If you play around with the Apple iPad at the moment it becomes pretty clear that the apps dont follow some type of guidelines on usability. Sure, the button sizes are correct, but some apps have very strange operating methods. For example, the Guiness Book of Records uses a different paging techniques than say, Wired’s page flipping method. At present, image link areas are also too large or small in some apps. This leads to some usability issues with current range of apps. It reminds me somewhat of the early days of CD-ROM – every app had a more creative, but not necessarily better way to navigate or operate.

With the iPhone, the screensize limited new or unique gesture methods. But with the iPad’s bigger screen developers are free to play around with new gestures, like three or four fingers swipes. While this is fine, there needs to be some user conventions that will hopefully happen over time.Just watching someone who is used to the iPhone will show this pretty quickly – you often see them repeating gestures with small adjustments in either speed, motion, etc. As Nielsen mentions:

“iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.”

This does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the platform, instead developers need to focus on certain aspects to ensure that their apps perform well on the iPad:

Even our limited initial user studies provide directions for making iPad designs more usable:
• Add dimensionality and better define individual interactive areas to increase discoverability through perceived affordances of what users can do where.
• To achieve these interactive benefits, loosen up the etched-glass aesthetic. Going beyond the flatland of iPad’s first-generation apps might create slightly less attractive screens, but designers can retain most of the good looks by making the GUI cues more subtle than the heavy-handed visuals used in the Macintosh-to-Windows-7 progression of GUI styles.
• Abandon the hope of value-add through weirdness. Better to use consistent interaction techniques that empower users to focus on your content instead of wondering how to get it.
• Support standard navigation, including a Back feature, search, clickable headlines, and a homepage for most apps.

If you want to go read the full 93 page usability report, you can find it here. This is a truly valuable resource if you are currently experimenting with touch interfaces.

Thanks to Albert for the pointer…

Currently content creators are sitting with a bit of a dillemma – the internet is not a place that necessarily likes paying for content, or at least thats the opinion of users. Any business case looking into news media will confirm this – people do not want to not want to pay for something that they can get free. Just ask Rupert Murdoch who recently decided to start asking people subscription charges to access the Times website. Early indicators show that its not neccesarily a big success. But this not because people do not want to pay for content, they hate the fragmented paywall system.

Solutions like iTunes for multimedia proves that people are willing to pay for content, provided its easy to do, and universal in terms of scope. And this is where Cred comes in, created by South Africans Saul Kropman, Jason Kramer and Toby Kurien. Instead of having to register at every content site (for example like The Times), users will use the Cred micropayment system to purchase credits to buy access to the relevant article. Cred is not only applicable to text based content like news, but multimedia sources as well.

At present, one Cred is worth one South African Rand, and publishers can charge up to a maximum of 20 Creds. At present  different denominations are available, starting from around R50 up to R150. In future users will be able to define their own amount. At present the system uses your credit card to pay for these, but Paypal support is coming in future.

For more info, here is the official press release:
As the developed world moves towards spending more online than on traditional media such as television and print, you’d assume that monetization of the Internet would come from advertising. With advertising revenue come massive expenses as journalists, technology and marketing come into play.  Internationally, media mogul Rupert Murdoch runs around calling everyone on the Internet a kleptomaniac for stealing his content and is aiming to lock down his online portals and go so far as to remove them from Google.

The fact remains that even with a full advertising complement, revenue simply cannot outweigh costs.

This is essentially where Cred comes in, we allow content providers to monetize their websites by charging users for content with individual micropayments or subscriptions. We at Cred love content; we personally create and consume content on a constant basis and it was this passion for excellent quality that led to the idea for Cred. With online text, audio and video being free there is little ascribed value and if there’s no value, what pressure is there for excellent content to be produced? Cred aims to preserve quality content by putting a value; we believe that the cream of content will then rise to the top.

