Dominiek.com

some random thoughts I’ve been putting down on a writeboard

Recently, I discovered a cool feature on my Macbook. If I hold the control key and scroll with my mousewheel/pad – I can zoom in and zoom out very smoothly. I’ve started using this a lot and it’s become part of my digital habits. I do it that often that colleagues almost think of me as the crazy zooming guy. This full screen zooming is good for many things during my normal productivity hours. I often use the zooming to show people certain parts of a User Interface and sometimes I use it to zoom in on a piece of text to make a statement :]. Also, it’s useful for pair programming. Now, partly because of my deteriorating eyesight, I can zoom in on something and sit back. This could be a word or a picture and while I sit back, I can really think about it. Zooming-in gets rid of all the other chaos on the screen and helps you to focus.

I guess the zooming metaphor applies to many things in life. As work – trained as an engineer – I deal a lot with the nitty gritty of things. I used to program a lot of low-level stuff like Assembly and C code. However I’ve done some more abstract technical things over the past years like: programming in a variety of languages, design patterns and thinking about user interaction. So far, I’ve been apt at being able to zoom in and out in a certain scope of my skill-sets. Most of it has been technical or related to building software. Right now I’m trying to extend my professional zoom-scope to extend areas that require right-brain thinking like design and business/strategy. Also in personal life – which is heavily intertwined with that old term ‘professional life’ – you can apply zooming very well. Zooming-in means getting short term things done, like changing the light bulb in the toilet. Zoomed out means planning ahead and equally important: changing one’s habits.

Another brother of zooming is filtering. Filtering out the irrelevance in today’s information overload is already visible in multi billion dollar industries and in a notable company called Google. The coming semantic wave – or web 3.0 if you will – stresses the importance of user interfaces that deal with the abundance of information. In recent web design trends it’s easy to spot the shift towards information abundance. Websites now have big fonts for important summarizing one-liners whereas old websites i.e. portals tried to cram as much information on the screen as possible. Zooming and filtering will be important metaphors in future User Interfaces. Google Maps and the iPhone browser are notable first examples of these so-called Zooming User Interfaces (ZUI’s).

Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t run on Linux. This is one of the reasons why I decided to install WindowsXP. My additional motive was using Adobe Flash and my webcam.

During the installation, I was playing with my new iPod nano, amazed by the advances they made since the iPod-mini. A few days earlier I ordered the device from the online Apple store. Here, I could customize my design by engraving some text, which I think is a nice Apple-strategy to eliminate the expensive costs of retailing (like Dell does). I was amused by the marketing setup on the Apple store website:

As you can see they shaped their color, capacity and pricing model to the customers. It’s a trick, but I’m OK with that, I think it’s social. And it works! My dad came back from a business vacation this morning. He incidentally bought one as well, which made my little sister complain that everyone has an iPod except her. This shows the broad market range they cover.

After installing Windows, I installed the iTunes, downloaded some tunes and played with my iPod. Every time I play with it, listen to it and even look at it I think: Yes, I bought a nice product!. But during my playing I noticed an irritating warning message popping up every once in a while, so I clicked it:

A little side note about computer viruses: A computer-virus is a viral-spreading algorithm to exploit faults in a software system. It does not compare to a biological-virus. This means, the software vendor is responsible for preventing them. After clicking on recommendations you will be send to a page that tries to sell you anti-virus products. I didn’t know that this could be legal, it’s like selling medicine for a disease you’re creating yourself!

It’s pretty obvious who’s trying to make money in what way, this is just the beginning: my next operating system will be MacOS.