Find: Apple signs chip manufacturing deal with TSMC in effort to distance itself from Samsung

A good thing for the mobile market: more competition. 

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Apple signs chip manufacturing deal with TSMC in effort to distance itself from Samsung

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The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has signed a deal with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to build chips for its mobile devices. TSMC will begin producing chips for Apple starting in 2014, but Apple will continue to rely on Samsung as the primary supplier for its mobile processors through next year. According to the Journal's sources, the transition has been slow-going because of glitches at TSMC that have prevented its output from meeting Apple's power and speed standards.

The transition comes as Apple is trying to rely less and less upon competitor Samsung as a component supplier. Cupertino has already stopped buying iPhone screens from Samsung and has pulled back on displays for the iPad as well. Back in 2012 reports...

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Find: The ARM Diaries, Part 1: How ARM’s Business Model Works

The main difference between arm and other chip designers: amd, intel and nvidia all sell physical chips, arm doesn't. 

Nvidia will soon also begin licensing its mobile ip, like arm. 

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// published on AnandTech // visit site

The ARM Diaries, Part 1: How ARM's Business Model Works

We've had well over a decade of Intel sharing its beliefs with us, but this is ARM's first attempt at doing the same. What will follow over the next few posts are a bunch of disclosures, some related some not, attempting to bring everyone up to speed on where ARM is today and where ARM will be in the near future. The best place to start is with ARM's business model.


Spotted: App to protect private data on iOS devices finds almost half of other apps access private data

This research only possible on jailbroken devices: a survey of apps and the information they access. 

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// published on ScienceDaily: Computer Science News // visit site

App to protect private data on iOS devices finds almost half of other apps access private data

Almost half of the mobile apps running on Apple's iOS operating system access the unique identifier of the devices where they're downloaded, computer scientists have found. In addition, more than 13 percent access the devices' location and more than 6 percent the address book. The researchers developed a new app that detects what data the other apps running on an iOS device are trying to access.




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Benjamin Watson
Director, Visual Experience Lab | Associate Professor, Computer Science, NC State Univ.
919-513-0325designgraphics.ncsu.edu | @dgllab

Find: Measuring Platform Churn

80% of us users without smartphones by oct 2014. Competition becomes churn rather than new smartphone users. 

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// published on asymco // visit site

Measuring Platform Churn

The latest comScore data shows consistent growth in US smartphone penetration. The rate is now 58.4% of adult consumers who own phones. This is up from 20% only three years ago. The rate of growth remains a remarkable 1.2% per month. That's 700,000 new-to-smartphone users every week. The historic average over 3 years has been 1.07%/month This after having crossed over 50% on schedule in August 2012. There appears to be no slowing.

Screen Shot 2013-05-06 at 5-6-5.42.50 AM

The next milestone I have pencilled in is the 80% mark which I extrapolate to be achieved by October 2014. 80% could be considered "saturation" which would signify a rapid slowing of new user addition. However, that might still not happen until 100%, depending on the availability (or lack thereof) of non-smartphones to buy.

This time frame is important because it would imply that essentially all mobile users in the US (some 234 million) would be a part of one ecosystem in about 2 more years. That's less than the life cycle of the typical mobile contract (and thus the life of one phone). Put another way, by the time a new buyer today is ready to buy the replacement to their phone the market will be saturated.

This implies the mode of competition will be changing to smartphone replacement rather than smartphone adoption. To some degree this is already happening but as the net user gains data shows only BlackBerry and Windows platforms have had any net user declines in the last two years. "Platform churn" is still a relatively rare phenomenon.

How that will change post-saturation will be a crucial determinant to platform growth. The data today points to a higher degree of loyalty for iOS users and potential erosion in the Android user base as a result. There are ways of forecasting this on the basis of survey data as Carl Howe did. However, the data from comScore has already begun to show that Android may have peaked around 54% share. Android share is now at the same level it was in July while iPhone share has grown by more than 6 points since then.

Screen Shot 2013-05-06 at 5-6-5.40.28 AM

There is a pattern of higher growth into the end of the year and an iPhone plateau into the first quarter, undoubtedly due to holiday buying favoring the iPhone. I don't want to discount the possibility of some change in this pattern but so far there seems to be a plausible reason for it: with iPhone pricing and availability in the US offering no advantages to alternatives, Apple's product is the most popular. Nearly more popular even than all the other competitors combined.


