Locked Nokia N9 home screen with incoming call

It’s been quite some time since Nokia last released a handset which innovated in the User Experience and User Interface domain. This changed with the recently announced N9 handset, where they have hit the ball out of the park in my opinion. Except for some of the iconography, they abandoned all their legacy User Interface design and came up with a fresh new concept that really stands its ground.

Nokia has now made available an animated demonstration of the software User Interface design and User Experience Guidelines for the N9 on their developer website. It is definitely worth checking out their innovative approach to mobile handset User Interfaces.

What do you think of the N9′s User Interface?

The psychological reward or kick apparently created when receiving attention from peers as a result of posting something personal ties right in with observations made by game design expert Jesse Schell, who researched the game mechanics of popular games that use psychological tricks to keep players to return again and again as well as to spend money. If you have a few more minutes to spare, you should definitely watch his very insightful talk about what makes the success of some these games as well as how game mechanics could be used to make people exhibit certain behavior in non-gaming contexts:

Is the game-designed world described by Schell – which essentially equals an omnipresent, all surrounding Skinner Box – something desirable? I certainly don’t think so. The potential of (deliberately) misguiding people into something disadvantageous to them or society is far too great and I think only good parenting as described by Doctorow can ensure that tomorrow’s generation will be aware of the psychological tricks that companies and governments will try to play on them in the future.

Although Apple has improved the iPad’s software compared to last year at launch, here are my reasons as to why I still wouldn’t have bought an iPad today even if I could have:

• Weight: Still much too heavy for my taste and it felt uncomfortable to hold in one hand for more than 5 minutes in a way that my fingers wouldn’t cover the screen.
• “Multitasking”: No change compared to last year and apps still need to be closed to switch to another app. Even my Nokia N8 cellphone can do better than that.
• Walled garden: All roads still lead to Cupertino, from first forced activation using iTunes on Windows or Mac, to apps and music and video. As I solely run Ubuntu Linux on my PCs at home, getting the device activated would already have been impossible, let alone moving photos and music on or off the device. This remains a major drawback for me.
• Garage Band: The arrival of this application on the iPad alone made me go to the Apple store and take a look but sadly Garage Band felt much less expressive than Apple’s promotional videos made me expect. I also found that the force detection when tapping the screen did not seem to be that sophisticated and tones were either loud or very low volume without any in-betweens. In hindsight, from the few minutes I spent in the store with it, the application feels a bit more like a gimmick than a serious music application. Maybe Apple will release new instruments and make other improvements later on.

All in all, I guess I need to check back again in 6-10 months or so for the iPad 3, to see if Apple can convince me to spend my money on their products. In the meantime, I’ll probably give other tablet manufacturers a chance.

In the first screenshot, I have added notes with recommendations as to how specific elements of the navigation instructions could be improved. In the second image, I have put together a mock-up of what I think an improved screen could look like.

Feel free to suggest further improvements in the comments below.

Marble Turn-by-turn navigation promotional screenshot

If you had just one instant to check which direction to turn to – a realistic assumption when driving a car – into which direction would you make your turn?

Slightly right, sharp right, or sharp left?

I cannot even imagine what the designer of this notification must have thought to justify that three arrows pointing in different directions were a good idea in this screen. For the next release, they should definitely use one single arrow only – pointing in the correct direction of course.

The team observed that in the light of a rising number of tablets and other computing devices where indirect mouse cursor interaction is replaced by direct touch interaction, scrollbars in their traditional form should be removed from screens. Instead, this screen real estate should be freed up for displaying the actual content a user is interested in, aiding orientation and readability on the small screens typically found on touch interaction devices. However, on desktop computers equipped with a mouse and large screen, scrollbars need to continue to have their place given that countless legacy applications will not be compatible with other forms of direct interaction scrolling such as dragging screen content up and down.

In this context, I believe the team at Canonical has found an innovative approach to unify both scrolling concepts as shown in the video below. I am looking forward to using the final design when I upgrade my desktop’s Ubuntu installation to release 11 when it comes out end of April.

As before, the code can be found at Github.

Ogre 3D 1.7 - Beginner's Guide

After announcing Cutexture, Packt Publishing asked me to review their new book “Ogre 3D 1.7 Beginner’s Guide” by Felix Kerger which I would now like to review in this post. The book is structured into nine chapters, aiming to cover everything from installing Ogre, managing 3D scenes, models, materials and animations to an overview of third party Ogre extensions. It is targeted at 3D programming novices who have already got some C++ development experience and who are keen on creating a 3D application or game.

All 3D programming techniques in the book are introduced by Kerger with the statement of a programming goal and detailed instructions to achieve this goal, generally by requesting the reader to make specific program code changes. Subsequent “What just happened?” sections then explain all steps and results in detail. I like this approach because seeing results early on lets readers stay curious about experimenting further and the book’s “Pop quiz” features, where readers are asked to reach some additional goals by themselves without further instructions, tie right into this. Quiz answers are then provided at the book’s end and each technique section closes with a review of what was covered and what readers should have learned.

