Week 10 - last post

I find it interesting that the guest speaker on Tuesday was a girl that has been in my CSE classes before and she was introducing a lot of stuff that she said was new, like ubiquitous presenter, even though that sort of system has been used in my CSE classes since I was a freshman here. Now that I think of it, maybe I sort of took the system for granted, assuming that everyone else has used it and that it was used by universities everywhere. It wasn't until later that I realized that this prevalent technology in my CSE classes was only contained within the CSE department. It's very useful for me, as a student and so I had assumed everyone else was taking advantage of this, I actually didn't even know it was an ongoing experiment for most of my classes, really, I'm a bit embarrassed now at my assumptions. My experiences with ubiquitous presenter was usually great, save for the one or two times the professor lost the file that saved his inked notes. I thought it was cool that the TA also doing audio charting research, which would go great with ubiquitous presenter if done right. I've actually had friends who run nerd gatherings like 'bar camp' and SuperHappyDevHouse show interest in ubiquitous presenter, but I don't think it's open to the public. (Which is too bad, they really wanted something like ubiquitous presenter to preserve the lightning talks they have at meets.)

On another note:

I find it interesting that everyone likes to follow the ad hoc design of the curly tail to indicate a content is being copied when, in my own mind, I find it kind of lacking in usability. I kept hoping that most tablet companies would come up with a pen like the ones Wacom uses for their artist tablets, with little buttons built in on the pen so that you can actually use it like a mouse (with a left and right click). But I've noticed that most tablet pens are very simple, which is too bad, because I think clicking on a pen lends it self to being more easily ingrained subconsciously without having the user memorize key strokes required to do certain actions. The technology is certainly there, I'm just surprised that most companies haven't borrowed upon that idea. Moreover, they've even gone a far as adding additional components, like foot pedals and knobs to take care of the copy command issue, when adding a few buttons on a pen really isn't that difficult. It's surprising, what we overlook sometimes when pursuing a design.