Find: Forecasting Windows market share

Tablets are up to 40% of their shared market, pcs are down to 60%. 

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// published on asymco // visit site

Forecasting Windows market share

Last week Frank X. Shaw, VP of corporate communications at Microsoft stated:

 … most of the people around me were using their iPads exactly as they would a laptop – physical keyboard attached, typing away, connected to a network of some kind, creating a document or tweet or blog or article. In that context, it's hard to distinguish between a tablet and a notebook or laptop. The form factors are different, but let's be clear, each is a PC.

Actually this "admission" that iPads are PCs is not something new. Steve Ballmer made the same assertion in 2010 pre-iPad (though calling them slates). Arguably, the notion that tablets are PCs has been dogma at Microsoft for over a decade and Windows running on all form factors has been a strategic guiding principle.

Which is why I've always added the tablet data to the PC data to create a picture of the "personal computing" market. And this is what that picture looks like today:

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Note how the share of various platforms has evolved over this brief time span:

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Seen this way, Windows has now reached 60% market share and it's likely to dip below 50% during this year. What happens beyond then is harder to imagine. If Windows tablets start growing as fast as the tablet market overall then Windows could stabilize in share. But if Android and iOS tablets follow their phone brethren in growth then it will be far harder for Microsoft to maintain share. But is that cause for concern?

Not necessarily.

The total computing market[1] is likely to expand to over 4 billion users with 1.5 devices per user in the next five years. That expansion implies that 20% share equals more than one billion devices, making such an ecosystem "good enough" for the average developer. It certainly has been good enough for Windows developers to date and they have kept hiring it throughout the new mobile app revolution.

So even if Windows dips to only 20% of the world's computing market it will still be perfectly "viable" for some time to come.

  1. I define the computing market as the total number of devices which have (a) a CPU (b) a broadband connection (c) a native application execution environment which is open to third party apps. This definition implies the presence of an "ecosystem" which is bound specifically to a platform.

Find: Behind the scenes of Tumblr’s design process

Begin with sketches. 
Track what you ask users to be aware of. 
Keep it small. 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site

UX Spotlight: Behind the scenes of Tumblr's design process

Tumblr Creative Director Peter Vidani
Cesar Torres

New York City noise blares right outside Tumblr's office in the Flat Iron District in Manhattan. Once inside, the headquarters hum with a quiet intensity. I am surrounded by four dogs that employees have brought to the workspace today. Apparently, there are even more dogs lurking somewhere behind the perpendicular rows of desks. What makes the whole thing even spookier is that these dogs don't bark or growl. It's like someone's told them that there are developers and designers at work, and somehow they've taken the cue.

I'm here to see Tumblr's Creative Director Peter Vidani, who is going to pull the curtain back on the design process and user experience at Tumblr. And when I say design process, I don't just mean color schemes or typefaces. I am here to see the process of interaction design: how the team at Tumblr comes up with ideas for the user interface on its website and its mobile apps. I want to find out how those ideas are shaped by their engineering team into a final product.

Back in May, Yahoo announced it was acquiring Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Yahoo indicated that Tumblr would continue to operate independently, though we will probably see a lot of content crossover between the millions of blog posts hosted by Tumblr and Yahoo's search engine technology. It's a little known fact that Yahoo has provided some useful tools for UX professionals and developers over the years through their Design Pattern Library, which shares some of Yahoo's most successful and time-tested UI touches and interactions with Web developers. It's probably too early to tell if Tumblr's UI elements will filter back into these libraries. In the meantime, I talked to Vidani about how Tumblr UI features come to life.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs

Spotted: A Study of Pointing Performance of Elderly Users on Smartphones

The abstract doesn't contain any surprises, but as the authors say, there is little work on mobiles and the elderly. 

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// published on Taylor and Francis: International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction: Table of Contents // visit site

A Study of Pointing Performance of Elderly Users on Smartphones
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 29, Issue 9, Page 604-618, September 2013. 

Find: Apple now charting App Store iOS fragmentation just like Google's Android

5% of ios users have a 1 1/2 year old os. 36% of android users have a 2 1/2 year old os. 

