The Incrementalist

Apple released another bump in the Powerbook line this morning. Typical weekday release, still no G5, no big deal—right? Well, there was one thing that caught my eye:

So what? We’ve had things like SideTrack to set aside sections of the trackpad for scrolling for some time now.

Wait, two fingers, you say?

For the past 15 years or so, we’ve pretty much been stuck with a single cursor with a couple buttons as our narrow pipeline into the world behind the screen. A few niche products and research projects have demonstrated the potential of multiple-pointer interaction. For instance, a SIGGRAPH video that I once saw showed a user holding a virtual tool palette with one hand, and clicking through it with the other hand’s cursor. It also made rectangular selection more fluid, with each pointer getting one opposite corner. A company called FingerWorks has been selling keyboards and touchpads that can detect multiple fingers. I’ve been curious, but they’re pricey and I’ve never found a demo unit that I could try for myself. With such a tiny market, developers and OS makers have had little incentive to investigate the possibilities of multi-pointer interaction.

That’s why Apple’s addition, if I’m guessing correctly and they’re not just using some capacitance trick, stirs my imagination. If they eventually move to multi-finger touchpads across their entire portable line, it’d be the first wide-scale deployment of a multi-pointer input device. (Nintendo blew their chance with the DS—it’s disappointing that its touchscreen can only detect one finger at a time, since it would otherwise serve as a great reconfigurable controller.)

The operating system could still be a bottleneck. I have no idea whether OS X can support multiple pointers under the hood—their initial use of the multi-finger gestures for things like scrolling is easy enough to do at the driver level. But I hope that if they expand the use of the multi-finger trackpads, they’ll eventually expose it at the OS level. I would love to have the additional expressiveness in my work. For example, I could use it to solve the ambiguity of whether the user wants to drag a frame or something inside of it—in the latter case, you could just pin down the frame with one finger and grab the contained element to yank it off. You could zoom in or out by grabbing a map at two points and bringing your fingers further apart or closer together (Hiroshi Ishii prototyped this behavior with phycons on a projection table). Or you might express the difference between “move” and “copy” operations by whether the user grabbed the item with one or two fingers.

Who knows, maybe Apple could end up doing for multi-pointer input what they did for USB and WiFi. Well, I can dream…

Update: As it turns out, some earlier Powerbooks and iBooks (though, sadly, none in my household) have trackpads that support this feature. On those machines, you can install a driver mod to enable two-finger scrolling capabilities.

Update: Looks like I missed another interesting feature of the new Powerbooks: an accelerometer! Enterprising hackers have already found ways to tap into it from software, yielding a “tilt”-control iTunes interface. I think it’s an unwritten law of Mac software development that every Mac I/O device must eventually be hooked up to iTunes.

Here are a couple other interesting bits about the A9 Yellow Pages:

• Here’s How We Did It
• B2.0 Article by John Battelle

While my previous post on the topic was more about the UI of the feature, I just noticed another interesting part of the page:

Clicking that button takes you to a fairly comprehensive set of web forms which allow the business owner or any random websurfer to contribute metadata about that business—things like phone numbers, email, website, hours of operation, and credit cards accepted. This, along with the fact that all of Amazon’s existing commenting and recommendation features are available for the businesses, made me realize that what they’re really doing here is planting the seeds for ownership of the real-world metadata game as thoroughly as they’ve captured the product-metadata space.

What’s the typical place to link to if you’re talking about a book or DVD online? Amazon. (I’ve even got a plugin on my WordPress installation that automates these sorts of links.) Amazon really realizes that they’re in the cataloging business as much as the product-shipping business—I don’t have a reference handy, but I remember Bezos saying that they could always make a business licensing their catalog (with all the rich comments, ratings, and other user-contributed metadata) if the “selling things” bit didn’t work out. Now they’re poised to become a definitive resource about local businesses (and other physical entities).

As good a job as I’m sure they’ll do with it, the fact remains that according to their license, Amazon’s dataset (including user contributions) is proprietary. (That could be one reason why they decided to run their own GPS photo trucks rather than employing pre-existing road-photo data sets.) They alone ultimately control what can be done with it. Wouldn’t it be better if we could find a way to collaboratively build similar systems without throwing our work over a proprietary wall in the process?

This morning’s buzz on the web seems to be centered around a9’s new Yellow Pages feature, which tries to show photos of the businesses alongside their results. How did they get all these photos? Basically, they had trucks with side-facing cameras and GPS units driving down the major commercial thoroughfares in a bunch of cities, and the system tries to roughly match up the geocoded address with the photos taken near that location. (As Russ Beattie points out, this has been done in Spain before, but not with this level of grace in the U.S.) If you know anything about GPS, you’ll realize that this process isn’t very exact, and indeed most of the photos of Cambridge businesses were about a block off their intended targets.

A9’s saving grace here is that they provide an incredibly painless way for users to correct the listings. At the bottom of the screenshot above, there’s a smooth javascript-driven row of images that you can use to pan down the street, and in a single click, assert that one of the particular photos is in fact the correct photo of the business—without going to another page, without signing in, without hassle. In my own projects like buskarma, I’ve learned the value of fast feedback—if you can present users with a minimal interface at the exact point at which they notice an inconsistency or failure of the system, you can often skim nice, targeted content improvements off the top of the user’s brain.

