Author: harold

After almost two years with a Windows Phone, I’m pretty excited to use Windows 8 and its not-so-new-to-me UI. I’m so over Win7 and any other icon-based experience interface.

This UI/UX is so efficient and relaxing at the same time. Here’s why.

Take the WP home screen for instance. When you look at it notifications appears on tiles, flipping over to display information. There’s nothing to do to get the information. The only thing you have to do is look at your screen. So even in this position of doing nothing, you actually get some minor things done (typically, knowing who liked your comment on FB or RT’d your tweet, email from someone specifically, new item on eBay, you name it).

It’s not only efficient, it’s relaxing. No pop-up, no weird-looking widget, no visual distraction but transition effects. No need of action like pulling a notification list or closing a popup. How many times did I tediously do that on my Android. It made me feel like becoming the machine’s bitch and this new UI frees me. It’s hard to describe but it feels great. I’m back in control being able to know what’s up/communicate in various ways in one instant.

Before, there was noise and confusion and a lot of clicks.

Now you just look, swipe or use. No “app launching”, more like “service launching” more than ever.

Other example, the classic desktop/taskbar/dock. It’s noisy to have that constantly in our view. How many times do we stare at it, searching things or visually wandering for nothing. Icons, pointless and aging concept that aimed at emulating an office desk. That is just not how we function in front of a computer anymore.

More than a decade that we have apps open at all time like email clients or browsers. We now don’t even turn our computer off but simply put them on sleep. And though we often use multiple apps, we don’t need them on sight all the time. Multitasking is BS and we only switch from one app to another. So Windows 8’s focus on full screen apps with easy switching between them makes sense. Again, efficiency and relaxation from the visual noise of a traditional desktop. Too many moving tiles? Turn them off or even better, go away from your machine. When you come back, know everything in one look, one swipe. Powerful, I’d say.

Icons are these weird shortcuts in our digital lives that don’t make so much sense today. Too static, useless and central to the experience. I’m glad they’re slowly going away from the common use of a computer with Windows 8. For work of course, file systems and icons will still be with us for a while.

It’s like the Windows 8 new start menu becomes a classy, modern living room to use everyday apps while the desktop becomes the clean, flattened workshop to create stuff and get complex shit done. All in one OS.

Mama like.

Speaking of seeing things over and over in France, I call sexism and the game industry.

This summer a controversy rose in the French video game press with a terrible article on Tomb Raider, filled with rape jokes.

I just read an article on the state of the game industry by David Cage at it once again. The first time I saw him fight for a stronger French game industry was ten years ago. Nothing changed. Things got worse (less studios than ever).

The first time I had feminist discussions about Tomb Raider was ten years ago. Nothing changed. Things got worse (more morons thinking they are right with their humor argument).

Same things with rape impunity, same thing with DSK, cannabis, work laws…

Is it OK to feel like moving on after a decade watching shit going down despite fighting and spreading the good ideas? France is so resistant to change. I’m so bored witnessing how slow if not inexistent change is. Maybe I’m impatient but a decade feels like a long time for 33-me.

I’ve been using Google and web services in English for about a decade now. At first, I used .fr instead of .com because I’m French but as I couldn’t find information in French and that I’m relentlessly using an online dictionary when I don’t understand a word, I quickly switched to .com/English.

No way to stay in a French online world and fight to find stuff. And in my domains, everything’s in English.

Fast forward a decade.

The French web is… I don’t know what to say. My parents always complain not finding anything on it but discussions going nowhere on boards. I’m not surprised. Some English Wikipedia pages simply have the quadruple or more in terms of quality and quantity, even on French-only things sometimes. You just have to compare Amazon.com and Amazon.fr, the latter is so terrible: no comments or useless ones (“this thing is a piece of shit!” thanks for the info bro), no ratings, bad search, bad sellers… When you are French, you wonder how this company could be that big. And then you have the original one, the .com where even the most obscure music album CD has a 20 lines review, where you have insane deals and where if you’re not happy, they come over your place to take your package back and drop a new one (on Amazon.fr, you have to drop the package somewhere at a post office).

It’s just another world. No wonder my parents generation doesn’t think the internet is that great, they just get pop-ups in the face and terrible websites with fucking roll-over menus and no valuable information in 2012.

The US took over. Popular French websites are US websites with .fr at the end; we have slate.fr, huffingtonpost.fr etc The last one I saw is a copy/paste of 9gag.com called… 9blague.com. Of course, all the US internet memes are translated in French with more or less success, especially less. Oh, the cringing.

