Top Right Quadrant

Posted at 11:32 on Wednesday, 11 August 2010 — with 1 comment.

TECHNOLOGY It’s been many moons since I’ve got my hands dirty with thermal paste and actually built a computer from scratch. It’s something I used to do very frequently in my school days but over the past few years I have, for myriad reasons, neglected this age-old geek pastime.

So last week, no doubt as a result of my recent competitive PC gaming kick (I’ll be competing at WiredOut III in Reading next week — but that’s a story for another blog post) I decided to pick up the credit card and spec out a brand new PC. For a long time, my main home machine has been a 20", 2.4GHz dual core iMac. However, while I continue to admire Apple’s computers, there is sometimes a need to ignore industrial prowess, ease-of-use and general design excellence in favour of raw, cost-per-gigahertz. Plus, it’s really fun constructing these, plugging them in and taking cover as you begin the inaugural boot-up from afar.

Because I know at least one person cares, and before I instigate yet another Mac vs. PC argument, I thought I’d lay out what exactly what is in this machine, why I chose those parts and what I paid for them.

Processor: Intel Core i5 750 — 2.66GHz, 8MB L3 Cache

Apart from the next-up-the-line Core i7 from Intel, is there really any other option? AMD sure aren’t putting anything exceptional out onto the market. The i5 750 is a very affordable chip boasting 4 physical processor cores, but without the HyperThreading offered by the more expensive i7 — which essentially offers eight virtual cores spread across the same physical four.

The Core i5 750 famously overclocks like a beast, given appropriate cooling. It can even accelerate itself to 3.2GHz (up from it’s stock 2.66GHz) in “Turbo Mode”. £160 well spent.

Memory: 2GB Kingston DDR3 1600Mhz

Ah, good old Kingston. Always very affordable (further evidenced by an offer for a 6GB (3×2GB) bundle I saw yesterday for a mere £10 more than the £49.99 I spent — grrr), yet I only picked up a 2GB stick here. I do plan to add some more later down the line.

Motherboard: ASUS P7H55-M H55 (Socket 1156)

HDMI-out, built-in 8-channel audio and yet only one 16x PCI-e slot. No room for a second GPU, but works well with the aforementioned Turbo ability of the Core i5 and is very overclock-friendly. Good deal for £61, I thought.

GPU: PALIT 9800GT 1GB

I must confess, being away from the hardware enthusiast circle for so long has resulted in being severely out of touch with what is the most important component in a hardcore gamer’s arsenal: the graphics card. I had to get recommendations on this, but the 9800GT seemed to get a reputation as only a slight upgrade from the 8800GT. However, at £78, the consensus seemed to be: “Get it!”

Chassis and Power: Casecom Black Mid Tower Case (with side window) & Arctic Power 500W PSU

I pussied out here. I found the cheapest case that didn’t look like utter crap (£19) and a fairly average output power supply (£28) — although I made sure to get a reputable brand, after my last machine died of a bad case of PSU-exploding-itis.

All the other crap:

• Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB — SATAII 7200RPM (16MB Cache) — Although I was really tempted to go solid-state. Maybe next time.
• Samsung TS-H653G DVD-RW SATA
• 80mm Blue LED Case Fan
• Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate

It all came to a grand total of around £450 including shipping. I saved some bank by reusing the 20" 1680×1050 LG monitor (which I love) that is currently tasked a second display to my iMac, as well as using the same aluminium Apple keyboard and Microsoft Intellimouse 3.0. The one problem with this resource sharing is that I NEED a KVM switch so that I may switch my focus between PC and Mac with ease, and not have to plug and unplug mouse, keyboard and display cables every time.

But I don’t just need any KVM switch. I need a mystical form of KVM switch that seems to be as elusive as unicorns, the Easter Bunny or Jesus. Is it so difficult to make a KVM switch that can seperately switch the focus of the Keyboard, Video and Mouse!? Sometimes I would like my display to operate as a secondary monitor to my iMac, sometimes I would like it to operate as the sole monitor to my PC (but still easily control both machines at that point). It’s not rocket science… is it?

Regardless, I’ve ordered a simple USB KVM switch to at least make my life a little easier until someone solves this problem which is apparently complicated to the magnitude of an infite Rubix cube.

Anyway, that’s my thing done. It was totally fun building this PC, and it runs like a ninja slicing a katana through butter on the moon. Whatever that means.

Posted at 10:09 on Wednesday, 28 July 2010

TECHNOLOGY Even if you’re not planning any forays into Windows Phone 7 application development, anyone at all interested in the science of design will find a lot of value in reading over at least the first part of the recently published Windows Phone 7 UI and Interaction Design Guide. It really goes into the detail behind what the Metro design language — that I’ve become so intrigued with as of late — means to the product and to the team.

Metro design interfaces embody harmonious, functional, and attractive visual elements that encourage playful exploration so that the user feels a sense of wonder and excitement. A clear, straightforward design not only makes an application legible, it also encourages usage and can lead to delight.

• Windows Phone 7 Design Resources from the Windows Phone Developer Blog

Posted at 10:07 on Friday, 09 July 2010

TECHNOLOGY For a while now, my much-beloved RememberTheMilk have adopted a classic user-interface detail, the genius of which I’m sure has been overlooked by many. They are certainly not the first — nor will they be the last — to do apply this, so I guess this is more of a celebration of user experience innovation rather than of RTM themselves, but their app does provide a perfect example that the user is explicitly made aware of.

