Usability: April 2007 Archive Page

Olympus DS-50 Voice Recorder (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Two brand-new Olympus DS-50 voice recorders just arrived at SHU. I've ordered two DS-40s as well.

My students have been learning podcasting basics with some older voice recorders, but the virtue of that older equipment is that it's very easy to understand.

The DS-50s are state-of-the art, but I realized with dismay just now that they only record in Microsoft's proprietary WMA format, rather than the more common MP3 format. The open-source Audacity audio editing tool does not currently have the ability to open WMA files. I can, of course, just plug the voice recorder's output into the computer's mic jack, push PLAY on the voice recorder and REC on Audacity, and transfer the file that way. That's how my students are importing audio from the voice recorders they're using now, so it's really not a burden when you think of it individually.

But that wouldn't be at all efficient if I asked students to fan out and bring back raw audio for me to incorporate into a workshop of some kind.

Microsoft says Windows Media Player 10 will export a WMA file into an MP3 format, but I found Windows Media Player a bewildering labyrinth of features that are completely irrelevant to my needs. The menu interface is not like any of the hundreds of other Windows tools I have used, so I can't even tell where I am supposed to look to find out what version of Media Player I've got.

Fortunately, I found a free tool called Switch, which quite painlessly converts WMA files to MP3s.

The Mercury News posted an Associated Press package that included a video news story, accounts from witnesses and a disturbing home-made cell phone video that recorded dozens of gun shots and angry and disturbed screaming, presumably from the gunman.

Perhaps most troublesome was that whoever was shooting the cell phone video, actually moved toward the gunfire instead of away from it. Some obvious advice: It's not worth it. Do not endanger your life for a YouTube moment.

News coverage aside, technology potentially played a key role in informing those most at risk. The way school administrators used their digital tools may even have saved lives. --Mike Cassidy --Digital tools were potential life savers during Va. Tech massacre (MercuryNews)

My brother is a Va Tech alumnus. At the University of Virginia we enjoyed a friendly rivalry with our larger land-grant sibling.

This time of year I have lots of papers to mark and lots of stressed students who need attention; further, three days this week I'm leaving early to attend to family business (today was a birthday party for both my kids, Wednesday I always leave early so I can watch the kids while my wife prepares for her night class, and Friday my son will be in an art show), so I haven't been following this as closely as I really wanted to.

Someone else will write a thoughtful analysis of the Wikipedia and Wikinews articles on the events, and someone else will track what the Va Tech students were saying to each other on MySpace and Facebook while the Va Tech authorities wondered how to get in touch with students and what they should say.

I'm glad my kids don't mind being hugged and kissed in public, since I was doing a lot of that today.

Update: the Roanoke Times has been covering the event on its breaking news blog, changing the title to reflect recent developments, adding time-stamped items to the top of the page.

The first issue was providing enough fun. Every puzzle should have some reward, and a complicated or multi-stage puzzle should provide some minor rewards for partial solutions. So once I had the puzzle structure in mind (more about that later), I could see which puzzles were going to open a lot of new game-play and which were only going to bring the player up against another puzzle -- the structural equivalent of getting through one locked door to find that there's another beyond it. Everywhere there was a puzzle without much game-play reward, I added plot material for the player to discover instead -- ideally, a hint that raised more questions than it answered, something that would both reward him for getting part-way through the puzzle sequence and keep him interested in what would turn up next.

The other point had to do with managing player attention. The more time a player spends in the presence of an unsolvable puzzle (say, a door he can see from the first room but that stays locked until half-way through the game), the more importance he tends to attach to that problem. It's a huge let-down to walk through that door and find that it leads to a broom closet with one cheap treasure in it. So the big puzzles, the puzzles the player has been taught to care about, should pay off in multiple ways at once: *both* major new game-play *and* major plot information. --Emily Short interviewed by Jim Munroe --Inside Interactive Fiction: An Interview with Emily Short (Gamasutra)

--Star Trek Bonanza (Something Awful)

Science Fiction movies have been a source for speculation about the future of technology and human computer interaction. This paper presents a survey of different kinds of interaction designs in movies during the past decades and relates the techniques of the films to existing technologies and prototypes where possible. The interactions will be categorized with respect to their domain of real-life applications and also evaluated in regard to results of current research in human computer interaction. --Michael Schmitz --Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies (Instrumented Spaces)

The humanist in me wants more analysis, more philosophy, more "why does this matter". Metropolis (which Schmitz incorrectly calls "the oldest science fiction movie") is filed under "movies without concepts," which doesn't exactly give much credit to the ground-breaking expressionistic set designs. It's not clear to me that the author recognizes that the scene with the human worker who moves dials on a gigantic wheel is supposed to make an artistic point. (The author calls it a "conceptual fault".) The movie also includes a scene where the Master of Metropolis contacts his foreman contacts on what we would call a video phone, and his office includes machines that resemble stock tickers, so not only does this paper miss the artistic point of the movie, it also misses the opportunity to discuss the technology.

I wasn't really satisfied to look at a picture and read a summary of the scene, though I did enjoy when the imaginary technology is paired with a real-world version.