Chrome OS as a platform without versions, potentially even for mobile

Chrome OS is really exciting to me, partially because it is like having an OS on a thumb drive, as some people have done, only even more flexible in some ways, and partially because it will break down many of the platform issues that we commonly run into. Software that works in the browser, or at least in Crome, will do so on any computer that can run Chrome or ChromeOS. 

Recently many people are talking about the growing issue of fragmentation of the Android platform and most people seem to be pretty worried about it. Michael Gartenberg has written a related article for engadget, Will Android Fragmentation Destroy the Platform. I think the crux of this issue has a few factors. 

1. People expect to own phones for too long. 2 years is a long time to wait before getting a new phone and right now phones and their contracts are designed to endure this kind of period. This needs to change if technology is going to continue to also change so rapidly
2. Phone manufacturers having to do too much to make Android work they way they want it. I am afraid I do not know much about what they need to do so this point could be framed slightly inaccurately, however, I think if Android was designed to evolve in a more friendly way and if the efforts to make a phone work on a given platform were less significant, then this kind of issue could be reduced quite a lot. 

In any case, as most have probably read, Chrome OS is currently including designs for various different window styles, which are targeted at various different device form factors, including touch input devices. The one platform they have not mentioned targeting is of course mobile handsets, however I tend to think their could be some value in doing so. ChromeOS on a mobile phone would mean several things.

1. Native support for great browsing.
2. Software independence. Because:

1. ChromeOS auto updates - which is not that significant..
2. Chrome is becoming an industry standard and is really good at running almost every website out there and it is really unlikely that there will suddenly be a new kind of browser that can not run on year, or even two year old hardware. 
3. This would also mean that any apps would work on any other phone or platform with a modern browser. 

Device independence. With android you can already log in and out of your phone easily but with ChromeOS syncing you could imagine setting the experience on all your computing devices at once, and not being particularly miffed if data failure of any kind occurred. 

One issue this raises is how manufacturers can give their users a custom experience, however, given the ChromiumOS is open and adaptable I imagine we could see a version which still supported Chrome syncing and updates to the engine etc. 

Also, issues like a dialer could be solved with some local code or with Google Voice, via the mobile HTML5 client. 

I have included a Phone UI mock up based on the current ChromeOS Touch UI which is on the Chromium website. 

In a lot of ways, I am talking about something similar to what Apple seemed to be presenting when they first released the iPhone, a phone without an app store that just uses web apps, however now, it seems this is becoming a desirable reality for several reasons.(sorry I had a link for that but I forgot where it was - perhaps next time) 

So, what would you think about a Chrome OS phone?

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Mark Whiting's posterous

Great Design from Non Designers

What's the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product -- the rest is noise. For example, the original iPod was: 1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac (most hardware companies can't make software, so I bet the others got this wrong). That's it -- no wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg -- nothing but the essentials, well executed.

via paulbuchheit.blogspot.com

I have written before about creating a design school or curriculum around the principals of a company like Google. In this provoking post Paul Buchheit (one of the people who did Gmail and later Friendfeed) talks about a perspective on design that I agree with very strongly, and that I think many other people have failed to clearly represent.

Additionally I think it is rather interesting that many non designers have very valuable perspectives on design, not just as solutions but really as methods and models for the creative process. I wonder how much we can really learn?

Posted via web from Mark Whiting's posterous

When Google Speaks, and When we Speak About Google

Occasionally, people at google write something long and interesting and when they do I tend to find what they say well informed and mostly true to form. Some people argue that they are being hypocritical however I find that they are generally being human. 

In any case, recently, Jonathan Rosenberg, wrote a nice long post about openness as a market strategy, how it should all come together and how google plays or at least hopes to play in this game. Have a look at the Meaning of Open to see what I am talking about. 

An interesting piece, posted by a non googler, Devin Coldewey  from Crunchgear, made the comparison between google and the roman empire which ended up also being mostly about openness and creating contextual improvements, not just making better products. Read Google, Rome and Empire. 

I have posted about these kinds of things before, in particular, one of my favorite articles from google, also from Jonathan Rosenberg, as a similar kind of state of play perspective from earlier this year, From the Height of This Place. 

I guess I quite like Jonathan Rosenberg's writing. What do you think of all this?

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Mark Whiting's posterous

And Google will make Waves

There is something great about people who try and people who speak up to start change and end ongoing issues that are sucking the blood of everyone around them. In so many cases, these kinds of issue are ignored or avoided by everyone. Those who turn around and make waves are the ones who are remembered. 

