MathJax

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Fitts' Law, a small presentation

One of the most known and applied laws of Human-Computer Interaction is the Fitts' law. A good interface should optimize and reduce the time presented by this formula :

"a" and "b" are only two constants, defined by the used hardware properties like a mouse. D is the distance from the object and W is the object width.
I want only to say that this is only the first formula, many other derviate ones exist.

The most important is how to design interfaces to optimize the time to select an object. I want to present the openSUSE menu where the developers have applied this :

 


When I've clicked in Developpement option, all the menu has changed.
Being different from a "standard" menu, the user haven't to move his mouse by width, but only up and down and no new menu windows are created. So less mouse movement.

In this precise example, not only the Fitts' law is applied, but also the Steering Law (Accot-Zhai).

This is just an introduction, and presentation for a small example, but I will to show interface features in other projects.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Linux Graphics, Part one

In this small post, I will speak about the Linux Graphic Stack and changes being addressed to it.


It is very clear, that the most thing that should change in Unix systems are the graphics. Most Unix systems use Xorg to handle all their graphics. I really think that is a very bad and old solution that should be changed.



  • The Past

To make things looking clear, lets compare the architecture of the current implementations :

In almost any Unix-like system, if we use Xorg it will be the layer responsible from low level graphics to some more advanced features. So it is doing a job which only the kernel should be responsible for.
Even graphics card drivers, they are made for every Xorg release and not for a Linux release.


If we add to this that X releases are not as frequent as the two other layers, we can conclude that the Linux graphics mechanism is the Achilles' heel of all the system.





  • Future

The future may be a lot better. With the include of the Kernel Mode Setting [1] in last Linux kernels (from 2.6.29) and specially in the 2.6.31, the kernel start getting his real role of the only thing accessing low level hardware.
The KMS allow less flicker, quicker terminal switching (with Ctrl-Alt-F1 to F7) and more.
Another feature is the ability to run Xserver itself as a normal application without root privileges. And allowing more security.





This start to let the Kernel do his job, is only the start. The Linux kernel 2.6.33 will include more work done to provide more low level handling : a KMS page-flipping ioctl [2] to optimize more and more time, and simplify management for other systems.


The page-flipping is a necessary thing for other projects like the Wayland Server, which is a lightweight replacement of X (and not a rewrite of it).
Xorg has become very old, new models of graphics and inputs come and its becoming more and more complex to make X supports them all.
Multi-touch input is a main area where X can't provide a good solution for that. Even Multi-pointer-X still doesn't answer all questions.


Wayland can become a solution if we design it having all new today problems in mind. It should be lightweight and easy to develop. After that, libraries like Nokia Qt could be easily ported to it.
The thing that everybody should know is that when a project becomes very old, with code that can't be understood, and huge, then it should be rewritten from scratch.
KDE developers faced many critics when they started rewriting KDE to release KDE4. But in the end, we now after releasing a "clean" desktop environment, we start seeing differences.


The design of Wayland, shouldn't be addressed without proposing a model being a skeleton of all manners of view surfaces and abstraction behind that. A recent paper [3] collected most of problems and it need to be applied on a real world implementation like Wayland.



To be continued...

  • Links :

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Google, THE monopole

The main goal of Google is to hold the maximum of viewed adverts on the net, and gain huge amount of money. Till now, ads are only shown as small links with some text. And the context intelligently matches user interests.

But, will google in the future, only rely on such type of incoming ?
My answer is simply : NO !

First step after acquiring Youtube is to play video ads before launching mostly viewed sequences, also put some intelligent context matching text ads somewhere. There is dailymotion and he already doing that.

But if we rethink another service that only google holds its sources, the GoogleStreetView !
Google Street View is a very helpful service provided by Google for free and for everybody.
Google can simply use some algorithms to detect the ad places in a street view, the orientation the deformation, and replace these zones with Google related stuff.

Goole StreetView, the next...

As explained in the photo, it won't be a difficult thing to be coded by the Mountain View team, and it will be a "Google only" stuff difficult to be reproduced in resonable time by other competitors. And of course, it will be a colossal source of money.

I really wish you "Don't be evil" Google !