Mapping Kiosk User Interface Design Concepts

Last year we worked on requirements for Zion Hospital in Chicago for a mapping kiosk application, the project never reached to its implementation stage but the software UI designed was envisioned since my HKG days when I knew that touch screen kiosks were going to be big in accessing and serving up information in the easiest possible manner at public hot spots. I had first seen these beautiful touch-screen kiosk interfaces at the IFC tower in Hong Kong and the screen showed a 3D interface of all the different levels of offices and shops along with your current position and the easiest path to get to your destination. After I had seen this, the common sight on streets of Hong Kong was observing tourists holding their maps and trying to figure out where the nearest MTR station is or searching for the nearest restaurant is or where the next touristy spot was and what bus/taxi/subway connections take.

The interface attempt for the hospital sprung up from design ideas of installing standing or hanging touch screen kiosks like the ones shown below:


Here is the interface design we came up with, the idea of the touch application was to access information as fast as possible. The maintenance of these units can remotely be done with software updates released over the internet. Payment applications can also be built if there is a need for providing info on pay/access model. Click on the images below to open them in a new window.

Now you tell me what you think how  the usability of these interfaces can be improved. 

Enjoy!

Sam Kurien

Re-Design of the Parking Meter

The parking meter is an interesting piece of public equipment and many a downtowns have these weirdly shaped posts (mostly ugly) standing or planted on the sidewalks, an important source of revenue for the city. Here are some pictures to amuse you and the first definitely reveals the total chaos of people trying to figure out the condescending parking meter. Look at the images below there are at least six people trying to figure the parking meter a sight not so unusual for unfriendly user interfaces.


A closer look at these parking meters reveal traditional parking meters haven’t changed mucy from the 1930’, oh for sure once in while we see cool looking meters with easy interfaces like the one in Harvard square that look at least new agey but I have had a hard time finding one with easy to use interface. Thinking on those lines I decided to design an interface conceptualizing what it should look like.


Problems:

Unordered buttons
Most of the parking meters have a myriad of buttons all over which creates creepy and scary look first time you look at it, there is no clear order in which these buttons are laid out and placements are most haphazard not following hierarchical order to present needed input or output information.
Orientation
In most of the parking meters across the U.S the buttons are grouped well mostly in a vertical order and the user tends to input or read information in horizontal or diagonal fashion, so if there are more buttons the end user is looking down at an angle and incline of his or her vision goes lower and lower with each row, so if it’s a taller person the difficulty in reading and usability of presenting information is hampered.
Colors
The color coding on these meters is usually a mess and some of them show the standard grey with black and white and some other use bright red or green iron plates that are engraved, so if the city changes rates then new meters need to replaced escalation of cost, downtime of service and loss of revenue. Didn’t know colors and dissemination of information could cause so much harm .
Fare Plan
The Fare plans are again displayed in vertical order most of the time, it makes sense to start with the fare plan and the time plan at the same level instead of two levels.
Iconography
Most of the parking meters today still do not have neatly represented icons and most importantly from the usability point of view do I push or pull, yank them left or right, switch on or off are the kind of questions the user is face with.
Payment
Payment is most of the times done with coins, so if you don’t have the right change then you stand and beg from people who might have the change to save you from getting a ticket. There should be alternative payment methods.

Explanation of Instructions
In many newer version of parking meters there are side panels that display a cheat sheet or an explanation of instructions of how to use this complicated device again lot of use of space and if the information changes, replacement of the parking meter itself (cost increases, revenue decreases model). Another observation is most of the instructions wear out, phase out with weather conditions and do not make sense to the end user adding to their frustration levels.

Alternative Redesign
It is easy to criticize existing products without showing alternative solutions. An alternative interface is shown here from Netherlands and a proposed interface from me is shown as well for you to choose and comment as to what you think, again this is not tested with feedback or even proto-typed. The Nethterlands version is of course on the European market and seems to be working well and seem to have a better usability feedback compared to the American counterparts.

My proposed idea is to have a interface panel that is a touch screen, cost may be a concern here but cheap LCD panels that are durable and extremely thin can be manufactured at a low cost to volume ratio, one disadvantage of the product itself maybe the portability. Here are some pictures of how the meter-kiosk should look like. Now, of course these can double as other devices to dissemination information like mapping, advertisements from the city, hot spots, serve up web pages for valuable tourism information etc. The hardware device can be refined to almost a single post just like the traditional ones but with a touch screen that can even be solar powered, scratch resistant and durable for outside weathering conditions.


