All Posts

Thinking about it, the rumble functionality of game controllers is a rather abstract feature. It’s hard to put down just how much it really adds to game experiences and how necessary it is and even harder to directly think of good examples of it being used in games.

In the following of the Nintendo Switch’s big presentation event on January 12 and a bit of disappointment from some due to its higher than they expected price, quite a few user comments could be found who thought that Nintendo better should’ve saved costs by amongst other things not including a new tech with the controllers that Nintendo is calling “HD Rumble” - a new advanced haptic engine that’s allegedly precise enough to mimic the feel of real life objects -, angrily seeing nothing in it than another useless, typically Nintendo, expensive gimmick.

Put short, I really don’t agree with them and don’t think Nintendo shouldn’t have included it.

Although information is of course still scarce at the moment, weeks ahead of the console’s launch, and I’ve not tested it myself, and even though it was hard for me to even evaluate the relevance of just normal rumble, I was immediately convinced by HD rumble during the presentation. As an example, Nintendo claimed in the video that the rumble feedback of the Switch’s so-called Joy-Con controllers would allegedly be good enough to mimic the feel of a glass filled with different numbers of ice cubes and the feel of the glass then being filled with water as well as this all even reacting live and precisely to your motion holding the controller. Perhaps a bit baffled to see this interesting tech really being part of the console and of all Nintendo being the first to make something more meaningful out of it beyond ‘mimicking the feel of an analog button’, I was rather impressed and didn’t saw a gimmick, but in opposite something very innovative that I directly thought could be used greatly for a gaming console.

Where to change preferences you’ve once set for a website, how much data has a site used this month, and what passwords are all saved for it - there are a lot of website-specific settings and browser features on the mobile web today, and for all of them, the Android version of Google Chrome should get a new interface.

As you can see in the mock-up above, this concept imagines a new Site info-feature that would be built directly into Chrome’s overflow menu and solely focused on all kinds of site-wide features. So besides sharing, printing or bookmarking http://viewout.net/2016/03/10/concept/Google-Chrome-Android-Site-Info-Concept, this would be the place to overview and control everything related with the overall website viewout.net, like changing the permissions you once gave to it, having access to saved passwords and much much more.

One of Android’s greatest key strengths has always been the way it handles notifications. Google’s mobile OS was the first to adopt and popularize this system of kind like passive app alerts piling up in something like a notification shade, and the Android team has advanced this functionality greatly with every new release.

It’s little surprise then to see Android Nougat again focusing a lot on that aspect, introducing things such as a new look for notifications, grouped notifications, new & more highlighted control options and a new direct reply implementation for messaging apps.

At first, all these updates might not sound like much and kind like like not needed updates and catch-up features. Actually, however, I’ve found that they’re a lot more significant than their names and first appearance might suggest, perhaps even displaying the greatest advancement to Android’s notifications since 2011’s introduction of actions and resizing, as they appear to be just the beginning of a deeper rethought of the system’s notification system.

Google Play Music has always had a big focus on the cloud. In fact, it was basically completely build around this very concept when it launched as “Google Music” more than five years ago, with the main feature being that users could upload their entire personal music library for free and then stream and listen to it from anywhere (and since the desktop music player was nothing but a lightweight website, anywhere really meant on any thinkable device just with a web browser!).

And until today - countless new iterations, a new name, several complete overhauls and the introduction of a new main feature with music subscriptions later -, this core concept and type of cloud integration is still what defines the service and sets it apart from the competition.

But though a cloud service at its very core, one thing that has not progressed, and which makes Google Play Music feel strangely unconnected today, is the still local-only listening experience. Instead of a unified, cloud-based implementation, every device still has it’s own local music queue and, even worse, own local music history and often thereof based suggestions, leading to many small, divided experiences in all the different places that a user is interacting with the service.

That one of Google’s self-driving cars was responsible for an accident on public roads for the very first time also didn’t go unnoticed to the news and social media last week, and one thing that I’ve thereby noticed is that many people appear to not yet understand the whole deeper relevance of autonomous cars. Focusing on the fact that they can drive by themselves and that there are taxicabs and trains as an alternative if they couldn’t, many don’t understand why the industry is investing so much in those projects.

Thus, I’ve decided to create this list with some less obvious aspects that self-driving cars could fundamentally change, also beyond the usual stuff like that they are way more secure than we human drivers. Of course the majority of people certainly understands that it’s about more than just ‘who is driving’, but I think it’s interesting anyway for everyone to try and think on the one hand side more openly about this rising technology, as well as about a few more concrete ideas what changes might come with it, perhaps even touching science fiction to a certain degree.

Synced Tabs have always been a defining feature of Google Chrome. They’ve already been part right from the beginning when the browser launched in 2008, a highlight when Chrome went mobile in 2012 and they’re still one of the main reasons for Google Chrome’s success on Mac OS and even on iOS, despite all restrictions.

Today however, this big strength appears to be rather underutilized. On the desktop, Synced Tabs have been downgraded to being just a part of Chrome’s “recent tabs” menu, which also includes 2-3 recent links from other connected devices. Of course it can still be very useful that way, but in first place, Google is making Synced Tabs a niche feature, and this despite the ever increasing role of smartphones, mobility and cross-device browsing.

To take full use and fully accelerate the growing potential of this feature, this concept imagines how Synced Tabs could be implemented in a better way. Considering just how few Chrome’s UI has changed over all the years, the idea presented in this concept might actually display the biggest shift in user experience ever for Chrome, though I’m convinced that this would be the right step and pay off.