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Find: Attack of the camera-phones: Hands-on with the Samsung Galaxy NX and S 4 Zoom

About time! Camera software is painful. And it's still too hard to get pictures off them. 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site

Attack of the camera-phones: Hands-on with the Samsung Galaxy NX and S 4 Zoom

Samsung's new Galaxy NX combines Android with a competent midrange DSLR.
Andrew Cunningham

At its event in London earlier today, Samsung took the time to highlight a few of its upcoming phones and tablets. The most interesting of the Windows tablets, the Ativ Tab Q, wasn't available after the event for journalists to try out. However, we were able to spend some brief hands-on time with both the Samsung Galaxy NX and the Galaxy S 4 Zoom, two of the company's latest attempts to marry its Android devices to more robust cameras than the ones that typically come with smartphones.

The Galaxy NX: Android cameras go semi-pro

The Galaxy NX is something of a successor to last year's Galaxy Camera, but it can also be seen as an Android-equipped extension of Samsung's existing NX camera series. The Galaxy NX looks like nothing so much as a Samsung NX 20 with most of the physical controls moved to the 4.8-inch, 720p IPS touchscreen (that's right, no AMOLED here). It also shares its 20.3 megapixel APS-C sensor and mirrorless-ness with the NX 20, though its shutter speed is slightly slower (a max of 1/6000th of a second, down from 1/8000th of a second in the Galaxy NX).

The camera's body is closer to DSLR-sized than point-and-shoot sized, but a grippy rubberized handle and loops for straps should make it easy enough to hold on to. Compared to the body of my Canon T3i, it's a bit slimmer but in the same ballpark, and if you've held a DSLR before you should be familiar with the Galaxy NX's size and heft. As we mentioned, all of the camera's manual settings can be accessed by navigating through the UI on the camera's touchscreen. While this sort of navigation could potentially be more friendly to novices, photographers used to adjusting settings on-the-fly with physical camera controls may find having to make ISO, shutter speed, and other adjustments to be more difficult without them.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs

Find: Map the iPhone Users In Any City, And You Know Where the Rich Live

Echoes of the recent pew survey showing that android is used more heavily among lower income groups. And if incomes group by both space and os, then os also clusters in space. 

Ssup in Indonesia though? Maybe blackberry's security is important to them?? 

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// published on Latest Posts | The Atlantic Cities // visit site

Map the iPhone Users In Any City, And You Know Where the Rich Live

Our stuff often says a lot about us, whether we own a hybrid car or a station wagon, a MacBook Pro or an ancient desktop. And this is no less true of our smart phones, sold on a sharply divided market between iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries.

Among other things, cell phone brands say something about socio-economics – it takes a lot of money to buy a new iPhone 5 (and even more money to keep up with the latest models that come out faster than plan upgrades do). Consider, then, this map of Washington, D.C., which uses geolocated tweets, and the cell phone metadata attached to them, to illustrate who in town is using iPhones (red dots) and who's using Androids (green dots):

That picture comes from a new series of navigable maps visualizing some three billion global, geotagged tweets sent since September of 2011, developed by Gnip, MapBox and dataviz guru Eric Fischer.* They've converted all of that data from the Twitter firehose (this is just a small fraction of all tweets, most of which have no geolocation data) into a series of maps illustrating worldwide patterns in language and device use, as well as between people who appear to be tourists and locals in any given city.

The locals and tourists map scales up a beautiful earlier project from Fischer. You could kill a few hours playing with all of these tools, built on the same dataset. But we particularly liked looking at the geography of smart phone devices. As in Washington, above, iPhones are often more prominent in upper-income parts of cities (and central business districts), while Androids appear to be the dominant device in lower-income areas.

These maps are also a blank canvas with nothing on them other than tweets. To the extent that you can easily make out the Washington Beltway above, or plenty of other roadway networks throughout the rest of these maps, that means people are tweeting while driving (or, preferably, sitting in the passenger seat).

Here is New York City, which has a smattering of Blackberries in Manhattan (yes, it's possible to tweet from a Blackberry). That green patch to the left is Newark:

Here is Chicago:

And Houston:

Atlanta:

Los Angeles:

And one place that really loves Blackberries? Jakarta.

Correction: This article initially misspelled Eric Fischer's name.

All images courtesy of MapBox, Gnip and Eric Fischer.

Find: Nvidia will license its Kepler GPU technology to tap into the 'exploding' smartphone market

Nvidia makes another move toward mobile: they start selling designs, not just silicon. Smart. 

