AT&T is the Death Star (HTC Fuze Edition)

Just got my new HTC Fuze from AT&T. Going through the always helpful forums at XDA-Developers, I came across the following cry of pain:

Why did AT&T (and others like Verizon) have to make changes to it?

Why can't they just leave it as it is as the Touch Pro? I can't stand the fact that they had to change the keyboard to be different!

No tab and Ctl key.....come on!!!!!

The guy has a point.

First there's the load of AT&T crapware that's included. You can't escape this since the good folks at AT&T thoughtfully re-engineered the default interface to include a prominent link to it. It mainly features fee-based services that ordinarily can be found elsewhere for free. Did I mention that you have to hack into the system to get rid of this stuff?

But back to the above lament.

The keyboard on earlier versions of this phone only had four rows. This allowed for larger keys. By squeezing in a fifth row, HTC, the manufacturer, had to reduce the size of the other rows and hence the keys. This made the keyboard slightly more difficult to use but no doubt HTC felt this reduction in functionality was justified since consumers now had a 'full qwerty' keyboard including a row of numbers.

Unfortunately when AT&T got its hands on the device, it simply said, 'qwerty, schmerty' and replaced the top row of numbers with punctuation marks. Worse, it replaced the normal function of certain keys on the lowest row with (surprise, surprise) yet more links to its fee-based proprietary services.

There is a conflict of goals here. The consumer wants a device to communicate with while the company wants a gateway to its proprietary fee-based services. This conflict results in interface decisions that alter how hardware and software traditionally function.

To the question then, what would a keyboard or operating system look like if it were designed by a telecommunications company, we now have an answer. For those of us concerned with the results, working towards a regulatory framework that separated the two -- i.e. the provider of the network from the provider of the network device -- might be a safe option.

Ah, the Good Old Days

Former assistant Cook County state's attorney Joe Roddy on the changed environment then and now for the Chicago Police Department:

"The difference is this -- when I grew up in the 40s and 50s, if a police officer asked you to get out of the park, you couldn’t get out fast enough. Now, people say, 'F**k you' -- pardon my Irish -- and spit at them...." [Mick Dumke, "The City That Pays Out", Chicago Reader, 11/27/2008]

Current Cites at the Reference Desk

Doing my Current Cites at the Reference Desk in between patron requests.

UPDATE: And hot off the presses, here's the latest issue of CurrentCites for November...

Yes, It's that Time of Year: Blue Beanie Day 2008

Courtesy of Jeffrey Zeldman:

Announcing the second annual Blue Beanie Day! Show your support for Web Standards and Accessibility. Please join us on Friday, November 28, 2008 in celebrating Blue Beanie Day.

Friday, November 28, 2008 is the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

It's easy to show your support for web design done right. Don a Blue Beanie and snap a photo. Then on November 28, switch your profile picture in Facebook and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group at Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/bluebeanieday2008/

How Dare You Call My Laptop a Technological Dinosaur

Every once and a while I come across an article which pretty much declares any device larger than a cellphone as dead because cellphones are what the teens are using and hence everything else is on the road to extinction.

This is silly.

I use my smartphone/pda/call-it-what-you-like -- all the time but even I know it doesn't replace my need for larger devices depending on what I'm doing.

I'm not going to write my research paper on one, for example, for the same reason that I wouldn't do the same, twenty years earlier, on the back of an envelope. You choose the tool to fit the job.

Ideas for Drupal4Lib IG Event at ALA in Chicago?

This is still a while off but I thought I'd put out an initial request before the holidays officially begin. It's a request for ideas and suggestions for the meeting of the LITA Drupal4Lib Interest Group at the 2009 ALA Conference in Chicago.

Feel free to leave comments either here or on the LITA Blog at:
http://tinyurl.com/Drupal4LibALAchicago

LAST JUNE/JULY IN ANAHEIM

Last June, we had a pretty nice BoF with librarians discussing Drupal projects they were working on. We also had a round-robin Q&A with librarians new to Drupal who were thinking about maybe using the CMS but wanting more information.

Here's my write-up of the event:

"Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Anaheim"

ALA 2009 IN CHICAGO

So next year, happily enough, we'll be meeting in Chicago (my hometown) and I wanted to poll people to see what they thought.

A BoF is pretty nice but we could just as easily have a speaker or two, or investigate an interesting theme or topic.

Time-wise, I don't think we’d get more than an hour and a half -- two hours max. Fun things might include specific modules for library application, using Drupal in a library environment -- anything really.

So if you have any ideas or suggestions, if you'd like to speak or would like to see someone else speak, if there's a theme or topic you’d like to investigate, please leave a comment either here or on the LITA Blog at:
http://tinyurl.com/Drupal4LibALAchicago

With just a little work, I'm sure we can arrange something that our fellow Drupal4Lib'ers would look forward to.

