It’s not exactly a secret that I have issues with Gartner and their hype cycle. When I was at IBM Research it would drive me crazy when someone would quote Gartner to try to prove that some technology or other was important. To summarize: since all Gartner really does it ask a bunch of technology companies what they think is next, quoting Gartner at a technology company doesn’t prove anything. You’re really just going with the group think du jour.
Having done my PhD studying virtual reality and 3D interaction, I tend to regard their hype cycle as particularly laughable. Lots of technologies, like VR, go around and around the circle (funny how Gartner draws their cycle as a line, as if technologies always progress from start to finish along it) from inflated expectations to disillusionment without going further. Depending on how you count, VR is on roughly the 4th cycle, and based on the job changes I see from folks I know at Facebook the current hype is dying down pretty quickly. Still other technologies are a flash in the pan, being hyped once and vanishing altogether.
And yet somehow the much hyped hype cycle endures, people quickly forgetting what last year’s predictions were in the excitement over what technologies might be about to break through on this cycle. So it was refreshing to see someone go back and look through all of the hype cycles published since 1995 to see how they fared. Short version: not well. Color me shocked.
We replaced our old TiVo a month or so back. The previous one had lasted forever (I’m pretty sure we got it around 2009), but it was starting to experience playback issues and at this point I’m pretty sure we got our money’s worth out of it. So I went ahead and ordered a TiVo BOLT.
Previously I’ve had really good experiences with both TiVo hardware and software (witness the previous TiVo that lasted forever in technology-years). But the BOLT setup experience was awful. It’s much more dependent on network access than our old model, and its feedback when errors is downright awful. Its customer service has seriously gone downhill as well.
The problems started when first setting up the device. During setup it successfully connected to our wireless network, but then it kept complaining that our network must be firewalling it’s access to TiVo’s servers. Except, nope, no firewall. I both checked the router and confirmed with Comcast. A call to TiVo’s customer support was useless: they kept wanting me to access the network settings on the TiVo home screen, except that I couldn’t complete setup to access the home screen because setup requires a successful network connection. Great design, TiVo! I gave up on that rep and tried another, and ended up in the same place. Clearly TiVo is now outsourcing their customer service to a low cost provider (I’m guessing India based on the accents) and providing a useless trouble-shooting script where reps have no idea how to help if a problem falls outside that script.
I should mention at this point that our previous TiVo had been connecting to our wireless network for years in the same spot with zero problems. And WiFi was clearly more of an afterthought for it: we started out with a phone connection for it to download program information (told you it was old), and bought the external WiFi connector for it a couple of years after getting the box. So I was pretty sure the issue was not our network.
Finally I gave up, dug out an old TV, and set up the TiVo box right next to our router with a hardline connection. Now I managed to complete setup, and after installing a software update I managed to get a wireless connection working as well. One small problem: the wireless radio in the BOLT clearly sucks. It could establish a solid connection only over very short distances and with a clear line of sight to the router. Put it back where the old TiVo was, and suddenly it started dropping the connection (and complaining about being firewalled) 80-90% of the time.
I will admit that our router is not the most technically advanced. For the last few years we’ve just been using our Comcast cable modem to provide WiFi. Yeah, it’s not the greatest, but it’s been good enough. Our TV and a Mac mini connect to our WiFi in that same spot without problem, and our mobile devices don’t have any issues in that room. At this point I gave up in frustration and, after playing around a bit with our router’s channel assignments, decided to just live with the sucky connection. It was a close call, though; I almost decided to give up on TiVo, return the damn thing, and just make do with live TV and streaming (our consumption of recorded content had been declining for years anyway).
Use of a BOLT with an unreliable network connection, however, is a death of 1,000 cuts. Remember how I mentioned that the BOLT is more dependent on a network connection than our old TiVo? Yeah, apparently TiVo no longer believes in caching data. Which is kind of ironic given how much more space the latest boxes have to cache data. The BOLT will download and use scheduling data, but program details are pretty much all accessed on the fly. Want to search for a show to set up a pass or record it? Requires a network connection. Want to look at a program’s details to tell it to record or give it a thumbs up? Network connection (ok, from some-but-not-all screens).
I’d been curious about setting up a mesh network in our home for awhile; in general our wireless worked ok, but connections had always been a bit slow in the back bedrooms. And I’d heard good things both about the setup experience and WiFi quality of the eero. After putting up with the lousy TiVo connectivity for a month or so, I finally caved and ordered a base station and two beacons from Amazon.
