As you may have heard, I recently acquired an OLPC laptop. At some point I am going to write up my experiences with the OLPC/Sugar software so far (in the meantime, to uphold a promise I made, here are some useful tips for using and setting up software on the OLPC). For now, here are my thoughts on browsing the Web from the OLPC Browse activity.
The killer bit of the Firefox browser, IMHO, was the ability to open multiple Web pages in separate tabs within the same browser window. Of course, internet Explorer now does multiple tabs (in a rainbow of shades) but back in my Windows (pre-IE7) days, I frequently did parallel browsing of websites by simply opening each webpage in a new window. The advantage of multiple tabs is that you don’t end up with a clutter of browser windows all over your taskbar.
I suspect that multiple tabs in browser windows, and (in Firefox at least) being able to bookmark all the tabs at once, has slightly altered how people browse.
Opening in a new window set me off down the path of parallel browsing but multiple tabs ensured I got there. Especially as websites got more interactive and state-sensitive (meaning that you can’t switch to another website then click ‘Back’ to return to your internet banking session). And I got less patient waiting for pages to load (ironic seeing as connection speeds have increased).
So now I’ve started using my OLPC to browse the web occasional when my other laptop is unavailable. This is an interesting, and slightly frustrating, experience.
The Sugar interface on the OLPC basically does away with the idea of windowing environments. That is, you don’t have a desktop on which to drag around and switch between windows. instead, each application (known as an ‘activity’) runs moreorless full-screen, like this:
This means a return to linear browsing. in some ways it’s a liberating experience in that I read what I want to read of the current website or page before moving on the the next. And when reading blogs and the like, I can always click ‘Back’ later. In many ways, though (and i’m a great believer in computers supporting user-behaviour, and not the other way round), it’s just frustrating.
For example, in writing this blog-post, I couldn’t easily open my blog or Andy’s OLPC tips page to check that I used the correct URL in my links. Nor could I quickly check my usage of a word in dictionary.com. I can, and sometimes do, open other instances of the Browse activity - essentially opening in a new window but with a little more effort - but more than three instances, I’ve found, tends to crash the whole lot.
Now, the OLPC and its software isn’t designed for me; it’s an education tool for children in developing countries. On the other hand, how soon before the older or more tech-savvy children start to want to browse in parallel - especially when internet access gets more ubiquitous?
I have resisted putting Firefox on my OLPC but tonight I’m sorely tempted…
I noticed, a couple of days ago, that my blog has acquired adverts.
For example, in my blog post It’s here, it’s green, and it’s got ears! a couple of the phrases in the post have acquired dashed underlines and Snap Shots icons, like the term ‘One Laptop Per Child’ in this screenshot (the link ‘XO (or OLPC) laptop’ has a Snap Shot icon because it’s a link that I created):
(click the picture to see it more clearly)
I’m not sure that I like this. I don’t want to be advertising random companies that I know nothing about. I was aware that the Snap Shots windows that are added to my links contain small ads in addition to the preview of the target website. But the preview of the target website is why I include Snap Shots on my blog and the ad is smaller than the preview and I can live with that. But I’m less keen on Snap Shots identifying phrases in my blog posts purely to add adverts.
I had a look at the Snap Shots website which explains that the adding of Snap Shot icons to non-link phrases is a new technology called Snap Shots Engage. It also describes the Snap Shot Shares scheme, in which I can get a share of the advertising income (I guess from both Snap Shots and Snap Shots Engage ads).
I’m not against people making money out of their websites - though I don’t choose to right now as that’s not the purpose of my website - and the Snap Shots Engage method is fairly non-intrusive compared with, say, Google ads. My objection is to a third party inserting adverts into my blog without me knowing and explicitly agreeing to it. Also, while the normal Snap Shots ads are obviously ads below the preview of the link target:
the new Snap Shots Engage ads are less obviously ads that have been chosen by someone else:
and in this particular instance, the tone of the text in the ad jars slightly with my enthusiastic OLPC post.