Proposed Parking Meter Interface


Below is my version of a touch screen interface which is almost self-explanatory and the hallmark of the good User Interface is exactly that it is “Self – Explanatory”. Please click on the image to see the zoomed in version in your browser.




Solutions:


Orientation
Unordered buttons are now replaced by color coded section on the touch screen for easy selection. The end user if handicapped can also hear the information via the built in speaker telling them what to do.
The flow of information is horizontal primarily with three basic steps
1) Choose Duration
2) Based on the Duration selected the Hourly Rate changes
3) Deposit Payment
Colors
The color coding on the redesign is distinct separating and grouping the three step process. The third section is on part of the touch screen but is integrated into the meter device displaying the information on the second panel as well.
Fare Plan
The Fare plans are again displayed based upon the selection its both informative and intutive, these can be changed at any time based upon programming and sending the information wirelessly to update rates, as well as the information on the meter.
Iconography
High level information is reprsented and outline with color codes and icons, information flows vertically and is the short summary of test. If the screen is reflected and viewing is difficult you can also hear out the informational steps to operate the parking meter.
Payment
The device will accept coins, cash tendered notes, credit and debit cards and chip enabled cards that have prepaid parking dollars/euros paid into which the machine can read and then spew out the receipts.

Final Thoughts:

Obviously the interface is not tested and followed by the iterative process that I mentioned in the last post, but hey this is a start for better usability isn't it?. If you have better ideas or alternative solutions please feel free to sketch up something and email it to me.

Wondering If Intuitive Designs should be the norm?

This post will start off with a posing question that is different from the title of the post- Should Intuitive Designs be built into systems or is the adaptability to such systems/interfaces already built into us?

I often wonder about the above question and  problems  like this do stay to bother. A architect/system designer/UI designer or a product designer always (well…not always) wrestle with these kinds of questions. On the left here is the pic of my daughter playing with my mac, when this was taken she was not even three, she is now four and knows how to use cell phones, and almost all the digital devices that her dad uses at home ranging from (ipods, iphones, wii, blu-ray player, hdtv’s etc.)….sounds scary isn’t it but again I begin to wonder if this is the world we live in now, as a parent I am confused whether to be proud of it or not? However these question still loom up in the air…

As I dissect these ponderings let me come at it from the angle of first answering the title to this post: I think as systems are designed and inventions (hardware) or software’s come to life a certain amount of intuitive behavior is always built into them no matter what and they either result into friendly or not so friendly systems. From the pictures above some of the mac fans may argue it is the ease of the system that allows this four year old to watch YouTube videos on my laptop but hold that thought that’s why I merged the two images into one, the laptops on one half is a PC laptop and on the other half is the mac and the web page Hannah is watching is YouTube on both machines. She has somehow figured out watching me for a good amount of time how to click on the favorite links in Safari as well as Firefox. So the argument that the MAC interface is easier for the child or easier to use in Hannah’s case fails. Again this may not  be a very good example but there is this truth that in the systems or interfaces designed some are easier to use and some are harder or just plainly inconvenient.

The second aspect again…”I wonder” and question is if the cognitive adaptability of the mind is strong in some (and not so strong in others) that enables the end user to just figure out the system and make use of it to satisfy a given need. In Hannah’s case her need to watch cartoons made her aware of the system (ot the tool to be used), she adapted the system and the need was satisfied. Though she hasn’t figured out that the favorites “Tom & Jerry” is bookmarked on the sites whenever she pulls up that site, her adaptive mind doesn’t care whether it’s a PC or MAC, she doesn’t care if the interfaces are convenient or not but the need to watch those cartoons is satisfied by her congnitive adaptability of the system irrespective of the intuitive design. This is true in the case of systems like SAP, the manufacturing industry really needed software products that solved problems on supply chain, managing production cycles etc and SAP systems solved that very need but the user interfaces on those systems “sucked” (pardon my expression here) big time but that is the truth. The engineers solved the problem but the interfaces were clumsy to use and soon productivity over a period of time turned into time consuming nightmares with SAP specialists rising in the market (sorry SAP guys...you are special) . So the next question that arises would be ...should designers/architects of a system even bother what the end user thinks, if the need is there, the end user will adapt and learn. Unfortunately many systems both devices and softwares are designed by technical people who believe that they know best and the end users know less or for that matter the end users don't really know what they want. The evolution of systems and the design process has come a long way and the truth of the age is far from it, we live in a age where interface designing has matured not only in the everyday machines we use but in software interfaces we design. The very competitiveness of firms to survive depends on it. An interesting point to note here would be to ask what then is the balanced approach to known as to how much intuitiveness needs to be built in so that it is easy to use, learning cycles are cut short, and finally it is easy to adapt.

