Design and Pickle Bottles

Thinking about design in the Indian context, I find pickle bottles extremely clumsy to use. As a south Indian, I eat food with my right fingers. I think of pickle in the midst of eating. So, I have to go unscrew the lid of the bottle with the left hand, find a clean and dry spoon, take care of the dripping oil on those trips between the plate and the bottle, and then finally close the lid and then take care of the dripping greasy spoon. The pickle being real greasy does not fall freely from the spoon. So I have to keep yanking the spoon till the pickle gets off. The whole thing just sucks. It could get worse: you had disposed the greasy spoon and you decide to go for a second round of serving!

I was thinking of something like an icecream scoop and a good bowl for the whole setup.

A documentary on Maya Lin

The first two minutes of the documentary pass by And it invariably strikes to me..."Oh! My God, What an emotional roller coaster is the chronological order taking the visitors thru !! Thats the heart of the design. Nothing else matters as much." Ofcourse, Maya Lin later explains the significance of the chronological order. She goes on building on this very notion of capturing time in all her works. First in the Civil Rights, then the Womens Memorial at Yale And the Eclisped Time at Penn Station.

57000 Names stretched on a timeline (wall) of a decade long! The numbers and the stretch of time add up creating an immensely overwhelming emotion moving the visitors to the core. A simply Brilliant Simple Idea !

Walk in the Rain

Sometime back in 2000, PC Quest has given 1 min excerpts of hugely successful tracks from the label : Music Today . I had the mp3s, but no ID3 tag info. So, I started naming them to my imagination. I called one of them "Mayur Ka Naach" (the dance of a peacock). Yesterday, I found that iTunes 5.0 is selling that track. Its called "Walking in the Rain", a Pandit Shivkumar Sharma composition for the album "The Elements: Water".

I thought, "Well, I was pretty close!"

Consistency and pulldown menus go away in a new Office version

Couple of genuinely interesting things happening this time.

Microsoft is moving away from pull down menus and toolbars in their next release of Office called Office 12. So no more "I have seen it. But cant find where it is" stuff.

The pull down menu technique was introduced into the office when there were about 150 features. But over the years and several releases as the commands and features grew to 1500, they had to use additional techniques like preferences/checkboxes to present all that stuff. The consequences? Some of them are deeply hidden...and it takes a lot of time to get to them. They realized that the technique no longer works.

In a strange way, the root of the problem has been "consistency". Yeah, consistency with the legacy of the predecessors in the product line. With office 12, they have finally decided to break off from the lineage w.r.t consistency. They began to think what they would do if they had began all over again. (Yeah, I too think Consistency is overrated and Change is good.)

They have reorganized all of the menus into 'galleries' now. The galleries look very task oriented and they actually guide you thru the lifecycle of creation/maintenance of the artifact. Everything is shown upfront in the galleries. No pulldown menus. No hidden features. Did this come at a price of loss of functionality? No. I am guessing they have built lot of contextual intelligence into it.

No annoying clip. There is thing little thing called floaty that comes up when you right-click and gets you most frequently used commands on the selected text. (Behaves little more intelligently than the current right click).

They have also departed from the alt key board shortcuts into something called Overlays. When you press the Fn key or something, you are shown the keyboard shortcuts on the items themselves. (With galleries you have nothing hidden.)

"You tell it what to do and its going to do that." , thats the motto. I think finally, its going to be a fair deal.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/sep05/09-13OfficeUI.mspx for some screenshots

There is a great video on the whole thing: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114720

Why are those Classics?

Why are movies like Gundamma Katha (The Story of Gundamma) and Maya Bazar classics? Both of these movies were adaptations of hugely successive stage plays. When something is a successive stage play, the contents turn out to be nothing less or nothing more, but just what is necessary. Going in multiple iterations helps anywhere, not just in building software. Or may be film making is not very different from building software, both work towards a common goal: appeasing the audience and making money.

98 BITSians on Map

I did this plot of BITSians-'98 on Google maps this Friday night. Tell me if you think something makes it better.

Ones with Very Long Wait

Two movies indicate a "Very Long Wait" on my Netflix Queue*. K. Vishwanath's Sirivennela and the "Pirates of the Silicon Valley", a dramatized war between Microsoft and Apple. The former has a niche American-Telugu audience (and presumably, Netflix has just one copy of the movie), while the latter probably has atleast a quarter million slashdot geeks waiting for it!

*There are about 110 movies in the Queue, as of Sep 08. Kungfu Hustle had a 'long wait' until its release recently.

Tagsonomy for iTunes

I have a decent collection of M.S. Subbulakshmi. The collection is dominated by two genres: Carnatic and Devotional. The other genres include: soundtracks, bhajans, light classical, Hymns (like Vishnu Sahasranama, Venkateswara Suprabhatham). Bhajans and Hymns fall are partly Devotional genre too. Some of the tracks are more listenable during early morning hours, some contemplative, some very festive (Hindu festive, ofcourse) in nature...

You see where I am getting at? Tags for songs, apart from the genre.

Genre is too rigid a classification and playlists are too cumbersome to achieve all of these listening patterns! I am hoping iTunes 6.0 will have it.