The element I speak of is their process of synchronisation between your mobile client and their servers. When using a mobile device, you’re likely going to be connected to the web via a cellular connection (3G, EDGE or GPRS if you’re that unlucky) and thus your bandwidth is going to be severely limited compared to the fibre line connected to your home. You’ll be limited by both a by-the-second technical transfer rate limitation and maybe even an artificial monthly quota imposed by your carrier.

With a task management app like RTM, the frequency at which you sync between the mobile and your master set of data is going to be fairly high and as we all know — HTTP requests are expensive. It’s good practice to make as little of these requests as possible (a rule that is understandably disobeyed on the desktop where a reliable, snappy connection enables things like AJAX feasible). You also have to give your user a very ‘connected’ experience and ensure your mobile app mirrors the master data as closely as possible. Ahh, the good old performance/usability concession.

In steps the concept of the delayed, accumulative task. In the same way a delivery company will not deliver packages to your home one-by-one as soon as the shipment is consigned, but rather spool the deliveries received over a certain time period before sending them out as a set, your RememberTheMilk app will, upon seeing an alteration to your data, wait for 3 seconds before notifying their servers of the change. Any other data changes that occur during this 3 second delay will also get noticed by the app and will be sent, in a batch, along with the first change that triggered it.

A fantastic way to reduce the frequency of naturally very slow and bulky HTTP requests over what could be (or will be if you’re on an iPhone) a very spotty data connection where network utilisation should be kept at a minimum — a good rule to follow universally with software development, but all the more important on the mobile. The complexities of enabling data access at multiple endpoints (and concurrency issues in general) are still there, but at least it’s not taxing the device’s potentially limited connectivity.

However, this certainly isn’t a silver bullet. The 3 second delay in accuracy between server and client is not going to cause any out-of-date information inconveniences, but waiting for the sync operation to happen can be a problem. Until iOS 4, iPhone users of the RTM app would literally have to sit and wait for this 3 second delay to finish and the sync process to complete before moving away from the application to do other things (or perhaps to complete the task they just added — those 3 seconds can aggregate to a noticeable productivity sink). This isn’t much of a problem now with the new background task API but a method of interrupting the 3 second delay and forcing an immediate synchronisation I’m sure would be welcomed anywhere this technique is used.

So, in closing, I would like to issue the biggest of big-ups to all the awesome UX designers out there. I hope to someday join your ranks.

Posted at 09:18 on Tuesday, 06 July 2010

TECHNOLOGY A lot of the criticsm of Microsoft’s social-centric mobile phones has been qualified with “although I’m not part of the Kin’s target market…”. Perhaps it is for this same reason that I was wrong to think the Kin phones were going to be popular among their younger audience.

Either way, Ross Rubin over at Engadget has itemised the reasons he can give for Microsoft bowing out of the handset show after a surprisingly short — but expensive — performance.

With the Kin handsets, Microsoft was too eager to get its hands into the pockets of young social networkers for whom the smartphone market had proven elusive. The key paradox of this was that the Kin data plan was the same for that of other smartphones at Verizon, and that continued to shut out those who aspired to mobile digital sharing nirvana.

Read more: Switched On: Kin’s seven deadly sins

Posted at 22:20 on Friday, 11 June 2010

TECHNOLOGY It seems to me, through hearing countless anecdotes and general whispering, that Apple CEO Steve Jobs expects nothing less than perfection in the fruit of his company — at least in the aesthetic sense.

Looking back at the progression of the design of something like the iPod or the iMac, one can assume his perception of what ‘perfect’ is has evolved in a iterative fashion as his design team exceeds these expectations far enough to bring a new model to market. I can’t really think of many times where Apple have released a product that has stopped short on the path to cosmetic perfection in favour of functionality.

Much of the time, functionality enhancements appear only when partnered with industrial design innovations, a prime example of this being the introduction of the currently standard ‘unibody’ MacBook Pro enclosures nearly 2 years ago. The ability to fashion a laptop chassis out of only a single piece of aluminium brought forth a computer that was considerably sturdier than it’s plastic predecessors, much lighter, more environmentally friendly but — perhaps above all else — they looked gorgeous, no doubt exceeding the expectation of ‘perfection’ relative to Steve Jobs circa 2008.

But earlier this week Apple unveiled the newest iteration of the iPhone that featured some very un-Applelike seams around the casing. Pictures of this phone leaked a few months before the official announcement, at which time the seams were either being regarded as ‘just a beta hallmark’ or were leading people to outright deny the device’s authenticity based solely on the disbelief that Apple would make such a departure from aesthetic perfection.

The seams, in reality, served a much greater purpose than interrupting the smooth metal band outlining the phone. They exist, in fact, to facilitate external antennae without the fear of metal (or to a lesser extent, plastic) blocking any of that cellular juice which is all-too-important to the iPhone. As they themselves fully acknowledged it is a departure from Steve’s usual cosmetic doctrine – although honestly, I’m glad I can bet on the fact that they would never go far enough as to bring back the stubby, telescopic antenna protruding from the top of your device to improve reception!

While the unibody MacBook construction could have been lauded as equal parts form and function, the decision to create these ‘out-of-body’ antenna chasms has certainly tipped the ratio, at least a tiny bit, in favour of just making the damn thing work better. I sincerely hope this is a trend that will continue.