Another interesting question that I will pose here is how do we measure those balances while designing such systems? We know maturity models optimize processes, procedures and product development but adaptability will be a hard one to measure as humans are capable of adapting at different levels of cognition, but at the end of the day I will settle for a system that has high form factor, high functionality and high adaptability in every area of design engineering. A design approach like the one graphically represented here from Anothony Robinson's six stage UI design work flow makes perfect sense to me if the approach is user centric, iterative. This approach though may have longer gestation periods and may be expensive in the beginning the plus's are the longer life cycle of the product and a support engineer's boon  - less maintenance and bug fixes. Now this may vary from industry to industry but this is a good start.

So in short...systems should have built in them the ease of use graphical or logical intuitiveness. System designers and Product designers should start by defining usability and utility (mind you they are different) from a the perspective of the all types of users in the mass, know the limitations that you cannot please everybody (a certain level of adaptability will be assumed from certain segments) and the result is we have a process defined for intuitive design to be the norm.

Sorry this post must have posed more questions than having answered them but these spaces are placeholders for my thoughts and I am sure I will revisit it soon.

Sam Kurien

Microsoft Future - Productivity Vision

I have been reading and discussing a lot about user interfaces and the ideas of how intrefaces are going to change the way we interact with different systems. Pranav Mistry's from MIT media labs talk on TED.com of his research on sixth sense technology is one aspect of these kinds of development we have seen lately. My favorite place these days on the web is following Microsoft's vision of the future and the neat research they are doing. Feel free to follow their blog and get a perspective on what's happening there. I have included here a video for you to enjoy. Most of the scenery you see in the video is Hong Kong, Chep Lap Kok Airport and buildings in Central, HKG.




Talking about productivity when it comes to user interface's these words pop in my mind "Intuitive", "simple", "logical" (even for dummies), "transference" (digital to real world and real world to digital).

INVIVA's Campaign for Microsoft XUI Concept

INVIVA a user experience design company recently created a campaign for Microsoft. I thought it was cool how they communicate through the ad the changing face of XUI which stands of experience user interfaces. If you have followed closely R&D at Microsoft research labs, and some of the products occasionally they show-case they justify that our interfaces are going to drastically change and mimic more of the real world objects, the ideas now while driving cars, or using a computer, or ordering the next drink or a meal is wrapped around in bringing a better user experience.

Included here is the video of the concept INVIVA developed. Enjoy!

Introducing the Blend Art-board

The one thing I like about the Blend is the idea of moving towards a system where the designer, architect and programmer can visualize and talk to each other with ease. Not only intuitive user interfaces is the order of the day but building them fast and with ease is also on the high priority with software manufacturers. This post is to introduce you to the different parts of the Blend Software's UI.

The work surface is referred to as the artborad where you will design your Silverlight or WPF applications. 

The artboard is your work surface, where you can visually design a document in your application by drawing objects and modifying them.

1. The artboard background color can be changed to suit anything you want, it is like the canvas where the majority of your work will be done.  To change the color you can use the Tools >> Options menu to do so. 

2. XAML Editor : The code that is generated is called XAML and can be edited in this window. If you look at indicator 5 it will give you options to be in Split view which means (design+code), XAML View which means you can directly edit the code. 

3. The Artboard controls have five key controls which are snapping on and off the gridlines, snaplines, showing annotations and turning on and off rendering effects. This area also shows the zoom percentages that can be controlled by clicking on the list down. 

4. This is the area where the filenames of your project appear. 

5. See point number 2. 

When you are working on a project you will also see certain tabs on the left and the right which can be turned on and off based upon the objects and actions you are performing on them. I have included these screen shots for your reference, in case you are following for the first time after you have installed Expression Blend. 

Enjoy..Next Time we will go ahead and create a roll over application.