The eero definitely earns the praise it’s received for it’s simple set-up process. Install the mobile app, plug the base station into your cable modem, specify the name you want for your network, and you’re off. The app connects to the base station automatically for you, so there’s no need to open up a browser and type in the IP address of your router. And the app and base station had WiFi up and running within a minute or two with essentially no additional work on part.
Setting up the beacons was similarly easy. Plug one in (I’m amused that the beacons also double as night lights), wait for the app to detect it, then have the eero test the connectivity to the beacon. If the connection is good you’re done, otherwise the app recommends how to reposition the beacon. I had one placement work right away, while I had to reposition the second beacon once before the app was satisfied with its placement.
The eero also makes updating easy. The app notified me of an available update, and with one tap the eero downloaded and installed the update.
Since getting the eero, our network has been noticeably faster and the coverage is significantly better. The BOLT now has a reliable connection. The bedrooms get a strong connection. I’ve noticed two cases where walking around the house while using the network caused short hitches (presumably from transitioning between the beacon coverage zones), but in both cases the connection quickly resumed.
After living with it for a week, I’d say that, while the eero is more expensive than other mesh networking offerings, the ease of use and reliability it offers has made it worth the price of admission so far. And the obvious care and attention that went into the design and implementation of the setup experience is orders of magnitude better than TiVo’s latest setup experience.
Besides activity tracking, the other thing smart watches are really useful for is keeping track of notifications. Feel (or hear) an incoming notification, glance to see what it’s about, then get on with what you were doing (or interrupt what you were doing to handle the interrupt). For email, though, I want one additional step. I can usually tell just from the sender, subject, and first couple of lines of a message whether it’s something I want to handle (either immediately or later) or immediately delete. And it’s surprising to me that current watches still often make the latter more difficult than it needs to be.
The Apple Watch is, frankly, bad at supporting fast delete of email messages. If you want to delete a message, you need to scroll all the way to the bottom of the notification to access the option to delete it. Maybe the watchOS developers need to read an entire message to decide whether they should delete it, but I don’t. If they want to keep swiping left to access a Clear option (I’d happily trade it for delete), how about letting me swipe right to delete? Pull down on the message to reveal a delete option? Either would be way faster.
Samsung’s Gear watches provide access to fast delete if it’s available as an action on the notification. So you can quickly delete a Gmail message with two taps: tap on the side to open the menu, then tap delete. But for reasons that escape me, delete is not available as an option for messages received with the built-in email application. Which Samsug provides. So, y’know, they could very easily address the lack. And they should.
Maybe they’re both leaving it as a new feature to call out for future software releases. Here’s hoping.
In order to keep tabs on both the iOS and Android ecosystems, I split my time between a Galaxy Note 5 + Gear S3 and an iPhone 7 Plus (yes, I like larger phones) + Apple Watch. I also bike to work daily and like to keep track of my rides (why is somewhat of an open question; it’s not like I’m trying to set speed records or anything).
The Gear S3 and Apple Watch have different philosophies for how to track my activities. The Apple Watch expects me to track all my workouts manually. Want to track a ride to or from work? You’ve got to manually start tracking the workout before you leave. And you’ve got to remember to stop it once you arrive at your destination. The failure modes are obvious: get thinking about something else (maybe a technical challenge you’re working on) and forget to start tracking, and your workout doesn’t exist. Or forget to stop tracking, and suddenly your ride home is twice its actual time.
The Gear S3 has a different philosophy. You can still start and stop tracking a workout manually, but the Gear S3 will also detect when you’ve started a workout and initiate tracking for you. And it’s pretty reliable: I can’t think of a single time that the watch has failed to detect when I start cycling, or when it’s thought I was cycling when I wasn’t (false positives and negatives, for those of you playing along at home). No more need to remember to start tracking your workout. The Gear S3 will also detect when the workout has ended and stop tracking for you. And that’s where it gets a little sticky. The watch doesn’t want to end the workout just because you’ve stopped moving; you might be stopped at a traffic light on a ride. So it typically takes it a minute or two before it decides you’ve really stopped your workout. It does try to then calculate back to determine when the workout really ended, but it’s still often off by a minute or so.
What I really want is a hybrid behavior. Autodetect the start of a workout; that’s really useful. But provide a manual method to stop a detected workout (as well as an autodetecting the end; that’s useful in case I forget). Strangely the Gear S3 doesn’t currently provide a way to manually end an autodetected workout, even though you can manually stop a workout you start yourself. With that one simple addition, the Gear S3 would provide workout tracking that I’d strongly prefer to Apple’s purely manual approach.