Although “Learn by doing: less theory, more results” is one of the book’s taglines, I found that it actually provides well written introductions to the theory behind several 3D graphics techniques as well. For anyone with a more than passing interest in 3D applications or games there is no way around these fundamentals, so becoming familiar with them early on can only be beneficial. For complex topics such as shadow calculations the author goes even further by providing pointers to more in-depth literature. I find such background information very important because it helps in understanding the “broader picture” of a field and therefore in becoming a better programmer.

For an introductory book, many essential areas needed to create basic 3D applications and games are equally covered very well. Some sections even go beyond that to an intermediate level, for example the discussion of geometry optimization techniques for faster rendering.

However, if the book’s goal really is to enable readers to “Create real-time 3D applications using Ogre 3D from scratch”, then I must also point out two bigger omissions: The first one is that “main loops” or application loops are discussed only very briefly and without any of the background information found in early chapters of the book. These loops play an essential role in tying all parts of non-trivial real-time applications together and should be treated in much more detail. As a recommendation, I would say “Game Engine Architecture” by Jason Gregory is an excellent and detailed treatment of this topic which more than fills this gap.

The second omission in “Ogre 3D 1.7 Beginner’s Guide” is in the area of User Interfaces. Ogre comes with no good default User Interface support built in, but at the same time, virtually all interactive applications require a User Interface of some sort. Consequetially, introducing readers to this area would have been very important to help them make the best out of what Ogre has to offer. (In fact, the lack of a good, well-integrated User Interface framework was one reason for me to publish Cutexture.) In my view, the author should have left out the entire chapter on particle systems (they play only an unimportant role in most 3D applications) and have replaced it with one on User Interfaces in Ogre instead.

Other than that, I would have also liked to see an introduction to the concept of state machines as part of the chapter on animations, as these let a developer define – roughly speaking – in which order different animations can be played back in sequence (e.g. standing -> walking -> running, but not standing -> running).

Finally, a minor gripe with my PDF version of the book was that Internet links were not clickable even though chapter references were.

Conclusion

I find that “Ogre 3D 1.7 Beginner’s Guide” is still a very good beginner book despite its omissions. Those who have never before written a 3D application but have some C++ programming experience and understanding of Object-Oriented programming should find a lot of valuable hands-on and background information in it. The author also does not try to cover up that readers need to be willing to learn some mathematics and basic programming patterns to obtain their desired 3D programming results. In my eyes, this honest approach is the only way to truly help readers advance to an intermediate 3D programmer level and therefore makes it another reason for me to recommend this book, especially compared to the many other 3D introductory books which contain lots of examples but no substance.

Giveaway

For those interested in picking up “Ogre 3D 1.7 Beginner’s Guide”, I will be giving away a free PDF copy by courtesy of Packt Publishing. Simply comment below on which User Interface you have seen you would like to see working in Ogre or link to this review on Twitter. I will pick a winner by the end of the first week of February 2011.

Update: The giveaway is now over and the winner has received his copy. Thanks to everyone who participated.

I will use your contact information solely for the purpose of this give-away.

In a nutshell, this new framework called “Cutexture” should provide developers with the following benefits over off-the-shelf User Interface solutions available for Ogre3D:

• The full range of Qt’s widgets can be used in Ogre3D, including the Webkit webbrowser component, enabling completely new ways of integrating Web content into 3D environments.
• Powerful: Qt is one of the most powerful User Interface toolkits currently available.
• Ease of development: Qt’s .ui files are supported for rapid User Interface development with Qt Designer.
• Reliable: Using the proven Qt framework, widgets are rendered into a texture instead of relying on unstable overlay techniques provided by desktop environments.
• Flexible: Possibility to extend Cutexture to use Qt widgets as textures on arbitrary Ogre objects.
• Open Source: Cutexture is available under the “MIT license”, thereby providing full source code access to the framework while allowing the development of proprietary (closed source) applications.

Download

Cutexture is available for download as a public repository on Github.

Compiling

Cutexture uses the CMake build system. A build is invoked with

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=”Release”

or

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=”Debug”

Cutexture’s dependencies are:

• Qt version 4.6 or higher, with qmake available on the system path when invoking cmake
• Ogre3D version 1.6.4 or higher
• Ogre Input System (OIS) 1.2.0

Specific installation paths for these dependencies are defined in CMakeLists.txt

Screenshot

Cutexture showing Qt widgets and a Google search

Feedback

I would be happy to receive feedback on Cutexture and of course welcome any code contributions.

There seem to be vast differences among airlines and plane models as to the quality of IFE systems offered. In particular, while some are quite responsive, intuitive and easy to use, others are slow, buggy, or confusing. I’ve compiled a few examples of IFE systems below but I’d like to hear from you, which IFE system of which airline you feel is the easiest to use?

Please leave a comment below (if possible, link to a photo or video so everyone can see why it is your favorite).

For those systems that stand out, I will then try to contact the respective airlines to find out more about the authors and the design ideas behind their IFEs.

Air Canada (2009)

Air New Zealand (2010)

(Scheduled for November 2010)

Delta Airlines (2009)

Etihad Airways (2008)

Qantas Airways (2008)

Scandinavian Airlines (2007)

Singapore Airlines (2007)

Virgin America (2007)