Some lessons from IM Pei's works

I was watching a documentary on the works of IM Pei, yesterday. I thought I would put down some of the things I took from it.

• Form follows function, except when things are pushed to the extreme. In his case, the HK's Bank of China tower's form followed structure (and not function). The structure enabled him distribute the loads to the four corners, tall ones needed to be counter the effects of things like strong winds.
• Design for people's needs. So there is no instant gratification from design work. It needs people to actually go around the buildings and live in them to get to know if the design really works.
• It takes things like hardcore persuasion and persistence to make things like the pyramid at Louvre happen.

$2,275 to change the destiny of Indian Roads

As $2,275 or the 1 lac car from Tata Motors is getting ready, my worst apprehensions about Indian road traffic and the emission levels are all set to be true. In a country where car has been a status symbol, 1 lac is no big deal to move into that status. More cars -> more traffic -> more gas -> more parking -> more pollution...more God knows of what!! Gas will probably shootup from Rs.45 a litre to Rs.60+ a litre. Most of the shopping districts, entertainment centers, business districts do not accomodate parking lots, forcing the car owners to park them on the roads creating huge road blocks for the moving traffic. Its too huge a problem to be postponed even by a single day OR to be thought about in a single dimension. Wish I had a part to play in solving these huge problems.

PS: $2,275 has the potential to spread the same problems to most of the developing countries making them more unmanageable!

A bad idea: Spell Check for IM

While I was exploring Google's new IM, it re-struck to me why spell check is such a bad idea for IM. Most popular case against a spell checker can be that its a very informal mode of communication and hence you dont have to be pedantically right.

I think that a bigger point against spell check is that: Given a context, we are extremely good at auto-correcting. IM, being a conversatory mode of communication, defines and keeps re-defining context clearly. Also, we humans are good at re-iterating mutual feelings thru conversations, thanks to paraphernilia like :) , lol , ha ha, :( , :D , :P ....

Ironically, there are hundereds of spell check plug-ins readily available for every IM client.

PS: Here's a poem that passes thru a spell check. It makes good sense to humans too. But its a total nonsense to an English teacher.

Eye halve a spelling chequer,
It came with my pea sea,
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rarely ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I'm shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect in it's weigh,
My chequer tolled me sew.

Arnold in India

When Terminator 3 got dubbed into Telugu, Arnold Schwarzenegger was translated as Anna Swarnasekhar. Yeah, "Anna Swarnasekhar natinchina Terminator 3". (Arnold stars in Terminator 3). Wondering what he might be called in Tamil Nadu? Anna Saravananan? (An extra -an to make it a little more tongue twisting.)

Different and Unlikely

Indian movies use two words a lot, when they write down the synopsis of a movie.

One: Different. "This movie is so different from the rest of the stuff." Remember (A')' = A ? Yeah, thats the case with Indian movies.

Two: Unlikely. "The girl realizes that love happens with the most unlikely guy in the most unlikely circumstances ." I have started questioning the very meaning of unlikely after all those unlikely usages of the word.

Why is Amitabh such a mainstream actor even now?

I think thats mainly because its only he who provides writers to write a story/script that does not entirely revolve around cliched love stories and still managesto make money at the box office. What do you say?

Water Tragedy

It takes about $1.7 billion a year to provide fresh driniking water to everybody on the globe. And about $9.3 billion for sanitation. The irony is that there is an annual spending of $46 billion on bottled water!!

The Rising

A bunch of kings revolting against Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse and then another bunch of soldiers revolting for a thing as silly as animal fat. Now, how interesting can that be for a movie?

Answers?

"Computers are useless. They only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso

Yeah, the greatness lies in asking the right questions.

India going more Nuclear

Dubya and Singh have talked about giving more nuclear technology to meet increasing demands of power in India. It sounds good in the first hearing. But how good is it? Well, India is definitely gonna dig out far fewer amounts of coal and thus emit much lesser greenhouse gases. But then you have the problems of disposing the nuclear waste. On a bigger picture, I think the more you have, the more you tend to consume it. People hop in to buy more gadgets and 'utilities' with the availability of power. But more buying means more depletion and more pollution.

Vijay Vaitheeswaran of The Economist says that Centralized Power Generation is a bad idea and it should be decentralized by giving it away to markets. You'll be much more frugal when you have to generate your power in the backyard using sun, wind or whatever.

London 2012 and boom come the attacks!

What if someother city had won the 2012 Olympics? Did the terrorists plan to blow stuff in the winner city OR was London the only target?

The best words came from Tony Blair. He said...Our resolve to live the way we live is stronger than their resolve to shake it...or something on those lines.

One of the best reports on the whole attacks are from Wikipedia, apart from the BBC. Smartmobs, afterall!

10 years of growth and still a toddler.

Amazon.com is celebrating 10 years of its existence. Here is their first homepage. Today's homepage is hell a lot better! Amazon.com has been consistently improving its user experience and converting them into customers quite successfully. They have been constantly realigning their technology to suit their business goals of allowing more sellers and buyers. Netflix is another great example I can think of that create a good experience.

The web has matured by leaps and bounds on the user experience front. Yet it is still a toddler. A lot more can be done to help businesses and design. We'll see much better experiences and designs in the coming years.