Spark, the KDE-ish tablet, up for pre-sale

by Michael in

Preorder at makeplaylive.com

The Spark is a new tablet based on the open source Mer and KDE's Plasma project. As someone who always did prefer KDE to Gnome (especially back in my linux-as-primary-OS days), I've been fascinated by the Plasma project so it's nice to see an interesting project making use of it.

The tablet has modest hardware:



  • 7 Inch multi-touch capacitive screen

  • 1 GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor with Mali 400 GPU

  • 512 MB DDR2 RAM

  • 4 GB Nand Flash Disk

  • Wireless Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g (3G via USB Extenal)

  • 1.3 MP built-in front facing camera

  • HDMI 1080P Output

  • 2 USB ports

  • MicroSD slot

  • 3.5 mm audio jack

  • Hardware volume and power buttons

  • 4 dimensional Gsensor

  • Battery: 3000mAH @ 7.4v

  • Weight: 355 grams



I'd take one for free/cheap to mess around with. I'm looking forward to when this begins getting into the hands of users and we can start seeing thorough usability impressions.

→ Mountain Lion

by Michael in

Mountain Lion

John Gruber was one of just a few Apple watchers brought in for 1-on-1 meetings with Phil Schiller (Apple's Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing) last week to discuss the next release of OS X and receive a preview build of the OS.

Gruber addresses the potential implications of such an odd non-event event well, but this part struck me:

And then the reveal: Mac OS X — sorry, OS X — is going on an iOS-esque one-major-update-per-year development schedule.

Gruber addresses the issue of Apple finally having the resources to give both iOS and OS X this kind of attention now (OS X 10.5 was delayed because the original iPhone's development strained Apple's resources).

The thing he doesn't mention is how this rapid release cycle for the core computing OS will be something we haven't seen in proprietary desktop OSes before. It's akin to first Chrome and now Firefox being on 6 week development cycles. Many will probably complain that each major release isn't as significant as prior ones, but this rapid release cycle will allow quicker release and polishing of new releases as well as easier course correction of a development is seen as a misstep. Previously we'd only really seen this on the desktop OS side in Linux distributions (Ubuntu famously releases two version bumps a year), but in the Linux world the distribution vendors are often restricted by development of tens or hundreds of external open source products which make up the whole.

It's an interesting time in the world of operating systems, that's for sure.

→ Apple, Suppliers Test Tablet With Smaller Screen

by Michael in

Apple, Suppliers Test Tablet With Smaller Screen

Wall Street Journal:

Apple, which works with suppliers to test new designs all the time, could opt not to proceed with the device.

That's really the only important part of the article. Of course Apple is testing tablets with smaller screens. Just as Apple is certainly constantly testing phones of 3 or 4 different sizes. It's unlikely anyone in the industry tests as thoroughly as Apple does. Testing doesn't necessarily indicate intent to bring to market. Anyone who proposes without real inside knowledge (which no one outside of Apple's upper management has) that Apple will introduce one soon would--if Apple did so--be right only by coincidence rather than by insight.

Having multiple sizes of the same device always brings a cost--especially for iOS. Android, like Mac OS X and Windows, is not made for fixed resolutions so new screen sizes and resolution scan easily be thrown around within reason. iOS, however, only runs at 3 resolutions to date, one of which is exactly quadruple another--allowing for design elements to stay exactly the same physical size. iOS only has two target UI sizes right now. The trade-off between the two approaches is simple: design consistency and sharpness (iOS) versus display size flexibility (others). Introducing a new larger phone or smaller tablet will mean current apps will have comparatively poor usability (Apps designed for a 9.7" iPad will end up having extremely small touch targets on an 8" or 7" tablet--or apps designed for an iPhone will just be less clear than what people are used to and have oddly large touch elements), so if optimized apps are possible to make at all it will introduce yet another design target.

These issues aren't necessarily insurmountable. If Apple introduces more physical sizes for its touch screen devices, it will be because it decided the usability / interface fragmentation sacrifice is less significant than the gains provided by a new size OR they've figured out a way around the problem. Anything is possible, so Apple certainly could introduce a new size touch device, but simply testing sizes is not evidence at all.

(For the record: I think a scaled up iPod Touch at 7" would probably be more usable than a scaled down iPad, but I can't exactly test such a thing. Even then, it would certainly be awkward for many iPod Touch / iPhone apps and definitely not optimal for the size.)

Tweetbot 2.0 and Tweetbot for iPad

by Michael in

A few months ago Twitter ruined the native iOS application. It was a sad day, as the official app was once known as Tweetie and was an app many iOS apps looked to as an example of great design. (Loren Brichter, the developer of Tweetie, introduced the "pull to refresh" concept used by numerous applications in his initial release.)

At that point I switched to Tweetbot ($3), and have been very happy with it on the iPhone. Well, today tapbots (the developer) released version 2.0. At first I was a bit nervous after my experience with the official client, but my fear was unfounded. The app is even more usable than before.

The official Tweetbot 2.0 blog post indicates a few new features:

  • Updated timeline view
    • Image thumbnails in timeline
    • Links now colored and single-tappable
    • “Retweeted by” bar now integrated and tappable
    • Cell colors adjusted for better contrast
  • New direct message view.
  • Redesigned “New Tweets” bar (Can be dismissed by tap and configured in Settings > Display)
  • Timed auto-refresh (timeline, mentions, and DM’s will refresh every 5 minutes)
  • Readability added as mobilizer service
  • Much improved tweet replies view
  • Links in user’s bio now tappable
  • “Huge” font size option in Settings > Display
  • Improved scrolling performance

The inline image thumbnails make a much bigger difference than I would have thought. Meanwhile many smaller tweaks like presentation of @ mentions and a new tweets counter at the top of the timeline add little hints of additional usability in areas I didn't realize were lacking. Tweetbot didn't need to get any better, but it did anyway.

The even bigger announcement today was Tweetbot for iPad. It looks like a great conversion of a great app. While I appreciated the official Twitter app launch release for iPad when it originally came out, it was plagued with many small usability issues that became magnified the longer the app went without any improvements to areas in which it has clearly been lacking. I easily made the decision to buy Tweetbot for iPad for $3 and deleted the official app before my new client even finished downloading.

An added bonus is that using Tweetbot on both devices allows me to finally use the Tweet Marker service to synchronize my position in my timeline and @ mentions.

With all this said, I'm still perfectly happy with the official Twitter app for OS X--aside from my desire to see it use Tweet Marker as well. If I could get a client essentially identical to Twitter for OS X with Tweet Marker added, I'd be golden.

 

Links:

Tweetbot for iPhone

Tweetbot for iPad