I’ve finally remembered to post a picture of my first custom Teddy Trooper (the vinyl toy created by German graffiti artist Flying Fortress):

The design is based on the famous van Gogh self portrait with the bandaged ear, currently hung in London’s excellent Courtauld gallery – probably the best gallery I’ve ever been to and well worth the token price of admission if you’re ever in London.

I have plans to do a series of them based on famous artist’s styles, though this is moving as slowly as side projects tend to move…

He’s pictured here basking in the late afternoon Tuscan sun at Corzano e Paterno.

This post originally appeared on the Masabists blog.

Earlier this week Passenger Focus, the UK’s official rail watchdog, released their annual Spring Passenger Satisfaction Survey, and the press release focussed on some very interesting insights into the reasons why UK rail passengers shun automated ticket vending machines.

At Masabi, Passenger Focus’s earlier research into ticket maching usability was a key influence in the User Interface design of our mobile phone ticket vending app, and it was encouraging to see this new research appears to validate our approach. The report shows that users choose humans over machines for the following main reasons:

1. “Incomplete ticket restriction information”
2. “A barrage of information and choices”
3. “Bewildering jargon”

“As a result some passengers would rather queue to speak to a member of staff, buy more expensive tickets than they need to or just give up and join the ticket office queue.”

Ticket Sales Usability

The UK has evolved a particularly complex fare structure, so a certain amount of complexity is innate in the system. The trick is to remove as much as possible, allowing the passenger to make an informed decision based on price and/or time preferences, without any arcane rail fare knowledge – I can say from personal experience that most ticket machines really do handle this badly.

By fusing real timetables with fare selection, the Masabi mobile rail ticketing app allows the passenger to visualise which trains each ticket will be valid on very rapidly, whilst also including a more detailed concise restriction description than most in-station vending machines. Timetables indicate which operator runs each train, a key point of confusion when many tickets are tied to a single operator.

The application can also adapt to the user, remembering favoured journeys and previously used payment cards (securely stored, and only reusable by re-entering the CVV number on the back). This personalisation helps eliminate the myriad of destinations thrown at the user of a vending machine, most of which will be totally irrelevant.

Queues

This year’s survey also looked at queue times in a number of regional stations – contrasting to last year, which focussed on the largest stations, almost all in London.

The industry lays down a maximum acceptable queue length of 3 minutes at off-peak times, and 5 minutes during peak times. Many stations, big and small, are still failing to meet these standards (click on graph to see a larger version):

Mobile ticketing offers a solution to this, providing a superior ticket purchase experience combined with informative timetables – all of which can be tested risk-free whilst queuing for a window or ticket machine.

Please comment on the original post.

Watching this video on the iPhone 4, I found I was constantly viewing it from two perspectives – firstly as a slightly overbearing  “it’s so cool” marketing piece that could only be made in America, but secondly as a deliberate deadpan satire about how you can con people into thinking so many very old and well established features are innovative.  3G, high res screens, and everyone’s favourite feature – video calling!  Mostly features that were disparaged by Apple until they finally caught up, incidentally – though I don’t think anyone else has tried to innovate a case that can block out radiation with a simple touch, they are breaking new ground there whatever Jobs says (unapologetically).  Maybe it’s just down to the trans-Atlantic difference in demeanour.

Apple have done a stellar job with the iPhone in a number of areas – user experience (some comparative Android thoughts coming up in a future post), popularisation of apps, and minimisation of fragmentation (but it’s there – iOS 4 is not available to first gen users, there is some feature fragmentation between each new model, and doubling the pixel size to run legacy apps on eg. an iPad certainly doesn’t always work, though technically it’s hard to see why).

Unfortunately they present it in such a myopic way that my gut reaction is to dislike them for it.

I’ve been noticing two camera related things when I go out recently – firstly there are a huge number of people carrying SLRs around these days, and secondly they appear to be almost exclusively Canon.

