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Nobody who is vaguely interested in technology can have failed to note the passing—on October 5th—of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. There have been many moving and insightful tributes in the press and across the WWW. It is not my intention here to add to that great outpouring: I never knew the guy and I’m not sure I have anything interesting or original to add to the story of Apple Computer. But I’ve got to say something: I’ve been using Macs as my main information-processing tools since 1991, and in any one year I may spend hundreds of hours sat in front of one. The quality of that interaction is something I both depend upon and enjoy. I owe the man… Nothing more than a few thoughts:

Firstly, we should surely recognize the tragedy of a man who has died so prematurely. Steve Jobs was almost exactly the same age as I am - in fact he was born about ten weeks before me - and I don’t feel old at all. With our rich diets and the supporting framework of modern medicine our life expectancies are stretching into the 90s. Dying in your mid-50s may have been a “good innings” in the Middle Ages, but it certainly isn’t nowadays.

Secondly, amongst the reams of text generated since his death Steve Jobs has been called many, many things, not least amongst them “visionary”, “genius”, “revolutionary”, “pioneer”, etc. All of which may or may not be be true: it’s very difficult to tell. The quality of the discourse in our current media ecology is such that hyperbole and lurid exaggeration are the norm: everyone’s shouting, everything’s turned up to 11. An overpaid pimply teenager who plays football for a living is a “hero”, the talent-shy showroom dummy who wins a hideously reactionary TV reality show is lauded as a “superstar”. The language we use is wearing dangerously thin.
What I can be sure of though—because I’m sitting here using one, directly experiencing it—is that the products that Apple design and produce are the best that money can buy. The man responsible for this is Steve Jobs. His long-term commitment to producing objects to the very highest standard means that for those of us who care about such things—those of us in other words who recognize that the tools we use directly impact upon the quality of work we ourselves produce—have somewhere to go. Apple Computer may be Big Business, but it is a business that has the quality of its products at the very core of its strategy. Apple products, on the whole, are so much better than everyone else’s it’s actually pretty embarrassing. A world without Apple would be a cheap and tawdry place indeed.

Thirdly, and following on from the above, it is gratifying that the whole Mac versus PC debate is finally dead and buried. Whether you view it technologically, conceptually, or financially Apple has blown the competition out of the water. The man responsible for this is Steve Jobs.
[As a footnote to this, an observation of mine: the Mac versus PC debate was always a lop-sided argument. Although I don't have any actually data to back this up, it seems pretty obvious that everyone who uses a Mac can also use a PC pretty well. The reverse is not true. Even many so-called "IT specialists"—particularly those working in the corporate and public-sectors—have never used a Mac in their life. On other words, most people on the PC side of the fence, even the techies, haven't got a clue what they're talking about, and most of their views on Macs are simply mulch regurgitated from the media.]

Goodbye Steve Jobs. You leave the world a better place. I don’t think we realize how much we’re going to miss you.

[Via Pixelsumo]

I’ve spent a fair amount of time on this blog talking about multi-touch interfaces. Nearly three years ago that seemed like cutting-edge stuff, but not any more. Check this out:

I love the way Mistry develops his ideas using very low-tech prototypes: that perspex glove with the four mouse rollers on it is classic Heath Robinson. Some of the examples in the video are clearly mock-ups, but nonetheless I think you’ll agree that a system of this sort could completely change what we mean by the term ‘computing’. It’s conceptually miles ahead of anything else out there at the moment, and the types of opportunity it will offer can barely be imagined.

But is it practicable? What we’re talking about here is a walking around with a device hanging around your neck like a smartphone, but with a miniature projector and reflector added to it. Power—battery life—will be a big issue. You’ll have to wear coloured thimbles on your fingertips whenever you want to use it, and using colour recognition as well as gestural recognition means it will probably only work under certain lighting conditions (unless it has some kind of light-adaptive software built in to it). Widespread use is going to depend on a massive increase in wireless bandwidth and cloud dependence.

I’m sure that the practical issues are all solvable. In a related video they’re talking about it becoming available in 10 years time. I’d be surprised if it was that long, but equally it’s not going to be next year.

Ladies and gentlemen, Pranav Mistry…

[Thanks to Adam Shailer for bringing this video to my attention.]