Of course, that’s for my commute ride. For running, I like the Apple Watch more than the Gear S3. That’s largely a size / weight issue, though. I helped out with some user tests of the Gear Fit 2, and it was actually better than both for comfort while running. But for general use I prefer the watch form factor.
So there you have it: human + AI would beat human alone and AI alone for tracking workouts. But then, I’ve long argued that AI + HCI can be better than either alone.
It’s been over 4 years since I blogged on this site. Part of that is just being busy, with both work and personal life. Part of it is also caution. The work I do for the Think Tank Team is highly confidental, and since my thoughts on technology are often wrapped up with what I’m working on I didn’t want to potentially cross any boundaries.
But I’ve started to miss writing (although not academic paper writing; I’m so glad I don’t do that anymore), so I thought I’d try to get back into it and see how it goes. Let’s see, shall we?
I’ve been reading two different Kindle Serials for the past week or so. A Kindle Serial is, in essence, a story published as a series of episodes; you buy the serial up front (they tend to be cheap; $1.99 seems to be the standard price) and then episodes automagically show up every couple of weeks as the author writes them. They harken back to old newspaper serials such as The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo.
While I like the theory behind bringing back serialized novels (it seems like fun, right? Get new sections of the story delivered regularly, building suspense as you wait for each new episode), in practice I have to confess they’re not as fun as I thought. Two reasons. One, I’m an impatient bastard and don’t like waiting. That wouldn’t be a major issue by itself, but the second reason is that I’ve usually always got a backlog of things I want to read. If I run out of episodes for a Serial I’ll switch to reading something else while waiting for the next episode. And when the next episode arrives I’ll probably be deep in that new book and it won’t be a good time to switch back to the Serial. So it’ll be awhile before I get back to it, at which point I may have forgotten some of the details for what was going on.
In short, I suspect Serials worked better when people didn’t have such easy access to so many great things to read. Good for the 1800s, problematic for today. I’ll finish out these two Serials, but I suspect I won’t buy any new ones. Unless I get them right before the last episode or two, at which point they might be complete by the time I near the end.
I posted my review of the Pebble watch two weeks ago. In my review I indicated that it would be nice if the Pebble gave you quick way to respond to notifications (“Ok”, “Busy”, etc.). But after a couple more weeks of living with the watch the two actions I really want to be able to take on email notifications are:
- Dismiss notification (which we currently have)
- Delete email message
Turns out that I get a fair number of email addresses where I can determine right from the watch notification whether I need to actually read the message later or whether I can delete it without looking at it further. Right now the latter case, which is more of my email than I expected, requires acknowledging the notification on the watch and then later deleting the message on my phone. One touch delete from the phone on email message notifications would save me a bunch of follow-up work. Hopefully they’ll include that ability in a future update.
I was an early backer of the Pebble e-ink watch on Kickstarter, so I’ve now had my watch for a bit over 4 weeks. After using it nearly continuous for that time (with a short break for a vacation), I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the experience. In fact, I’ll share two reviews of the Pebble, since right now it offers a drastically different experience for iOS and Android.
I own and use both iOS (an iPhone 4) and Android (a Galaxy S3) phones in order to keep tabs on the user experiences offered by each platform. I typically split my time between them, choosing which to carry based on my expected needs on any given day. When I received my Pebble watch I chose to pair it with my iPhone first, so I’ll begin there.
The Pebble watch with iOS
In theory the Pebble should offer a great experience with iOS. It essentially ties into notifications at the operating system level, which means that setup is simple and should in theory allow receiving notifications across apps on iOS. And when you set it up at first it does exactly that. Plus you can use it to control music playback, act on calls, etc.
There’s just one problem: there appears a bug in iOS such that if your phone even temporarily loses the Bluetooth connection to the watch you have to manually toggle your notifications for each app off and back on in order to resume receiving notifications. So during that week the pattern I’d see over and over is that I’d get notifications on the watch for the first hour or two, and then suddenly I’d stop receiving them. It’d take me a bit to notice, and then I’d have to go in and toggle my notifications. That’d be good for another hour or two, and then…
So while in theory using the Pebble with an iOS device should be great, in practice it was downright annoying. And it’s not the Pebble team’s fault; they’re more or less at the mercy of Apple fixing the iOS bug, unless the team can figure out an application-level fix in the interim. And that’s going to be a challenge given the sandboxing in iOS. At the end of a week using the watch with iOS I was ready to write the watch off as “not ready for prime time”. But then I switched to pairing Pebble with my S3…
The Pebble watch with Android
Pebble’s integration with Android is a bit kludgier. Rather than tying into notifications at the operating system level, Pebble is instead largely accessing notifications on an application-by-application basis. And in some cases accessing data directly; you need to provide the Android Pebble app with your email credentials to allow it to check for and provide notifications for your email.
