Find: Pressy restores the physical experience #finds #physical #ui

Hard buttons are a useful things. And people miss them. We are physical beings acting in a physical world. Maybe our phones should be physical too. 

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

Pressy adds a physical, programmable button to Android phones

Android phones nowadays are largely devoid of physical buttons — save for the typical duo of volume and power keys. But Pressy, a Kickstarter project that promises to bring a programmable physical button to nearly any Android device, is challenging the idea that consumers are happy doing everything on a touchscreen. With 45 days left to go, Pressy's creators, Nimrod Back and Boaz Mendel, have raised more than $92,000. Pressy surpassed its stated $40,000 goal in less than 24 hours. To put it simply, Pressy is taking off.

Continue reading…

Find: New faces of Android - inside Google's management shuffle

Will be interesting to see if android changes meaningfully. 

The android experience isn't very different from the ios experience at this point. 

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

New faces of Android: inside Google's management shuffle

One big loss at the world's most popular smartphone platform has been followed by another. Five months after Android founder Andy Rubin left his creation to work on unspecified other projects inside Google, head of Android product management Hugo Barra quit to take a job at upstart Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi. And while there are clear potential benefits for both parties in the move — having Barra as an ally inside the explosive Chinese market could prove hugely profitable to Google — he also leaves a void at Android.

Continue reading…

Find: A prototype google smartwatch


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

Here's the smartwatch WIMM made before Google bought it

Find: on the police use of cell tower dumps

On one hand, they help catch suspects. On the other hand, it puts phone metadata for 100k users in government hands. 

*** 
 
 
published on Ars Technica // visit site

How "cell tower dumps" caught the High Country Bandits—and why it matters

Surveillance footage of one of the robbers.

On February 18, 2010, the FBI field office in Denver issued a "wanted" notice for two men known as "the High Country Bandits"—a rather grandiose name for a pair of middle-aged white men who had been knocking down rural banks in northern Arizona and Colorado, grabbing a few thousand dollars from a teller's cash drawer and sometimes escaping on a stolen all-terrain vehicle (ATV).

In each of their 16 robberies, the bandits had a method: "The unknown male identified as suspect number one often enters the banks in rural locations near closing time and brandishes a black semi-automatic handgun. Suspect number one then demands all the money from the teller drawers. He obtains an undisclosed amount of money, puts it in a bag, orders everyone on the ground, then exits the banks with a second suspect. They have been seen leaving the banks on a green or maroon four-wheel ATV with suspect number two driving."

Investigators had bank surveillance footage of the robberies, but the bandits wore jackets, ski masks, and gloves and proved hard to track down. It wasn't for a lack of witnesses or police effort, either. At one 2009 robbery in Pinetop, Arizona, for instance, the bandits got away with $3,827. Witnesses saw a man run from the bank and into a residential area, "looking around as if he were lost." Witnesses later saw the man tear out of the area on an ATV driven by another man. Police followed their escape route and found the spot where the ATV left the road through a freshly-cut barbed wire fence. The cops followed the tracks 17 miles northwest of town before losing the trail completely.

Read 21 remaining paragraphs

Spotted: most app launches happen from other apps #spots #mobiles #apps #menus

Quite related to some of our own work.

***  
 
// published on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Oh app, where art thou?: on app launching habits of smartphone users

Alina Hang, Alexander De Luca, Jonas Hartmann, Heinrich Hussmann

In this paper, we present the results of a four-week real world study on app launches on smartphones. The results show that smartphone users are confident in the way they navigate on their devices, but that there are many opportunities for refinements. Users in our study tended to sort apps based on frequency of use, putting the most frequently used apps in places that they considered fastest to reach. Interestingly, users start most apps from within other apps, followed by the use of the homescreen.

Spotted: Upright or sideways? analysis of smartphone postures in the wild

Phone orientation as a function of app. 

*** 
 
 // published on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Upright or sideways?: analysis of smartphone postures in the wild
Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Niels Henze, Tilman Dingler, Kai Kunze, Albrecht Schmidt

In this paper, we investigate how smartphone applications, in particular web browsers, are used on mobile phones. Using a publicly available widget for smart phones, we recorded app usage and the phones' acceleration and orientation from 1,330 devices. Combining app usage and sensor data we derive the device's typical posture while different apps are used. Analyzing motion data shows that devices are moved more while messaging and navigation apps are used as opposed to browser and other common applications. The time distribution between landscape and portrait depicts that most of the landscape mode time is used for burst interaction (e.g., text entry), except for Media apps, which are mostly used in landscape mode.