According to its creators, Mabuse is a piece of “real-time audio-visual composition and performance  software.” It’s an application written using Max/MSP that allows users to create audio tracks and manipulate video in real-time using graphical sequencing tools they call modulators: as usual you can create your own patterns or draw on an existing bank of presets. Check out this short tutorial video for an overview:

Presumably to allow for a greater degree of flexibility with the audio composition and processing aspects they’ve also released Mabuse as a VST plug-in for Ableton Live. It’s only available on the Mac as yet, but say that a PC version will be forthcoming given the interest:

There’s also a video tutorial here.

Although I suspect the VST plug-in won’t really take off until the promised full-screen version is available, overall these are very clever pieces of software that deserve to succeed. The seamless integration of the audio and video elements—and their real-time capabilities as performance and composition tools—make Mabuse very powerful. It’s a fabulous example of convergence!

I think if I was still performing techno music live this is what I would be using. Hooked up to a Lemur, natch…

This year I finally made it to one of the Nielsen/Norman Group’s Usability Weeks and did the Usability In Practice 3-day seminar.

Opening Slide

Very good it was, too. The content was bang up-to-date and the expertise of the presenters was clear for all to see. Although there were a few moments of tedium as one or another of them droned on a bit, on the whole it was all kept interesting by judicious changes of speaker, plenty of Socratic dialogue, effective use of multimedia, and a fair bit of practical work and demonstrations. They even gave us homework!

Jakob Nielsen

It was interesting that the seminar confirmed my impression (gained from teaching usability) that writing the tasks is really one of the most difficult aspects of the process: if they’re not right for any reason, almost any results you get from the testing will be of dubious value. It probably won’t be difficult to identify what the most common task will be in any given situation, but wording and structuring them correctly for the test is absolutely crucial.

Testing Mobile Devices

The best bit of course was the Paper Prototyping on day 3. The day before Janelle Estes had shown us some video of a user test on this page at inMod (modern furniture and lighting). We were then given the task of redesigning this Flash-based wizard and to build a paper prototype of the design. The team that I was a part of came up with an excellent solution and a really cool prototype. Very satisfying and hugely enjoyable.

Our Prototype Under Test

Of course one of the best things about attending such events is meeting new people and the possibility of networking. There were people from all over Europe in attendance: Latvia, Denmark, France, Switzerland, you name it. Fascinating to see what people were up to.

And, AND, I came away with a great idea…

We’ve all seen that bit in Minority Report where Tom Cruise is using that gestural computer interface, grabbing images, flipping them around, swiping them aside? Well, 6 years on and a very similar system is for real:

The main man behind the g-speak system seems to be one John Underkoffler, who was—surprise, surprise—one of the technical advisors on Minority Report. There’s lots more information, including a historical overview of g-speak, on the Oblong website.

Is this the future of computing? No, I don’t think so, not for us plebs. Gestural interfaces will become the dominant paradigm, but mainly in the form of touch screens. There will be a place for this type of spatial operating environment—as they call it—but I would imagine it will be limited to military/industrial applications. Oblong themselves say the system is suited to:

• analysis of large data sets;
• operation of three-dimensional interfaces;
• construction of efficient multi-user collaborative applications;
• integration of large screens and multiple computers into room- and building-scale work environments;
• development of large-scale applications that run interactively across enterprise networks.

I reckon that’s about right. The system only makes any kind of sense with the huge screen(s).

Bloom is a recent application for the iPhone developed by Brian Eno and Pete Chilvers. The press release describes it as “part instrument, part composition and part artwork”; in practice it’s an ambient music generator that allows the user to input notes via the touch screen. These notes are then a) displayed like ripples on a pond and b) taken up by the programme and variations are generated over time.

I’ve been playing with the thing all week. Despite being very simple to use, it’s very good at what it sets out to do. It’s hypnotic and relaxing, and does actually create convincing ambient music. There is only one sound available, a sort of cross between a piano and a harp, but there are subtly shifting drones that hover in the background as the melodies drift in and out… There are also a set of ‘moods’ that seem to change the scales used by the ‘pieces’:

There’s obviously a lot of very clever stuff going on behind the scenes. Presumably all the sounds are generated in real-time (i.e. no samples) which gives the music a very rich and warm sound. Knowing Eno, I’m guessing it uses an FM synth, probably built in Max/MSP or PD. And although the sequence generator seems to be little more than a delay line at first listening, if left alone the programme will generate endless variations on even the most simple of inputs.

