Bienvenue à Paris (or Welcome to Paris)

That's not Paris as in Jon. It is, as you may have guessed from the title, Paris as in France. That is where this week's missive is coming from. We are here on the first leg of a two-city trip to meet European members of the IBM i community. Our first event starts tomorrow (Wednesday), when we begin a two-day version of the RPG & DB2 Summit here in Paris, organized with a lot of help from our friends at Arcad Software. That’s nice for us because it means we can focus on speaking and leave the organizational aspects to someone else.

Following the Paris Summit, we head for Stockholm, Sweden, where we’ll be providing RPG, DB2 and PHP content for a three-day Data3 event. For those of you unfamiliar with Data3, think of it as Sweden's version of COMMON. Not sure how many we’re expecting in Paris, but the latest news from the folks at Data3 was that more than 130 were expected in Stockholm. That's good to hear. It promises to be an interesting week.

While we're over here this time, we're going to be taking some notes on differences and commonalities between the European IBM i community and the North American one. We'll let you know if anything pops up during those discussions.

As we write this, we're about to head out of our hotel and check out the journey to the Summit venue, which is some distance away. We're doing this now because the Summit starts at 8:30 a.m. and we don't do mornings, so our goal this evening is to determine just how disgustingly early we have to leave the hotel to make it to the Summit on time.

Before we go though a quick shout-out to our lunch companion Michelle Cummings. Michelle and Jon have known each other for some years when Michelle worked on the RPG compiler team. She's been living in Paris for the last two years since her husband's company transferred him here. She decided it would be fun to live here for a while. From what she told us over lunch, and the pictures we've seen on her Facebook page that have recounted her time in Europe, she has most certainly enjoyed herself and had some unforgettable experiences along the way. Her most recent adventure was running in the Medoc Marathon (Le Marathon Du Medoc). A most unusual event in many, many, ways. Looking at Michelle's
photo, you might be tempted to think that running the race in costume was the unusual part. But you'd be forgetting that we are talking about France and where would any French event be without wine? The entire marathon takes place in Bordeaux wine country and wanders though the grounds of chateaus and vineyards as well as the local villages. As Michelle tells it, there was a wine or cheese station every 2 kilometers or so (about 1.2 miles) where all the runners stopped and imbibed for a while before setting off for the next station. Needless to say a few didn't make the distance, but one can't help feeling that they still had a much better time than the average marathoner! This site is in French - but you don't need to understand French to enjoy the photos of some of the crazy costumes folks wear. Check them out here.

Almost made us think that we'd like to try a marathon like that ourselves some day, but then common sense prevailed and we decided that there just has to be a less painful way of sampling the joys of the French countryside!  

Before we close, a quick reminder that the Watson “Jeopardy!” TV show (#IBMWatson) is being rebroadcast this week for those who missed it the first time--or just want to see it again. And yes he will still be giving those of us who live in Toronto a good laugh by placing our airport in the U.S. Check your local listings for show times.

Penny ... Penny ... Penny

Fellow fans of the show “The Big Bang Theory” will no doubt recognize the line above. Well, we're here to tell you that last week that annoying catch phrase became a nightmare reality for us. But we're getting ahead of ourselves and perhaps need to set the context a little first.

Last week we traveled to the N.Y. area where we were speaking at two one-day education events organized by The Long Island User Group (LISUG) and North Eastern Systems Technology Users Group (NESTU). Both events were well attended and it was good to see that both of our RPG-, RSE and PHP-oriented sessions continue to be popular. We had a lot of fun, met a lot of great people and look forward to going back again - particularly since the restaurants we ate at were truly amazing. Not good enough to tempt us to move to the area (that would take a lot), but terrific food none the less.

Ignoring the usual delays in getting into La Guardia, the trip had gone very well, but that was about to change!

Our GPS had been behaving a little strangely and we suspected that our route (New Jersey to La Guardia via the Lincoln Tunnel) was less than optimum, but we had just downloaded the latest road works data and assumed it was routing us around a problem area. All went well until the GPS died in the tunnel, due to the fact that our rental car's power outlets not working. It was at a critical time of course because, as any of you who know the area will be aware, the minute you exit the tunnel you’re faced with a bewildering array of choices and we hadn't a clue which way we wanted. A good example of what happens when the technology you come to rely on lets you down. We chose to follow the signs for the interstate but we must have missed one, and by the time we got the GPS going again we were not only lost but in the heart of the New York fashion district with so many deliveries/road works etc. going on that traffic was at a crawl.

To cut a long story short, despite thinking that we'd be at the airport over two hours before our flight we ended up checking in only about 40 minutes before it was due to leave. Normally they wouldn't have accepted us for the flight but luckily it was a quiet period and they let us go anyway--thanks American! So, sweaty from the run through the terminal, etc., we boarded the plane and sat down sighing with relief. The relief was short lived--it would be the trip from hell.

It began with delays due to traffic volume, and we had to wait in line for nearly an hour after we had left the gate. Then the pilot announced that another plane had spotted that the door over the ground communication link had not been closed and although it was not a safety hazard we had to go back to get it closed. At least air traffic control allowed us to jump the queue when we came back out! Now this would have been annoying enough, but not unexpected. What made it unbearable was the couple a few rows behind us, or to be more precise: the wife.

