Tag Archive for 'PC Hardware'

Great service for a CardScan!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 1, 2008
in Odds and Ends
. 2 Comments

The day I left New York to fly back to Israel I bought, on an impulse, a CardScan business card scanner at Best Buy. I’d received all these cards from colleagues at the IORG conference, and the thought of typing all the details into my computer was depressing…

Anyway, I got home, installed the software, and the scanner wouldn’t work right. Yikes! I mean, I build electronic gear, so I know this can happen… but I was thousands of miles from the nearest Best Buy. I’d just transported a paperweight halfway across the planet!

So I called CardScan’s tech support number, and a nice gentleman there took me patiently through some troubleshooting and concluded that the hardware was at fault. The guy told me he’d get someone in touch about a replacement and I went to sleep. Next day I get an email from a Mr. John Phillips in Canada, who is with OptiProc, a CardScan reseller. He told me to send him a scan of my receipt, my address, a description of the fault, and so on; and he’ll ship me a replacement as soon as I did. Not after considering my reply, mind you; nor after I send back the unit. Immediately when he gets my address. And he did; in fact he FedEx’d the new unit, for added speed. Only when this tested OK - which it did - was I to post the old unit back to Canada.

Good customer support is a key part of the user experience, and this is as good as it gets - so, kudos to CardScan, to OptiProc, and to John!

CardScab business Card scanner

The scanner, by the way, turned out to be a cute little gadget - you place a card in its input end and seconds later it’s scanned, OCR’d and parsed into your contacts database. A truly useful device if you venture often outside your cubicle and actually meet other people!

The evolution of the On/Off power switch symbol

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 7, 2008
in Design history
. 10 Comments

We all know the symbol with a vertical line in a circle: it identifies the On/Off power switch. It occurred to me that this familiar symbol is evolving in a bizarre fashion.On Off Power Switches

Originally, switches had a lever or slider that could move to either of two physical positions. In those days the switch was marked with the word POWER and its positions with ON and OFF. Then, as switches became smaller and more globalized, the two words were replaced with 1 and 0, as seen even today on many rocker switches.

And then the ubiquity of microprocessors made it more economic to do everything with momentary pushbutton switches; the computer inside could take care of figuring whether you meant ON or OFF. And so, the button now needed an icon that conveys both options; I surmise that is when the familiar “1-inside-a-0″ symbol came into existence (if you know otherwise do share in the comments!) This round icon fit nicely on round buttons, and became ubiquitous.

OnOff power switches

But then we start to see the form shown in the two photos above right: a bastardized version combining the 1-in-a-circle with a 1 in the same symbol. This makes no sense at all - the correct representation would have been 1/0, for On slash Off. Instead we get On slash OnOff. Sloppy thinking…

Such erroneous contractions are often seen in spoken language - as in “IT technology”, which expands to “information technology technology” (there’s even a company by that name, and its slogan, amusingly, is “We make sense of IT“). But now we see the same error invading the more compact space of visual symbols…

A REAL switch for the wireless radio

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 5, 2008
in Design history and Good design
. 3 Comments

In the old days electronic gear had on/off switches that were actually physical devices with two positions, like the light switch on a wall. Nowadays these have become a rare sight: with everything computerized, most state switching is done by pressing pushbuttons and keys, with the switching done by the logic circuitry or microprocessor.

The disadvantage of this solution is that (a) you can’t tell the state of a switch by looking at it, and (b) the act of switching can take a while as the computer goes about its activity. Even the basic act of turning a computer off now takes long moments (in the original home computers you hit the switch and power was simply cut off).

Thinkpad T61 wireless radio switch

Here is a delightful exception to this trend: my latest Notebook, a Lenovo Thinkpad T61, has a slide switch on its outside for switching the Wireless radios on and off. Slide it to the right and the radio pops on instantly (as indicated by a green spot that becomes exposed under the slider). Slide to the left and the radio shuts down. Besides being fast and convenient, this is very useful when flying: if you believe in the inadvisability of having the Wireless on during flight, you can ensure it is off (and will stay off) before even turning the Notebook on. Absent this assertive hard switch, you’d need to turn the computer on, discover you left the radio on when you last put it into standby in the airport, and then you’d need to fumble with soft switches and dialogs to turn it off before the plane crashed. :-)

LCD Monitor adjustment blues

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 16, 2008
in Bad design, Design history and Improvement
. 0 Comments

So we’ve made the move to flat computer screens, which have many advantages over their bulky CRT ancestors; but the vendors pulled a fast one on us when it comes to the controls for adjusting the screen’s image.OSD on Samsung SyncMaster 913N monitor