Currently in the final stages of testing, we’re accepting sign ups from content providers looking to prove their content is worth charging for. Initially we’re available for the WordPress platform and eventually will expand to other platforms such as Drupal, Joomla as well as provide documentation that will allow developers to hook into their own niche content management systems.

The revenue model affords content providers 80% of all revenue without having to worry about fraud, payment gateways and are linked to a ubiquitous payment system thus allowing for easier access to your content by users with a Cred account. Cred scales perfectly for larger organisations as they can white label the Cred offering if desired.

Whether a small, niche publisher, band, photographer, author or massive media conglomerate anyone can start charging for their content with Cred.

Go to www.yourcred.com to sign up and follow us on twitter: @yourcred

This year’s Tech-Ed conference is once again in Durban, and is one of the premier training oppurtunities for just about anyone who works with Microsoft’s suite of products, technologies, solutions and services. If you are a technology professional involved with building, deploying or maintaining IT solutions, Tech-Ed Africa is a great conference that will give you many insights into dealing with present and future challenges.

I attended last year, and I have to say it is one of the most well organized, informative conferences I have ever attended. The sessions are informative, and I really appreciated the information on upcoming products, and how businesses should ready themselves.

This year there is more than 200 technical solutions, all delivered by Microsoft and industry experts. These technical sessions are very open, and attendees always get an oppurtunity to get there questions answered.

Tech-Ed is running from 17 to 20 October, and if you book within the before 30 July, there is a super early bird special.

If you want more info on Tech-Ed 2010, click here.

Apple just announced its new Magic Trackpad. Looks like a very nice little buddy for your Apple keyboard. But, as it is with these things, the proof is in the pudding. I will have to try it out.

Looks like the next logical move in Apple’s “everything touch” strategy. Curiously absent: Touchscreen Macs. New iMacs maybe? Stay tuned.

Update: New iMacs and Mac Pro also released. The iMacs are all upgraded to the Core i range, starting from the Core i3 upto Core i7. No touchscreens though. Mac Pro is now upgraded to the Intel hexacore processors, giving you up to 12 cores if you feel you need that kind of power. With hyperthreading, that results in 24 threads at once. Nifty.

Apple 27 inch Cinema Display

Apple also announced its new 27 inch Cinema Display. With a 2560 x 1440 IPS panel, this is clearly for the professional or very well heeled crowd, at $999. Keep in mind the display also comes with USB hub, built in iSight camera and a Magsafe charger for your Macbook. Think of it as a very expensive docking station with a beautiful display attached.

Greg's Cable Map

With the flurry of underwater fibre cables reaching the African shores, it can be tough keeping up with all of them. While not all of them are operational yet, it is pretty great to think how Africa will finally get out of the dark ages with regards to internet connectivity.

South African developer Greg Mahlknecht built an excellent free resource to quickly check out the current cable situation. Its pretty easy to use – if you want to know where a cable is, just click on “list of cables” on the right, and then click a cable. For example, Seacom. That cable will then appear in white.

Here is Greg’s description:

Greg’s Cable Map is an attempt to consolidate all the available information about the undersea communications infrastructure. The initial data was harvested from Wikipedia, and further information was gathere by simply googling and transcribing as much data as possible into a useful format, namely a rich geocoded format. I hope you find the resource useful and any constructive criticism is welcome.

All in all a very cool little tool.

If you want to check it out: http://www.cablemap.info/

Just about any techie would tell you that the slowest part in a modern computer is still the harddrive. In fact, 90% of the time you wait for your computer is because that little needle is busy reading sectors from a very fast spinning disk (not counting waiting for Seacom delays…). True, hard drives have become very quick over the years, but the other components in a computer has just progressed at exponentially faster pace.