I’ve had a look at the Snap Shots FAQ page to work out how I can opt out of them putting ads on my blog but they just say:
“At this time, Snap offers advertising exemption to educational and governmental institutions. If you feel that your web site fits these criteria and would like to apply to be exempted, please send an email to customerservice@snap.com and we will review your application and get back to you shortly.”
And I’m neither an educational nor governmental institution. So, I’m going to disable the Snap Shots Wordpress plugin and lose Snap Shots completely.
And it’s so exciting! My OLPC laptop has arrived at last!
In case you’ve been living in a cupboard for the past couple of years (this is mainstream, afterall), the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project’s aim is to design a small, cheap, lightweight but robust laptop as a tool to support education in developing countries. The XO (or OLPC) laptop is the result of that effort.
So what’s it like? Well, I’m typing this blog post on it. The width of the laptop is 22.5cm (I just measured it) so the keyboard is quite small. I can’t touchtype on it but I can work up to a fairly efficient multi-finger typing. It’s a bit like typing on the Psion palm-top but the keys feel nicer because they’re rubbery and press easily.
The screen on the XO is amazing. It was designed especially for the requirements of the OLPC project. Many of the children that will use the XO laptop are schooled, or spend a lot of time, out of doors. Therefore, a typical laptop screen would be no good - bright sunlight would render the screen unreadable. There are two modes to the XO’s screen: a full-colour mode which is
pretty readable in sunlight as it is, and a monochrome mode which actually gets clearer to read the brighter the sunlight. Why aren’t all laptops made like this? Working at home in the summer would be so much more fun!
What else? Well, the ‘ears’ are actually the wireless antenae which will still work, apparently, even if you snap one off (they’re actually slightly flexible and tougher than they look in photos). I can connect to my home WPA-encrypted wireless network (but not, sadly, to my work LEAP netwok). There’s no ethernet port but you can, i think, get an ethernet USB dongle to work.
It has a built-in webcam. It comes with 1 GB solid state storage but I’ve put an 8 GB SDHC card in the slot beneath the screen to have more space than I’m bound ever to need. It has a built-in microphone and speakers, with mini-jack sockets for plugging in an external mic and headphones. Or, alternatively, you can plug in different inputs (eg a temperature sensor) to the mic socket.
And there’s ‘ebook mode’… You know how you can get some highly-priced regular laptops that have a screen that swivels round into ‘tablet mode’? Well, the XO does that too. To be fair, the XO doesn’t have a touch-sensitive screen but then its screen swivels so that you can use it to read ebooks. At the press of a button, you can rotate the display by 90, 180, 270, or 360 degrees. And if reading an ebook isn’t your thing, you can play games using the game buttons on either side of the screen.
I know I’m sounding like a commercial break now but it really is that cool. And rather sweet for a inanimate object. And it has a handle. And it fits in my handbag.
Oh, and did I mention it’s green?
And it has ears. 
The other recent event that impelled me to start my internal blog was last week’s Extreme Blue European Expo at Hursley. Extreme Blue is a student internship program that IBM runs every summer. It lasts 12 weeks. The projects are proposed by IBMers but are implemented by students. The Expos are held in different locations each year, I think, but this year the European one was held in Hursley, UK.
I’d heard a bit about the Hursley-based SiSi project from a friend who was mentoring the team, so I moseyed on down to Hursley House and spent a good hour-and-a-half visiting the Expo stands and hearing about those and other projects from around IBM sites in Europe.
I’ve been learning British Sign Language (BSL) for about a year and, having learnt just the basics about how to communicate in BSL (that is, it’s not just hand signs or fingerspelling but also facial expressions, lip shapes, and the spatial location of the signs that matter), I couldn’t imagine how an avatar could convincingly sign - especially not translated in real time from speech, which is what the SiSi project aimed to do.
The SiSi team’s demo blew me away. They use a third-party piece of software to convert speech input to text. The text is then sent to the client machine (I think) where an avatar signs the text in BSL or American Sign Language (ASL), depending on the language you selected. I can’t remember any more of the technical details than that but the demo text they tried was translated to BSL at a reasonable speed, I thought (probably as fast as a human interpreter). The demo was on a local system but the students reckoned it did okay over remote systems.
