Ted versus The Media Lab [video]

That may be true, but Negroponte was proselytizing streaming media back in the early 90s, long before anything like Spotify or Netflix were actually practical. Did all this hot air have any effect? I have no idea. But from where I was sitting, he was definitely pushing hard for something that others were not at the time.

Also, the first music recommendation service I ever heard of was started at the Media Lab. It was called Ringo, and you'd email it a list of your favorite bands, and it would then email you back recommendations for other music you might like. Ringo was implemented using some sort of statistical correlation amongst other people's lists of favorite bands.

Ringo was eventually spun off into a company called Firefly which ran a music community website that used this technology. It didn't do so well, though, and was eventually bought by Microsoft, which shut down the website about a year later.

> Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?

Sure, but I don't think that doing it very well is. I mean they typically do an okay job, but I've yet to find one that just blows me away with its ability to find music for me that I will love.

Yes, I'm introduced to some good new music this way. But I also have to listen to a lot of dreck too.

#1 is "It must have all of the music", which is really a lawyer problem, not an engineering problem.

(#2-#11 are just variations of "No no, I mean all the music", "Does it have really old music, like X?" "What about really niche music like Y?" "Oh, oh, what about Z? I bet it doesn't have Z.")

And while I’m on the topic of Baumbach movies, there’s a scene in the Squid and the whale where the kid gets in trouble for performing a Pink Floyd song at a high school talent show and claiming it as his own. When he’s rightly brought to task for it, he says something like “I could have written it, it’s a simple song” to which he is told “but you didn’t” (paraphrasing, it’s been a while). There’s an echo of that here too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Landsberg

I agree 100% with Ted's take on self revealing user interfaces:

>Now, I happen to be in the school of Jeff Raskin, you know. As I said, my interface slogan was "Making things look right, feel good, and come across clearly." And if I hadn't snubbed Jobs and Woz and, uh, what's his name at PC '76, I might have been the Jeff Raskin of Apple, instead of Jeff Raskin. Because essentially, Jeff Raskin and I have the same point: making things look clean, and simple, and self revealing. That's a term I got from Klaus Landsberg (sp?) by the way. The term "self revealing". The term "intuitive" is stupid. Because, is a mouse "intuitive"? You look at it, and oooh, oooh, oooh. But the moment you see it work, it has revealed itself. So it's "self revealing", is the term. Pac-Man is another very nice example of a "self revealing" piece of software. I've often used it as an example of how software ought to work. Because you learn the rules within three quarters, putting three quarters into the machine. That was then. And could, after then, gradually pick up on other aspects. Whereas, it is in the interest of companies like Microsoft, and alas now Apple, to make things entangling and unclear, because that way you become committed to them. Like Microsoft Word. There has to be a Microsoft Word expert in your office in order to do all the dingy little things that people want to do: formatting text.

That’s the perfect term to describe how self revealing pie menus support rehearsal: by popping up to lead the way when you click without moving, and then follow you when you mouse ahead after clicking, and finally get out of your way when you gesture quickly without pausing.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-design-and-implementation...

>The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus

>They’re Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing.

>Originally published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991.

>For the novice, pie menus are easy because they are a self-revealing gestural interface: They show what you can do and direct you how to do it. By clicking and popping up a pie menu, looking at the labels, moving the cursor in the desired direction, then clicking to make a selection, you learn the menu and practice the gesture to “mark ahead” (“mouse ahead” in the case of a mouse, “wave ahead” in the case of a dataglove). With a little practice, it becomes quite easy to mark ahead even through nested pie menus.

>For the expert, they’re efficient because — without even looking — you can move in any direction, and mark ahead so fast that the menu doesn’t even pop up. Only when used more slowly like a traditional menu, does a pie menu pop up on the screen, to reveal the available selections.

>Most importantly, novices soon become experts, because every time you select from a pie menu, you practice the motion to mark ahead, so you naturally learn to do it by feel! As Jaron Lanier of VPL Research has remarked, “The mind may forget, but the body remembers.” Pie menus take advantage of the body’s ability to remember muscle motion and direction, even when the mind has forgotten the corresponding symbolic labels.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1

>Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective

>By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018.

>Pie menus should support an important technique called “Mouse Ahead Display Preemption”. Pie menus either lead, follow, or get out of the way. When you don’t know them, they lead you. When you are familiar with them, they follow. And when you’re really familiar with them, they get out of the way, you don’t see them. Unless you stop. And in which case, it then pops up the whole tree.