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Nvidia will license its Kepler GPU technology to tap into the 'exploding' smartphone market

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Nvidia has announced plans to license out its graphics technology to other companies in an effort to take advantage of the huge market for smartphones, tablets, and other devices as its core PC business continues to shrink. According to a blog post published by the company, Nvidia will start by licensing out the GPU core in its Kepler GPU, and it'll also license out its visual computing portfolio, which the company says will let licensees develop their own GPU technology while taking advantage of Nvidia's vast array of patents. Unsurprisingly, the impetus behind this change is the major shift in computing towards mobile — the company says that the "explosion of Android devices" presents it with a huge business opportunity even as its...

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Find: Samsung Galaxy S4 LTE Advanced coming soon, but most carriers aren't ready

300 down, 150 up. 

This might be enough to break the cable monopoly. 

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Samsung Galaxy S4 LTE Advanced coming soon, but most carriers aren't ready

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Samsung is planning to release a variant of the Galaxy S4 that supports LTE Advanced (LTE-A), the next generation of superfast mobile data. The device will come to South Korea within weeks, Samsung Mobile head J.K. Shin tells Reuters. The updated device could prop sales of its flagship up as Apple and other competitors bring new smartphones to the market. J.K. Shin also confirmed Samsung is in talks with "several overseas carriers" to sell the new phone, but refused to confirm where and when the device would go on sale outside of Korea.

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Find: CPUID's CPU-Z Arrives on Android via Google Play

An appropriate that tells you about your android cpu. 
 
// published on AnandTech // visit site

CPUID's CPU-Z Arrives on Android via Google Play

About three years ago, I remember one of the biggest problems I had while sorting out phones was figuring out what SoCs were inside them. Manufacturers weren't yet open to disclosing what silicon was inside, and there wasn't any SoC messaging or branding from any of the numerous silicon vendors. There was a pervasive sense of contentedness everywhere you turned with the current model where what was inside a handset was largely a black box. I remember wishing for a tool like CPU-Z for Android so many times, and I remember trying to explain to someone else just how dire the need was for something like it. 

Today vendors and operators are considerably less opaque about what's inside their devices (proving yet again that the 'specs are dead' line is just false hyperbole), but unless you know where to look or who to ask it's still sometimes a mystery. For end users and enthusiasts, there remained the need for something beyond lots of searching, pouring through kernel sources, or kernel messages (dmesg) on devices. 

We now have CPU-Z for Android from CPUID, and it works just like you'd expect it to if you're familiar with it on the desktop. There's the SoC name itself, max and min clocks, current clocks for the set of cores, and the other platform details exposed by Android. There are other apps that will get you the same data, but none of them organize it or present it as well as CPU-Z does now.

 

It isn't perfect (for example, I wish 'Snapdragon 600' devices would show APQ8064T and APQ8064AB when appropriate), but virtually every device I've run it on has popped up with the appropriate SoC and clocks inside. It's clear to me that CPUID is doing some device fingerprinting to figure out what particular silicon is inside, which is understandable given the constraints of the Android platform and the sandbox model. Right now however, CPU-Z for Android is quite the awesome tool. 

Gallery: CPU-Z Android

Source: CPUID, Google Play


Find: President Obama orders government spectrum to be opened for wireless broadband

Could be a big deal. 

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

President Obama orders government spectrum to be opened for wireless broadband

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President Obama may still be facing many questions over the NSA surveillance efforts of phone and internet users, but he's moving forward with another government technology effort that's not likely to draw quite as much controversy. In an executive order announced today, the president issued a memorandum ordering the government to free up a huge chunk of the wireless spectrum currently reserved for federal agencies and use it to expand wireless broadband internet access for individuals across the country. "These efforts will provide access to more spectrum for wireless broadband providers and equipment vendors as they respond to increasingly rapid consumer adoption of smartphones, tablets, and other wireless devices," reads a White House...

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Find: Original Mac GUI artist thinks new “flat” iOS 7 icons are A-OK

Kare seems to say that it's time for icons to be more glanceable, better for regular rather than novice users. 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site

Original Mac GUI artist thinks new "flat" iOS 7 icons are A-OK

If you've used a computer, you've seen Susan Kare's work. She was a member of the original Macintosh team at Apple and drew the lion's share of the Mac's system icons; her post-Mac work has included art for Facebook, Microsoft, and many others. Her keen eye for design even led to her being summoned to testify in Apple v. Samsung.