I left it running today for about four hours, and it was still happily evolving when I turned it off. Running the programme this long did highlight one thing: it drained the battery in a couple of hours. Here it is in action:

I love it. It’s not a toy. It’s not a gimmick. Bloom actually turns the iPhone into a viable and meaningful instrument that allows you to produce some very listenable and sonically high-quality ambient music. I found it extremely satisfying to be able to tap out a quick sequence, let that evolve for a while while I went about my business, and then ‘add a new part’ just as I was passing by. Or shake it and start again. Whatever…

As with RjDj, it suggests a completely new type of relationship with both the music and with the technological device, and you find yourself operating somewhere between the seemingly incompatible realms of recorded and improvised musics.

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One final point: there has been a lot of comment about Bloom being a rip-off of Electroplankton (which has been available on the Nintendo DS for ages). This is just silly: I don’t particularly want to diss either Electroplankton or the DS, but, as this short video demonstrates, we’re talking completely different kettles of fish:

The defining element of the desktop GUI is the icon, which, although it often has a name, is above all a picture that performs or receives an action. These actions give the icon its meaning. As elements in a true picture writing, icons do note merely remind the user of documents and programs, but function as documents and programs. Reorganizing files and activating programs is writing, just as putting alphabetic characters in a row is writing. Rather like the religious relics after which they are named, computer icons are energy units that focus the operative power of the machine into visible and manipulable symbols. Computer icons also remind us of the cultural functions of Hebrew letters in the Cabala or of alchemical and other signs invoked by such Renaissance magi as Giordano Bruno. Magic letters and signs were often objects of meditation, as they were in the logical diagrams of the medieval Raymond Llul, and they were also believed to have operational powers. As functioning representations in computer writing, electronic icons realize what magic signs in the past could only suggest.

Released on October 10th, RjDj is one of the most interesting pieces of software that I’ve come across for some time. It’s difficult to describe what it is exactly, so you’d better watch the video (over 9 minutes but worth it, believe me):

I downloaded RjDj this afternoon and begrudgingly dragged my unloved and unused Apple headphone set out of the box—the software only works with this headset at the moment. It all worked perfectly first time, and within five minutes I was tapping, banging, clacking, and, yes, even singing along to “the soundtrack to my life.” Live and interactive: John Cage would have loved it.

Cooking the Sunday dinner became an experimental sound workshop: peeling potatoes, kicking open the flip-top bin, using a knife to create glissandi on the grill rack, whistling, thumping the worktop, running the tap, the clanking of saucepans, all became melded into some futuristic ambient-techno soundscape. Great fun!

At the moment, the number of scenes available is limited (5 only) but the website promises another 18 coming shortly. It could do with a way of exporting your recordings, and of course people posting comments on the RjDj site already want programmable delay times, use of better headsets, access to the individual audio channels, etc., etc.. Like a lot of iPhone applications, it borders on being a gimmick: something interesting and exciting for sure, but we’re not quite sure what to do with it…

BUT: what we’ve got here is an application that is sampling in real time, performing DSP on the input, playing that back and recording it at the same time. On a mobile phone. (In fact, RjDj makes the phrase ‘mobile phone’ suddenly seem redundant, out-of-date.)

Something important is happening here. It seems like one of those tipping-point moments, a paradigm shift. The gestural interface of the iPhone is exploited by RjDj in such a way that it allows not only a new way of making music, but a completely new way of experiencing music where our behaviour generates the events that become both the raw material and the gestures that shape our listening.

In fact, one could envisage a future where we no longer primarily bought music performed by other people. Instead we would buy new ’scenes’ and build up a library of software that would transform the music we listen to and the sounds we experience according to mood, behaviour, whim, or conscious control. All ‘recorded music’ would become permanently fluid, open to improvisation and gestural control.

RjDj costs £1.59.

This is interesting:

Under development at the University of Washington. More info here.