01.23.14 |
Gaming |
∞
Microsoft promotes the Xbox One as an all-in-one solution for your living room needs: gaming, film, cable TV, even home exercise. But the Xbox One leans on convergence to a fault. It’s a console whose overstuffed feature set, for now, has left it vulnerable on both price and its user interface. While core gamers kept sales strong over the holidays I’m concerned that the console will have a rough future with a mainstream audience.
Its convergence problems start with its $500 price tag. Devices that already carry the same feature set of core streaming services (e.g. Netflix, Hulu Plus) as the Xbox One are $100 or less. Granted, the Xbox One adds on high end gaming, voice and gesture UI integration along with limited cable TV control, but those additions for $400 are a hard sell for everyday consumers. And I doubt we’ll see a price drop anytime soon; the console requires high-end expensive gaming hardware to compete with Sony’s PS4 over next gen gaming. The Kinect, one of the Xbox’s purported main innovations, drives the price higher. Microsoft tacks on additional fees as well: a $60/year Xbox Live subscription is required for most functionality, a policy unheard of on competing tech devices like the PS4 or Roku.
Convergence across diverse activities also adds complexity to the Xbox One’s UI, an extra hurdle for mainstream adoption. Just compare the console’s preferred interaction method – voice – against interaction on competing media and tech devices. From my own testing, Xbox One voice commands largely work. But it still feels like a feature trying to find its footing; about 20% of the time I have to repeat myself or a command takes me in an unwanted direction.
80% reliability is a good start, but that’s 15% short of what it should be given the competition’s astounding performance. Consider the 1 to 1 touch interaction on a modern iOS or stock Android smartphone or tablet. Or the tried and true keyboard and mouse inputs on a desktop or laptop. Even buttons on a remote control for the cable box. These aforementioned devices “just work.” Granted, Microsoft’s voice technology is new and will improve, and there’s a game controller for backup navigation. But historically users outside a tech or gaming enthusiast base show little patience for new input technologies that work unreliably.
Then there’s added Xbox One functionality that’s puzzling. Things like:
- “Snapping” an application like a web page or Skype alongside the right side of the screen seems like it would be used in a rare scenario.
- Minority Report style Kinect gestures to move around the UI that are slow and awkward.
- A Windows 8-like interface that’s visually striking, but occasionally confusing with a menu of very similarly sized and colored boxes doing different things.
Microsoft would argue that ambition takes time and that the Xbox One’s rough patches will be smoothed over soon. And I want the Xbox One to succeed; strong competition from Microsoft’s console leads to better technology from Sony, Nintendo, Apple and Google. However, other living room tech isn’t standing still. Rumors suggest the next Apple TV iteration will be ambitious. Sony’s PS4 runs select multi-platform games at higher resolutions with a more straightforward, gaming focused UI, which could appeal to the core gaming market. Drive can only take a console so far; with Microsoft’s missteps on price and UI, it’s unclear if the company can deliver on its promise.
01.22.14 |
∞
Front end developer and author Nicholas Zakas:
The things I look for in a front-end engineer have little to do with traditional computer science concepts. I’ve written before about what makes a good front-end engineer and how to interview front-end engineers, and generally I still agree with everything I wrote in those articles. I want enthusiasm and passion for the web, and understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and more importantly, how to use them together to create a solution to a problem.
01.09.14 |
∞
I’ve been a fan of Will Smith and the whole Tested crew for a while. And Will tells it exactly like it is from his first day on the CES show floor:
It’s an endemic problem at this show–the vast majority of products being shown here are absolute garbage. I’m talking about products that no one in their right mind could want.
01.07.14 |
∞
I’ve always been a fan of Vimeo, especially their video player, which I’ve found historically more HTML5 friendly and more responsive than Youtube’s. So it’s impressive for them to launch a new player today that’s rebuilt from the ground up. I haven’t spent too much time with it, but so far it feels a lot speedier on startup time. Nice web integration improvements as well as noted in Vimeo’s blog post:
No more toggling into the HTML player — now everyone who has an HTML5-capable browser gets the HTML player. And when you’re in a modern browser, even if we can’t fully use HTML5, there’s a good chance you’ll get HTML controls.
01.02.14 |
∞
Federico Viticci over at MacStories knows his iOS apps very well. The guy oversees and has written hundreds of posts for MacStories, so we shouldn’t be surprised given the high quality of writing over there that he’s very well qualified in his opinions.
If you’re looking for some fresh apps to start the new year I can’t think of a better list to start from.
12.25.13 |
∞
If you’re an iOS user there’s a lot of app sales going on for the holidays. But there’s no better single sales grouping than over at App Santa. Very respected iOS dev teams with some excellent apps. I use Tweetbot, Clear+, One Password, and Launch Center Pro daily. I only use Scanner Pro every so often, but it’s essential for keeping track of receipts, especially on business trips.
12.24.13 |
∞
It’s too last minute to be useful for holiday gifting, but for 2014 shopping, Canopy is a great site. It’s effectively a wrapper around Amazon with hand picked recommendations; most items selected are very design and/or tech friendly, and often hard to find elsewhere. I like the clean web design as well.
12.23.13 |
∞
During the holidays I tend to travel more and rely on my iPhone and iPad for blogging and social media. But there’s a big problem when you find a cool link on RSS or Twitter: the URL is often littered with proxies, tokens, and other junk that’s unnecessary. Enter the free Clean Links app. Just copy whatever the URL is to your clipboard, open up the app, and a “cleaned” version of the URL is pasted back on your clipboard for use elsewhere. For those that want a faster workflow, Clean Links supports the X-Callback-URL scheme for use in apps like Drafts or Launch Center Pro.
12.19.13 |
∞
Alice Marwick’s article has already gotten a lot of well deserved praise, but this passage really stood out as a smart (and simple?) observation that I’ve rarely spotted in other articles:
Certainly, a level of material wealth is necessary to participate in San Francisco tech culture. Very few pointed to the elephant in the room of assumed wealth: “People behave as if we all make kind of the same.” To forge the type of social connections necessary to move into the upper echelons of the tech scene requires being able to take part in group activities, travel to conferences, and work on personal projects. This requires middle- to upper-class wealth, which filters out most people.
The result of this mythology is that it denies the role of personal connections, wealth, background, gender, race, or education in an individual’s success.
11.06.13 |
∞
Screenshots can be a tricky thing; in my day job I take a lot for sharing with coworkers. The default Mac OS X behavior of dropping screenshots on the desktop is poor and leads to a lot of unnecessary cruft. I’m not super crazy about Dropbox’s implementation either, as their default file references include a Dropbox web UI around the image itself (I prefer the image raw.)
Naturally, this workflow for keyboard launcher Alfred fit my particular screenshot needs very well. I currently have two keyboard shortcuts set up; one allows me to select part of the screen, which then copies to a Dropbox folder and pastes the link to the raw image in my clipboard, the other just copies the image direct to clipboard for screenshots I know I won’t have to reference later.