HTML 5 Sketchpad

HTML5 being touted as the wave of the future in markup languages. Just do a google search if you’re curious about html5 and you’ll find a ton of info on what it is. HTML5 is being developed as the next major revision of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) started work on the specification around June 2004 under the name Web Applications 1.0.[1] As of February 2010, the specification is in the "Last Call" state at the WHATWG - which as mentioned earlier stands for WEB HYPERTEXT APPLICATION TECHNOLOGY WORKING GROUP. The main purpose of HTML 5.0 is to reduce the need of plug ins for RIA applications like Adobe Flash, Silverligh, Apache Pivot, JavaFX etc.

I won’t bore you with all the details about coding, but I found this cool online sketchbook while browsing completely flash free sketching application. It will be interesting to see if this will be cross system embeddable (Is that even a word? Good thing about the English language is use it and popularize it and somebody will add it in the dictionary) and portable with blogs/social networking sites.

Now that I have a iPhone -Darn!...Windows Phone 7 comes out

Well everybody is feeling it, I am just saying it aloud. After the first leaks of the widows phone 7 user interface t it seems the user interface is mind blowing – "totally awesome". Tiling and Spacing and the money muscle of Microsoft is going to change the landscape of the smartphone markets. If you haven't seen the videos of this awesome interface check out Giz's post for pics and videos.

The one thing I want to point out here is smart intuitive user interfaces is another key for market acceptability, market capturing and market leadership. The software as I suspect is going to integrate with Microsoft Auto's - My Synch and your media center PC at home. True integration of the automobile, home and your self. Now you are truly mobile indeed...!

Microsoft expects the first phones running the software to be available by the end of the year, and says that network operators including Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Verizon and Vodafone, and vendors including Samsung, LG, Sony-Ericsson and long-time partner HTC have committed to offering devices running Windows Phone 7 Series.



Also Check out Win Phone 7 Visual Tour here...

Sam Kurien

Operations Research - A Thought - 'Optimization'

Operations Research is one of my favorite topics in Management Science, I view this subject something as “wisdom from God”, the biblical characters that come to mind immediately are Joseph and Daniel who stood in the courts of Kings and answered in wisdom…essentially saving their kingdoms from great destruction.  Genesis 41 verses 25-33 gives us the account about the exceptional wisdom Joseph displays in advising the Pharaoh:

25 Then Joseph said to Pharaoh, "The dreams of Pharaoh are one and the same. God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do. 26 The seven good cows are seven years, and the seven good heads of grain are seven years; it is one and the same dream. 27The seven lean, ugly cows that came up afterward are seven years, and so are the seven worthless heads of grain scorched by the east wind: They are seven years of famine.  28 "It is just as I said to Pharaoh: God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do. 29Seven years of great abundance are coming throughout the land of Egypt, 30 but seven years of famine will follow them. Then all the abundance in Egypt will be forgotten, and the famine will ravage the land. 31 The abundance in the land will not be remembered, because the famine that follows it will be so severe. 32 The reason the dream was given to Pharaoh in two forms is that the matter has been firmly decided by God, and God will do it soon.  33 "And now let Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of Egypt. 34Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt during the seven years of abundance. 35 They should collect all the food of these good years that are coming and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh, to be kept in the cities for food. 36 This food should be held in reserve for the country, to be used during the seven years of famine that will come upon Egypt, so that the country may not be ruined by the famine."

I have little doubt that Joseph  had the gift of knowledge in operational research. He knew exactly the count of how much needed to be saved for the kingdom to survive in the time of famine.  So what is this to do with operational research; it is to display that this subject though neither fully art nor neither fully science (its mixture of economics, statistics, math, physics, conventional wisdom) managers need to effectively use it for business decisions. So what is operations research? In short it is the discipline of applying advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions or in short wiser decisions. To get you interested in my writings here’s to start off with a problem — An optimization problem?

I have a collection of numbers partitioned in two groups such that the resulting difference in the sums is as small as possible:

7, 10, 13, 17, 20, 22 [The total of these numbers sum up to 89]

They can be split for example into [7, 10, 13, 17] where sum is 47 and [20, 22] where sum is 42 the difference between the two sets is 5.

Can you do better?

Note: The amazing thing about this example as you will find out they all lead to solutions that are under 10, often zero or one. It would be extremely hard to achieve without formal optimization.

Is Agile Project Management even an an appropriate term?

To give you a break from my silverlight and WPF babbling I will branch out occasionally into different topics to keep you interested and at the same time tone down my boredom from talking about the same topics again an again.  As the title suggests lets explore if "Agile Project Management" is even an right term that is being so loosely used these days.. To understand we need to first answer what Agile software development is?.

