Wildchicken: Computers and Internet

Pelago.com

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 02:55:02 GMT

I've updated my new company's website and it went live today! www.pelago.com. We're still in stealth mode so there's not a lot of detail about our product development stuff, but we're getting closer!

The new site was something I was doing this past week in parallel with our product design and development. A few weeks ago I redesigned our logo, and now here it is unveiled with a new site to wrap it up in. Check it out! I haven't done logo design in a while, and I went through quite a number of iterations to get here. Had to think about company values, branding, design values, culture, etc. before starting on actually designing it. It was fun, though. One of these days, just for my own portfolio, I'm going to document that process for myself and see the journey of the Pelago logo. I'm happy with how it turned out.

The site itself went in fits and starts, but once I was able to sit down for a couple hours solid I was able to establish a basic design direction which I was able to follow. It's a little light on content, but that's what happens when you're a startup in stealth mode. I can't wait to actually be able to talk about our work! Then the website can show more - but then that requires a lot more design work to get it there. Oh well.

We also did a little co-development with American Eagle, so you can see our little logo on their site. Go to ae.com and pick out something. If you click on Send to Phone, you can see our little logo at the bottom. Nothing obtrusive or super fancy, but we're getting out there.

BTW, we are hiring. Check out the jobs page. :-)

Not iYet

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:53:12 GMT

Got my hands on a iPhone here at work, and after spending a couple days with it I have to say: not yet.

Don't get me wrong, it's beautiful and lust-inducing. It's a gorgeous device, and has "steal me" written all over it. They did an amazing number of things just so right, and obviously had to get a service partner to change the status quo because it was the right thing to do. Visual voicemail? Threaded SMS? C'mon, now there's no other way to do it, and because the iPhone did it the other phones and carriers will have to get with it or get left behind.

Initially the onscreen keyboard wasn't quite as good as I hoped; it kept on getting P when I wanted O. But after using it more, I realized it's pretty damn good, just not as good as a dedicated keyboard quite yet. I'm still using my Blackjack (but that's quite an imperfect device as well). I'm surprised that they didn't have the keyboard actually show lower-case letters, especially when typing in passwords. I found myself wondering what I was typing, and the glowing shift button just didn't seem enough for me.

The kicker right now is that I have a couple pairs of good headphones - a Bose noise canceling pair for traveling and general sitting-on-my-butt use, and a Shure pair for taking around with me. Neither of them will fit on the iPhone, since the iPhone's jack is recessed and the plugs simply won't fit! I know, get a dongle that will do it, but why the hell should I spend another few dollars for a crappy solution like that?

I know, everyone's going to come out with an iPhone friendly design, but I'm perfectly happy with my existing headphones and I can't believe that I can't use them as is.

However I wouldn't be surprised if Bose released a new cable for their headphones that also include the microphone. Now that would be slick. However most other headphones don't have that option, and it sucks that you would have to use a stupid dongle (which I'm not sure is even out) or use their headphones only.

For the same price as a PS3, I don't want to have to make that choice quite yet.

Yeah, yeah, it's a great device, it's signature Apple, and they have a lot to be proud of and everyone else needs to stand up and take notice. But I think I'll wait a little while longer. Unfortunately for me, it's likely not a matter of if, but when.

Sony Reader

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:44:24 GMT

I got one of these Sony Readers recently and I've been using it rather extensively for a couple weeks now. Don't get it confused with the original Easy Reader, as nothing is cooler than reading.

The Good:

You need to check out the screen. It has great DPI for a digital display, so text looks very good. If you didn't know any better, it looks like a fake display since it's very flat and doesn't glow which means you need light to read it, just like a real book. The screen, legibility, and overall cool factor is the best part of this; I'm reading 3 books on this right now, and I'm enjoying the experience. You can even change text size on the fly and bookmark pages to your heart's content. Battery life is great since electronic ink is very efficient.

It also seems to do a decent job of showing pictures in black & white. The resolution is good enough such that even with a limited number of grey levels the dithering does a great job of giving you a full range. You just need to make sure that your images are at a resolution that's close to the reader's native screen, otherwise pictures look like crap.

The Bad:

The interface, on the other hand, starts to get a little less cool both on the device software as well as the hardware itself. Why have 2 ways to page forward and backward? Why have the number keys along the bottom when the UI uses them in a list going from top to bottom? It may make more sense to put the numbers vertically to match up with the screen. The extremely slow refresh rate of the screen causes some problems if you're actually trying to use the d-pad to navigate the rudimentary UI. I wonder if they could have removed the need for a d-pad if they had better aligned the number keys along the side. I think they could have easily removed 6 buttons right there: remove the redundant paging buttons and the 4-way d-pad. It feels like such a lost opportunity to have a much better hardware/software experience that is really integrated.

When you really think about it, the industrial design overall isn't amazing. It's okay, but it's not quite there yet. Don't get me wrong, Sony tends to have solid industrial design, but for some reason this one didn't quite meet my expectations.

The Ugly:

Where it gets really ugly is the Sony Connect software. You need to use their software and their store to get books, and frankly it sucks. They try to be a little like iTunes and software of that nature, but they fail completely. It has neither the catalog of Amazon or the integrated library/catalog interface of an Tunes or Zune. On top of that, you can download the software to your PC, but you can't create an account unless you have a reader! Why would they prevent someone from checking out the store that way and even prevent them from buying books? What if they wanted to read them on their laptop? Anyway, it makes no sense. The PC software is horrendously bad, enough so that I really don't like browsing for books. I go to the bookstore or Amazon, write down the titles of books that I want, check the Connect store if they have it, and if they do then maybe I'll buy it. Horrible.

And to my earlier point about pictures looking like crap if they weren't in the right resolution, why can't the software either automatically change them when I'm synching or at least tell me that they need to be in a particular size?

Some books have footnotes/endnotes that you can actually go to, but the navigation gets so weird that I've found that I've lost my place by following one. Such a shame.

I don't read product manuals so maybe there is a way to do these things but I just don't know how. Then again, for consumer products I really don't think it should be necessary to read manuals in the first place.

Summary:

I would love to see future readers fix all of these things with the device and the connect store to either get with the program or we get a standard e-book format that I can download from Amazon and synch with my device. I can bring .doc and .pdf files with me, and I honestly haven't tried to do that yet, but it's not quite the same as getting the latest releases from Amazon or the bookstore. Getting me off of the Connect software/store would make this experience sooo much better.

All in all, if you like gadgets and want to take reading to the next step, give this a shot. It's not cheap (US$349.99), but if there are enough titles in the Connect catalog to keep you happy, not having to lug around books when you travel is a nice feature that your back/shoulders would be happy about. I think electronic ink is a really cool technology that we're going to see used more in the future, and when you get beyond the crappy store and PC software, get used to the klunky device interface, and you're just reading through George Orwell's 1984, it's almost like you've seen the future of books. Almost.