I’ve never really understood the netbook craze. I can see the benefits of having a lightweight, low-power computer that performs 90% of the tasks you use a personal computer for; it just hasn’t appealed to me, or my wallet.
I can understand that it’s a very cheap way to get online (even though they are double US$ the price in the UK), but I’ve been perfectly happy with a 13″ Macbook I bought 4 years ago. I haven’t seen a purpose to re-spend the money that I invested all those years ago on a laptop that can do half as much.
Other things worry me about netbooks though, they’re a stop-gap. Since the iPhone, the dream has been to have a fully-fledged PC available in your hand, that works quickly and has a long battery life. Netbooks bridged a gap by providing a long(er) battery life and smaller screen, but have left it to the big boys to sort out the proper way of interacting with these smaller devices. See my post on netbook touch screen usability for more on how infuriating it gets.
So, in the next two years, netbooks will die completely. They will be replaced by what these users have wanted all along: a tablet PC with a good touch screen interface. For the first year, pretenders to the throne may have to carry a small bluetooth keyboard whilst the niggles are worked out, then the revolution will come, prices will drop and all those people who shelled out their hard-earned money will happily spend again to get a tablet.
If it is not beyond my power, I’d put the whole netbook format on deathwatch. Its death will be prolonged by price, but it will soon fall. The netbook’s time will come, and we’ll be a whole lot better off with its sucessor.
Last weekend I was sat on the tube (London underground to international readers), picadilly line to be exact, heading into central London. A young man got on and sat down opposite me. He got out a little ASUS netbook, turned it on and swivelled the lid to use it as a touch screen. “Awesome”, I thought, “he’s got one of those cool touch screen netbooks running Windows 7, I’d love one of those, it’d be so convenient”.
I watched the man use the laptop for a while, tapping at the screen, using two fingers to scroll on a page and it looked ace; it looked simple. Soon, the experience turned sour.
I watched as the man pulled a stylus out from the side of the computer and starts to tap at the screen. I had thought styluses had been banned by international law since the introduction of the iPhone nearly two and a half years ago. Still, if there are some things that can’t use the OS zoom function then maybe a stylus has to be used.
I then received an even greater shock.
I watched in amazement as the man lifted up the screen to try and use the keyboard. Upside down. A control + something command that was not present in the touch screen menu.
Naturally, as a usability practitioner, I was horrified but continued to watch the bloke struggle. It took five stabs and glances back at the screen to confirm the action was successful. By this time, the man looked thoroughly frustrated with his program’s choice of shortcut. Soon after, he packed up his laptop and got off the train.
What appears to be the moral story, is that no matter how advance your OS is, the applications that you run can still scupper the experience, especially with tablets. There are two solutions to this problem:
1. The iPhone way – touch is the only interaction option. No legacy apps are allowed. It’s an OS designed for touch and for touch only.
2. The full screen keyboard way – Windows 7 may have a good touch screen keyboard, but it isn’t implemented in all apps (the iPhone way). You would need a true full-screen multi-touch keyboard, adaptable to different screen sizes, to make it function correctly.
Did you know, HTML 5, the spec that will be completed in 2022, but with some bits available now, will have a whole new set of form elements designed to make complex forms available natively from the browser. I’ve been to a few talks where Opera’s Bruce Lawson has demoed and talked about these upcoming features that have been implemented in the Opera browser. From an accessibility standpoint it looks great; no longer will screen readers have to rely on labels to infer the type of data to be entered into forms. From a developer’s standpoint, you won’t have to code javascript date pickers any more, nor have to rely on javascript for validation.
So, all of this makes it easier to enter data on the web, a great thing. I asked the question this morning, “who enters the most data on the internet?”. The answer is spammers. It is generally thought that 90% of all e-mail sent is spam, and a quick glance at my blog’s spam counter sees 7,300 fake comments caught compared to 56 real comments.
So, why will HTML 5 forms be such a problem? Well, at the moment, spammers use automated tools to crawl the internet, looking for forms to fill in to spread their advertising links or perform XSS attacks. To bypass most validation, the crawlers look for labeled form fields to fill in. Quite simply, HTML 5 forms will make this job easier.
Instead of labelling forms with “e-mail”, there’s now a specific input type <input type=”email”> which validate an e-mail address. Common anti-spam methods of adding a second e-mail field hidden to normal users will be ignored as there is a clear (and CSS visible) e-mail address field.
Forms validation may be useful for the normal user, but it’s even more useful for the spammer. With limits of input fields now being contained in plain text in the input, it makes it trivial for bots to enter correct data.
So, what can be done about this? Well, I’m not sure. There are some anti-spam methods that will still work, for instance timing the entrance to the page and seeing how long it took to complete the form. Very short times are spam, short times are sent for moderation and normal times are approved. There’s captcha, which is inaccessible and then there’s blacklisting, which hasn’t worked for years.
If you have any theories, please share them here. If there’s a solution or something the working group can do to make spam more difficult rather than easier, it should get into the spec sooner, rather than later.
This is the first in a short series about my blog re-design. I’ll try and cover all the techniques used, including CSS3 and HTML5 usage
When considering the colour scheme for this blog, I looked at my old one quite a bit and decided that I quite liked it. Based on the resolution that blog design should be evolution rather than revolution, I set about finding a suitable palette that matches the silver, yet provides a bit more of a range of colours.
I’ve never really understood the netbook craze. I can see the benefits of having a lightweight, low-power computer that performs 90% of the tasks you use a personal computer for; it just hasn’t appealed to me, or my wallet.