Despite that kludginess (and the hesitation over providing the app with your login credentials), notifications are rock solid when the Pebble is paired with an Android device. I can’t remember a case where I heard an audio notification for email on my phone and didn’t have the notification pop up on the watch a few seconds later. And after a couple of weeks of using the watch with Android I really like the fast access to notifications that it provides.
Although I sometimes wear the watch on weekends, I primarily use it on weekdays. And there are a lot of cases (getting our daughter ready for school, taking public transit, meetings, getting work done) where I don’t want to pull my phone out but still want to be able to easily glance to see what a notification is about. In my case I actually need to see the contents for an item maybe 5% of the time, so the main advantage of the Pebble is to allow me to quickly (2-3 seconds) determine that I don’t need to pay any more attention to an item. The interaction reminds me of Ben Shneiderman’s contention that one way to design an effective user interface is to allow users to say “no” as quickly as possible.
The interactions that the Pebble supports are currently limited; you’re essentially restricted to acknowledging notifications. And in some cases it might be nice to be able quickly respond to notifications with canned messages: ok, busy, etc. But those are edge cases for my usage patterns, and since the Pebble team is actively adding functionality and will eventually open the watch to 3rd party developers I expect we’ll see the watch gain those capabilities down the road. But I don’t the current experiences suffers much from the lack.
There are two gaps that I’d like to see the Pebble team remedy quickly. First, the Pebble just shows the most recent notification; there’s no way to navigate between notifications if you get several at once. Second, there’s no way to check the current power level of the watch. After having the battery die while I was at work one day I now try to recharge the watch every 5 days or so to avoid that happening again. A current power level display in the Settings menu would address that issue. In general, though, charging the watch isn’t a big issue. Although I did decide not to bring the watch on a 5 day vacation because I didn’t want to tote around yet another cable.
Since the Pebble requires a Bluetooth connection there is a hit to battery life on the phone as well; my S3 probably ends up with 5-10% less battery at the end of the day. But since Android sucks at power management anyway I already have to charge my S3 daily, so it hasn’t really been an issue. It was more of a problem for iOS, since I could get 2 days of battery life out of my iPhone 4 and had to moving to daily charging when I had the Pebble paired with it.
So after roughly 2 weeks of actively using the Pebble with my S3 I really like how the watch augments my experience. Enough so that I’ve switched to primarily carrying the S3 during the day so that I don’t have to give up those notifications. If you’re thinking about getting a Pebble and plan on pairing it with an Android device, I strongly recommend it. If you’re thinking about pairing it with an iOS device, however, I’d probably wait until Apple fixes the iOS bug or the Pebble team figures out a workaround.
I can’t resist adding that my personal opinion is that the future of wearable computing looks more like the Pebble than it goes like Google’s Glass. A watch is inconspicuous, and it remains out of the way unless you explicitly glance at it, meaning that it doesn’t interfere when you’re not actively using it. It’s still fast to access, though; glancing at it requires just looking down and turning your wrist. Contrast that with Glass, which remains a distraction in your peripheral vision even you’re not actively using it.
The Pebble watch: Recommended (for Android)
Amazon opened it’s new AutoRip service. In a nutshell: for eligible albums (read: where the content providers let them) that you bought since 1998 (and going forward) they’re automatically adding a digital copy of the album for you to their Cloud Player.
I had three reactions upon hearing the announcement:
- That’s pretty dang cool. I got approximately 40 albums added to Cloud Player as a result of this service, broadening the set of music I can easily access across any of my devices. Of course, it’s not perfect; it added a number of albums I’d actually bought as gifts for other people, since they can’t distinguish between stuff you kept and stuff you gave away (although a mechanism to transfer ownership to someone else’s Cloud Player would be nice).
- I can’t believe the content providers agreed to let them do it. Actual useful functionality agreed to by the music companies? I wonder what the terms of the agreement Amazon worked out are.
