Author: James Kebinger

New MBTA website: wow!

The MBTA today unveiled their new web site, and all I can say is wow. Its way more than I would have expected out of them (this is a site where the outages page was updated by hand editing before). Theres a clean and modern new look, plus an array of new, useful tools.

Theres a revamped trip planner integrated with google maps, with “suggest” for landmarks when you type (which doesn’t work quite right yet..)

My favorite, and the most impressive is the new My MBTA feature which allows one to save planned routes and sign up for customized alerts. (but I’m not sure if they email them). There’s a hidden, unlinked tool (with the old look) called VIP Alerts that seems to let one do email and sms alerts.

UPDATE: It looks like the MBTA didn’t like people using the t-alert system before it was public so they took it down.

There’s another tool that isn’t linked up yet (it’s commented out in the source, I wonder why?) is system schedules for your ipod.

Hyperopia

The New York Times Magazine had its annual year in ideas issue this past sunday – one of my favorites was Hyperopia, which is the idea that in the short term, one feels guilty for not getting enough “stuff” done, but over the long term, one looks back and wishes he or she had more fun back then.

This is on my mind as I finish off a class (man machine system design) where I really haven’t learned much and the assignments are so long that the professor has to be a sadist of some kind, as I try to figure out what I’ll take next semester (the evening class pickings are lame) and why I’m getting a master’s degree in computer science the first place.

Bucking the left to right convention

Tufts Health Plan (no relation to the school) made an poor design choice for guiding people through multistep processes on their website. The convention for wizards has been left to right just about forever; the button for continue should be on the right, and back/cancel should be on the left. Combine that with the same mapping for back and forward in web browsers and I’m pretty sure the mental model most users have of this activity is left to right. So much for stimulus-response compatibility here:

tuftswizard.png

Tivo DRM Broken. Hurray!

I salute Jeremy Drake for providing a platform-independent mechanism to decode Tivo video files. What I like most about the code he released is that it’s not a crack per se, as it still requires the Tivo’s password (as did the windows-only tivo software). You don’t let people have what they want (and should have been given) long enough, they’re going to take it.
The cat’s been out of the bag for a while anyways, it was just more difficult and required windows and direct show dump to get files decode so they could be (lawfully) played on the mac.

I love tivo, but they’ve been teasing the mac community with unfulfilled promises of tivo to go support for at least a year now. I’ve never understood their reasoning for this; of course the windows user base is bigger, but I’d guess the percentage of tivo owners who use macs are higher than the general population mac percentage. Mac users seem more willing (and perhaps able?) to pay a bit more for a better user experience. Now that cable companies are releasing cable boxes with DVR capability, I would think Tivo would want to cater more to this community of people with higher expectations, not less.

While I’m talking Tivo, I can’t see how the company is going to be around for many more years. Cable companies DVRs aren’t as good as Tivo’s, but there’s a lot of people who’ve never used a Tivo and don’t know what their missing. Then there’s this whole Tivo Series 3 debacle; $800 for an HD DVR that doesn’t let users do anything more than a cable company DVR – there’s no tivo to go for example. Why would someone who’s just dropped a couple of grand on an HD set up not be willing to get the cable company’s box for no money up front and less money per month?

Then again, people have been predicting the death of Tivo for years, so who knows what will happen?

Books: Rails for Java Developers

I’ve been reading the beta copies of Rails for Java developers and really enjoying them so far. The book starts off moving through the ruby language feature by feature and comparing them to the features of Java, which is a great way to apply what you know to learning something new. Things continue in this manner through comparisons of ruby’s ActiveRecord to Hibernate, rails’ ActionController to struts, and so on. All the while the authors strike the right balance between fun asides and getting to the point (some books can try way too hard to be entertaining and fall flat).

I haven’t actually written a Ruby on Rails application before or since reading the book, so I can’t comment on the completeness of the material, but I can actually read Ruby now and write some short scripts so that’s a start. This is more than I can say about some of the online materials I’ve read about ruby.

If you’re familiar with java and would like to learn more about Ruby and Rails definately pick up a copy of this book. You might even learn a thing or two about java in the process.

Credit where credit is due: i originally found out about this book due to this blog post (which said a lot of what i just said..)

Constraints, friend or foe?

I’ve seen several places that sing the praises of building something under some kind of constraint, including this article at the always excellent Creaating Passionate Users blog. Checking out everyone’s projects in the “lab” session of my class reminded me of this.

The assignment was to build two version of a weather forecast reading tool for a hypothetical phone – one really basic, the other with some better automation features. One just had to be able to enter a zip code and click through seven days of weather. There weren’t many details given, and no requirement on the type of implementation (this is an engineering psychology class so there are lots of non-programmers).

I looked at the assignment and saw the requirement to type in a zip code and immediately discarded the idea of using powerpoint, reasoning that powerpoint faking of entering text via phone button pushes would require hundreds of slides. So I moved to flash; which was good practice, and I got to test out an open source framework in the process (ASAP Framework). The majority of the class turned in perfectly adequate workflow prototypes in powerpoint. How did they do that?

They embraced constraints.

Key constraint: entering an arbitrary zip code isn’t the point because we’re not really finding the weather. This simplifies things tremendously, and I can’t believe that didn’t occur to me. The power point projects only allowed one zip code to be entered (ie the “3” button was the only link active on one slide which would link to the next slide that would show a three entered) which was fine because the usability test task could be given as “find the weather for zipcode 12345”.

Embracing that constraint reduces the complexity tremendously and allowed people to concentrate on the work flow (and in some cases beauty) of their apps, while I was futzing around with flash. I’m able to (and indeed prefer) to prototype in tools more powerful than Powerpoint, so I immediately brought the big guns to bear, never having paused to think about the tradeoffs one might make at little cost to make it possible to do a reasonable fidelity prototype in powerpoint.

I do find building these prototypes in powerpoint incredibly tedious because of the drudgery involved in creating hyperlinks between all the frames as compared to writing some scripts. Good programmers are “lazy” in that they’d rather take time to automate something than do a task manually, but there’s obviously got to be a repetition threshold under which it would actually be faster to do the work manually than invest more time in building a more robust, automated solution. This project probably fell on the keep it manual side of that line.

At least my on screen cursor eased in and out of position. Can’t do that in powerpoint! (or can you?)

Kickball Miracle no more

The dream is over – my team lost tonight in the second round of the playoffs – too many errors, not enough runs. We started a comback in the top of the 5th with three runs in, but alas, it was not enough. At least we have the one win to look back at in the long offseason :).

I did have fun reffing the game after ours though – I called a tight strike zone because I’d rather see lots of kicking than a pitchers-duel any day of the week. The teams certainly came through for me. One of the teams scored 11 runs one inning. Fun to watch.