Category: technology

Button button who’s got the button?

No, really, who has got buttons?  I was shopping for mobile phones and since the last time I did so, maybe a year ago, it’s like the industry has declared war on actual, real, physical, clicky, buttons.  What’s up with that?  I’m not talking about keyboards.  I’m talking about function buttons for stuff that, you know, you want to do quickly, maybe without even having to look at the screen.

I think every phone has some kind of wake/sleep/on/off kind of button and a rocker or pair of buttons for volume.  After that, physical buttons get scarce. Except for the iPhone most have gone with capacitive “buttons” little patches of touchscreen with little or no tactile identity, and some of which, annoyingly, only light up and reveal their function when you touch them.

For clean design and let’s face it, cost control and durability, you want the fewest physical switches you can get away with. So what’s critical?  In my view, what critical for a physical button is whatever you want to be able to do quickly or without looking at the phone – either stuff you might do while on a call (does anybody still do that?) or stuff you want to do fast.  Here’s my list:

- STFU button: because you need a way to make your phone stop making noise as fast as possible.  A volume down button that you keep jabbing while your inappropriate ringtone ruins your best friend’s wedding is just not fast enough. This should be a mute button plain and simple. All sounds and vibration off at one press. I think the iPhone has this next to the (two!) volume buttons. I usually set my phone to use vibrate for all alerts rather than play a sound, but there always seems to be some app that wants to make a noise at the wrong time.

- Snapshot button: because when your baby/pet/sunset/accident/celebrity sighting/wardrobe malfunction moment happens, you need to snap it quickly.  I’d prefer this button to turn on the phone in camera mode and immediately take a shot.  Most camera buttons I’ve seen put you into camera mode if your phone is already on and unlocked, and also work as a shutter button once you’re there.  Not fast enough, I say. They’re just starting to get acceptably quick shutter lag, but that’s no help if it takes two taps and a swipe just to be able to start shooting. My now retired HTC Glacier / MyTouch had a camera button, but you still had to turn press the power button to wake the phone up and swipe to unlock it before you could even try to take a shot.  My new HTC One lets you get to the camer with a single swipe from the lock screen, but again, you have to press the wake up button and once in camera mode you have to hit the shutter.

That’s it, just two buttons that I wish my phone had that I could find in the dark or in a pocket or without looking, and access immediately without going through menus or steps. Also nice to have but really I could live without if there was a reasonable way to do it in the software: volume controls and wake/sleep.  In the why bother column, though I have to say they were useful for figuring out which end of the phone was up, home, back, windows, genius, whatever those three lines mean, etc.

After some research, I figured out that I couldn’t have my chosen buttons, at least not on the set of phones I was considering. I chose the HTC One because T-Mobile offered me a free car dock with it. This device has just two (arguably three) buttons: a barely raised black rectangle on the top left of the phone that turns it on and off and wakes it up and puts it to sleep, and a rocker switch for volume control on the right edge.  If you grab your phone with your left hand, you can hit the power button with your thumb and the volume with your index finger. With your right hand, the opposite.  Either way, you’re then going to have to use your other hand or your dextrous thumb to do stuff on the phone.  I’d argue that it’s almost unavoidably a two-handed job given the size of the phone. At the bottom of the phone (by the way, I haven’t yet figured out how to tell top from bottom without looking at it, and even then the power button on top looks a lot like the micro-usb port on the bottom) the HTC logo looks like a button but does nothing. To its left is the back “button” and to its right the home “button” – while you can see which is which on sight even unlit, neither one (or the HTC logo for that matter) has any feel other than smooth glass.

HTC One showing capacitive buttons and micro-usb port HTC One power button and IR blaster HTC One volume buttons

Maybe I’ll get used to this as I got used to on-screen keyboards, largely due to good software engineering (swype), but for now it feels like the smooth monolith of design bas bulldozed this monkey’s pattern of tool usage.

Glitch will be the next Instagram

I’m calling the peak of the Instagram reto “film” filters thing.  Soon enough that visual language will be dead as cupcakes. Recently I poked fun at Apartment Therapy for calling bathroom home offices a trend, and they had three data points to support that claim. I’ve got exactly none, but I’m going for it anyway.

What’s going to replace Instagram as the way to make a boring photo cool? I say what’s next is glitching. Glitch is a movement – or at least an aesthetic:

Glitch art [via Wikipedia] is the aestheticization of digital or analog errors, such as artifacts and other “bugs”, by either corrupting digital code/data or by physically manipulating electronic devices.

Ordinary digital photos, like the ones we take of our lunches every day, are pretty boring, and generally – at least technically – pretty good. Instagram and its ilk put some noise and quirk into regular shots, adding a tiny bit of what film used to deliver – randomness. Glitch can do that too, and it it’ll do it in a native digital language instead of a folksy but ultimately bogus analog one. It’s the imagery of the DIYer, the Maker and the hardware hacker. Glitch shows you how many things have to work just right to make a digital picture show up, by breaking them just a bit.

I think soon enough there will be glitch camera apps, maybe even glitch filters for Instagram. Somebody will make a digital camera that will be to digital cameras as Holgas and Dianas were to film cameras. As a way of easing the transition, here’s a cat photo that’s been glitched and also instagrammed. You saw it here first, trendspotters.

Lucy controls the horizontal

New and improved, aka just like it used to be, almost

Google, describing the new and mildly controversial high-end Chromebook Pixel, says this of its screen:

“The 12.85” screen has the highest pixel density of any laptop, and a 3:2 photographic format designed for the web puts every one of those pixels to good use.”