- Having been given an inch, I immediately want a mile. Similar access to digital versions of movies I’ve bought on DVD would be awesome. Access to ebook versions of books I’ve bought from Amazon would be even better. Heck, I’d even consider a limited service charge per book for the sheer convenience of access to much of my library in digital form. I suspect I’ll have to keep hoping for that one for awhile, though. Book publishers are sadly still working out that whole DRM thing…
Last weekend, as part of our ongoing quest to catch up on things we think we should do as good Californians, we finally made it to Alcatraz (courtesy of my wonderful wife, who gave me the tickets as a Christmas present). I’d been agitating to go for awhile, but my wife was lukewarm and my daughter downright reluctant (although amusingly the latter ended up having a blast and really wants to go again).
All I really knew about Alcatraz before visiting was that it was a maximum security prison for a time (obviously) and that it had previously served as a military fort. And that it’s prominent in the Bay, visible from many points within San Francisco.
The National Park Service contracts with Alcatraz Cruises for transportation to the island. I knew the National Park Service has been pushing on more sustainable energy use, but I found it interesting how far they’ve gotten with Alcatraz (although in retrospect it probably shouldn’t have been too surprising that they’re further along near San Francisco…). Several of the Alcatraz Cruises boats are fitted with both wind turbines and solar panels, and those boats also have batteries that they can charge using landlines when docked. In addition, they’ve put solar panels on the old Alcatraz Island power plant to provide an alternate power source to the plant’s diesel generators (and as far as I could tell the generators were not running on our visit.
You arrive at the island’s dock, the only easy way on or off the island, and immediately get a quick briefing from an NPS ranger. The short version is essentially “stay out of blocked off areas, walking tours times are posted, and the path to the cell block is that way”. Unfortunately we missed the walking tours (our tour time was 12:45, and at least on the day we went the walking tours were earlier in the day); apparently on ranger or volunteer-led tours you can visit parts of the island that are otherwise off limits.
Building 64, the main building at the dock, is partially a Civil War-era building with (in places) 10 foot thick walls. There’s a small bookstore, some exhibits about life on the island, and a short (roughly 15 minute) film from the Discovery Channel that provides an overview of Alcatraz. It’s worth catching as a quick overview of the different eras of Alcatraz.
Roughly speaking Alcatraz has four eras of interest. The first is its use as a military fort (and eventually military prison), starting roughly in 1853. There are still signs of the original military era construction, particular on the lower levels of some of the island’s buildings (in additional to Building 64, the cellblock is build on the old fort’s citadel, which must cause all sorts of interesting civil engineering challenges.
The second era was its use as a federal penitentiary from the 1930s to the 1960s. This era is obviously Alcatraz’s most famous, most of the construction dates from this era, and the audio tour focuses on this period.
The third period was roughly 18 months between 1969 and 1971 when the island was occupied by Native American protesters from several tribes protesting, and drawing attention to, the ongoing mistreatment of their people. While I initially thought the protest was a rather minor thing, apparently it actually had a noticeable impact on public opinion and led to a number of government policy changes toward the Native Americans. I also discovered that damage to a number of buildings (the warden’s house, lighthouse keeper’s house, and the recreation hall) date to a fire that occurred in 1970 (during the occupation), rather than a simple combination of time and weather.
I must admit that I do find it amusing that the graffiti added to the buildings is now considered historical, the extent that the NPS appears to have re-applied the graffiti after repainting the island’s water tower.
The last period was its use as a National Park (part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area) since the 1970s. In addition to preserving the historical buildings, the NPS has also been working to restore the gardens and protect the island’s wildlife. Alcatraz is now home to a fair number of nesting birds, to the extent that the NPS actually blocks off access to parts of the island during nesting season. The island is thus a good place to see, in the right seasons, gulls, cormorants, pelicans, night-crowned herons, snowy egrets, and other birds.
I personally wanted to see the island both because I was curious about the prison’s history (and the tour did not disappoint, providing both a glimpse of life at the prison and details about some of the escape attempts) and because I found the three-dimensional arrangement and structure of the buildings on the island so interesting. If Alcatraz were just a flat 2D plain it would be rather boring, but instead buildings and paths are tucked everywhere they would fit. I would imagine that there are also a number of hidden passages, likely build during the island’s military days, to support hidden troop movements between parts of the island.
I was definitely not disappointed; my biggest regret was that we didn’t have even more time to look around (we got to the island around 1 and the last boat back was at 4:25). But since my daughter had such a good time I’m pretty sure I can talk her into going back. In future trips I’m curious to catch some of the walking tours, and one of these days I’d like to do one of the night tours. I bet the Rock in the dark is quite a different experience.
jeff pierce 