TechnoCloud

This morning’s check of my RSS feeds produced a pleasant surprise. Google Reader’s previously rather ugly design has had a winter spring-clean with the heavy blue backgrounds toned down or replaced with a sprinkling of seasonal white snow.

Changes in design to heavily used sites or applications are not for the faint-hearted and are a common way of upsetting your most loyal users. RSS feed consumption is about speed and familiarity of the layout, but the redesign has addressed many of my grumbles.

Collapsable menus to decide what’s important to me on the page, not to Google. A cleaner, simpler design, easier on the eye. More white may be a design cliche, but it works.

The only real remaining grumble is that the ‘home’ page still looks cluttered and an area where Google of all people should know that less is more. I’d like to be able to configure the homepage to remove the recommendations, collapse the starred/shared items and select which feeds appear as defaults on the page.

Over the last few months, there has been increasing levels of buzz around user interface. From Microsoft’s Surface to the wii and iPhone, the trend is clear - the humble mouse and keyboard/keypad’s dominance are likely to fade as more intuitive and ultimately ‘human’ forms of interaction emerge into the mainstream through touch, motion and voice.

Therefore, it was particularly interesting to get a sneak preview of the next version of Windows which included many of the user interface innovations shown in the Microsoft Surface. Indeed, given the success of the iPhone, how long until we see this functionality coming to Macs?

Below is an early demo of the new Windows 7 OS in action:

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7

Deep in TechnoCloud Towers is a room which I use to showcase consumer technology. This allows colleagues to familiarise themselves with the home entertainment gadgets that their budget or interests wouldn’t normally bring them into contact with.

There’s no doubt which two gadgets excite the most interest - the Apple TV and the Wii.

For all its limitations, Apple TV has a wonderfully intuitive user interface that people ‘get’ first time round. Simple, elegant and no manual required, it’s in theory a good mass market proposition, even though it’s shown few signs of breaking into the mass market…

The wii impresses in a different way. It’s always interesting to see the energy levels rise as soon as you show the motion sensor controller. It brings out the kid in almost everyone as they at first shyly and then with abandon launch themselves into Wii Sports, after a basic explanation of the principles behind the controller.

As the iPhone and potentially the Microsoft Surface are likewise showing, user interface design on consumer technology devices remains in its early phases as more intuitive and satisfying ways emerge to issue commands. That TV remote is already starting to feel pretty dated…

When I first heard we were having a talk from Martin Fowler, I assumed that the Eastenders crew were paying us a visit. In fact, we got the enterprise software design guru rather than James Alexandrou’s most famous creation.

In an impressively off-the-cuff talk, he gave his opinion on the history and direction of enterprise software design, which reaffirmed my belief that simple common sense is one of the most valuable qualities in business.

Among my takeaways as a non programmer:

- Make whatever you design reversible, e.g. Object Orientated Programming

- Design (software) and code at the same time

- Stay technology agnostic, keeping to general principles

- Look backwards, not forwards: The role of technology gurus is spreading awareness and take up of existing technologies rather than the dangerous game of trying to second guess where individual technologies will go

- Communication, communication, communication: Find a common language to communicate with your stakeholders and involve them often and early.

- Drink lots of water when you’re speaking…

Visual recognition is one of the significant challenges facing search as the scale of multimedia content on the web grows. It is relatively straightforward to extract text and even audio, but the variables involved in visual recognition mean that a human eye remains the best judge of a successful search. The likes of Blinkx, Riya and eVision are trying to change that but it remains early days.

Interesting then to see the Retrievr experimental service. It allows you to draw a Paint-style sketch or upload an image and then to search a selected group of ‘most interesting’ Flickr images for matches. Rather than object recognition, e.g. find ‘chairs’, it works by searching for related blocks of colour and overall shapes (see pretty accurate results for a beach below).

Although the existing link is just something to play with at this stage and the results are mixed, the technology has powerful potential to retrieve better search results. For example, rather than just a search for a dog, you could use this in conjunction with existing search to find a dog on a blue background that fills the majority of the screen.

This could have all kinds of potential applications, such as better tagging of visual archives, finding unauthorised use of your copyrighted images, finding a particular video clip.