Google, one of my favourite ideas, organisations, and brands,  is one of those groups who consistently makes waves in all areas of their business and the business of the world. As many people know they do it with a simple motivating mantra, "Don't Be Evil" and sometimes we can see this notion being implemented with deadly accuracy. There are of course many great examples however this article relating to comments on the Google Voice product from AT&T is a rather elegant extreme. 

If there is one blog you should read it is the Google Public Policy Blog. 

The images are from Google's Logo repository. They make meaning, alongside their waves, and they also make something they call Google Wave which I am starting to use to run projects in. 

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Mark Whiting's posterous

Spelling Google

Spelling the number. More info. Mostly unrelated this post.

I was reading through my old unread items in Google Reader and came across this amazing piece I had set aside to read and never got around to. It is like a Google state of the union address and I really think that it offers not only a lot of insight but a lot of context into what we know and have, and why. In any case, I suggest everyone read this and then read it again to make sure they did not miss any of the interesting details.

I also should mention, I quite like the title, "From the Height of this Place," which gives me ideas, unrelated to how tall I am.

The fall begins

Today Google announced the closure of some of there products. Most are of limited importance to me however I am a little impacted by one, Google Mashups Editor.

A early prototype for a personal website in Google Mashups Editor.

When Mashups Editor first came out I instantly applied to be a user and was quite impressed and interested by the things it allowed me to do. Sadly at the time my knowledge and understanding of web languages was minimal so I did not make as great tools as I could have, however, I did make a number of test sites and apps including a few which were early prototypes for a javascript website and portfolio I wanted to make. I never finished this project as my comprehension of the appropriate technologies was not good enough and I did not realise which these were until much later. However, now, I feel I could make some interesting sites with this product I have just been busy doing other things and not had a specific need yet to return to this tool. I am sad they are discontinuing it because I think it was a lot of fun and really easy to use on some levels and opened a door for me in creating webapps that I have not seen done by many other sites.

I know Google App Engine is more powerful but I have not yet had a chance to interact with it and I have yet to start to engage in the learning process. I may never have time to deal with this system. I hope something like Mashups Editor comes again.

Writing to be translated

With Google Reader's recent new feature, being able to translate all one's feeds into a language of their preference, using Google Translation Tools, it seems the language of the web is becoming less and less noticeable. However, reading the output of translated sites can often remind us of the value of knowing more than one language. The value I perceive is of course having expression for things which are not included in ones base language. French, the language of love has many shortcomings when describing technical situations,  German, great for precise and complex descriptions but with a very different kind of romance, and for my self with asian languages, a word like rènào or 热闹 which has no direct English translation yet describes one of the key things I love about China.

When it comes down to it, Google translator sucks quite a lot, however languages do not make this task easy.

Where do we go from here?

I think there are 2 directions of interest.

1. Write content with the intention of it being translated - For the time being we do not really know what this means I think most of us do not really know how Google Translator works, perhaps however Google could provide some guidelines on how to make things more translatable by their service. I think this could also include a feature which evaluates a given translation task and suggests words that are uncertain or sentience structures that may cause some problems.
   
2. Create a systems of exceptions - If a writer tacks advantage of the specific strengths of a language it will become harder to translate, however those strengths are really important and can offer significant changes in meaning. To deal with this situation I think known exceptions could be added to a system like the Google Translation Tools. These exceptions would extend the ability of the translation system to firs state that there is some difference in meaning and secondly suggest words that may approximate the idea in the target language. The scheme of having user editable results (which google now has) is great but going on to use that data to create richer output would be really fabulous. 

What do you think about this?

Google Reader knows when you made a mistake

Google Reader knowing what you did not mean to do. 

Back in the day if you accidentally pressed Shift+A in google reader you would find that you had just marked all your items as read. For some people this may not be a problem. For me, it is. I often have 1000 or more unread items, some of which I am deliberately saving so I do not have to keep track of them.

So, just a few moments ago I accidentally pressed Shift+A when going for Shift+S and I got the popup pictured above. Yay for Google's UI team.

Google Chrome the best thing since Electricity

The last page of the carton which includes a near complete description of the service.

Today some people got a strange cartoon in the mail that depicts a great thing from google. Check out the scanned images here. The destination Google Chrome seems to not be live yet.

I am so happy. This is like all the people in government in the USA just turning around and asking the rest of the world, "how did we piss you off and what can we do to make it better?"