Its for this very reason why you might have the latest Core i7 machine with large amounts of RAM, but still can go make a cup of coffee in the time it takes to boot up. Luckily solid state storage has come along – this does away with the moving platter inside a hard drive and instead replaces it with chips that do away with access times (the average time the needle takes to find that little bit of data) and also makes the drive silent and uses less electricity. Sounds like a terrific solution, except for price. Whereas a 500GB 7200rpm hard disk drive costs R800 today, a similiar size SSD costs around R15000. No, that is not a typo. So people who wanted the speed of SSD were forced to buy smaller capacities – 64GB currently goes for about R1800 for a decent Corsair SSD.

And this exactly what makes the Seagate Momentus XT so special. Seagate refers to it as a “hybrid hard drive”. The XT has a 500GB traditional HDD merged with a fast 4GB SSD chip. Now 4GB might not sound like much, but you do not have to manually choose which files to drop on this SSD portion. As you use the drive, it keeps track of what files are used often, and stores these files in the SSD. These typically include files that are used by the OS often, your most used apps, etc. The Momentus XT is not only a laptop drive – in fact, it will beat most standard desktop hard drives as well. In many benchmarks it beats the WD 10,000 rpm Velociraptor drives… Its also operating system independent, so you can go ahead and use it with Windows, Mac or even Linux. The adaptive memory just keeps on doing its thing.

Now you might think 4GB SSD is not enough – but here is some of the changes I noticed using this drive. Just for some background – I installed this drive into a late 2009 Apple Macbook Pro 13inch, with a Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz processor and 4GB of RAM. It used to have a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB 7200rpm drive installed, which was pretty quick already. Here is the boot times of a full Mac OS X install. Take note this not a clean fresh install, but instead a install that is made from time machine restore for both the old and new drives. In fact, I havent reinstalled or reformatted my machine in more than 2 years. Time Machine just does such a good job of that, another thing where I really do believe Mac is still better than Windows. This install is full of apps I run often, but also small utility apps that I like to use every now and then. All in all a pretty representitive Mac install. You can expect the same performance improvements on Windows as well.

Both the old and new image is defragmented and then left for about 10 minutes so that the adaptive memory does its thing.

These speeds are carried over to shutdown speeds as well. Again, once the adaptive memory gets used to the shutdown procedure, speed increases as well. Very impressive.

So how does it affect everyday apps? Just everyday apps like Firefox load in half the time (and this does not include timing from cached apps in memory, this is after reboots). Larger apps like Photoshop get even better performance. iTunes gets zippier as well. Here is some timings I did with the drive. iTunes load time for a 60GB library. (Take note this is timed after a reboot every time).

Here is the startup times for Photoshop. This is a standard install without any plugins. Again, this is a startup after a boot every time.

I did not time everything, but here are some things that improve as well:

• You know that little wait while you type into the Spotlight search box? Thats gone.
• Virtual Machines are faster as well. I know an average VM is much larger than 4GB, but over times these do become faster. I guess that adaptive memory looks for files within the VMs as well.
• Everything is snappier. The stuff you do most often on the computer just happens so much faster. Makes me only wish for the day when SSDs will be cheaper.

I did notice that the drive is a little more noisy than the previous drive, but I can only hear it it if I put my ear right against my laptop. Other than that I did not find any other negatives when using the drive on a day to day basis.

Just a tip to Mac users who would like to install one – do not use  a tool like SuperDuper, rather do a Time Machine backup, and then restore the image during the install process of Mac OSX. For some reason the drive doesnt cooperate with those image cloning tools. This goes the same to Windows users, do not use DriveImage XML. Do a reinstall, I know its quite a process, but the performance boost is well worth it.

The best part of the Momentus XT is that it costs only slightly more than a standard 7200rpm notebook drive. I payed R1200 for the 500GB model. And the performance in real life use is much faster. While it wont quite reach the speed of a fast SSD, it is a fraction of the price. And that makes it a very good deal. So you might want to know if it makes more sense to rather spend your money on a full on SSD or even more RAM. Suppose you have a machine with a normal 250GB 5400rpm drive and 2GB of RAM. Here is a pretty handy chart to put hybrid hard drives into perspective:

So if you want large capacity plus fast performance, it seems like a hybrid hard drive might be the ideal middle ground before SSDs become affordable. I am willing to bet that Seagate will spread this hybrid technology to its other hard drives as well. I think the sweetspot will be a desktop drive with 8GB or 16GB of SSD memory. Hopefully in a few years we will laugh at this as SSD have finally become comparable in price with hard drives… Bring on the speed.