Kare's vision and aesthetic have shaped the direction of modern GUI icon design, and she remains active in the design world. With such an intimate connection to Apple and its history, it's not surprising that she has an opinion on iOS 7's new "flat" iconography. NetworkWorld asked her what she thought of the updated icons:

Generally a good direction—am a fan of simple, meaningful symbols that fill a space, such as Music and Weather. It's better—more iconic, less illustrative.

Criticisms of the iOS 7 icons have cropped up in many places. The Game Center icon is nonrepresentational blobs of colors, the Camera app looks like a piece of bad clip art, Settings is some kind of weird manhole cover thing, and so on. But Kare's take that icons should be symbolic rather than literal has a tremendous amount of merit. Discarding photorealism and sticking with bold shapes and colors challenges designers to come up with more meaningful symbology and ultimately results in clearer icons.

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Spotted: Uncovering practices of making energy consumption accountable: A phenomenological inquiry

On the relationship of informational feedback and sustainability behavior. 

// published on ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)-Current Issue // visit site

Uncovering practices of making energy consumption accountable: A phenomenological inquiry
Tobias Schwartz, Gunnar Stevens, Leonardo Ramirez, Volker Wulf

Reacting to the discussion on global warming, the HCI community has started to explore the design of tools to support responsible energy consumption. An important part of this research focuses on motivating energy savings by providing feedback tools which present consumption metrics interactively. In this line of work, the configuration of feedback has been mainly discussed using cognitive or behavioral factors. This narrow focus, however, misses a highly relevant perspective for the design of technology that supports sustainable lifestyles: to investigate the multiplicity of forms in which individuals or collectives actually consume energy. In this article, we broaden this focus, by taking a phenomenological lens to study how people use off-the-shelf eco-feedback systems in private households to make energy consumption accountable and explainable.

Spotted: Influence of personality on satisfaction with mobile phone services

How personality affects the mobile experience. 

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// published on ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)-Current Issue // visit site

Influence of personality on satisfaction with mobile phone services
Rodrigo De Oliveira, Mauro Cherubini, Nuria Oliver

We propose a conceptual model that explains the relationship between the users' personality profile and their satisfaction with basic mobile phone services (calls, messages, and simple GPRS/3G services). The model captures direct and indirect effects on satisfaction by means of two variables: actual mobile phone usage and perceived usability of the related services. We empirically validate the model with data gathered from 603 customers of a telecommunication operator, and find that: (1) extroversion, conscientiousness, and intellect have a significant impact on customer satisfaction—positively for the first two traits and negatively for the latter; (2) extroversion positively influences mobile phone usage; and (3) extroversion and conscientiousness positively influence the users' perceived usability of mobile services.

Find: The global influence of iOS 7’s design language

Does ios 7 have a unique experience, one that creates a relationship with users that they cannot find elsewhere? I think it may. Most users will not notice the liberal borrowing from wp7, webos and android. 

But tastemakers will. Will they find an alternative? 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site

The global influence of iOS 7's design language

It was hardly a secret that the look of iOS was due for a design makeover. Former iOS software head Scott Forstall was out, and Apple's product designer Jony Ive was in. Ive apparently winced when asked about the stitched leather look of some apps—it was obvious the days of faux texture were numbered.

Now that we've had a good look at iOS 7, though, it's clear that the departure is stronger than most people expected. This isn't a gentle de-stitching; it's a pretty radical overhaul.

When the iPhone debuted, there just wasn't anything quite like it. Yes, the idea of a screen as a phone wasn't solely Apple's creation, and no, it didn't invent the grid of icons on a touchscreen. Nevertheless, Apple was forging a new path, and it was its trail to blaze.

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Find: Apple publishes transition guide to ease developers onto iOS 7

Different, but better? Nice function, but the look echoes others. The experience doesn't seem that unique, aside from the layering with parallax. 


// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Apple publishes transition guide to ease developers onto iOS 7

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iOS 7 represents the biggest change to Apple's design principles since the original iPhone, the company said — and that means lots of work for the developers who want their apps to look native on the platform. To that end, Apple published a user interface transition guide for iOS developers today, TechCrunch reports.