What do people think. What browsers do you use.

Google Design School

Google Logo for Lego's 50th Birthday

I am in the midst of applying for a interesting looking job. I hate writing cover letters, however I did think of something a little interesting. Google Design School.

Google, as everybody knows has a great line-up of really usable services and they have consistently kept the user at the centre of their design requirements. Being a large company and one that claims one of its core fundamentals "don't be evil" there is a need for a well defined path to avoid the expected corporate evils and ensure a future of great user service. Google has published their interpretation of this path on their corporate home-page and in doing so created a defining structure for others, in the same space and in my opinion, in almost any other industry. My personal interest lies in two of their documents which I think combined could be used to teach comprehensive design thinking, and hence the prospect of a school of design based on the methods and thinking of Google. The two articles are as follows

1. Google User Experience - A casual documentation of what google holds important when considering the user in their products. 
2. Google Philosophy - Seen as "ten things Google has found to be true" and some great insight about good strategy for almost anything, business, design and whatever else. 

I think it would be fun to discuss this more. If anyone wants to help me put together a course outline for a Google Design class it would be a lot of fun. I really think there is a lot of design learning available there and that it could be used to create something really interesting. 

On Real Semantic Web and Language

I am in China :-) and I am really happy to be back here. At the moment I am in Hangzhou which is where I used to live.

The other day I posted about language and how natural language systems would be gould for Semantic Web and then today I cam upon a Google tech talk that details the matter quite well.



Have a look if you have some spair time. I am about 20 minuts in so far and though it is not completely thrilling the speaker has made some interesting points.

Sorry about spelling I am using an internet cafe in which pages are not loading perfectly and spell checkers are not working.

China is so much fun.

Budgeting

So I have been using mint for a few months now and more recently I have been spending a fair bit of time planning and budgeting my upcoming trip. During this process I have experimented with a hole bunch of information models and approaches to money. Not really thinking about breakdowns and contingencies but just trying to work out really effective ways to visualise the data at hand and also ways to work with it. Part of this has included considering sources of data and how the data will be used at different times during this process. 

A scenario of what I am thinking about is as follows. 

A person planning a trip around the world must consider a number of things; travel costs, passports and visas, projected income, projected living costs in each location, and accommodation. They can map these things out pretty easily before they start actually making reservations and so forth so they can just get a rough idea about weather or not it will work with the money they have. This is not hard, essentially writing documenting dates of events, like the start of a trip and so on, and costs of things that can be estimated or referenced online. As a side note, I really think travel sites should give an estimated cost per day living, at perhaps 3 different tiers of luxury. That would help so much. 

After getting an estimate cost model and realising whether or not the trip is even remotely viable they need to start actually buying tickets and so on. At this point I think the common visualisation methods, such as daily balance spreadsheets, begin to fail because they do not let the user really represent the information the do and do not know in a realistic manner. I may be very sure that I need to leave a specific country by a certain date, or meet a friend somewhere at some time but for the most part I think there are just too many variables to construct a good model in this way. This really is quite a wicked problem, too much potential to change. 

I guess what I am really getting at is that there is a gap between having an idea of what should happen and making it happen in naive budgeting methods because they do not seem to accommodate indecision well.

I also think as one lives the process of spending money the budgeting model should be a tool that can continue to provide feedback and help with contingency processes. 

So the end product I think should exist is some kind of thing where costs have various statuses of certainty, as do most other details, like dates. This should also be applied to income as so many people work on hourly wages. This would basically let the user forecast a cost or profit and as time comes close establish greater detail, then as the expenditure occurs it can be represented within the system in absolute detail. I think beyond that the role of such a product is just to provide a hole lot of really useful ways of looking at the data at hand. I really think people miss a lot of info about their money information because they do not look at the data properly. This is something a good money product should help with.

Oh gosh what a scrambled set of thoughts. Luckily I can blame my concussion for this post. 

In other news, I obviously lived through the night re. yesterday's post on my Concussion. 

In other other stuff, why on earth do more spell checkers not use Google's spell checking technology. Apple's sucks so much in comparison to Google's. 

Google Sites and Zen Products

Today I think I have started actually using google sites a little bit which is good fun. I am using it to help manage a project I am on with some people in australia, for now it is private but there may be some stuff for public view in a bit. 