The project was done with the University of East Anglia and the RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf people) who supplied the database of signs (which I guess is probably a database of video clips and associated labels). I’m not sure who marked up the signs in Sign Language Markup Language (SLML), a form of XML, but I expect that’s the most intensive part of it.
The great thing for IBM and the Extreme Blue scheme is that, like last year’s LAMA project the SiSi project has attracted loads of press coverage, here and around the world.
SiSi aside, there were loads of other cool projects including (you can probably spot a theme in my interests here!) the Accessibility in Virtual Worlds project. For a change, the virtual world concerned was not Second Life but, instead, Active Worlds. Active Worlds enabled the project team to devise a way to mark up objects around the world using XML so that blind people can walk through the virtual worlds using sonar. The user wears headphones (or has speakers set up) and the nearer something is, I think, the louder the sound (or something like that).
I came away from the Expo with a handful of really professional-looking Moo cards and leaflets from the stands I had time to visit. I think the most amazing thing that occurred to me about the Expo was the amount and quality of work that the students were able to produce in just 12 weeks.
At the beginning of September, I went to the HCI 2007 conference at Lancaster University (in the North of England).
I was Chairing the HCI Practice Day (the Thursday) of the conference so it was all a little bit hectic but still, as usual, a lot of fun.
This year, in line with the times I guess, there was a fair number of papers on Second Life and other virtual environments, including one about BDSM in Second Life. In fact, there was definitely a bit of a trend this year for erotic HCI… (that, as a statement, either makes HCI cool, or it just goes to show that academics can make *anything* boring 
).
There also seemed to be a fair amount about emotions - that is, how we engage with technology; eg why we happily waste an entire evening on Facebook or watching random videos on YouTube. Web2.0 was also in there, of course.
There were also some papers on bluetooth, several (as usual) on eye-tracking, and stuff about Accessibility, usability of the Web, methods of evaluating interface usability, and so on.
IBMers featured quite heavily in the HCI Practice Day (as you might imagine):
- Mark Farmer (IBM Warwick) introduced the IBM Task Modeler tool that he develops (the link takes you to the Task Modeler page on Alphaworks where you can download a copy to try yourself).
- Colin Bird (Master Inventor and Information Architect at IBM Hursley) followed up Mark’s introduction with a presentation about how you can (and we do) use Task Modeler to support information architecture: to model user tasks and create the navigation for information centres.
- Ben Fletcher (Senior Inventor at IBM Hursley) did a great presentation on deafblind technologies, including the possibilities of virtual worlds in supporting deafblind (and deaf or blind) users.
- Me (Technical Author at IBM Hursley) - I was raconteur for Alan Dix’s panel discussing the HCI issues in Web2.0 technologies.
The keynote speaker for HCI Practice Day was Jared Spool (the usability guru who isn’t Jakob Nielsen - and is much better and more credible, IMO) who moved heaven and high water (kind-of) to get here. He did a fantastic presentation that was very very funny and entertaining while being relevant and interesting too. He also attended as many of the other conference sessions as he could and participated by asking questions and making suggestions.
In fact, all the keynote speakers were great this year. Sometimes keynotes fly in, do their thang, then collect their expenses and go. All three (the others being Stephen Payne from Manchester Uni and Elizabeth Churchill from Yahoo!) all got involved in the conference, especially Elizabeth who was able to stay for the whole conference and seemed to be on every discussion panel going!
You can get the full proceedings of HCI 2007 (and, at some point, previous HCI conferences too) from the BCS eWIC site.
As a delegate, I also got the full proceedings as pdfs on a funky little USB drive, which I like.
It’s not long now until the call for papers will go out for HCI 2008 (to be held in Liverpool, City of Culture). If this blog is still active by then, I’ll post the call here. I encourage you to get involved in HCI - it’s more than user interface design or usability; it’s also about being innovative in how to design technologies for human beings.
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