Here we go again. From the Isaiah Washington slur flap
I welcome the chance to meet with leaders of the gay and lesbian community to apologize in person and to talk about what I can do to heal the wounds I’ve opened.
Now that’s how to get a meeting.
Last week I posted (on Core77) about Virgin America’s new on-board entertainment system.
Here’s a run-through of the system by Charles Ogilvie of the airline.
The information is good, the capabilities are good, but the video is filled with corporate/tech jargon. I’m always amazed at how unable some business folks are to talk to (or about) people in plain ol’ English.
Some of the scary phrases to listen for
Good marks, however, when a TLA is introduced and defined, and then explained, which is nice,
Much of the lingo is pretty far from how we might want to talk with Virgin (although they mention the dialog back and forth with us they are interested in).
Oh, and did you see the arrow cursor flipping around whenever they showed the on-screen display? Is that real, or an artifact of the demo actually being filmed on a desktop computer and not the seatback? A detail, for sure, but if you’re going to talk about open source, Linux, multi-stream, file servers and the like, expect that same audience to notice things like faked-out demos.
A quicker and more polished on-board tour is here.
The Conversation is a fantastic 1974 Coppola film that has surveillance as one of its central themes. There’s a lot of great technology imagery, especially the analog audio that Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) uses to decipher the content of the conversation, and also the surveillance trade show that Caul attends. Here’s a sampling of stills depicting the awesomeness:
The lab, with lots of reel-to-reel and plenty of buttons for Bill DeRouchey.
The trade show, complete with booth babe, and some very 1970s design (environments, hardware, clothing, typography).
I had a fun time at a Microsoft event in SF yesterday, essentially a product demo day, with 300 people watching presenters tweak HTML (and other arcane variants of such code), and then some more intimate discussions on design, user experience and so on by Chris Bernard. Given the emphasis on User Experience, I thought these demo kiosks were lovely but discouraging to use.
Things look nice.
I’m not sure about the term demo assets exactly, and why I need to get them ready, but the mess of a screen at least has a “do this first” zone.
Except it’s a non-stable trick. They put a Windows shortcut on top of that white triangle, but I accidentally dragged it when I went to click it. It’s not really a button, it’s a fake button, and one that easily breaks when someone tries to use it. Oops.
Okay, so now you do the double clicking they want you to do. And up comes a DOS window that lasts more than 1 second. Maybe I’m just un-tech enough to have that bother me, but it really seemed like the backstage was being revealed in a way that it shouldn’t. Why do I see DOS stuff when I’m running a new Windows app?
Anyway, it wasn’t clear what that was doing (perhaps restoring things to a pristine state) and it was even less clear what to do next. Some things to click were just Word documents that you couldn’t interact with (that’s a demo?), and others were apps that gave dire warnings about expiring betas. Again, maybe I’m not the right person to be trying this stuff anyway, but you can see that the commitment to design and user experience has a long way to go.
My hosts were exceedingly kind with their time and made me feel very welcome, so I apologize for having the poor grace to only post something negative. I suspect they are only too aware of the many instances of this sort of thing going on, and are marching uphill. But at least they are marching!