Also, I have recently begun to realise I really like some aspects of Zen, especially when they are represented in products and systems. I think a big part of my interest in these systems is the sense of really robust simplicity, not ephemeral or short sighted simplicity. There are a number of things I think fall into this category nicely so I was thinking of starting a list of Zen products and systems and services. I think the first thing to go on the list will be Sakura Systems because they are just so Zen. Does anyone have any good things to add on? 

I will just add that I think [good] one page sites could be added to this list. I will see what I can find. 

Stupid White People

This is a great TED Talk about cultural diversity. I wish there was a way to stop stupid white people. Good blog too. 

Also, Google has added some more sharing features recently and I am going to start using them a little to see if there is any value. Here is my shared items list so far. 

Planning to Travel Around the World and Using the Google Visualisation API

So I am going to France this summer then I thought it would be nice to go overland to Korea and then to China before coming home. Here I have started to plan my movements but I have not yet checked spelling. I have also used the google data API to render this in an interactive timeline. I think it is still linked to the online data I am editing so it may change without notice.

It was not hard to use but it did take a little while to get it to work. I wish I could pipe in other data sets or something. Perhaps I can... I will see what I can do. 

Update: The timeline has stopped working for anyone now so I am going to not bother fixing it until I know some more details about my trip. The API is good but seems to be crufty and have some serious reliability issues at the moment.

Trucks and Cars and Things

So recently I started working a little on an automobile system looking at most aspects of transport and mechanical design from a new perspective. For the time being I am just kind of concept storming and using Google SketchUp to model some ideas but eventually I think it would be really interesting to take the project a bit further. In any case, today I was reading Dark Roasted Belnd where they were discussing truck trains. One of the companies highlighted by the article is a really innovative new company that is doing a few interesting things to create universally better trucks. The company is called ETF (Emirates Truck Factory) and as far as I can immediately tell they are not in production at the moment. I hope the do come soon and I hope they apply some of their interesting innovations to a wider range of mobility applications. 

Economy Mind

So I was a little bored so I started watching this Authors at Google talk by Tim Harford. He is not a good speaker but he does a good job talking about some really interesting results of using economic thinking and economic analysis to understand human behaviour. One point I particularly liked was the conclusion that people in addictive and similar circumstances are naturally inclined to do things that help them deal with their habits. The findings suggest that if a system is put in-place to help people deal with such problems they are likely to use them with the hope they will be affected. 

Also in the talk he mentions a service that offers related solutions called Stickk. Their model is to provide a way to document progress with a stake, made up of personal value, at hand. If the progress falls below a user set amount the stake is contributed to a charitable cause. This company has found that such a method can successfully motivate people to manage their own habits. 

On another note, I had to watch parts of a few other Google talks to find to one that was truly interesting. I wonder if the quality of google talks is going down. I also still wish they created a good summarisation service. 

Smooth Things and Good Information

Over this last weekend I have been to a number of quite good lectures from the RMIT GRC, graduate research conference. Apart from just being a good showcase of interesting work it also unveiled the reason and value of doing a PhD at some point and now I am even considering this a real possibility. For the time being I am interested in doing it some place where I do not speak the language and where I can get a scholarship. More on this later.

At the same time there is some interesting work here on interface design. I think this is a great example of what more projects should be like. Seeing many of the graduate projects I realised that most people do not know anything about presenting content well. I was saddened also to see that a number of the applicants, especially masters were at quite an elementary level of development of ideology. I am not sure if these people will be allowed to progress immediately and I hope that RMIT presses them to work harder in the future.

Because I was away watching presentations and working on projects a lot recently I have a huge number of reading built up in my Google reader. I am working though it and learning interesting things. Read my reblog if you want to see more on that.

Searching for Reading

Yesterday the much loved Google released an in line search with some parametrization into Google Reader. It is all AJAXy and stuff so things are good.

Yesterday also, however, Google Reader cleaned all my unread posts which put my on the verge of tears as I had quite a few really great things saved to read some where. In any case now my I have a clean slate to work from.

On another note Google Docs has added some interesting auto fill tools into Spreadsheets. One of the things they have added, which I think is really smart is a tool that uses Google Sets to find its elements when doing an auto fill. I think this is a great use of goggles services. I hope to find a good way to utilize this new tool. They also added some other stuff for programmatically referencing RSS and XML feeds but I have not played much with it yet.

The love of Gmail

Recently a video competition started involving making videos of the human passing of Gmails around the world and through various situations. I think it sounds quite interesting and I am quite certain I will enter a few pieces.

Does any one else want in?

Also, I am glad to say that I have started the forum for my Individual Projects stuff and so far there are four members.