Agile software development has it roots in OOP (object oriented programming) where iterative development, use of a particular functionality could be reproduced, ability to plug in cross-functionally or design development methods for re usability of components could be done in an easily gave rise to the practices of agile software development into being.  This was extended across development teams for collaborative purposes during development or the life cycle of the project. Agile software methods break tasks into small increments and avoid long term planning, time frames are shrunk to a max of four weeks for a set of tasks to be completed which may involved requirement analysis, design, coding, testing and acceptance of that stage. Documentation is produced all along with those activities happening in tandem.

Usually in an agile software development team members usually come from cross-functional expertise and because hierarchal power structures aren't present decisions are made quick and responsibilities are assigned for development, changes, bug fixes, and releases. The team's size can vary from five to ten people but larger projects are usually comprised of such teams collaborating in real time and often Agile software development  then becomes a daunting and challenging task. However these days we have measurement metric softwares that measure the progress of each task on each day by which Agile development becomes easier. So coming back to the question I posed to mix the terms Project Management (PMP) and Agile Project Management wouldn't be right as they both address management of software development life cycles differently, they have different methods and practices. Traditionally Project management adopts the 7 step or waterfall approach the Agile software development uses methods like Agile Unifed Process (AUP), Agile Modeling, Agile Data Method, Scrum, Extreme Programming and while its practices consists of Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Pair Programming and the RITE method. I may explain each of these methods or practices some time in the near future.

I am sleepy now...some more about this in the far future.

Sam Kurien

Full Screen Applications

Often there is a need to run a Silverlight application full screen. This is often achieved by creating a small button or a link which toggles the application to full screen and using an escape sequence toggling back to small area within your website. The code to do this is quite simple and straight forward:

{ if (!Application.Current.Host.Content.IsFullScreen) { Application.Current.Host.Content.IsFullScreen = true; } else { Application.Current.HostContent.IsFullScreen= false; }

The explanation to this piece is quite simple so here its is - the if statement checks the current state if the app screen is in full screen mode or not. The if condition starts of by asking If Application is Not full screen then do something in this case set it to full screen or else do something else (in this case set back the app mode from full screen to its original state running within the web page.)

What's a XAP file?

A few days from now you will see a lot of sliverlight/Blend blogs coming up. If you get bored send me a note or an email but I will try to incorporate something that I am externally reading on technology be it something on hull design or something in pure sciences. The idea is to see everything holistically and borrow tool sets when and where required or needed in that branch of application to solve a problem. Anyway let me come back to the title of the post and answer that question. All blend developers probably know, if so move and let the illiterate in this area learn:

A XAP file is a Siliverlight application file commonly voiced as the ZAP file that follows the compression algorith of a common Zip file. So in short a file with .xap extension is a a compressed output for the Siliverlight Application. When you create a Silverlight application in Visual Studio or Expression Blend two files are created App.xaml and the Page.xaml. What's a XAML? - XAML is extended access markup language. When you build your application by pressing F5 the output XAP is generated. For the technically curious you can take the output XAP file and rename the extension to a ZIP file and if you decompile it wallah you will see your two files extracted.

A Silverlight application will often contain external files like graphics, media, video content etc which are all collated together along with your web html and script code files into one compressed file when the build is done and is placed inside the XAP file. Visually something like this:

The problem however is when you are making changes to one portion of your project the XAP get's overwritten every time you make the build. An overwrite to the build is common to developers but there may be instances when you want to keep the external content and website files of the project separate from the Silverlight project. In Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 you can do this and it will prompt you if you want to link the XAP file to a location on your web site project itself.  This helps since the file is located in your Web site project itself, you building your Siliverlight project will have no effect on the changes you make on your HTML or script files of your project.

Observe if you build a Silverlight Application using Visual Studio it will  show two projects in your solution explorer one will be the Silverlight application and the other will be the website project but what is missing is the XAP file. You may wonder where it is, it makes an appearance when the ClientBin folder is created for you which happens when the output file was generated.

Hope I don't sound confusing but here is a start for me and you to keep learning.

Sam Kurien

Raving About Some iPhone Apps

Smartphones have changed the way we work, communicate, translate, and do almost anything that our work and personal spheres entail us to do. I have been liking the way I intereact with my iphone and use some apps to enhance the productivity of my life. You will find anywhere on the internet the top 10 or the top 50 or the top 100 iphone apps but here I am going to introduce the ones that have changed my life.