Spotted: graphical passwords for mobiles


 
// published on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Improving user authentication on mobile devices: a touchscreen graphical password
Hsin-Yi Chiang, Sonia Chiasson

Typing text passwords is challenging when using touchscreens on mobile devices and this is becoming more problematic as mobile usage increases. We designed a new graphical password scheme called Touchscreen Multi-layered Drawing (TMD) specifically for use with touchscreens. We conducted an exploratory user study of three existing graphical passwords on smart phones and tablets with 31 users. From this, we set our design goals for TMD to include addressing input accuracy issues without having to memorize images, while maintaining an appropriately secure password space. Design features include warp cells which allow TMD users to continuously draw their passwords across multiple layers in order to create more complex passwords than normally possible on a small screen.

Spotted: ProjectorKit - easing rapid prototyping of interactive applications for mobile projectors

A toolkit for prototyping mobile projector applications. Mobile projectors are an important part of the mobile future. 

***
 
 
Shared via feedly // published on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site
ProjectorKit: easing rapid prototyping of interactive applications for mobile projectors
Martin Weigel, Sebastian Boring, Jürgen Steimle, Nicolai Marquardt, Saul Greenberg, Anthony Tang

Researchers have developed interaction concepts based on mobile projectors. Yet pursuing work in this area - particularly in building projector-based interactions techniques within an application - is cumbersome and time-consuming. To mitigate this problem, we contribute ProjectorKit, a flexible open-source toolkit that eases rapid prototyping mobile projector interaction techniques.

Spotted: Investigating collaborative mobile search behaviors

Vidya does search. Congrats on the pub V! Was this a trip to Europe then?

 
 
Shared via feedly // published on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site
Investigating collaborative mobile search behaviors
Shahriyar Amini, Vidya Setlur, Zhengxin Xi, Eiji Hayashi, Jason Hong

People use mobile devices to search, locate and discover local information around them. Mobile local search is frequently a social activity. This paper presents the results of a survey and an exploratory user study of collaborative mobile local search. The survey results show that people frequently search with others and that these searches often involve the use of more than one mobile device. We prototyped a collaborative mobile search app, which we used as a tool to investigate users' collaborative mobile search behavior. Our study results provide insights into how users collaborate while performing search.

Spotted: Pinch-to-zoom is a fitts task


 
 
 // published on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Exploring pinch and spread gestures on mobile devices
Jessica J. Tran, Shari Trewin, Calvin Swart, Bonnie E. John, John C. Thomas

Pinching and spreading gestures are prevalent in mobile applications today, but these gestures have not yet been studied extensively. We conducted an exploratory study of pinch and spread gestures with seated participants on a phone and a tablet device. We found device orientation did not have a significant effect on gesture performance, most pinch and spread tasks were completed in a single action, and they were executed in 0.9-1.2 seconds. We also report how participants chose to sit with the mobile device, variations in gesture execution method, and the effect of varying target width and gesture size. Our task execution times for different gesture distances and precision levels display a surprisingly good fit to a simple Fitts's Law model.

Spotted: Interface activity may be a third component of the multitasking tradeoff #spots #mobiles #multitasking #effort

Related to today's discussion: managing multitasking
  
***
 
// published on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Managing distractions in complex settings
Robin Deegan

Mobile devices are being used in more and more complex settings such as cars or medical environments and these environments are causing serious distractions for the mobile user. This paper presents novel research that investigates mobile user experiences when interacting with cognitively demanding distractions. This research finds that, surprisingly, the user's primary task is not always affected by the distraction but, in this case, the actual interaction between user and device is. This observation initially appears to contradict current research which suggests that a distraction will affect the primary task. The main conclusion of this paper is that a user, when dealing with distraction, can balance their cognitive processes by applying less cognitive resources to the mobile device interaction in order to maintain their performance at the primary task.

Spotted: the impact of screen size on perceived useability #spots #surveys #measures #mobiles


 
 
// published on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Does size matter?: investigating the impact of mobile phone screen size on users' perceived usability, effectiveness and efficiency.