The guide, which is available only to members of Apple's developer program, walks designers through iOS 7 changes including edge-to-edge layouts, translucent menu and status bars, and buttons without borders. It also describes the three core themes of iOS 7. Those themes, as quoted by TechCrunch:

Deference. The UI helps users understand and interact with the content, but never competes with it.

Clarity. Text is...

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Find: Exclusive - an early look at Intel’s own phone UI, “Obsidian”

They have to try, but I'm not optimistic. 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site

Exclusive: an early look at Intel's own phone UI, "Obsidian"
Obsidian's start-up sequence (video link)

Intel is planning its own UI overlay, codenamed "Obsidian," that it will bring to the mobile operating system Tizen and possibly Android, eventually. A source working at Intel has tipped Ars with several early screenshots and some video of Intel's Obsidian project, which includes a handful of unique UI touches.

Tizen, a mobile operating system backed by the Linux Foundation, Samsung, and Intel, has yet to ship on any physical devices. Samsung announced that it plans to launch Tizen devices later this year, mainly in Eastern markets. Intel's Atom chips have also made appearances in a handful of Android phones and tablets, but the company has yet to publicly announce further Tizen devices.

From what we see in the materials passed to us, it's still fairly early days for Obsidian, and it's not quite feature-complete yet. The UI overlay appears to use very boxy, closely-packed icons that mirror the flatter designs of Windows Phone and Android over the skeuomorphism of iOS. Three buttons are persistent along the bottom of the screen (phone, messages, and people), which our source says are not analogs for hardware buttons that come later but are meant to be soft keys.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs

Spotted: Age-related differences in performance with touchscreens compared to traditional mouse input

Older folks do better with touchscreens than mice.

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// published on Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site
Age-related differences in performance with touchscreens compared to traditional mouse input
Leah Findlater, Jon E. Froehlich, Kays Fattal, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Tanya Dastyar

Despite the apparent popularity of touchscreens for older adults, little is known about the psychomotor performance of these devices. We compared performance between older adults and younger adults on four desktop and touchscreen tasks: pointing, dragging, crossing and steering. On the touchscreen, we also examined pinch-to-zoom. Our results show that while older adults were significantly slower than younger adults in general, the touchscreen reduced this performance gap relative to the desktop and mouse. Indeed, the touchscreen resulted in a significant movement time reduction of 35% over the mouse for older adults, compared to only 16% for younger adults.

Spotted: Improving two-thumb text entry on touchscreen devices


 
// published on Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Improving two-thumb text entry on touchscreen devices
Antti Oulasvirta, Anna Reichel, Wenbin Li, Yan Zhang, Myroslav Bachynskyi, Keith Vertanen, Per Ola Kristensson

We study the design of split keyboards for fast text entry with two thumbs on mobile touchscreen devices. The layout of KALQ was determined through first studying how users should grip a device with two hands. We then assigned letters to keys computationally, using a model of two-thumb tapping. KALQ minimizes thumb travel distance and maximizes alternation between thumbs. An error correction algorithm was added to help address linguistic and motor errors. Users reached a rate of 37 words per minute (with a 5% error rate) after a training program.

Spotted: Mobile advertising - evaluating the effects of animation, user and content relevance

Relevance to user doesn't improve recall, while relatedness to page does. Relevance to user does improve pleasure, while relatedness to page doesn't. Animation has no important impact. 

// published on Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Mobile advertising: evaluating the effects of animation, user and content relevance
Marco de Sa, Vidhya Navalpakkam, Elizabeth F. Churchill

The potential for user-relevant, context-appropriate, targeted advertising on mobile devices is enormous given device improvements and advances in personal and location-based data collection. However, little is known about how users experience display advertisements ('ads') on mobile devices, or what factors drive mobile ad effectiveness. In this paper, we investigate users' experiences of display advertising on mobile devices. We consider three factors that are often studied in desktop settings the ad's level of personal relevance to the user, its relevance to the page content, and within-ad properties, with a particular focus on the level of animation in the ad. Our findings reveal a few surprises.

Spotted: TouchViz - a case study comparing two interfaces for data analytics on tablets

A study comparing tablet and desktop platforms for analytics. 