The Seagate Momentus XT reached South African shores last week, its currently only at suppliers, but should reach stores soon.

Highly recommended.

Despite the bandwidth problem with Seacom at the moment, luckily there is still hope to make local internet users more savvy over time. In the US many people visit sites like Woot or Groupon as a way to quickly get access to great deals – however, as a business it makes it difficult to sometimes justify making a special offer available, and then only a few people might take advantage of it. After all, with low prices, high volume is your only choice to be profitable.

South African site Twangoo makes this service now available to us locals, and its offers are currently based on location in SA. The way it works is as follows: Shop A makes a special offer available, provided enough people are interested in it.But this special is only available if these people reserve the offer beforehand, and enough people do this within an alloted time. There is obviously great potential for a service like this.

Here is some more details:

www.Twangoo.co.za, South Africa’s premier group buying club, uses the power of collective purchasing to access exclusive deals on exciting things to do in your city. The Twangoo team has been approaching the aspirational brands across each city and asking them to offer Twangoo members an exclusive deal of such incredible value that they would be silly to turn it down.

However there is a kicker to all this: The deal only happens if a predetermined number of people sign up for it. Members are told via email, Facebook, Four Square or Twitter of any new deal. If they see something they like, they reserve it and when enough people have signed up ‘the deal is on!’ A voucher is emailed and then redeemed at the participating business.

Says Daniel Guasco, Founder and CEO “By using the Web to give consumers buying power through the leverage of groups, Twangoo is a great way to find new and exciting things to do at an unbeatable value. By joining the club – for which there is no cost – you become one of a few with access to preferential deals at Cape Town’s trendiest restaurants, concerts, events, lessons, tours, spas, salons, retail shops, and much more – all with such value that it will be hard to pass up!‘

Upcoming Twangoo deals for Cape Town include:

- An incredible Truth Coffee deal
- A 2 course meal at Savoy Cabbage
- A day of pampering at the Yemaya Health Spa
- A month of boxing training and lessons at the Armoury Boxing Club
- Yoga classes, helicopter flips, dancing lessons, and lots more

At present Twangoo is only available in Cape Town, but this will hopefully change soon enough. If you are a business who wants to see how Twangoo might work for you, contact their CEO at Daniel@twangoo.co.za

Seacom has been down for nearly two weeks, bringing the new found wealth of International bandwidth South Africans have been enjoying to an abrupt halt. This is not the first time Seacom has caused major Internet outages in South Africa, and if history is anything to go by it might not be the last either. Perhaps we need a back-up plan?

ISPs have been falling over one another to bring their users online, either by setting up proxies or buying access through the SAT3 cable. A simpler more cost effective solution has been around for years though, and as a nation who suffered under the era of being “capped” we more than anyone should know the value of locally hosted content.

Recently internet giants Facebook and Google invested heavily in hosting their data in South Africa. Google brought along all their products including Gmail and Youtube amongst others. These services are thus all accessible even though Seacom is down. Although ISPs have been sluggish in assigning the new routes.

But these services are just the tip of the iceberg, there are literally thousands of other sites that host in South Africa through Akamai or elsewhere that can be accessed. All these sites have been indexed over two years and been made available on http://www.locallist.co.za.

Local List is a project powered by ISLabs to catalog local websites, for users who run out of international bandwidth and has been around since 2008. The site can now be used whenever Seacom goes down, when you get capped or when you want to find sites based on proximity and response times. Local List has recently gotten a new design, and some nifty features like improved search powered by Google and geolocation features.

Check it out.