Tag Archive for 'PC Hardware'

The infamous Caps Lock key

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 24, 2008
in Bad design, Design history and Improvement
. 5 Comments

Caps lock key on a modern PC keyboardEveryone knows that the QWERTY keyboard layout sucks, because it carries a legacy from the early typewriter days; still, we’re all locked into its use and live in oblivion of what we’re missing. But we have another legacy from mechanical typewriters that is hard to forget because it bites us daily. i REFER TO THE cAPS lOCK KEY.

It is interesting to trace the history of this design infamy. Originally, it made a lot of sense: in a mechanical typewriter the Shift keys did just that: they shifted the type mechanism vertically so the type bars would hit the paper with the uppercase letters; and the Shift Lock key would keep the keys locked in this position. This key had to sit right above the Shift key, because it physically latched it in a depressed position; hitting Shift again would release the lock. It was very easy to see (and feel) whether Shift was locked or not, because both keys would be depressed when the lock was engaged. The photos below are from an antiquated Royal typewriter; you can see how the Lock key holds down the Shift key on the right (and note the quaint caption on the latter key – Shift / Freedom, in allusion to releasing the Lock).

Shift Lock in an old typewriter

Early computer keyboards carried this idea forward, with a Shift Lock or Caps Lock key that had two physical positions: depressed for Lock, and flush with the other keys when released. You could therefore tell when you were in Caps mode, and would notice immediately if you hit the lock accidentally while touch typing. The delightful Commodore 64 had this feature, among others; the photos show a keyboard that came with the collection of homebrew boards described here, from the late 70s.

Two-position Caps Lock in a 1970s keyboard

Later, as keyboard makers sacrificed quality for cheap manufacturing, the more complex and different two-state key was replaced with a momentary key like all the others, with electronics to implement toggle action. Gone was the tactile feedback. Now a simple brush of the finger could accidentally lock you in Caps mode. Worse still, the position of the Lock key next to the left Shift key, which made sense a century ago, was retained – placing this relatively little used key right in harm’s way.

I don’t see manufacturers giving us back the 2-position key (it would cost them a few cents, after all), but the least they could do is move this stupid key to the top row, next to the Scroll Lock, where it will remain unused, unnoticed, and harmless.

So, what can we do about this? Well, one thing we can do is disable the offending key. No need to tear it out – I used KeyTweak, a free key remapping utility, to disable it on my Windows XP system. Good riddance!

Also, if you use MS Word, you may be unaware that depressing Shift+F3 repeatedly will change any selected text to lowercase, uppercase, and sentence case; a very useful feature after YOU’VE ACCIDENTALLY HIT sHIFT lOCK AND CONTINUED TYPING.

Plug and Gag: hardware that thinks it’s software?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 20, 2008
in Bad design
. 4 Comments

These days nobody is surprised to see a software product expect tens or even hundreds of free Megabytes on the disk – a far cry from the frugal eighties, when entire operating systems would fit on a floppy or two, but this is life and we accept it philosophically. But when a piece of Hardware makes similar expectations, I begin to be annoyed. And increasingly, they do.

For example, I recently installed for a friend a new printer, the Hewlett Packard Deskjet HP-F2280 printer/scanner/copier. I put the CD-ROM that came with it into the drive, and then had to stick around for more than 15 minutes, and interact with a zillion dialogs, while the product installed an endless stream of stuff on the hard drive. Fifteen minutes for what ought to be the installation of a device driver?!?!!

Leaving aside the question of speed – this computer was running at over 2 GHz, so I’d expect it to need 15 minutes to solve massive mathematical problems, not to copy some silly software from a CD – there is the question of manners. It is not good manners to sell someone a printer, and then to blast hundreds of megabytes of software onto their hard disk, without so much as a pretty please. And HP has the nerve to claim in the System Requirements that you need “450 MB available hard disk space” to install the printer under Windows XP. For Vista, you need 700MB.

Think about it: 700 Megabytes? 700 MB is enough to store all the text of the Britannica; it’s the sort of space you’d expect for a complete development environment, or for a powerful video editing program. But a printer?!

Sheer Chutzpah, that’s what it is.

Something is wrong with our Notebook LCD screens, part 3

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 22, 2008
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

And now, following Parts 1 and 2, here is the last installment…

These days, more and more Notebooks come with displays branded by the makers as VibrantView, or CrystaslBrite, or OptiClear… exciting names indeed. What they all refers to is glossy LCD screens, which would be much better described as GlareMirror, or UglyReflector, or maybe just RazzleDazzle…

Glossy screen on a Notebook computer

Photo source: Marco Wessel, under Creative Commons license.

The underlying idea is to remove the matte anti-glare layer on the older screens, a change which results in better definition and more vibrant colors, plus better outdoors visibility. All commendable attributes, except that the price you pay is a mirror-like surface that reflects windows, light fixtures and other bright objects, a problem that motivated the original matte layer to begin with. Solutions? Work in a totally dark room, or try to yank the screen around until you find a reflection-free angle. Note that the last works for a single viewer – these screens are most annoying when someone shows you something on their screen: maybe they found the glare-free position, but you, looking from the side or over their shoulder, will get the full blast of annoying reflections.

Now if the matte screens were bad – if their colors really sucked, or their focus was totally fuzzy, I can see the possible value of a trade-off; but TFT LCD’s have reached maturity years ago, and are a delight to use. So what got into the vendors’ heads, to throw in the glossy finish – not as a  rare option, but as a mainstream technology?