Thanks for any help,

LEO
(2008-09 Chair of the LITA Drupal4Lib IG)

When Design Kills

I had a very pleasurable time at the Garfield Park Conservatory on Chicago's West Side several weeks ago. Finding it however included a mishap due in part to this extremely poorly constructed map which I found while wandering around looking for directions.

You can see a larger version of the entire billboard here -- plus a close-up of the map itself.

I was at the "Gold Dome Fieldhouse", looking for the main Conservatory building. Can anyone guess why I started heading (incorrectly it turned out) west?

Time's up: You can make a map in a thousand different ways (just look at mass transit maps from various cities), but one of the few conventions is that the top generally points north, the bottom south, the left west and the right east. That's how maps are laid out.

Unfortunately, the person who designed this one, decided to ignore the convention and turned the thing 90 degrees counter-clockwise. This way, it may have been easier to fit in with the rest of the information on the board -- that's probably why they did it -- but it's really going for convenience of composition at the expense of comprehension.

Nobody looking at this is going to instinctively tilt their heads sideways to figure it out. Instead they'll do what I did and head off in the wrong direction.

I was saved by friends who, lucky for me, drove over and picked me up. Others might not be so fortunate. The whole point however is that bad design happens when it doesn't take user assumptions into consideration. The result can be not simply making things harder to find but causing users to make incorrect and possibly disastrous decisions. Just ask the person who designed the "Butterfly Ballots" in Florida.

Good News for Net Neutrality

Net Advocate and UMICH Don Susan Crawford has been named a "FCC Review Team Lead" by the incoming Obama-Biden Administration. Maybe the 'Net has a future after all...

[h/t TechPresident]

Three Events in My Life

They're selling Obama hats at my local 7-11. I know 'business is business' but this is the first time I can recall when the 'swag' from a presidential campaign was thought valuable enough to hit the retail shelves.

Three world events have affected me in my life. The first was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I was there, had been there since '84 and knew what it was like to have a police state just a block or two away. I was working construction in those days. I had finished up and had taken a nap. When I woke up one of the people living in the house told me the extraordinary news that while I was asleep, the Wall had come down.

Of course, the person exaggerated. The Wall which surrounded the entire western half of the city hadn't come down. Rather an opening had been made at Checkpoint Charlie and also at the Brandenburg Gate where people from East Berlin -- the 'Ossies' -- could cross over. What followed were three days of absolute euphoria as tens of thousands of East Germans came over, swamping the local public transportation, waiting in long lines in front of banks to pick up their "Begrüßungsgeld" (i.e. welcome money) of 100 DM with which they bought items absolutely unavailable in their part of the city such as cassette radios and bags of oranges.

The downfall of that Wall and the regime it represented was the most positive experience of my young adult life.

More than a decade later, I was living in New York City. When I first heard that a jet had struck one of the World Trade Towers, I thought maybe it was an accident, albeit of horrendous proportions. When the second plane hit the second tower, I like everyone else in New York knew otherwise. I can remember walking north to work, up 1st Avenue, and seeing the emotions of people looking past me in the direction of Lower Manhattan. I finally turned around to see what they were looking at and the towers stood there, clearly visible as they always were, but now smoking and about to collapse. The ruins continued to give off smoke for weeks.

Now I'm in Chicago. Just three days ago, the eyes of the world were focused on our city. It was the final act of a series of events whose beginnings, I would argue, stretch back to the turmoil of the election in 2000. It was a period of abnormal excesses, exacerbated in reaction to 9-11, where we as a nation didn't always come off as a preeminent force for good. In fact, in many ways, we lost ground.

So after an unbelievably long campaign that could have ended in any number of ways, we all gathered in Grant Park, not wanting to risk fate by putting into words what so many of us were hoping and some of us had worked for. Pennsylvania was declared, then Ohio. The polls in California and the rest of the Pacific-coast states were closing at 10pm Central Standard time. At 10pm the people in the park started counting down from 10 to 0. Exactly at that point on the large TV screens, Wolf Blitzer from CNN said he had an important announcement to make, that CNN now projected Barack Obama to be elected President of the United States. The crowd in the park, all 250k of them, went wild.

It's a moment, like the two others, that I'll never forget.

NetDiver 10th Anniversary

Carole Guevin's NetDiver, a portfolio site for aspiring web designers, is celebrating its 10 year on the web. You can get the "Official" poster here...

Carole Guevin was a voice of (cutting edge) sanity during the early days of the web and it's great to see her site still going strong. She even has a Facebook Group...