iTunes 10 new sync mode

While some have noticed that the new iTunes 10 could now play music directly from connected iDevices without having to activate the special “Manually manage music and video” mode, the other interesting related, but much more interesting new feature was missed.

Previously, iTunes media transfert was either a full sync, meaning you had first to put songs in a playlist then tell iTunes to sync it with the phone, or a full manual process, where you could drag and drop files, but would loose the power of using the sync options defined.

It is now possible to simply drag and drop songs from the iTunes list to the iPhone icon, which which prompt iTunes to immediately transfer these songs to your device.

iTunes 10 will list those songs under a new “Manually Added Songs”  group in the “Music” tab of its iPhone settings.

This new feature allow the best of both modes: full sync while still allowing immediate media transfer on demand. Sweet.

See it the new iPhone sync music settings screen on this screenshot.

PS. I discovered this by chance, and I can’t understand why Apples doesn’t announce such new features somewhere in their release notes.

Tags: iphone, itunes

Hackathons, developer’s conceptions, and how it negatively affects good UX. #ota09

The culmination of the Over the Air 09 conference is a developer competition. Over the 24h of the conference, developers are invited to code some application, with many prizes setup up by the organizers and the sponsors.

Sponsored categories ask for example how to provide a demonstration on how a sponsor’s product / API can be used. For example “Best BBC. com hack”, or “Best Lonely planet hack”. There are also general categories “Best use of WebApp/widget”, “Best hardware hack”, and the weirdly phrased “Best User Experience / Service Design”.

Sounds cool? Yeah, kind of. But to me such competitions, hackday or hackathon tend to encourage the worse of the typical developer mindset, which is often antinomic to delivering a good UX.

Read more…

Tags: #ota09, developers, hackaton, ucd, ux

Over The Air 09: first impressions

I attended the first day of the Over The Air conference yesterday, which proved very interesting for two reasons. First, I heard about some of the new and upcoming developments in mobile tech (widget, widget, widget, it seems…). Second, this was a Developers conference, and very much so. So this doubled as a field trip in developer land, ethnographic style.

If there was any doubt about the audience being developers, just counting the number of ladies would remove it. I estimate the ratio to be close to 1 woman for 15 guys, a very far cry from the approximate gender parity of UX crowds.

The session were mainly technical, full of info about APIs, (in-)compatibilities, standards etc. Some UX session were also present, but I have to say I was a bit disappointed by them. It’s not that they were not good, far from it actually, special props to Bryan Rieger with his incredibly clean, beautiful, and effective slides. It’s just that given my background in UX and the MSc I just finished, none of this was really news to me: I was simply not the intended audience.

Like any good event, #ota09 got me thinking on a couple of points, that will be the basis of a few blog post.

First up: Hackathons, developer’s conceptions, and how it negatively affect good UX

Tags: #ota09

How trusting your clients results in a better User Experience (as seen in Snow Leopard)

With the coming release of Mac OSX Snow Leopard, I find it interesting to compare Microsoft’s and Apple’s policy regarding serial numbers, activations, and how they affect the user experience.
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Tags: drm serial piracy snowleopard

#UXcampLondon session: What do you do? Explaining our jobs to ourselves and others – David and Martina

That session is one of those that can only happen in a bar camp: it was pretty much improvised, consisted mainly of a group discussion. I found it however very interesting especially since a couple of participants were less deep in UX than the rest of us, and provided a somewhat external outlook, very much appreciated given the topic.

In the field of UX, you pretty much have as many job titles as you have individuals (each of these post it is one!), and it is very difficult, even for us, to clearly see what each of these mean.

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#UXcampLondon sessions: Johanna on Google Wave

I enjoyed the presentation, but just like after watching the official introduction at Google IO, I am not sold on Wave.

The technology behind it sure seems impressive, but I have yet to see (or understand?) what concrete benefits it brings. I have not yet seen any use that would not have been filled by either email, IM, a forum, or google apps.

Wave is remixing all of those into something new, which is bound to be very disturbing as it will be in a uncanny valley where we think we know what is there (for ex. someone typing a message), while the reality is different from what we expect (you can edit you correspondant message while he types it).

Seems to me they try to have one single tool to achieve very different things, which is generally a recipe for failure.
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#uxcamplondon or the best event ever.

OK, that title may be a bit hyperbolic. But it was still really great.

A barcamp with great people and very interesting session, all perfectly organised.
Oh, and free drinks in the sun next tot he river.
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Hello world!

This is it. #UXcamplondon pushed me over the edge, and I’m back in the blogging world.

Got tons of ideas from #UXcamplondon that I want to get out of my brain. This blog is meant to contribute to the conversation, so comments are most welcomed.

Hope you’ll like what’ you’ll read.

Also: this blog has been put together in a rush. I am supposed to be working on finishing my MSc dissertation, so some work has been delayed (theme, advanced configuration etc).