Never in his life does Jon recall feeling so tempted to get up and smack someone--hard! Susan was equally annoyed by the woman's behavior, but knowing that Jon has a slightly shorter fuse than herself was more concerned at what he might do. And this is where we come back to “The Big Bang Theory.” Remember how Sheldon knocks on his neighbor's door going (knock-knock-knock) Penny? (knock-knock-knock) Penny?  (knock-knock-knock) Penny?  Well, that’s exactly what this woman was like, only it was "Teddy," not Penny (we've changed the name to protect the innocent; he's suffered enough!). She did this over and over and over and ... that is when she wasn't berating him for not looking after the baby properly, for falling asleep, for not answering fast enough, and much of the time for failing to answer rhetorical questions. The rhetorical questions were asked over and over and over, and in the same monotonous style as the "Teddy ... Teddy ..." bit. It’s quite possible that the only reason Jon isn’t currently in jail for assault is that finally, after about 90 minutes,  both the lady in question and her long-suffering husband finally fell asleep. Of course this just meant that she nagged and moaned even more when she chanced to wake up before he did. There was a five-minute-plus period when she just asked the same question over and over and over. What vital task was involved? She wanted him to sign the customs card. He on the other hand was in the peaceful oblivion of sleep and figured it could wait until he was fully awake.

The truly sad thing about the whole affair was that most of her complaints concerned how poorly (in the wife's opinion) her husband took care of the baby. It apparently didn't occur to her that the mental damage caused to the child by hearing his father constantly attacked like this probably by far exceeded most anything that his supposed lack of attentiveness might have caused. Maybe we should have said something, we were certainly tempted, but while it might have made us feel better we doubt it would have had any effect. If we are being gracious we could choose to think that she was scared of flying, but it didn't feel that way.

This week we're traveling again, but we won't be trapped on a plane with nowhere to go. We're headed back to Montreal by train with a stop over in Ottawa to see Eddie Izzard to round out the trip. At least if we find ourselves near the passengers from hell once again we can go for a walk and even move to another seat.

Ah, the joys of travel!

How’s Your User Interface?

This is not yet another diatribe about green screen vs. GUI--well, not exactly. I'm less concerned about how the interface looks as in how intuitive it is for the user of the system. One could write a very intuitive and easy-to-use green-screen interface. Likewise, one can write an extremely non-intuitive (though pretty) graphical or browser-based interface. I see them every day.

I'd like to use a couple of examples of user interfaces that could be used as models of what user interfaces should be like. The best part of this is that to do the research on these user interfaces, you can have a lot of fun. Two of my favorite “toys” are also great examples of intuitive interfaces: Wii and Tivo.

Wii, which is more a toy than Tivo, has an incredible user interface. Whoever thought of the idea is brilliant. If you haven’t played with, er, I mean, done user-interface research with, a Wii, perhaps you should. Before playing, create an avatar that looks like yourself--it’s call a Mii (of course). You do this by pointing at a generic base avatar and then choosing from a wide variety of styles for your avatar’s hair, eyes, nose, etc., until you have a Mii that looks like you--or maybe one that looks the way you would like to be--but at least it represents you, the user. All of this took the use of only one button and pointing at the screen with the game controller itself (not a track point or roller ball). Then with a few movements on the screen and buttons pressed (there are very few buttons on the controller), your Mii is playing sports with other Miis.

The truly ingenious thing about the Wii user interface is that it reads your body movements. When you bowl, for example, you mimic the movement of holding a bowling ball (which is really your controller), swinging your arm back and forward and then releasing the ball. The ball’s journey down the lane is dependent on the way you swung your arm, the position of your hand when you let go, etc. It's an amazingly realistic reproduction of real-life bowling. I make all the same mistakes bowling with Wii that I do bowling for real with the same results!

OK, some of you are probably thinking “Sure, I could write a good user interface if I had cool gadgets like a controller that senses movement. But I just have a keyboard and (maybe) a mouse to work with. What does this have to do with writing business applications?” True, you probably aren’t going to be able to use a virtual-reality type input device with your users. But could your screens be more intuitive to the users? I’m guessing they can.

Maybe an example that’s a little closer to our world--at least in terms of input devices--is Tivo. I became addicted to Tivo a couple of years ago. Before Tivo, I didn’t have my VCR flashing 12:00 all the time (DVD recorders were too expensive at that time), but I’ll have to confess that I was known to record the wrong show or to fail to record anything at all sometimes because the user interface wasn’t intuitive. Tivo is another fine example of an intuitive user interface, this time with the use of a very small “keyboard” in the form of the remote control. Most of Tivo’s buttons allow it to act as a TV and VCR/DVD controller.  The vast majority of the time, I only need to use about four or five of the many buttons on the remote--the most common being the forward and backward buttons (actually two ways of pressing the same button), the page up and down buttons and the Select button. Sound familiar? Enter, F12, Page Up/Down. It doesn’t always take the most cutting edge of input devices to provide a truly intuitive interface. It takes looking at the task from the perspective of a user rather than a programmer.

I don’t have a silver bullet for improving your application interfaces. No one does, no matter what they say. Making it pretty doesn’t make it intuitive. My guess is that what all our users really want most is an interface that doesn’t make them feel stupid, whether it’s implemented with green letters on a black screen or with boxes and buttons and a mouse.

How can you learn to write better interfaces? One way might be to spend some time with some truly great ones and try to evaluate as much of what makes them great as you can. See if you can find ways to emulate the thought behind them. I’m not sure that you'll get away with writing off your Wii and Tivo as business expenses, but this just might work to justify the purchase to a spouse. …

— Susan Gantner