In A9’s case, once I corrected the entry shown above, it immediately started using that photo as the definitive one. It didn’t, however, update the thumbnail in the search results listing (I assume that’s cached). It also didn’t give me a way to assert that the photos were of the wrong side of the street for the business I was looking for. Finally, it didn’t make any attempt to re-interpolate the locations of the nearby businesses based on my assertion. Still, the mechanism is a great Wikipedia-style way of having the legions of web users who are undoubtedly kicking the tires of this service today improve the results as they go along.

Oh, and by the way, A9’s not the only one who’s been driving around with photo trucks. Peep this screenshot from a collaborative GIS demo that I helped put together for a northeastern state which just happened to have yearly drivethrough data for all of its state roads. Track me down at ETCon if you want to see it in action.

It’s a shame that Amazon.com provides much better facilities for searching and wishlisting books than most local libraries do, since you can save a bunch of cash (not to mention room in your house) by only buying the books which are worth re-reading. Fortunately, Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup bookmarklet tool offers a way to combine the handiness of Amazon’s catalog with the cost savings of library use.

A bookmarklet is a browser bookmark which contains a glob of JavaScript code instead of a URI, so that it becomes a little program which operates on the page you’re currently viewing. In the case of LibraryLookup, it scours the web page you’re looking at for an ISBN number, which it then feeds to your library catalog so that you can jump directly to the listing there.

The Minuteman Library Network is an umbrella organization for many local libraries in the Boston area, including my own Cambridge Public Library. They recently changed their catalog format, and I updated the bookmarklet to work with the new system—here’s the result:

library

To “install” it, just drag the “library” link above to your bookmarks bar. Then, next time you’re looking at some random book on the web, click the “library” bookmarklet and you’ll get a popup showing whether it’s available at any of the Minuteman branches and giving you the ability to reserve it. Enjoy!

Update: It’s worth mentioning that I had some problems posting the bookmarklet code in WordPress for a bit—it turned out that it was eating the backslash characters when saving. I replaced each backslash with %5c, which fixed the issue.

Over the past year, MAYA Design has been working on a pretty cool project for Eaton, but I haven’t been able to say anything about it. However, since it’s being shown at CES and now has a public site, I think I can start writing about it. I should mention that while I work for MAYA, I haven’t had much personal involvement in this project, I just think it’s nifty.

Home Heartbeat is an inexpensive nervous system for your home. It’s one of the first consumer-level uses of Ember’s low-power mesh-networking technologies. While the individual sensors don’t actually relay messages from other sensors for power reasons (that way, they can supposedly last for years on one battery), you’ll be able to get repeater modules to extend the coverage range of the net (you get about 90 feet per base or repeater). When you bring home the starter kit and plug in the base station, you will effectively have a mesh network in your house.

So what does this get you? Well, the Ember chips are cheaper and more power-efficient than, say, WiFi, so it’s more feasible to place networked sensors (and actuators) around your house and just forget about them until they have something interesting to tell you. (A network supports up to 30 devices.) Here’s the starting lineup of sensors:

• wet/dry sensor — can tell you if the basement’s flooded or Sparky’s water bowl has run dry
• open/closed sensor — tells you the current state of a door or window
• power sensor — stick this between the outlet and your iron or TV’s cord and you’ll know if it’s on or off (I want one that can tell me the actual power draw, though, like the Kill A Watt)
• water valve shutoff — hey, an actuator snuck in there! I don’t know much about this one; presumably, you could set it up to cut off your water if the wet/dry sensor detects flooding
• reminder — Here’s where things start to get interesting. This thing is a timer that you stick next to some task you’ll need to accomplish in the future. When you take care of it, you touch it and the timer starts over. So you can put it next to your air system filter, and tell it to ping you in three months—or stick it on the washing machine and have it remind you to put your laundry in the dryer in 40 minutes.
• attention sensor — This is actually a networked button, which is kind of cool in itself. Stick it by the door and have the kids press it when they get home—or give one to your neighbor to stick on their fridge, so they can press it if they see a suspicious character lurking around your house.

That’s the input, what about the output? Well, the base station comes with a small pocketable display which the team informally called the “key fob” (you can actually use it as a keychain), but which is apparently called the Home Key^TM in the product. It’s got a vibration feature (and probably some loathsome beepy stuff) to alert you to sensor messages, but it also acts as the setup interface. When you first get a new sensor, you slide the key into it, and the sensor bonds with your network. At the same time, it becomes the user interface for that sensor so that you can name it and configure it. When you’re done tweaking the sensor, you just pull out the key and stick it back in your pocket.

What happens when you leave the house? Unfortunately, your key is left high and dry, though it does remember the last state of all your sensors, so you’ll still be able to check whether you left your iron on or not. In addition, the base station can call out using your landline to send SMS messages to your cell phone for simple alerts. It’s too bad that they couldn’t work in a pager chip or something so that you could keep using the same key for your alerts.

So, basement flood warnings are great and all, but what else can you do with a household mesh network? Well, the base station has a USB port, which will probably support some interesting programming possibilities, along with allowing you to use your broadband connection for the SMS alerts. From what I hear, there will be some effort set aside to help the developer community do interesting things with this platform in the coming months.

If you’re interested in more details, I recommend checking the product manuals in the support section of the site.

Update: My co-worker Mike discusses the philosophy and motivation of Home Heartbeat.

Update: MAYA has now has a page about Home Heartbeat.