While traveling I have been doing more work on my iPad, some of which I had previously done on paper or on my laptop. I’ve been reading and reviewing conference papers, making UI design sketches, and writing longer chunks of text such as this blog. The experience has been informative, but not altogether positive.
Here are the slides of the presentation I gave at the IIiX 2010 conference. I presented work done in collaboration with Jeremy Pickens on session-based search. The paper is here; the talk highlights some of the theoretical considerations and gives some examples of the new interface we’re building.
In today’s business and academic circles it’s rare to see a presentation that doesn’t involve PowerPoint (or its Mac cousin, Keynote). For better or for worse, we’ve grown accustomed to the visual cueing and pacing functions that these tools provide, both as audience members and as presenters. This mode of presenting has become so entrenched that all manner of problems have been ascribed to over-reliance on these kinds of presentations.
Thus its interesting to see attempts at innovation in this space. In particular, I am thinking of Prezi, a recent startup that is pushing a more interactive, hierarchical presentation model in which you can move from overview to details and back in smooth transitions, and rather than structuring your presentation around a single narrative, you can define multiple aspects that can be explored interactively. In addition, Prezi has neat-o animated transitions among the views you define.
So does this mean that Microsoft’s stranglehold on presentation software is at and end?
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I was excited to see annotations mentioned in the description of the updated Papers app for the iPad, but was disappointed in the execution. They added two kinds of annotations: text notes and highlighted passages. While both are useful for active reading and appropriate given the characteristics of the device, the implementation left a lot to be desired.
Not having gone to SIGIR 2010, I missed Gary Flake’s keynote address, in which he described and demonstrated Microsoft Pivot, a zoomable, faceted search interface that his group built. Jeff Dalton has a good summary of the talk, which parallels Gary’s previous presentations, including a TED talk (video below). The demos are pretty slick, and the scale at which the system operates is impressive.
In some ways, his emphasis on rich clients and interactive control over large, pre-computed datasets, is a great illustration of HCIR principles. The user is encouraged to explore by making fluid, immediate, reversible operations over large data sets with the goal of finding useful information.
In a recent Bits column, Nick Bilton wrote about a Microsoft patent application that claims a curling page transition when flipping pages on a touch display. Very much the sort of thing you find on the iBooks app on the iPad, and on other applications. Very much the sort of thing that Ian Witten’s group has been writing about for years. I am not an expert on patents, but it seems to me that various aspects claimed by the Microsoft patent can be found in the following papers:
To try to understand the software limitations of inking on the iPad, I had earlier described an ad hoc writing experiment I had conducted on some free iPad applications designed for drawing. The goal was to understand whether the software imposed any fundamental limitations on marking on an iPad using a finger or a stylus. Because the device is designed to be operated with a finger, there seem to be some hardware-based limitations on the size of the tip of the stylus that prevent the kind of fine-grained visual feedback one needs to write. My conclusion at the time was that there was something wrong with the way applications got stroke data from the device that made all of them track so poorly.
It appears that I was over-generalizing. First, given the capabilities of the iPad platform to download and render video, it seems unlikely that the hardware is not capable of providing events fast enough; the question was really about the software. A reader of this blog pointed out that I had missed the Penultimate app, and this app was apparently quite good at handling ink. I had indeed not tested it because at the time I was testing only free apps.
I am trying to understand the capabilities of existing iPad applications with respect to active reading. In this spirit, I have reviewed iAnnotate, and have written about e-books in general. Mekentosj Papers is a Mac application for managing academic papers; a version of it has been ported to the iPad. The idea is that you can use it to find papers you need to read, read them, and also manage their re-finding. The app fails on all accounts.
In a recent post, James Landay compared Dan Bricklin’s note-taking app with a research project called NotePals done at FXPAL during a summer internship by Richard Davis, James’ student. The idea behind both is that writing on a small device (or with poor spatial resolution) is hard, but if you write large and then scale down the ink, you get much more legible results.
Dan’s iPad app works great for this purpose, and with only a little practice one can get really proficient with it. I’ve used it as my primary sketching tool on the iPad, including for sketching interface designs. I wish I could import background images into it for sketching on, but otherwise it’s a nice basic tool. The same idea — write on a zoomed out image & then shrink the ink — works great on the iAnnotate app as well, although the interaction is not really optimized for that the way that Briklin’s app is.
The impact of academic computer-human interaction research on the real world has been debated repeatedly over the last few years. The criticism is that HCI research isn’t that relevant, and that really innovative interfaces (such as Apple’s iPhone) are designed by outsiders, without input from HCI researchers. My sense is that things are not so dire, that there is a trickle-down effect, and that practitioners do pay attention to research results when those results are packaged effectively.
But the criticism is not completely without merit, and only a few systems described in the CHI and UIST literature (to take two academic examples) actually make it into product. On the other hand, one finds examples of transformative work (e.g., Tim Berners-Lee’s framework for the World Wide Web) being rejected by top-tier conferences.
Thus it gives me great pleasure to point to an academic success that is also succeeding in the real world. I am talking about ShapeWriter.