Last weekend I decided to quentify the second point with a little test.  I walked down the (crowded) Embankment in London from St Paul’s Cathedral to Westminster Bridge on a sunny afternoon and counted up every brand I saw, 25 SLRs in total over about 20 minutes split like this:

If you were to take these stats at face value, it would look like Canon are outselling everyone else in the market combined by a ratio of two to one – no mean feat!  Three of those Canons were serious / pro-grade (L lenses), compared to one of the Nikons (and possibly some of the Others – I don’t know enough about the other brands to be able to say).

This is a very small sample taken in one place, but that one place was the middle of a very connected cosmopolitan city during tourist season so it probably represents a reasonable slice of the international market, with obvious UK bias.

I suspect the real global sales figures are not so extreme, but I still find this an interesting trend that quantifies something I’ve been thinking for a while.  Whilst Nikon currently has a signficantly higher mindshare among professionals than its overall market share, how long could they keep that up if most of the entry levels being sold into the market were Canons?  This generation’s pros are already set in their ways, but the next generation will be picking up whatever camera they can lay their hands on – either 2nd hand or their parent’s unused SLR bought back when they thought having an SLR would automatically make your pictures better.  Chances are it’ll be a Canon.

Anyone setting out to buy their own SLR will often end up buying whichever brand their mates have, because of advice bias from those friends – they’ll understand their brand better than the other – and also the potential to share kit.  This would again seem to reinforce market dominance for any brand that can gain signficiant market share.

The other effect this might have is to generate a skew in resources available for R&D.  No manufacturer can afford to have many new lenses being developed simultaneously, but if the sales skew generated significantly greater revenues for Canon it would over time start to pull ahead in the range of lenses it can offer, which might presumably have something of a feedback effect on its proportion of sales.  I have no idea how much of an issue this would actually be – both manufacturers have an excellent array of glass covering most needs, and 3rd parties like Sigma plug a lot of the gaps (like long tele-zooms); once you go above the really basic kit lenses though, most are sitll geared towards full frame sensors and a manufacturer who could make a more compelling upgrade path for crop sensor bodies might be able to do better.  I’ve no idea really but you can potentially see how Nikon might get upset.

However, it’s worth remembering that nothing stands still and a disruptive technology can easily humble a market leader within a few years – Apple is busy proving this in the mobile phone market, after all.

The most obvious candidate for that in higher-end photography would seem to be EVIL bodies – basically, everything people think of as “SLR” (interchangable lenses, easy to access manual settings, etc) without all the actual tedious and expensive bulk of  aSingle Lens Reflex moving mirror and prism.  Canon haven’t expressed any interest in that market that I’ve seen, because their SLRs seem to be selling very nicely thankyou and they’d probably rather not cannibalise those revenues before they have to – who knows if that’ll turn out to be a mistake.  Then again, they may have a crop sensor EF/EF-S compatible EVIL body just waiting in the wings for the day that their competitors have made the case for the concept to consumers, which will flood onto the market backed up by Canon’s entire lens catalogue.  I’d buy one as a backup body immediately.

One of the hardest aspects of managing fast paced growth in a startup company such as mine is coping with the influx of employees.

One of the principles of interaction design I was taught, based on research done by the psychologist George Miller, is that most people’s cognitive capacity is 7 +/- 2 – in effect, the average individual can remember seven items of information reasonably well, but struggle as soon as they have to remember more.

This becomes a stark problem when the number of employees required to complete a round of tea heads above this – compounded by the fact that each person likes their tea differently, and some odd people even seem to like coffee.  When we reached the point that people would come in early to get the chipped mug, just to have a way of identifying themselves, I figured something had to be done.

Step forward YourDesign, who have the best mug design service I could find in 5 minutes of Googling.  Just knock up a quick design like this, pay £8, and you have a personalised mug:

Within 2 days I had my prototype back, and within a week the whole company were kitted out with branded mugs.  We’re even considering getting them for regular customers who drop by for design and development iteration meetings…

Slight warning: the print quality is a bit fuzzy, but with a nice bold design it works pretty nicely, and I no longer have to order mugs alphabeitcally whilst they brew, run round the office reminding myself who wanted what, then accidentally pour milk into the wrong mug and have to start again.

