybe about wine), then browse a retail site for a book that that mate recommended and stumble across a brilliant gadget. That’s five good things in the space of a few minutes. Here they are, in case you missed them: your mate’s a person (good), and he’s got a blog (debatable, but there you go). He’s talking about wine (which is definitely good), and he happens to recommend a book (great). In the process, you stumble across a gadget (brilliant!).

The problem with all that is that you didn’t instantly recognise all the good things in that very brief narrative sentence. The web is an interconnected bunch of arbitrarily-related pages, like a catalogue of (often good) stuff, without an index. It’s arbitrary, because the pages only exist when it’s linked to; and the stuff can be anything from a purchasable item to an innovative idea. This network is mind-numbingly huge and even the most versatile of polymaths can’t be interested in all of it. So, what we want is all the good stuff, and we want it with all the flexibility an arbitrary system can offer (I like this, this and this… are they related in any way?)

Well, when I look at them, I can see that they’re related; and not just because I happen to have chosen three things I like. I have had the tremendous privilege of testing a gadget which lets me capture these things, and lets me peek at how they connect with my own little perspective on the web. The gadget’s called Glue, and it’s the latest offering from AdaptiveBlue. I’ve blogged about AdaptiveBlue’s Smartlinks in the past, and they’re responsible for the little icons next to the linked things above (if you have a decent browser). What they’ve been doing is allowing you to contextualise the stuff on the web, and Glue goes a step further by letting you also interact with other folks’ contexts.

Firstly, Glue is a browser plugin for Firefox (remember, I said to get a decent browser?). Glue creates a  bookmark in your bar, but the real magic occurs when you navigate to some stuff. As you seek out or stumble across interesting things online, the Glue menu glides down, giving you instant options to “like” the item, find out more about it, and see who else has “liked” it too. They have an excellent walk-through on their site, so I won’t duplicate their efforts by explaining how it works here, but it does recognise many kinds of “stuff” from a myriad of very important sites.

The interesting part, for me, is that it brings a context to all the arbitrary links we follow all the time. We can see where we fit in with this, and what our mates think too. Best of all, these things are treated just like that: as the things in which we’re interested. I want to talk about this book, not this page about the book. I want to rate this book, and if a friend sees it on another site, he’ll still see that I liked it!

Best of all, it’s a social network without the need for a social-networking space. It’s the first thing I’ve seen which successfully breaks out of the need to be inside a specific place in order to interact and contextualise—we don’t need MyFace’s training wheels! Glue shifts its focus from trying to hem in, or reduce the web, to elegantly augmenting it.

As you can tell, I really like this gadget, and I thank @fraser and @alexiskold for building it, and letting me have a play of the Beta.

 

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008   Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Category: Apps, review, tech   View Comments

New BBC iPlayer Layout: What were they thinking?

Sometimes I come across a site and have to wonder what the designers, consultants, marketers, management teams and everyone else involved were thinking when they signed off on the project. The sting is that much worse when it’s a re-design of a well-loved site.

Well, the brains behind the new BBC iPlayer layout have failed, miserably! The new design is cluttered and lacks the wonderful functionality of the older sidebar. Its ease of use is completely gone in favour of… something? I have no idea what benefit the new layout brings. There is no additional feature set. It doesn’t DO anything different.

I have two major concerns with it:

  1. It’s cluttered.

The benefit of the original iPlayer was an ease of use and elegant design. It was simple to find a programme, easy to play it, and easy to find related content. They have now juxtaposed radio and television programming, littered the screen with unfathomable boxes, and made the filtering by category bloody difficult. Its main content doesn’t fit above the fold, making its screen real-estate poorly-used even though there is much more content on display at one time. The wonderfully-simple method of sidebar filtering is gone in favour of some myspace-esque scatter-box setup. It’s complicated, un-elegant, and supremely difficult to use.

Poor effort, badly done.

2. It’s ugly. I know this is subjective, but the actual player doesn’t fit well in its space. For all the seeming effort to splash content across the screen, the player itself doesn’t use enough of the screen when it’s in viewing mode:

You wouldn’t guess that the better-looking part of this screen is below the window scroll line, would you? Instead you get terminal-esque white text below a plain box which doesnt fit.

Background Rubbish

When I went to the forum to see if anyone else had noticed, I was pleased to see the top-most comments were all complaints about the bad layout. The boards were closed (I can only hope because of overwhelming viscerole being poured out!) but I did note another poor design feature: the background gradient repeats both horizontally and verticaly. What this means is that on a wide-screen layout, you see a tiled gradient instead of a smooth black-to grey.

I hope the BBC Design team heeds the forums, this plea, and countless others waiting to occur. Please fix the great iPlayer. This revamp’s rubbish and it feels like something pushed out to tick boxes rather than satisfy user needs.

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Zemanta Pixie

 

Saturday, July 5th, 2008   Tags: , , , , , , ,
Category: review, tech   View Comments

Zemanta

Exterior view. Bronze tympanum, by Olin L. Warner, representing Writing above main entrance doors. Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Cropped from the Library of Congress digital version using the GIMP.

Image via Wikipedia

I’m trying out a Zemanta blog post. What it does, apparently, is to suggest ideas for the article you’re currently writing. It’s a semantic blog suggestion feature, and it’s manifested in this instance as a firefox plugin that adds a write widget to my WordPress WYSIWYG editor. IIt updates every 300 characters, and also has ‘semantic features’. There’s an interview over at R/WW, for more information. I’m kind of trying to see what it recommends so need to fill in the 300 characters:

Related articles

Well it looks like it suggests related articles, and adds a bunch of Zemanta boxes into the blog space. It also finds images from Flickr.

I could see this tool being very handy in future, though I usually blog from a client, and I don’t think this supports ScribeFire or ecto (which is rubbish, by the way.) However, there are a few problems with it:

  1. It generates an unhelpful set of areas in the blog itself. So if you include a Zemanta suggestion, it pastes it where you’re typing, and you end up typing in an alt area in the code… annoying.
  2. It updates every 300 characters. This is annoying because it’s not necessarily that real-time. This is an awkward interface feature. It also places your curser at the top of the post every time it updates, meaning what I just typed appeared above the opening line…

I think this kind of application, however, is prescient of the direction the Read/Write web is heading. It’s active and dynamic, and I’m sure the interface will be ironed out over time. I’m not sure what ‘semantic’ features they’re necessarily incorporating (is this just keyword-searched or is it tyingin with some RDF store somewhere?) but I like the way it’s heading.

I like the fact that it suggests images (all images in this post provided by Zemanta), but I’m not sure about the inclusion of ‘Zemanta’ presence everywhere… I’m also slightly concerned that some of the images it supplies are ‘license unknown’, meaning  you could use one and infringe on copyright. It does, however, have a link saying you can check it yourself, which shows they’re thinking ahead! It’s implementation of images is a bit of a struggle, however, in that you end up typing in the description area without the ability to click out of it. This is balanced by the fact that it automatically adds citations. It only adds a single image, though… so you can’t add a second image to the same blog post.

Now, they just need to make it a bit smoother, and stop jumping to the top of the bloody post ;)

Zemanta Pixie

 

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008   Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Category: blogging, interesting, review, tech   View Comments

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