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Elephants and User Interface Design

I’ve always had a fascination for antique software. Perhaps its because I miss the simplicity of the Windows 3.1 days…and its incredibly simple WinAPI, which could be mastered in its entirety by a single developer. That was when I first started Windows programming. My tool of choice back then was Borland Pascal with Objects 7.0, which is still available today in incarnations as CodeGear Delphi. Even though InstallAware also uses C++ and C# for some of our projects, Delphi is still my personal tool of choice today. But in 1992 we didn’t have even Delphi 1.0. So software was written the hard way…lack of visual designers, no matter how simple the API, is always a pain.

But why the fascination for antique software then? To be honest, I’m not really sure. Maybe I’m just into antiques after all 🙂 I must admit I get a huge kick out of building and maintaining antique Windows boxes. Around 2001 (wow!, even the turn of the century is now almost a decade old), I had to collect real antique hardware to build an antique Windows box. An ISA video card, ISA sound card, ISA modem, PS/2 keyboard and mouse, along with an old processor were necessary. Otherwise, Windows wouldn’t recognize your devices, plain and simple. Today, thanks to the “virtues of virtualization”, one doesn’t need to shop around for old (and hard to find) hardware anymore. Of course, VMware has been around for a while…delivering near-native performance for virtual machines. VMware owes most of this performance to its native drivers for guest operating systems…which provide high performance video display, for instance. However the one drawback of this approach (which really doesn’t matter in the real world anyways) is that if VMware doesn’t have drivers for your operating system, you’re stuck. So even though one of the first things I tried on VMware was to build a Windows 3.1 virtual machine (on top of good old DOS 6.0), it had no sound, 16 color graphics, and 640×480 resolution only.

Virtual PC to the rescue! Virtual PC takes a different approach – instead of implementing custom drivers for video, sound, and so on – it emulates old cards, cards that are old enough that Windows 3.1 recognizes them. The real-world drawback is that Virtual PC can be slower because its emulating old hardware, instead of passing calls directly to the underlying hardware. However with Virtual PC, I was able to build a Windows 3.1 virtual machine that had high color display, sound, networking – practically everything! I was even able to play old DOS games like Flight Simulator 5 (the first version of the family to support textured graphics and digitized/synthesized sound). It was antique software heaven 🙂

Even today, I maintain a fully-configured Windows 3.1 virtual machine, ready for usage at a moments notice. I’ve installed a full set of browsers, email clients, FTP clients, compilers, IDEs, Office programs, games, and what not. I’ve also got some real gems that my contemporaries from that era will recognize – After Dark screensaver (can anybody really forget those flying toasters?), Stacker disk compression (the first company that *I* know of to win a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft), Norton Utilities and PC Tools, just to name a few. Watching PC Tools or Norton defrag the hard disk in native DOS mode…moving all those character-drawn blocks around…still looks more convincing to me than my native Windows defrag tool 😉 You *know* the thing has direct access to hardware and is *making full use* of that privilege 😉

Working in this virtual machine is very refreshing in many ways, and contains invaluable lessons for software development from a historical perspective – you get a broad overview of ideas that survived, and those that failed. And maybe the ultimate lesson is the realization that nothing has fundamentally changed since those days in the computing world. Sure, we now have fancy graphics cards, jazzy on-screen effects, way more processing power – but ultimately, in your day-to-day use, you still have the same email client, the same word processor, and the same spreadsheet; which require direct keyboard input, learning the program, and regular crashes. Sure, Windows 3.1 did crash a *little* more frequently at the kernel level, but most real-world software seems to be equally unstable these days. About 30% of the time I open Internet Explorer 7, it hangs. Vista, despite dramatically multiplying resource requirements and reducing performance thanks to its DRM focus, is even buggier – every time I view an MSN video in the browser, the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) crashes! Makes you really wonder if we’d all be better off reverting to Windows 3.1 – at least, it would run at lightning speed on today’s machines 😉

But what about the place of elephants in user interface design? Enter OS/2. After perfecting the Windows 3.1 antique VM, I decided to take the challenge to the next level – another contemporary of the Windows 3.1 times, OS/2. I had never actually used OS/2 in the real world – my only memory of it was drooling at a high-school demo of it (I lacked the hardware capable of running it at the time). So I soon found out that OS/2 also ran just great under Virtual PC…and had several versions of OS/2 virtualized 🙂 This is where the elephants come in. OS/2 had some “artistic” elements in its user interface, namely elephants in wizard screens:

Yes, IBM indeed built a product with this sort of “artistic” license 🙂 The elephant even changes its pose on the different screens! How’s that for a user interface concept?

In retrospect, its interesting to note that OS/2 didn’t survive, and Windows 3.1 did (although, we’ll never know how much of that owes to Stacker-esque business tactics on Microsoft’s part, and how much to the elephants). Its more interesting to note that despite dramatic improvements in hardware performance, the way you use the computer today hasn’t really changed – and nor has its reliability. The user interface still employs the same metaphors from the Windows 3.1 era – windows (doh!), menus, context menus, buttons, more menus, keyboard input, and so on. I even find myself craving the ugly Windows 3.1 “window themes” – if I could find a skin like that for my current Windows, I’d use it in a heartbeat! I’m not so sure Vista’s maximize/minimize buttons are all that better. Ultimately, what’s the *most* fasctinating to me is, while people debate whether Vista is worth the upgrade from Windows XP or not, they don’t even realize that in their day-to-day usage, even XP isn’t all that different from trusty old Windows 3.1 😀

Well, I just got my hands on a copy of Borland C++ 3.1 for OS/2. Its time for some more antique software fun! I was actually thinking of taking the LearJet on a spin in the latest Flight Simulator 10…but seeing that it runs even slower than how fast Flight Simulator 5 ran on its *original introduction*, I’m really thinking older might be better 😉

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My Good Friend Anthony

Until recently, I was very fond of British Airways. They have awesome full-flat beds in business class, as well as nice lounges where you can wine and dine yourself to your heart’s content. Sure, their staff could be friendlier – I once had an airline attendant “quiz” me on the location of the nearest security exit after the “security presentation”. I should have asked her if she would like me to blow in the vest as well 😉 But overall, it was good value.