NB: shooting white against white on a white background in a lightbox that is slightly too small – harder than it looks

After a bit of a break, I’m about to start a stint of Blackberry development and really wanted to try out the new Blackberry JDE integration with Eclipse – something that promises to reduce the immense tedium of running Blackberry simulators somewhat. Anyone who has ever tried to do that will understand how valuable this could be, both financially (time is money after all) and to your sanity.

The plugin requires at least Eclipse 3.4, though, and I was stuck way back on 3.3. Eclipse was reluctant to update itself to any new version from any of the obvious “update” menu items, so I went for the simple brute force method:

1. Zipping the old Eclipse app folder, then delete it
2. Download the latest Eclipse, and add the latest version of whatever plugins are needed
3. Reattach to the old workspace folder.

This initially appeared to work, but didn’t.

Ant Integration

The most visible problem was that Ant builds would no longer run. They’d start, and the red ’stop’ button on the console would light up (indicating I could stop the running Ant process, not that it was stopped) but no logging at all reached the console. No dialogues appeared explaining the problem.

The clue lay in the workspace’s .metadata/.log file – there were two exceptions, at least one of which was being thrown every time I tried to run Ant:

!ENTRY org.eclipse.core.resources 4 75 2010-03-01 21:17:55.921
!MESSAGE Errors occurred during the build.
!SUBENTRY 1 org.eclipse.mtj.core 2 75 2010-03-01 21:17:55.921
!MESSAGE Errors running builder 'Preverification Builder' on project 'Framework'.
!STACK 1
org.eclipse.core.runtime.CoreException: Build state machine has not been initialized.

or

!ENTRY org.eclipse.ant.ui 4 120 2010-03-01 21:21:16.468
!MESSAGE Error logged from Ant UI:
!STACK 0
java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Accept timed out

Not, admittedly, much of a clue but enough to eventually track down the problem. Ant’s configuration – in particular, the locations of its jars – are stored in your workspace, despite it being a plugin integrated into Eclipse. If the location of Ant’s plugin folder changes, Ant stops working with this workspace.

To fix the problem, go to Preferences > Ant > Runtime. Remove all jars under Ant Home Entries, and then find the new versions in the Eclipse plugin folder (as an External Jar Location). Apply the changes, and your builds shoudl run again.

JavaME Emulation

The JavaME plugin is notoriously bad at introducing breaking changes whenever it updates. This time was no exception – my JavaME projects appeared fine in the IDE, but produced the following exception (to the console, at least) whenever a WTK emulator was run:

Running with storage root C:\Documents and Settings\Tom\j2mewtk\2.5.2\appdb\rms
Running with locale: English_United Kingdom.1252
Running in the identified_third_party security domain
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: framework/midp/Application
	at com.sun.midp.midlet.MIDletState.createMIDlet(+29)
	at com.sun.midp.midlet.Scheduler.schedule(+52)
	at com.sun.midp.main.Main.runLocalClass(+28)
	at com.sun.midp.main.Main.main(+80)
Execution completed.

The fix turned out to be simple – delete the project, and check it out again. The new version will start with fresh metadata that works with the new plugin. Not very nice, but hardly fatal (if you’re using version control).

Incompatible Plugins

At the end of this, I discovered that the Blackberry JDE plugin does not support the very latest Galileo, so it was all a bit of a pointless exercise. Such is life in mobile development…

This is a diagram I drew to understand aperture numbers (the f numbers on a lens) and the concept of stops. In the graph, the gap between each bar is a stop (click to enlarge):

The most confusing thing was always the non-linear nature of stops – an increase of one stop of light means that the amount of light has doubled, a reduction by a stop means a halving of the light.