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// published on Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

TouchViz: a case study comparing two interfaces for data analytics on tablets

Steven M. Drucker, Danyel Fisher, Ramik Sadana, Jessica Herron, m.c. schraefel

As more applications move from the desktop to touch devices like tablets, designers must wrestle with the costs of porting a design with as little revision of the UI as possible from one device to the other, or of optimizing the interaction per device. We consider the tradeoffs between two versions of a UI for working with data on a touch tablet. One interface is based on using the conventional desktop metaphor (WIMP) with a control panel, push buttons, and checkboxes -- where the mouse click is effectively replaced by a finger tap. The other interface (which we call FLUID) eliminates the control panel and focuses touch actions on the data visualization itself.

Spotted: Swipe vs. scroll - web page switching on mobile browsers

On mobile devices, swiping between web pages beats tabs. I wonder what the wider implications are?

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// published on Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site
Swipe vs. scroll: web page switching on mobile browsers
Andrew Warr, Ed H. Chi

Tabbed web browsing interfaces enable users to multi-task and easily switch between open web pages. However, tabbed browsing is difficult for mobile web browsers due to the limited screen space and the reduced precision of touch. We present an experiment comparing Safari's pages-based switching interface using horizontal swiping gestures with the stacked cards-based switching interface using vertical scrolling gestures, introduced by Chrome. The results of our experiment show that cards-based switching interface allows for faster switching and is less frustrating, with no significant effect on error rates. We generalize these findings, and provide design implications for mobile information spaces.

Find: Early 'Metro' concepts for Windows Phone revealed in Microsoft design video



// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Early 'Metro' concepts for Windows Phone revealed in Microsoft design video

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While Microsoft's "Metro" design is unified across Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox, there was a time when the company was creating concepts for its big mobile refresh. In a new modern design story, Microsoft has revealed some of the inspiration involved in Metro and some early concepts to show how it evolved Windows Mobile to the flat tiled interface in Windows Phone 7.

Some of the early designs were clearly inspired by Windows Media Center, an application for media and TV in Windows, and Microsoft's Zune media player. A brief video shows the progression to a more modern look with the first concepts behind Microsoft's Live Tiles that are now being used to power Windows 8 and the Xbox One. Of course, nobody at Microsoft is sure what to...

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Find: Pew - over half of all Americans now own a smartphone

Several interesting results: 

• over half of us population has a smartphone
• those with higher incomes and education are more likely to have iPhones than android devices
• minorities significantly more likely to have smartphones than whites
• blacks much more likely to have android devices than iPhones 

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Pew: over half of all Americans now own a smartphone

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More than half of Americans now own a smartphone, according to the latest poll by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Just 15 months ago, smartphone owners accounted for over half of phone-owning Americans, but Pew now reports that a simple majority of Americans — 56 percent — own phones, taking into account those who have no cellphone at all. Nearly half those people who didn't own a cellphone two years ago have become phone owners, with only nine percent of Americans remaining off the mobile grid.

Pew also found that Android and iOS have an equal marketshare among US cellphone owners. However, there's a marked distinction when that's viewed by economic status: consumers with lower incomes tend to own Android devices, while...

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Find: Starbucks is reportedly dominating mobile payments in North America

Starbucks is the one success story in us mobile payments. 

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Starbucks is reportedly dominating mobile payments in North America

Starbucks_ios_passbook_1020_large

Square, Google Wallet, Isis and plenty others are all working to grab the lion's share of the growing (but nascent) mobile payments market. But, so far, none of these options are as widely used in North America as Starbucks' simple mobile apps, according to new findings from the research firm Berg Insight. Across the continent, Berg claims that about $500 million worth of mobile payment transactions took place last year. "However, the vast majority of these payments were made using Starbucks' phenomenally successful smartphone app, whereas mobile wallets that can be used at multiple merchants have yet to gain traction," the research firm said.

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Find: Jelly Bean on one-third of Android devices; Gingerbread still on top

Froyo & gingerbread 40 %, ice cream sandwich & jellybean 50 %. Better, but not good enough. 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site

Jelly Bean on one-third of Android devices; Gingerbread still on top

Jelly Bean continues eating away at Gingerbread's share, but version 2.3 of Android still accounts for over a third of all devices.
Android developer dashboard

The latest Android usage figures have been posted on the Android developer dashboard, and there's the usual mix of good and bad news. The good news is that Jelly Bean continues to erode both Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich, and versions 4.1 and 4.2 combined now account for around a third of all usage. Version 4.1 of the software has in fact overtaken version 4.0 for the first time, with 29.0 percent share compared to Ice Cream Sandwich's 25.6 percent. All told, version 4.x of Android now accounts for 58.6 percent of all devices accessing the Google Play store.