OK, so it’s on the small side but has lots and lots of pixels per inch. But the second part made me pause, “and a 3:2 photographic format designed for the web puts every one of those pixels to good use.” A laptop screen with a “photographic” 3:2 format? Is that news?  Is it retro? Is it really “designed for the web”? What does that even mean?

Let’s review prior limeduck art on matters aspect ratio.

  • In which I note that then-newfangled wide format laptop screens deliver less area for a given diagonal measurement
  • In which I make a contrarian move from 4:3 digital and 3:2 film formats to 1:1 digital. (a move, by the way, that’s since been solidified on many a smart phone by instagram, aping the format of several now quaint or deceased film types)

So this Chromebook is bucking the wide trend in laptops and (non-ipad) tablets, that’s fair enough, it’s a valid design choice, but it seems rich to call the 3:2 format “photographic” – arguable, if you think photography is all 35mm film and digital formats that emulate it – and also “designed for the web” – hard to define but I’m pretty sure that the web would demand even more vertical space if it could speak in a monolithic voice.

Am I shocked shocked that marketers are making shit up? Surely not.  Just taking a moment to observe that everything old is new again.

For those who must know, here are the screen ratios of visitors to this blog in the prior 12 months:

12.7% Portrait formats
7.1% 1.25:1 (same format as 8x10 film)
9.3% 1.33:1 (aka 4:3, TV and digital camera formats, good ol' 1024x768)
45.2% 1.6:1 (common MacBook formats like 1280x800 and 1440x900)
25.8% 1.78:1 (aka 16:9)

No sign of the Chromebook Pixel’s 1.5:1 yet, but we’ll keep an eye out for it.

Rise and shine, the light therapy shower is almost real

Via Apartment Therapy and CNN Travel, news of a shower that aims to vanquish jetlag via light therapy. Why didn’t they think of this sooner?  Just add some sunlight bright LEDs to a shower, what’s so hard?  Sign me up, I say! I’m a big fan of light therapy and waking up feeling refreshed.  But wait, it’s not real, at least not yet.  Also, it’s not a shower with water, just a closet with light. Seems like a missed opportunity to me.

Lots of people have trouble getting going and waking up in the morning. There are plenty of shower heads with lights in them, some powered by the water current, but all of them far too dim and randomly colored to be anything other than mood lighting. There are some practical limitations to showering next to an uncovered sunrise-facing window (don’t even get me started on the his-and-hers outdoor bathtubs in those weird ads) and I don’t think anybody takes caffeinated soap seriously.

So on this first Monday morning after the return of daylight saving (not “savings”) time, I ask the inventors and manufacturers of the world, how hard would it be to make this happen? Kickstarter, anybody?  Until then, I’m just moving the regular light therapy lamp to a shelf in the bathroom – NOT inside the shower* – which might not help but sure doesn’t hurt.

* Those of you who need to be reminded not to eat the silica gel should also be reminded that corded electrical appliances can be very dangerous in wet places.

In which the TSA is impressed with my wood

en MacBook cover, that is.  Last month, I treated myself and my new MacBook to a spiffy cedar plank of a cover from Karvt. This month, I did some flying, and that included everybody’s favorite drill, take out your computer and put it in a bin all by itself.  I did not lose my ‘stache scissors or my cool, but in both Denver and Phoenix, I was quizzed by neighbors in the security line and by TSA screeners. “What kind of cover is that?” “Is that real wood?” “Did you make it yourself?”  Consensus was that it was pretty darn cool.

In case there’s any doubt that I’m turning into some kind of 21st-Century Margaret Lanterman, here are some other forest products I’ve been coveting or enjoying recently:

Levenger’s Bamboo Note Card Box with Index Cards
You know I’ve got a thing about index cards, especially ones with a grid on them.  After lusting after Levernger’s superb example of the genre for some time, I finally pulled the trigger, convincing myself that the package deal with this sweet bamboo box justified the expense. As it turns out, I had to go to the retail location and beg the staff to substitute gridded cards for the ones with plain old lines on them, but it was wheedling well spent.

Vintage Cork Desk Caddy (also with index cards)
Having decided to put the Levenger box on my work desk, I still needed something to hold my index cards and pencils at home. After some searching, I came upon this beauty, variously described as vintage, mid-century and 70s, on Etsy. I’m not sure if the cork body is really meant to take pushpins or not, but it holds pencils and index cards admirably, and I prefer the bare cork surface anyway.

Vers 1E Walnut Sound Isolation Earphones
Somewhere along the line, I misplaced or discarded the crappy earbuds that came with my ipod and my phone. Despite my complex relationship with their 1.5R radio, I’m still enamored with Vers Audio, so I decided to give their earphones a try. I’m no audiophile and I couldn’t carry a tune if you gave me a bucket, but I find the sound quality excellent and the little rubber thingies on the ear end both comfortable and sound-insulating.  Plus, the walnut wood matches my bedside radio. It’s the little things that matter.  Also, Vers plants 100 trees for every one they use in their products.

Wooden Lego-Like Building Blocks (HT @gizmodo)
OMFG.  Even if Giz is confused on the issue, I know these are not actually Lego, and I’m a little worried that they may be trampling on some patent by the estimable Danish toymaker. But, OMFG, I really want these.  That is all.

Well, almost all.  If you’ve got walnut in your ears, cork and bamboo on your desk, and cedar on your mac, you certainly can’t be caught dead with unsharp pencils, so I purchased the wood pulp edition of David Rees’ singular manual, How to Sharpen Pencils. Honestly, the fact that it even comes in ebook format is a little unsettling, don’t you think?