You can see the diaphragm of a lens here (the white circle in the centre, ie. the hole that lets the light through):

Plenty of people have commented on the stupidity of Verified by Visa and similar schemes, which put iframed verification forms into the web purchasing system that look remarkably like phishing forms (encouraging users to trust such embedded forms), without providing any additional security benefits. A quick glance at the economics explains why sites do this – it enables them to lower their costs by shunting fraud risk onto Visa – but from a user’s perspective it’s still bloody stupid.

Even worse is when you cannot complete a payment without it, but it doesn’t work – an experience I have just had with BA, trying to book a flight over to Queen’s Day in Amsterdam. After entering all my details, I got this:

The bank would like the following information… an empty iframe. It’s actually loading a JSP on BA’s site which delivers an empty HTML page wrapping a script that tries to trigger a form that isn’t defined in the markup. Knowing that is no great consolation…

So congratulations BA, Easyjet were undoubtedly very happy to receive some cash in exchange for a functional web experience.

I’ve spent a few hours playing with Tableau Public, a free version of the rather expensive Tableau data visualisation app, and it’s pretty good. After a random discussion of how Estonia has, according to the Economist world stats book, 84 guys to every 100 girls, I prepared this map in a couple of hours as an exercise in understanding how Tableau works:

The map shows the male:female ratio of every country as coloured crosses, from red (more women) to blue (more men); the size of the cross is proportional to the country’s population.

Quick Caveats

Tableau Public is a cut-down version of commercial software, with no ability to save files locally. In theory you can publish your diagrams to the web on their site, but that feature was a bit broken when I tried it.

This means that you have to retrieve your diagrams using screenshots, and I have no idea what the legal implications of doing that are if you intend to use them for anything but personal interest and satisfaction! It does constrain the quality a little, too.

Source Data

Being lazy, I didn’t want to type in all of the raw data from the Economist book, so I pulled it from Wikipedia: population data came from here and sex ratio from here. Copying the tables directly into Excel brought a load of unwanted links and images, so I copied into Notepad++ – where it appears as tab separated values – and reloaded as a TSV file via disk.
The country names had a few extra spaces and other characters in them – I pulled these out with the LEFT, MID, LEN etc functions.

Tableau theoretically understands full country names, but I had mixed success getting this to work, so I imported a lookup table of two letter ISO 3166-2 codes, which are also supported and are unambiguous.

I then used VLOOKUP to pull together all this information into a single Excel sheet (remember to turn range lookup – the fourth, optional argument – off); as the data came from diffferent sources, there was a little messing round standardising country names. The finished spreadsheet is here if you want to play with it.

Visualizing in Tableau

It really helps to look at this tutorial video before starting anything – Tableau starts with quite a blank slate!

Open up the XLS in Tableau, and it’ll make a first stab at identifying what is what from the Excel column formats. You’ll see the fields seperated into text and numeric lists down the left hand side.
If you don’t see a globe next to the Country Code field, right click, go to the Geographic Role submenu, and select Country (ISO 3166-2). Tableau can now map this to a geographical location automatically. Also ensure all numeric columns are recognised as numeric with the Change Data Type submenu.

To recreate the map visualisation,  follow these (approximate!) steps:

1. Select the Country Code and Total fields, and click on the Show Me! button.
2. Select the map diagram type (near the bottopm of the list). You should see some dots across a map.
3. Drag the Population column over to the Size box, right click and select Dimension to scale the dots by population.
4. Drag the Total column to the Colour box and they should become shades of green; further down is a green graduation which you can click on to change, and adjust to a red-blue graduation. Click on Advanced and set the midpoint to 1.0, to make the middle grey represent a 1:1 ratio.

Your left hand panels should look a little like this now:

This is really just a very high speed starter and I’ve barely dipped below the surface – I’ve got some quite complex business plan data that I’ll be dropping in later to experiment further.

This is how the mirror movement redirects the light to the sensor when a photo is actually taken:

Amusingly enough, you can view the complex mechanics that made the SLR so good for film as a drawback for the digital age – Live View, long a staple of point and shoot cameras, has been late in coming to SLRs because the whole mirror mechanism has to be bypassed.