The bad news is that versions 2.2 and 2.3 (Froyo and Gingerbread) still account for a combined 39.6 percent of all Android usage, and while they continue to erode from month-to-month, they still represent a rather large piece of Google's dessert-themed pie. Also bad is that while "Jelly Bean" is now on a third of all Android devices, only four percent of those devices are actually running the latest version of the software.

Aside from waiting for Gingerbread devices to be replaced by newer ones, Google is taking some steps to fight platform fragmentation. It is doing so partly by separating several Android components from the OS itself and partly by working with its partners to offer always-up-to-date "Nexus experience" versions of popular phones like the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and HTC One. However, for consistency's sake (and for the security of the platform), we'd still like to see OEMs work harder to adopt new versions as they come out.

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Internship: Brooks Bell Internship Program​

An interesting internship opportunity at brooks bell. 

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carissa Nickel <Carissa@brooksbell.com>
Date: Wed, May 29, 2013 at 12:02 PM
Subject: Brooks Bell Internship Program
To: "bwatson@ncsu.edu" <bwatson@ncsu.edu>

Good Morning Ben,

By way of introduction, my name is Carissa and I work for Brooks Bell.  I got your name from Mike Adams and was told you might know of some aspiring developers that would be interested in our new two week intensive internship program here at Brooks Bell.  We are looking for 4 developers total that would like to participate (I have included a blurb about the program below along with a link) in this program.  It would expose these students to the online optimization business, great contacts, and it could lead to a longer-term internship or a position.

Brooks Bell is excited to announce its new Digital Testing & Optimization two-week intensive internship program that will debut this summer. For two full weeks, interns will be exposed to the testing and conversion optimization world through deep immersion classes and hands-on experience. By the end of the second week, interns will have built and completed their own test on a live website. We are looking for motivated and ambitious college juniors, seniors, or Masters program candidates with a passion for data analysis, strategy, and marketing.

There are twelve available openings for the program, which will form three teams at the beginning of the first week. Each team will consist of an analyst, a strategist, a developer and a designer. The three teams will build and run their own test, then be judged by a panel at the end of the second week. Members of the winning team will each receive a $1000 prize.

Requirements

- Must be a college junior, senior, or Masters program candidate
- Must provide your own laptop
- Minimum GPA: 3.4

 

Click here for an application

The application says were are past the deadline, but we are extending it a couple of weeks.  Please let me know if you have any questions or have a recommendation.

Thank you,

CARISSA NICKEL

EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT

______________________________________________________

Direct: 919-521-5276

www.brooksbell.com

 

 

______________________________________________________

 

BROOKS BELL Experts in Online Conversion


Job: Looking for budding mobile UX folks​

An internship opportunity.  

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mishra, Danesh <danesh.mishra@reged.com>
Date: Thu, May 30, 2013 at 10:29 AM
Subject: Looking for budding mobile UX folks
To: "bwatson@ncsu.edu" <bwatson@ncsu.edu>
Cc: "Slaton, Steve" <steve.slaton@reged.com>

Ben,

 

Hi, I found you on this site -- http://mobiclass.csc.ncsu.edu/.

 

We are looking for individuals / students who could help us with UX and UI input for browser-based mobile applications. We are interested in someone who is willing to work with us part-time as an intern for a few hours on a project basis. Do you have any recommendations on how best to find such individuals?

 

We are a service provider to financial and insurance companies. Our customers use our SaaS applications to enable them with their compliance and regulatory needs. Our software applications have traditionally been designed for desktop based users. As our customers embrace new technologies, namely tablets, we would like to begin to optimize the user experience of our browser-based applications for those devices and mobile users too. We would like that individual to examine our existing user-interfaces and make recommendations on guidelines, approaches and design best practices to enhance the product for tablet users.

 

Thanks and regards,

Dan

 

Danesh I Mishra - PMP, PMC 

SVP, Enterprise PMO

RegEd  

2100 Gateway Centre Blvd., Suite 200  |  Morrisville, NC  |  27560 

d    919.653.5220 | Eastern time

m   919.345.8925

f     919.653.6510

http://www.reged.com

   

 



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