Top on the list is EasyTasker a Project management App that allows you to track work projects, projects due, emails, and ability to push work to assigned individuals and synch tasks when and where you needs them all wirelessly. The ther cool things it can do is track timesheets, invoices, user groups and even paypal integration to buy tools that may be necessary for the project. All activites can be synchronized across all your computers.

TurboScan is next on the list, it allows me to to scan receipts, bills, documents save them as images and push them tas PDF to my business or personal email accounts.

aNotes or Awesome Notes is an app that helps me takes notes and classify them into folders, sticky notes, and collate them into books. The app allows me to synch and transfer to my gmail accounts Google Docs, Evernote and the unique ability to add wallpapers and pics as backgrounds to my notes. A plus for the traveller to paste that pic while note taking for your blog or your memoir. It’s also really easy to move notes around, change their look (there are eleven different themes), and sort them by name or date. An annoying feature for me but a boon for the many who forget to put titles on a note is aNote initially auto assigns from the first line, but can be easily changed by tapping the title in notes view. If ‘cool’ user interfaces is what you’re looking for, Awesome Note comes out with flying colors (literally!).

If your looking for a Genie among Apps look no farther, the App Genie is 26+ tool app set  that I love and among them one stands out the scanning of barcodes and isbn to check prices of products and books (in my case) and shop or order it from the cheapest place possible. You genie makes you an intelligent shopper indeed! The translator tool is not bad and helps you talk or email in multiple language. The country facts app in the tool set is a favortie pastime as it helps me brush on country facts and all the trivial useless facts that hopefully may come handy some day. The unit converter and the battery indicator has a guy that voices out the status of your battery and conversions. And the best part is its only $1.99...so go for it...you will have no regrets.

The Bing and Google search Apps are next favorite on the lists and the best part is geo voice searching features, pulls up the nearest starbucks, car mechanic, shopping mall, anything and everything you are searching for. Intelligent/smart searches will be a subject I will be writing on in the future but these apps are wonderful and the best thing is these search engines are increasingly becoming "accent" sensistive which means they are able to understand English words spoken by non-native speakers a plus in times of trouble. Personally among the two I I have seen Bing working better with voice search but with added features of visual image search being more attractive than Google.

What the iPad should have been?

Almost two weeks ago the Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, all the speculations and the almost two year frenzy of expectation, rumors and what it will be came to an end with this beautiful product launch. Though priced a little high, lets cut to the chase before the praise at the end of the day its merely a giant ipod touch. From the form factor point of view I like the product but am thoroughly disappointed especially after keeping tabs on 'Microsoft Courier'. If you haven't seen that one I have included a video for your right here.



So my takes of what the the iPad should have been. From the video above you may have guessed it right away, dual screen that closed as a portflio file would have been cool with features of flicking things from one screen to another of utomost importance. At least 128 GB starting solid state hard drive with options that would upto at least 1TB, a minimum of 5 mega pixel camera and ability to make video conferencing calls and some really cool software to do the magic video meeting well. I can dream Apple can't I? Ports that can connect to video camera's and all the the good wireless connectivities.

From the business point of view, Apple did take a gamble at pricing it at $499 but analysts say they did it with a wiggle room of bringing down the prices in new feature releases to $199 but we all know how Apple plays the game but to begin with they should have started off with some basic stuff and left the industry behind...aren't they supposedly famed for doing that...I am now beginning to wonder!

Bits, Bytes & Bricks - Sam's Official Tech Blog Unveils

OK I have been meaning to do this for a long time, in the past many incarnations of my so called tech blog have appeared and disappeared in cyber space from time to time but as I get into the habitual writing, learning and exploring things, I hope this one lives on the internet for some time. And for that time I hope to put my thoughts here as I learn and explore stuff in the technology realm and its confluence with business. It will be an effort to outpour my rants, raves, geek, nerd, business, sci-fi, far and near future in form of bits and bytes mostly (so far haven't figured out how I will use bricks, but it rhymed in the title) in the up coming blogs here. So, bear with me and hopefully you will like what you read here. If you are interested I also run (I mean write)  a faith based blog called sdnautilus  (strange name isn't it...will let you know the tech nomenclature secret in the future here) where I write about my spiritual journey in things that I am learning as a Christian.