As I see things three or four times -once or twice through my US network and same with my French peeps- it creates so much noise in my mind and shows me how pyramidal France is about web culture: a couple of people on top, in Paris, translating American humor and a lot of people writing Frenglish comments they translate from Reddit and then you have a huge amount of people reading articles with sources coming 99% of the time from the US. I just resumed the French internet culture.

At the same time we have great, fast, reliable and cheap internet connections there. It’s super weird.

Excellent article on Diaspora and the paradoxical way people deal with networks and technology.

This is the depressing Matrix-like paradox of technological progression. Even as each new discovery empowers us, we also risk a kind of slavish attachment, inertia and dependence. In fact, nothing short of government intervention stops the beast of disruption from mutating into something ugly. And even by then, usually, the effects have already been felt.

If you’re living now, the future depends upon the path that Facebook chooses for you. “Does Facebook start to copy Google," which advocates open alternatives to the offerings of austere Apple, “or does it start to copy Apple?” If Facebook picks Apple? Says Wu: “We’ll be in a very different future.”

We are in a culture of profits-no-matter-what so, they all want to be Apple. The margins always make me think “a lot of people are getting screwed” but the margins, man. On the other side, users don’t mind the slavish attachment.

He called it the “Freedom Box,” and with it, users could theoretically communicate directly with each other using peer-to-peer technology, circumventing the control of dictatorial data middlemen.

But developers make another photo app or Twitter client instead of using open protocol to build stuff like that. Developers are not so great at understanding long term things, I suspect. And also, profit, money first. It’s not always been this way but the app store madness took over. I blame developers and services like web hosting for not having been able to make things simpler for users, like Facebook Twitter and Tumblr did. WordPress is already “too complex” for people, so it’s also people’s fault because it’s not that complex (but web hosting is a nightmare), it’s just that they don’t see freedom of speech as worth it.

Whatever succeeds Facebook, it won’t be owned by Mark Zuckerberg, but it also might not be owned by the people. It might fall somewhere in between.

The question to me is, will making insane profit still be the thing we use to measure success? If so, it will be the same problem over and over.

My life, these days.

In the 80s I grew up with toys from the garbage, fixed by my foster dad. It was great.

One year later mid 80s I had brand new Lacoste shirts, before the French suburbs knew about the (rich) symbol it represents, at the same time that New York rappers from the ghetto were buying all the chic European brands like Gucci or wanting to do so so badly. It was great too.

86, bitch. With my dad, at the grand-mother’s.

It kind of says it all. I’ve never been trying to show off my status so much than having a few cool, sturdy things. It’s a very privileged position to not be spoiled, knowing what things are worth and at the same time, not wanting anything because you’ve been growing up with little and not needing anything either because the new family can provide. I never craved being rich nor felt disdain for not so rich people. I understood that you can be happy/unhappy regardless of what you have on your account, it was amazing getting aware of that at an early age, living it like I watch a movie. Kind of a perfect balance.

Knowing this I quickly focused on the fact that obviously, quality stuff have a price which is fine to pay. But paying for social status, no way man. It was disturbing in high school, when it was all about brands and shit. Even more when Paris minorities were all about Lacoste and that I was like “thank god I don’t have to wear these white-people good quality shirts anymore, looking like Carlton.” They would be parading in their fresh Lacoste tracksuits and I would smile, thinking how lucky I was to be out of this stupid pyramid of meaningless status bullshit. Because I knew that wearing some expensive clothes doesn’t make you part of a class, no amount of money will. I mean I didn’t know, I felt it. I learned about it later on in my life.

Anyway. Today my adult world is shallow, cares too much about brands and status (sad and hilarious to look at people looking at each other’s smartphones in the metro). It became an obsession through the 00s, actually. I guess my generation is really fucked up on that. I don’t care! My jeans are like $10 with shipping but I get quite a unique style. My laptop is $500 but you don’t do much more on your $3000 one (yes I have a SSD so it’s fast too). I use the "horrible brand, ew” Windows-powered phone which gives me the best mobile experience -I tried them all, you haven’t- and it feels like you’re missing out for a question of status.

Nah wealth is knowledge, the capacity of deciphering things so that you get the best for the buck is being rich. It might be because knowledge is pretty much free on the internet that people stay on Facebook, measuring where they are on the social pyramid. Free tools to change your way of thinking? Meh. Free wealth symbols? Fuck yeah.

I think I modestly participate at flattening this world. I like this idea.