Something is wrong with our Notebook LCD screens, part 2

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 15, 2008
in Bad design
. 3 Comments

We discussed the recent trend that is eliminating the optimal resolution in notebook computer screens. Another undesirable trend is the move to widescreen displays. These days it is almost impossible to buy a notebook PC with the traditional 4:3 screen form factor; all new models boast a “wide” screen with a 16:10 form factor such as WXGA (1280×800) and WSXGA (1680×1050). In fact Lenovo, makers of the Thinkpad I use, have just proudly declared that they’re dropping all 4:3 screens in their new line of notebooks.

And what are they proud of? What’s so cool about giving us less effective screens?

Xerox Alto system16:10 is a perfect choice if you want to watch movies, which come increasingly in wide formats. However, business notebooks are not intended primarily for this enjoyable purpose. They are meant to do business on, primarily word processing, email, presentations, and the like. And for this purpose, widescreen is totally inadequate. Documents are invariably taller than they are wide, like the paper pages they emulate; even presentation slides have a 4:3 aspect ratio. That’s why the venerable Xerox Alto (at right), sporting the granddaddy of all of today’s Personal Computer interfaces, had a “portrait” form factor screen: because you could process a whole page at once.

Now ideally, a wide screen might accommodate two pages side by side; and that works fine with a large external monitor. But Notebook screens are kept small for portability, and there is no way you can comfortably read two pages on a 14″ or even a 15″ screen. So you have to use the screen for one page, and since these screens are shorter (top to bottom) for a given diagonal size than the 4:3 type, you end up seeing less lines on a document at a given page width. You get more area at the edges of the screen, which you don’t need, and less height, which you do.

Like I already said, something is very wrong…

Something is wrong with our Notebook LCD screens, part 1

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 12, 2008
in Bad design
. 2 Comments

Something very odd is happening to the LCD screens on the Notebook computers that play such a major role in our existence.
386 notebook with monochrome LCD scrreen

The first aptly named “laptops” had small, low-contrast monochrome screens that had “eye strain” written all over them (well, not all of them did – the Grid Compass, in 1982, had a lovely bright orange-on-black display). Then came the first color screens, like Passive Matrix and DSTN, which were also pretty poor; and the  screen grew slowly in size, though there was still much plastic surrounding it. And finally Active matrix TFT screens achieved affordable prices and became the standard, and their size attained the width of a the keyboard while resolutions reached 1024×768. We were at a sweet spot, with notebooks whose keyboard and screen were so good that one could use them ergonomically without even wanting an external screen. For anyone who grew through the earlier clunky technologies, this was notebook nirvana.

And then…

… In the last few years, we are drifting away from that bliss. New notebooks have screens that make less and less sense. In this post series I’ll look at a number of issues with these.

For starters: Native resolution.

As I said, a sweet spot for screen resolution was (IMHO) 1024×768 pixels (XGA) on a 14″, 4:3 screen. The trend in the last 4 years is to go ever higher: 1400×1050 (SXGA+), for instance, and beyond. Obviously, the higher the resolution, the more things you can show – more spreadsheet columns, larger unscaled hi-res images, more windows, more emails… but then, at a given screen size (say, 14″) these things are smaller in absolute size; text and icons become small enough to cause significant eye fatigue, especially for anyone over forty.

Now, in principle you can try to fix this problem by driving the screen at a lower resolution. Some users actually try that, with sorry results, because one thing about LCD screens (as opposed to CRTs) is that you must use them at their native resolution. This is because an LCD, unlike a CRT, can’t increase the physical pixel size. Reducing resolution from 1400×1050 to (say) 1024×768 means that each pixel must now span a square of approximately 1.37 by 1.37 physical pixels; but this is a physical impossibility in an LCD, where each pixel is a discrete physical electronic device. The display driver now attempts to solve the problem by shading the “half pixels” in intermediate colors and shades, and this results in an unacceptable degree of fuzziness of the entire screen.

A better solution is to set applications to use larger fonts, and/or to change the overall DPI setting in the display properties in Windows. This will indeed cause text and other elements on screen to become larger. However, it will not get you back to where you were with the 1024-wide screen, because not all elements will scale – for example, icons will become blocky, and images on web pages will remain tiny while text grows, badly distorting the layout of many pages. Basically, you’re jumping through hoops to make a hi-res screen simulate a lower-res screen – poorly.

Of course, some users may need the added pixels – programmers, graphic artists, even accountants… but they would be better off using a physically larger screen, either by buying a 15″ or 17″ notebook, or by using a large external screen. Ordinary users, however, are better off with the portability of 14″ (or less) and the unscaled text and crisp focus of the XGA screen. Not that anyone’s asking them… new notebooks have screens of 1400 or even 1680 pixels across. Since these must cost more to produce, while being harder on the eyes, it’s unclear why the vendors don’t offer low res screens as at least an option; but in fact XGA notebooks are now rarer than hens’ teeth. Go figure…

One hand!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 4, 2008
in Good design
. 0 Comments

Here is an absolutely trivial product feature that turns out to be very nice. This is the latch release for the more recent IBM (now Lenovo) Thinkpad notebook computers.

I’ve been through more models of Thinkpad than I remember, and until the T4x series they all had two latch releases on the front edge of the lid. Then came the T40, and it only had one, on the right, which actuates both latches through an inner linkage. When I first saw this I was disdainful: who cares, after all? But when I started to use a T41, I realized how useful this feature is. These days we mobile users run around the workplace from meeting to meeting with our notebook; and until someone comes out with the secondary displays we’ve seen on futuristic promotional videos (but never in reality), we often have to open the notebook to check details of our coming meeting while walking towards an elevator… and with the single-latch arrangement, you can hold the machine in your left hand while opening its screen with the right.

Like I said, a trivial detail, but it really is useful. A nice piece of design from IBM!

Great service for a CardScan!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 1, 2008
in Odds and Ends
. 3 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
. 85 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
. 1 Comment

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