Until recently. The last time I was flying, British Airways lost my luggage. Needless to say the love-hate slider between myself and BA made a little more progress towards the hate end that day. Brilliantly, I had also put my cell phone in the suitcase, which was also lost now. The first thing I did out of SFO was to buy a new temporary cell phone. I gave BA the number so they could keep me up to date on the “property irregularity report”.

The next day in the middle of an important meeting, my temp phone rang. I excused myself, saying I just had to take this call – really didn’t want to miss it if it was the airline. So the voice at the other end spoke:

“Anthony?”

“Um…excuse me, who?”

“Is Anthony there?”

I wished so badly for them to be calling from BA. I “figured” maybe she has the wrong name or something:

“Where are you calling from?”

“??? San Francisco!”

Turns out it was the wrong number, plain and simple.

Sadly, I did not get a call from BA for the remainder of that day (even though I had been promised one). However, I did get a call from Anthony himself 🙂

“Hey dude…have you been getting calls for Anthony?”

“Yes.”

“That’s me.”

“OK…”

“Look dude, I change phone numbers a lot, and I move around a lot. If somebody calls me, tell them you don’t know me, you don’t know who I am, you don’t know where I am, and you don’t know my new phone number. Just tell them you don’t know anything about me and hang up.”

WOW! Now this was entertaining 😀

“Man, how would I know who you are or where you are anyways?”

“OK thanks dude, I gotta run!”

As Anthony had predicted, a lot of people did try to get in touch with him. There were lots of calls that started like this:

“This is not a sales soliciation. This call contains important information about your account…”

There were also some strange text messages:

“Im home gogo ?!gangsta go da rnb thug!”

(Don’t ask me what that means – although I imagine Anthony might know)

Overall, during the course of the next weeks, I held on to the phone just to see what else I might find out about Anthony. I found out his last name through a friend who called, as well as the numbers of some of his friends. But Anthony himself remained elusive, even though I kept getting lots of his traffic 🙂

And BA? They were in the process of actively losing my luggage when I made a trip to SFO two days later. My bag was sitting right there at the terminal and for some reason, they had not scanned it upon arrival. The unhelpful staff were now apologetic. I guess that’s it for flying BA and their business beds 😉

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Braga and the Kitchen Fetish

I’m quite a Star Trek fan, and this post is about an interesting pattern I have seen emerge in Star Trek shows (and a spin-off by one of the producers, Brannon Braga).

Next Generation was discontinued at the peak of its popularity (for reasons unknown to me). For a while the only Trek on the airwaves was Deep Space Nine, which took place on a space station, and often criticized for the lack of exploration. Voyager returned to the exploration theme – and also was the debut of what I call “the kitchen fetish“.

A regular character on Voyager, considered by most to be highly annoying, was Neelix. Neelix was a strange little creature but he did spend a lot of time in the kitchen. A lot of boiling pots, bubbling mixtures, pans with burning oil, near-miss fires, and delicacies which turned out to be not so well-aligned with the taste buds of the unexpecting explorers from the Alpha Quadrant were a staple of the show. Often times, Neelix‘s taste in food was horrible for the crew of Voyager – except when he was temporarily merged with Tuvok, the resident Vulcan, and seasoned his recipes with Vulcan logic for one short episode. Sadly, the need to conserve power made replicator usage a luxury on Voyager, and the crew had to deal with the Talaxian, and the viewers got to see lots of the kitchen.

Enterprise, the ill-fated show, perhaps to avoid criticisms like those against Neelix, had a completely off-screen chef. The chef was never visible in any episode (but viewers still complained that Phlox, the doctor, was too much like Neelix and equally annoying). Enter the series finale of Enterprise. Nearly the entire episode took place in the till-then inaccessible kitchen of Enterprise. The chef was actually substituted in by Riker from the Next Generation, chatting with the Enterprise crew thanks to the blessings of holodeck technology. Riker was listening to what the crew had to say about Archer and everything else that’s going on, whilst giving them instructions on how to knead pizza dough (and getting a bit curt with his instructions every now and then). It was the return of the kitchen – and with a vengeance.

After Enterprise was over, Braga started a new show, Threshold. I very much enjoyed Threshold, just like the Star Trek series. Threshold even featured Brent Spiner, more commonly known as “Data“. Threshold dealt with a very interesting alien invasion scenario – where the aliens don’t actually send any particular member of their species to Earth, but instead a probe that manipulates all DNA on the planet, and starts converting everyone into their own species. In the very first episode of this new, and also ill-fated show that saw only one half season, the probe makes its first contact with humans on board a ship out in the Pacific Ocean. The very first scene of this very first episode takes place in…well, you guessed it, the kitchen! Pots and pans ablaze, broth bubbling, once again we start off with an extensive kitchen panorama.

Don’t get me wrong – I love kitchens. A kitchen has always felt to me like the coziest place in any home, and is full of savory anticipation of taste bud nirvana. I just find it very interesting that the kitchen theme has emerged so frequently in shows produced by Braga.

There is also another recurring Braga theme…which I will talk about in my next post, so stay tuned!