Dimitrios Raptis, Nikolaos Tselios, Jesper Kjeldskov, Mikael B. Skov

Given the wide adoption of smartphones, an interesting debate is taking place regarding their optimal screen size and specifically whether possible portability issues counterbalance the obvious benefits of a larger screen. Moreover, the lack of scientific evidence about the concrete impact of mobile phones' screen size on usability raises questions both to practitioners and researchers. In this paper, we investigate the impact of a mobile phone's screen size on users' effectiveness, efficiency and perceived usability as measured using System Usability Scale (SUS). An experiment was conducted with 60 participants, which interacted with the same information seeking application on three different devices of the same brand that differed on their screen size.

Spotted: an alternative to pinch-to-zoom #spots #mobiles #ui

Bill is a true ui pioneer. It's good to see someone questioning the new mobile "wimp ". 

---
 
// published on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Toward compound navigation tasks on mobiles via spatial manipulation

Michel Pahud, Ken Hinckley, Shamsi Iqbal, Abigail Sellen, Bill Buxton

We contrast the Chameleon Lens, which uses 3D movement of a mobile device held in the nonpreferred hand to support panning and zooming, with the Pinch-Flick-Drag metaphor of directly manipulating the view using multi-touch gestures. Lens-like approaches have significant potential because they can support navigation-selection, navigation-annotation, and other such compound tasks by off-loading navigation to the nonpreferred hand while the preferred hand annotates, marks a location, or draws a path on the screen. Our experimental results show that the Chameleon Lens is significantly slower than Pinch-Flick-Drag for the navigation subtask in isolation.

Spotted: Best Practices on the Move: Building Web Apps for Mobile Devices


// published on ACM Queue - All Queue Content // visit site

Best Practices on the Move: Building Web Apps for Mobile Devices

If it wasn't your priority last year or the year before, it's sure to be your priority now: bring your Web site or service to mobile devices in 2013 or suffer the consequences. Early adopters have been talking about mobile taking over since 1999 - anticipating the trend by only a decade or so. Today, mobile Web traffic is dramatically on the rise, and creating a slick mobile experience is at the top of everyone's mind. Total mobile data traffic is expected to exceed 10 exabytes per month by 2017.

Spotted: Rules for Mobile Performance Optimization


// published on ACM Queue - All Queue Content // visit site

Rules for Mobile Performance Optimization

Performance has always been crucial to the success of Web sites. A growing body of research has proven that even small improvements in page-load times lead to more sales, more ad revenue, more stickiness, and more customer satisfaction for enterprises ranging from small e-commerce shops to megachains such as Walmart.

Find: Two Ways Artificial Intelligence Contributes to Great User Experience #finds #ai #emotion

AI for predicting what a user will type, and what a user will like. 

---
 
// published on UX Magazine // visit site

Two Ways Artificial Intelligence Contributes to Great User Experience
August 22, 2013

As someone who has done research for the better part of a decade, I'm often in the uncomfortable position of dispelling misconceptions about the state of AI.

When a stranger on a plane hears you do AI research, there's a 60% chance you'll get asked precisely how concerned they should be about Terminator-style renegade robots or when they can expect to have Rosie the robot maids do all their housework.

While future Marxist robot sociologists will contend that the path to the former robot most certainly goes through the latter, the truth is that most of the AI we interact with will be software running in internet services or apps on our and .

...
By Aria Haghighi


Find: White House calls for warrantless searches of suspects' cellphones


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

White House calls for warrantless searches of suspects' cellphones

The Obama administration is urging the Supreme Court to allow for warrantless cellphone searches of arrested suspects, calling upon the court to resolve a nearly six-year-old case. In a petition filed last week, the White House disputed an appeals court ruling, which determined that police should be required to obtain a search warrant before accessing the contents of a suspect's phone.

The case in question stems from the 2007 arrest of a Massachusetts man suspected of selling crack cocaine. Upon his arrest, police took his cellphone and searched his call history without obtaining a warrant. That led them to his house, where they found drugs, money, and guns, and ultimately led to his conviction.

Continue reading…

Spotted: a panel on mobile gpus at siggraph, with anandtech's anandtech shimpi #gpus #local #spots #mobile

Shimpi and anandtech are based in the triangle. 

