The human mind relies so much on the concept of beauty that the gadgets deemed ‘ugly’ are thought of as technologically inferior.
The way most Apple products are designed, expecially the Macs, most Apple users tend to ignore the shortcomings of the hardware.
I am one of those users.
Bakit tinawag na TIKI-TIKI for babies?
Kasi ang baby galing sa titi at kiki, pinaghalo lang para di bulgar.
Alangan naman, UNITED AMERICAN TITI KIKI for babies. Sagwa diba?
(mga jokes na napulot kay Jopz)
Many of the academic types who were involved in creating the earliest implementations of the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC and various universities sort of sneered at the first generation of personal computers when they appeared in the mid-seventies, since the early personal computers were much less powerful than the machines that they were used to programming. There wasn’t that much you could do with only four kilobytes of memory and no disk drive.
But Larry Tesler, who was a key member of the Smalltalk team in the Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC, felt differently. He was really excited by the potential of personal computers, buying a Commodore PET as soon as one became available in 1977. He was one of the demonstrators at Apple’s famous Xerox PARC visit in December 1979, and he was so impressed by the Apple visitors that he quit PARC and started working at Apple on July 17, 1980, as the manager of the Lisa Applications team.
Larry championed consistency between applications, and made many contributions to what eventually became the Macintosh User Interface. He was also the leading advocate and implementor at Apple of user testing: actually trying out our software out on real users and seeing what happened. Starting in the summer of 1981, Larry organized a series of user tests of the nascent Lisa software, recruiting friends and family to try out the software for the first time, while being observed by the Apple designers who recorded their reactions.
The user tests were conducted in a specially constructed room featuring a one-way mirror, so observers could watch the tests without being intrusive. The tests were conducted by a moderator who made sure the user felt comfortable and showed her the basics of using a mouse. Then, with no further instruction, users were asked to perform specific tasks, without help from the moderator, like editing some text and saving it. The moderator encouraged each user to mumble under her breath while doing the tasks, revealing her current thinking as much as possible. Each session was audio or videotaped for later analysis.
When the software required confirmation from the user, it displayed a small window called a “dialog box”, that contained a question, and presented two buttons, for positive or negative confirmation. The buttons were labeled “Do It” and “Cancel”. The designers observed that a few users seemed to stumble at the point that the dialog was displayed, clicking “Cancel” when they should have clicked “Do It”, but it wasn’t clear what they were having trouble with.
Finally, the team noticed one user that was particularly flummoxed by the dialog box, who even seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, “I’m not a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?”
It turns out he wasn’t noticing the space between the ‘o’ and the ‘I’ in ‘Do It’; in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital ‘I’ looked very much like a lower case ‘l’, so he was reading ‘Do It’ as ‘Dolt’ and was therefore kind of offended.
After a bit of consideration, we switched the positive confirmation button label to ‘OK’ (which was initially avoided, because we thought it was too colloquial), and from that point on people seemed to have fewer problems.
In ENGLISH:
Eat all you want!
Don’t be shy!
Feel at Home!
In TAGALOG:
Kain lang kayo ng kain!
Walang hiya kayo!
Pakiramdam niyo bahay niyo to!
Google Images now allows you to restrict your search to a specific category – albeit in an “unofficial” mode only – and one of these categories may well be powered by actual image recognition (as opposed to textual keyword analysis). Right now, the available modes are (at least) the following:
show everything (the default old search)
show faces
show news images
But there doesn’t seem to be anything in the interface to trigger this – you have to resort to appending a parameter named “imgtype” to the result URL, with the values “face” or “news”. A normal result URL when searching for the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) for instance looks like the following:
>> images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=w3c
As you can see, there’s logos, white papers, maps, group photos and so on. But append &imgtype=face to the URL, and you’ll end up with lots of W3C members – this works incredibly well (with only a single result that could be a potential miss, and even that one includes a small face as part of the image; it should be noted however that “face” in this case means “human face,” and not e.g. the face of Mickey Mouse):
>> images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=w3c&imgtype=face
Google watcher Ionut Alex. Chitu comments that this type of search result “may be the first visible result of the Neven Vision acquisition” from August 2006; Neven Vision’s speciality was image object recognition. The “news” parameter on the other hand triggers the following search result, and it may well be that it’s based on the much simpler algorithm of Google just taking into account images from sources they list as news:
>> images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=w3c&imgtype=news
It’s unclear what exactly Google defines as news. Whereas for instance the second result, Sci-tech-today.com, is also one of the ~10,000 Google News USA sources – we can verify this using the “site:” operator – the first one, Counter-smap.com, isn’t (it may be a source in a non-US Google News, or it may be that Google uses certain keywords found on a page to determine its “news” status).
It would be incredibly neat to see this being rolled out for many other categories, from “animal” to “Creative Commons-licensed” and what-not. And it’s actually possible that more undiscovered image types are already supported. Which image categories would you like to see?
Try it yourself…
As right now there’s apparently no official interface to accompany these two new search types, I’ve created a form for you below to perform it, and also made available the functionality as part of the multi search gadget for iGoogle.