Chris Sherman at SearchEngineWatch talks a bit about Longhorn search and links to a Channel 9 video clip where you get some glimpses of how search is going to be implemented in Longhorn. What’s clear right now is that they are: 1. Planning for a search experience that operates...
The Problem
Internet users have largely given up trying to keep up to date with the vast amount of content being published on their ‘favourite’ web sites, let alone the slow moving sites that they need to track but are not motivated to visit ‘just in case’. Portal vendors have tried to help by allowing users to aggregate bits of many web sites together, to minimise the number of web sites a person needs to access, particularly in a process context.
Proprietary approaches to Syndication, or the publish and subscribe model to information access has been tried several times on the internet, taking the form of for example Internet Explorer channels, and PointCast personalised news feeds. Avantgo continues to find a niche publishing channels to PDA’s.
Email has become flooded with newsletters, status updates, just in case cc emails, and application specific notifications.
RSS to the rescue
Recently however with the advent of RSS, we now have an Open and Simple way for applications to publish, for users to locate and subscribe and for subscribed content to be accessed, processed and ultimately scanned and consumed, discussed, archived and subsequently retrieved…
Just finished my first read of this book, (it really needs reading twice), and found it pretty good. Unfortunately it also left me being very frustrated because the methodology proposed is so well supported by the outlook Add-in, and I have to use Lotus Notes. There is a template for Notes,...
An interesting book that takes 300 plus pages to describe what it probably could do in 20. The basic idea, you are happiest when you are involved or imersed in what you are doing. It then gives loads of examples of how this can happen in sports, music, work etc. ...
I have posted the Excel spreadsheet that I use to log and chart my symptoms. I have left some real data in it of the last flare that I had because it might be useful for people to compare their experience. The spreadsheet might be useful for other people as...
This is a short article that I wrote for the occupational therapist who works with one of my daughters who has Raynauds and Scleroderma.
There are a variety of different types of technology assistance that would benefit Jennifer in an educational setting. My perception is that a range of techniques will be required that reflect the unpredictable nature of her symptoms and the variety of different tasks that she needs to perform. There is no magic bullet solution that meets all of her needs.
Writing
When Jennifer has to write for extended periods there are a number of issues that need to be considered:
1. Her ability to dictate in a fluent fashion is limited at this age
2. Her hands get cold
3. Her hands get tired
4. Sometimes the movement/dexterity of her hands is limited
What solution options are available in addition to traditional pen and paper?
1. Voice recognition
2. Hand writing recognition
3. Simple gesture recognition
4. Different types of keyboard
5. text substitution
Each option is considered in brief below:
Voice recognition
Voice recognition is …
This book provides an introduction to using and programming Radio Userland. I thought I would give it a read as it seems that radio userland is quite a powerful and flexible environment. I have already played around with a few additional tools, particularly as I wanted a bit more power...
In my previous blogs, I talked about my concerns over the neglect of employees productivity and my personal productivity challenges. In this blog I talk about some of the simple things I would like. Its interesting that lots of them sound quite easy to achieve, and some of them work right now if only the systems were configured that way.
Users don’t know what they want!.
I have developed quite a few systems, and worked as an architect and systems integrator on many more and it’s always been pretty clear to me that in general users don’t know what they want. Even if the user takes the trouble to write a specification, in the end it won’t meet their requirements for at least one of the following reasons:
Right now it seems to me that Longhorn is being targeted at three communities:
It’s got lots of other features that will appeal to the mass of task and structured task workers in corporate environments, but true thin client approaches will probably appeal more strongly for these users IT managers, particularly with the current wave of smart client rich UI toolkits that run on top of a JVM.
So how might this pan out in reality:
So maybe that leaves 40% of users who will either switch to thin clients, unless Microsoft can convince businesses to stick with them because of the benefits …