In the good ol’days, every monitor had at least two round knobs, one for contrast, one for brightness. This is as good as it gets from a human engineering perspective. You just twiddle the knobs back and forth until your eyes tell your brain to tell your fingers to stop right there. Today, we have instead an On-screen Display (OSD), which some vendors tout as a good thing; in reality it is slow, unfriendly and confusing. The idea is that you use a line of pushbuttons the navigate a hierarchy of menus just to get to the function you need, and then you need to click a good deal more to effect the adjustment. To make sure this is easy, the buttons are often labeled by cryptic symbols in near-invisible relief (as in the photo below, of my Samsung SyncMaster 913N); and the logic they use, though simple, is far from intuitive. This may be justified - indeed inevitable - for accessing the numerous advanced functions that did not exist in the CRT days; but couldn’t they have left alone those more basic controls?

That’s progress for you (sigh)…

Control buttons on Samsung SyncMaster 913N monitor

So, what can we do about this? Adding analog controls is not realistic on these super-integrated monitors. The only thing left, which actually removes much of the confusion, is to do what the vendor should have done - mark the controls with visible labels, as I’ve done:

Labbeled Control buttons on Samsung SyncMaster 913N monitor

Keyboard light: no more groping in the dark!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 4, 2008
in Good design
. 5 Comments

A humorous video review from CNET on the Lenovo Design Matters blog (yep, these guys have a blog where their designers interact with their users - a commendable idea!) compares the Thinkpad X300 to the MacBook Air. Nicely done - take a look.

Interestingly, the reviewer mentions one favorite feature of mine in the Keyboard Light on Lenovo Thinkpadrecent ThinkPad notebooks that many users may be barely aware of: a little white LED in the screen’s frame that illuminates the keyboard. This is useful for when you work on an airplane at night and prefer to leave the overhead reading light off (whether out of consideration for your co-travelers or for your battery life - in the dark you can work at the screen’s minimal backlight intensity).

This LED in itself is a great design idea, but I’m even more impressed by how you turn this lamp on: you depress the Fn key and the PgUp key together. Why is this impressive? Because these two keys are located diagonally at the opposite corners of the keyboard; this means you can find them - by touch - in absolute darkness, which is where you’re at if you need a light in the first place.

Incidentally, this is how I discovered this feature during one long flight - I was groping to find the Fn key combination for increasing the backlight level, hoping to have the screen itself illuminate the keyboard, and I accidentally hit the right keys. And there was light!

Activation keys for Thinkpad keyboard light

Paying all over again: non-transferable accessories

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on March 21, 2008
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

I upgraded recently to a Lenovo Thinkpad T61, from an IBM T42. Good road warrior that I am, I had the T42 accessoried to the hilt, notably with a bunch of extra batteries to last me through the long flights across the Atlantic. Since the new machine was also a Thinkpad, you’d think I would simply reuse the accessories in the new machine, right?…

Thinkpad Batteries

Wrong. The power supply can’t be used because it has a different output voltage - you can’t argue with that. The 3M privacy screen can’t be used because the screen’s a different size - fair enough. But the batteries?!!ThinkpadBatteries2

The batteries are very similar, but their plugs differ. Intentionally.

Look at the photos to compare the Bay Batteries of the two machines; exactly the same dimensions, same voltage too… but the plug is just different enough to prevent reuse. Hard not to harbor cynical thoughts about the reason…  :-(

Mighty Mouse: the best XY input device out there!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on March 4, 2008
in Design history and Good design
. 0 Comments

So many XY pointing devices have been developed over the years… I’ve used light pens, graphic tablets, trackballs, touch screens, joysticks, touch pads, trackpoints, even that weird HP desktop machine, the HP-150 from 1983, where you pointed at the screen and your finger intercepted IR beams crisscrossing the raised screen bezel (this last failed miserably - how could they ignore fatigue from repeatedly raising the arm to touch the screen?!)

But the king of all XY input devices is without question one of the earliest: the Mouse. Only the QWERTY keyboard has greater tenacity (unfortunately, in this case). Invented in 1963 by Doug Engelbart and later commercialized by Xerox PARC, the mouse remains the most popular device in the family, and this is (IMHO) because it is simply the best - it maps extremely well to the brain-hand-screen-eye-brain closed loop, making its action so intuitive as to be transparent. It just doesn’t get any better than that. And interestingly, the exact shape of the mouse is unimportant: almost like cars, they went from blocky to streamlined as time went by, but are just as good in any shape. It’s the basic “movable box with buttons under the fingertips” that is the winning factor; the rest is window dressing.

Here’s kudos to a great design!

Mice (computer and porcelain)