---
 
// published on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

New directions and developments in mobile GPU design

David Blythe, Eric Demers, Barthold Lichtenbelt, James McCombe, Anand Shimpi, Dave Shreiner

Computing is evolving as smartphones and tablets increasingly become primary entertainment devices. This shift requires greater performance from mobile processors to deliver the same quality experiences that a PC or gaming console does, but without compromising battery life in a more compact mobile device form factor. This panel, composed of leading mobile graphics experts from Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Intel, ARM and Imagination Technologies, will cover the newest and best ways advanced programmers can take advantage of GPU design implementation and optimize for mobile-specific platforms. The discussion will cover the latest graphics APIs like OpenGL ES 3.0 for sophisticated graphics programming, compute APIs like OpenCL to enable GPGPU acceleration, and Android APIs like Renderscript for advanced features such as instancing, occlusion queries, superior texture compression formats, and multiple render targets.

Find: PopUp Exposes Bull City Secrets


// published on Triangle Localista // visit site

{Play Local} PopUp Exposes Bull City Secrets

So, you're walking along Main Street in downtown Durham and as you approach a certain restaurant your phone makes this funny little chirping noise. You take a look at it and see a notification on your screen that reads something…

Read more →

Find: A Tour of Moto Maker - Customization Meets the Moto X

Great idea. Control and expression are important elements of good user experience. 

---
 
// published on AnandTech // visit site

A Tour of Moto Maker: Customization Meets the Moto X

A key part of the Moto X's story is one of hardware customization. At launch, those users buying Moto Xes on AT&T will be given the option of selecting from 18 back colors, 2 front colors and 7 accent colors. Additional options include custom text on the back of your device, storage capacity (16GB or 32GB), charger color, cases and headphones. It works out to around 504 different possible combinations of Moto X choices users can select from. I won't go into great detail on the Moto X here as Brian has already done a great job of that in his original piece, and we have a full review in the works. 

If you show up at an AT&T store, you'll be able to see examples of color combinations in person, but you can only go home with a woven white or woven black model. This is the composite material, carbon fiber-looking back we've shown photos of already, with a matching black or white front. If you want to customize a Moto X, you can buy a Moto X redemption card - good for one customized Moto X. Take the redemption card home, head to motorola.com/designit, type in your PIN and off you go. The AT&T store visit is purely optional however, you can just go to motomaker.com and buy a fully customized Moto X directly from Motorola.

In both cases, the Moto X receives final customization and assembly in Fort Worth, Texas. The process should take approximately 4 days depending on component availability. If you don't like what you end up with, you're free to exchange/return the device within a 14-day window.

Motorola provided us with PIN codes to try out the nearly-final version of Moto Maker and pick out our own custom Moto X design options. Brian put together an excellent video taking you through the entire process:

There are a few minor bugs/inconsistencies in the Moto Maker webapp itself but otherwise the process is quite painless. It's pretty easy to tell what color combinations work or don't work, and Motorola has a number of recommendations for designs already made. As with any online configurator, image accuracy is always a concern. We won't see the results of our customizations for a few days, but we'll do a follow-up post comparing what Moto Maker presented us with and what it looks like in person.

At present the options include the different colored backs which are polymer, in addition to the two woven composite materials. Other patterns will gradually be made available, along with the wood back options that we were shown, although Motorola still doesn't have specific timing beyond saying sometime in the Q4 timeframe for those wood options.

It took me much longer than I expected to settle on a color combination. There aren't an overwhelming number of choices, but there are enough options to make you think - and a number of really good looking combinations. I found it very easy to put together a fairly subtle phone with a splash of color thanks to the 7 accent colors, but I ultimately ended up designing something pretty over the top – lemon lime with yellow accents and the white front. Brian settled on olive with silver accents and the white front. 

There is a small amount of software customization that comes with Moto Maker. Based on the color you choose for the back of the Moto X, Motorola will pre-select a wallpaper that matches. You can specify custom text to be displayed at boot, and finally you can opt to automatically setup your Google account on the phone to simplify the out of box experience when you finally get it. 

