S60 Open to new features

Bertolt Brecht held that theater, above all, was a way to educate.

Brecht talked about his plays as if they were political meetings, and expected the audience to play a part -- the part of "participating in the discussion". To reinforce this notion he employed techniques to remind the audience that after all they were watching a play. The "willing suspension of disbelief" that theatre depends on was something Brecht wanted to bend, if not break. He called this the verfremdungseffekt, which I'm told doesn't translate precisely to English but is close to something like "the distancing effect". When attending a Brecht performance you are supposed to mentally take a step back and observe yourself watching the performance.

Brenda Laurel, whose book Computers as Theatre I read in about 1990 and didn't understand until at least ten years later, has said some things that resonate with this. In Piercing the Spectacle: A Situationist Critique of Computer Games, she said

"The reason why we have not succeeded in building good games for education is that to do so would entail reconstructing the notion of education itself. In particular, we would need to redefine what it means to be a good learner. Instead of receiving information, we might construct understanding. Instead of giving the right answer, we might think of taking an appropriate action. Instead of obeying the rules, we might question authority. These are the sorts of rehearsals for living that games could be offering us."

This brings us to danah boyd. She is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communications. In a piece written for the Brittanica Blog she says:

"Why are we telling our students not to use Wikipedia rather than educating them about how Wikipedia works? Sitting in front of us is an ideal opportunity to talk about how knowledge is produced, how information is disseminated, how ideas are shared. Imagine if we taught the “history” feature so that students would have the ability to track how a Wikipedia entry is produced and assess for themselves what the authority of the author is. You can’t do this with an encyclopedia. Imagine if we taught students how to fact check claims in Wikipedia and, better yet, to add valuable sources to a Wikipedia entry so that their work becomes part of the public good."

A great deal of all this, it seems to me, is all about hyperlinking. At the most basic level, this piece of writing almost certainly would never have existed if not for hyperlinking. I followed hyperlinks to find these things, and I'm using hyperlinks now to create relationships among them. At another level, Brecht's ideas about the distancing effect are very much postmodern ideas. In the hyperlinked world of today the distancing effect is second nature to us. It's a common trick nowadays for media, whether transmitting fiction, fact, or something in between, to prod the audience to realize that "this is not reality, this is a performance.".

The hyperlinking of content is continuing and accelerating, and it's changing the way we interact with information. This is hardly news. But it's interesting that institutions -- educational, governmental, and corporate -- are not changing; they're resisting. Maybe Brecht would have predicted this; that institutions seem to try not to change. Maybe that's the whole point; maybe humans create and maintain institutions in order to resist change. But no matter what they do or don't do, "Brechtian" today means something a bit different than it used to, and before long "Laurelian" and "boydian" may achieve common usage as well.

I've tried a number of times to use RSS regularly. As a user, that is. I always end up deciding I don't like it. And I usually try again because I keep thinking I ought to like it; a short "feed" that alerts me to some new posting somewhere seems like a useful idea.

I think it might be the brevity. Feeds are often headlines of a sort, and good headlines are very difficult to write. I prefer the long version of most things; I'd rather get the whole picture. Or maybe I just have too much time to waste!

I do wonder, though, if my dissatisfaction with feeds is unique or whether there are other Feed Abandoners out there. Maybe we should start a support group.

This is an uncharacteristically sales-oriented posting, but seems to me like it's worth it. In Europe (and elsewhere in the world) you can buy an S60 phone from Nokia, not from a carrier such as Vodafone or T-Mobile. In the US it's always been different; if you wanted a phone you had to deal with the carrier.

From Nokia's perspective, this has made it difficult to make some of our phones available. I also believe it's a bit of a sore point with some parts of the company that the iPhone may not comply with some of the requirements Cingular/AT&T insists that our phones meet!

This situation seems to be coming to an end, finally. You can already buy an N95 independent of a carrier, and this PC Magazine article talks about how the E series will also be available that way.

Calling the E90 a "mini laptop" is an interesting way to put it, too. I haven't tried one of those yet; I'll have to see if I can convince somebody I need to borrow one. Because of where I work I have a unique way to measure which of our phones are the best. When I ask if I can borrow one, if the answer is "no, stay away from my phone" it's probably a pretty good product!

Did you know that in 1981 Apple Computer was the biggest personal computer company? The Apple 2 (at various times it was the "Apple ][" and the "Apple //", typographically) ruled that market. 1981 was also the year that IBM introduced their first PC. Here's what Apple said then:

So 26 years later, as the iPhone debuts later this week, Welcome, Apple, seriously!

(The Apple ad, old Apple logo, and IBM logo are, obviously, property of their owners and used here as an historical commentary.)

Have you heard the old adage about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is up to? If you've ever worked in an organization as large as Nokia -- or even as large as S60, which is a great deal smaller -- you know what it means. Here's a cool thing that was complete news to me.

S60 Agents -- when something starts out like this, it's probably going to be interesting: "Do you like technology? Do you like mobile phones? Do you like software? Do you like people? Do you like being the first to know about new technology? Do you like toast?" At the moment this is only for New York City, apparently, but hopefully it will spread.

In the Browser group, of course, we have our own agent and he's investigating right now. Soon we'll know more about the S60 Agents program. Such as, what kinds of snacks they serve.

It sounds like S60 Marketing may be able to show some samples to you if you're an S60 Agent (I really don't know). And if all else fails, maybe you get some toast.

Hi, everyone, Franklin here -- my first post. Peter finally paid up :)

We're excited that iPhone will have the same browser as S60. There are over a dozen different mobile browsers in the market, most proprietary, all with different limitations and problems -- a web developer's nightmare. I can't even call it "browser wars" -- more like "browser mosh pit."

So our dream is that phone manufacturers everywhere will adopt the same open, full browser engine as we have, and to encourage that we've contributed code to open source. Open is good for everyone.

But when Harry McCracken writes in PC World, "[t]oday's demo was the most tangible proof yet that the iPhone will be the first phone with a truly full-blown Web browser" I have to squirm a little. Reality Distortion Field is powerful... must...not...submit....

You all know that Nokia shipped the first "truly full-blown Web browser" on a phone, back in March 2006. He even goes on to praise our browser in the next paragraph -- thanks, Harry!

But we had it first. So there.

Some of the coolest phones that have our full browser with Mini Map, Visual History and other nifty features are the Nokia Nseries Multimedia Computers. To date over 50 million S60 3rd Edition phones from Nokia, Samsung and LG have shipped! (About half of the 100 million S60 phones are 3rd Edition.)

All running the best web browser in the world ;)

From David Weinberger's new book Everything is Miscellaneous:

Paper drives thought into our heads. The Web releases thoughts before they're ready so we can work on them together. (p 203)

The trust we place in the [Encyclopedia] Brittanica enables us to be passive knowers: You merely have to look a topic up to find out about it. But Wikipedia provides the metadata surrounding an article...because it expects the reader to be actively involved... (p 142)

...the Internet makes knowledge as instantly available as a calculator's 'equals' button. (p 215)

It's a very interesting book!

Years ago I read the phrase "intuitive just means you learned it somewhere else". I don't recall who said this and can't seem to find it -- if you know, drop me a note!

One of the most important things to me about designing user interfaces is trying to figure out if an audience of users has already learned something, and where they learned it. "Where they learned it" is important because that may determine whether the users will bring that particular piece of intuition into play in relation to the design.

You usually want your designs to be "intuitive". If a design is not "intuitive", designers are told, it's not a success. In design reviews, "intuitive" is frequently an important criterion. This is generally a pretty good idea; if users can use your design right away without pausing to figure it out first, so much the better.

There are many levels of "intuitive", though, and these have to do with where you learned something. As humans we have enormous implilcit understanding of mass and gravity; that's why we can toss a ball accurately (or semi-accurately in my case) and how you know by looking whether to try jumping a certain distance. As inhabitants of high-tech civilization we have a lot of implicit understanding of graphic user interface, and that's why we don't expect an object on a screen -- in most contexts -- to drop to the bottom because it's "heavy". In fact, even more than that, we even know that in some contexts, such as certain games, we do expect objects to have mass and react as if there was gravity.

When you see a new user interface, sometimes there's a little "aha!" moment. Something surprises you, and at the same time seems suddenly obvious. I think that moment represents a realization that you can bring a different intuition into play in a context you already understood in a different way.

Intuitive design is about ease of use. Counterintuitive design -- done really well -- is about aha.