The purchase experience is something that we rarely talk about in our reviews, but it does play a major role in customer satisfaction. I feel like Moto Maker is a successful attempt to improve the smartphone purchasing process. The customization options are easy to get excited about, and the overall experience is without equal in the phone space today. Given how personal these smartphones are, the customization play with Moto Maker is clearly very well thought out. As we've seen in the past though, personalization alone isn't enough to make for a successful product. Stay tuned for our full review of the Moto X.


Find: Indystate - Smartphones outsell feature phones (again) for the first time, worldwide

The end of an era. 

---
 
// published on Ars Technica // visit site

Smartphones outsell feature phones (again) for the first time, worldwide

Now in the minority of new sales.

It's not your imagination—most people you know, worldwide, have (or are about to get) a smartphone. According to new mobile industry data, 435 million mobile phones were sold around the world in the second quarter of 2013 alone, and just over half of those were smartphones.

"Smartphones accounted for 51.8 percent of mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2013, resulting in smartphone sales surpassing feature phone sales for the first time," said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a statement on Wednesday.

However, IDC (a rival industry analysis firm) said this shift already took place during the first quarter of 2013.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs

Find: Indystate - Nearly 80 percent of smartphones shipped last quarter ran Android, says IDC

80 android, 15 ios, 4 winphone. 

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

Nearly 80 percent of smartphones shipped last quarter ran Android, says IDC

Dsc_2362_large

The smartphone market continues to explode, and the Android ecosystem has been the biggest beneficiary of that growth. According to the latest smartphone OS marketshare numbers from IDC, shipments of Android phones increased a whopping 73.5 percent to reach over 187 million units in the second quarter of 2013 — a figure that gives Android 79.3 percent of the smartphone marketplace. It's a dominance no doubt helped by Samsung, despite the fact that the company's marketshare amongst other manufacturers slipped a little bit this past quarter. The sheer volume of phones the company ships (over 72 million last quarter) has certainly benefitted the Android ecosystem.

While Apple increased the number of iOS phones it shipped year-over-year...

Continue reading…

Spotted: SGRT - a mobile GPU architecture for real-time ray tracing

A specialized hardware for ray tracing on mobile devices. Such hardware historically has difficulty finding traction, but samsung might have a chance with it, given its market strength. 
 
// published on High Perfomance Graphics-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

SGRT: a mobile GPU architecture for real-time ray tracing

Won-Jong Lee, Youngsam Shin, Jaedon Lee, Jin-Woo Kim, Jae-Ho Nah, Seokyoon Jung, Shihwa Lee, Hyun-Sang Park, Tack-Don Han

Recently, with the increasing demand for photorealistic graphics and the rapid advances in desktop CPUs/GPUs, real-time ray tracing has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, ray tracing in the current mobile environment is very difficult because of inadequate computing power, memory bandwidth, and flexibility in mobile GPUs. In this paper, we present a novel mobile GPU architecture called SGRT (Samsung reconfigurable GPU based on Ray Tracing) in which a fast compact hardware accelerator and a flexible programmable shader are combined. SGRT has two key features: 1) an area-efficient parallel pipelined traversal unit; and 2) flexible and high-performance kernels for shading and ray generation.

Find: Windows 8 passes Vista at last, as IE10 growth slows

Worldwide browser share: ie at 50, chrome and Firefox at 15, with chrome taking from Firefox. 

Mobile browser share: safari 60, android 20, opera 10, chrome 5. 

---
 
 // published on Ars Technica // visit site

Windows 8 passes Vista at last, as IE10 growth slows

Windows 8 has finally overtaken Windows Vista to become the third most widely used operating system in a month that saw Internet Explorer 10's rapid growth slow down, and the gap between Firefox and Chrome close sharply.

Firefox was down 0.86 points to 18.29 percent, with Chrome up 0.59 points at 17.76 percent, bringing the two browsers within spitting distance of each other. Internet Explorer gained too, up 0.46 points to 56.61 percent. The prospect of Chrome overtaking Firefox to take the number two spot is once again with us. The two browsers last looked as though they would trade positions a year ago, before Chrome lost ground and Firefox reasserted its dominance.

Safari and Android browsers maintain their dominant positions. The Chrome browser on Android is continuing to show strong growth, picking up 0.69 points last month. Internet Explorer, however, suffered significant losses, dropping 0.49 points and wiping out the gains made in May and June.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs