How my day was...

[mdlbear]

My day at work was almost entirely taken up with the Patent Review Committee: a dry run in the morning for my presentation, and the meeting itself all afternoon. My walk got squeezed down to under half an hour.

But the presentation went well; I'll find out tomorrow whether it passed. In any case, the next step is to get back to turning it from a bailing-wire-and-duct-tape demo into a real system. I'm actually rather pleased with it -- it's a system of physical devices, not just software.

Somehow I managed to twist my right ankle, just standing up out of my chair. Aspirin and a brace seem to have taken care of the worst of it, but I'm grumpy. That was the good ankle.

Not my project, but it's cool as heck and launched today: iCandy.ricohinnovations.com. No Linux client yet, unfortunately; I'll see what I can do. [11-10: Note: iCandy is cool technology, but it's still beta at this point and the site might not be the best introduction to it. The somewhat-misnamed About Us page might be a better place to start. Note that you need a webcam and iTunes in order to use it; we're all hoping that the need for iTunes will go away, because it's just as useful for sharing links to photos and websites as it is for sharing links to music.]

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Whatever that's a picture of, I can't see it - I'm not a member. Sorry, but I'm not going to sign up and give them my email address, name, age, mailing address, bra size, SSN, preferred brand of toilet paper, and mother's maiden name, just to see a picture.

[mdlbear]

Hmm; they appear to be a bit sparse on detail if you have images turned off. iCandy is a website that lets people associate QR codes (2-d barcodes) with music, video, or websites. Print out a card with the QR code, hand it to someone else, and they can hold it up to a webcam (with the application running, of course) and it plays or browses to whatever the code is linked to.

It's mostly for music, linked to iTunes (hence the name) and last.fm. It's a research project that several people at my lab have been working on for the last couple of years.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I don't have images turned off. All I get is a blurb page urging me to sign up.

[mdlbear]

Then try How it Works from the navigation links at the top, and About Us from the links down at the bottom of the page.

If you're not seeing a blue round-cornered rectangle with the words "iCandy Where "personal push" comes to shove" and a row of grey buttons below that, then they may be doing something stupid with browser detection. There should also be a row of text links across the bottom titled "About Us" ... "Developer Blog". In any case, I'll point the team at your reactions; you obviously had a much different reaction to the page than they -- or I -- was expecting. Neither of us is probably in their target demographic, though.

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

A project motto does not a blurb make. On the 'home' page, it would be better if there were a quick blurb like 'iTunes lets you share your playlists online. iCandy lets you share playlists offline.' -- just something to express what it's supposed to do.

I think this is a neat idea, kinda like taking the CueCat idea and instead of only letting manufacturers define where people go letting the users do it themselves.

[mdlbear]

Yes, it *would* be much better. Will pass the word along.

[(Anonymous)]

We've taken all your feedback into consideration and will be writing a much clearer description of iCandy on the About and Home pages in coming days.

iCandy is an interesting technology that people instantly *get* when they see it demoed but has proven elusive to describe in words. Stil, we're working on it.

Margarita

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I am stupid. All along, I thought you were trying to show me a picture of some physical object, displayed via iCandy. I didn't understand that you were trying to show me iCandy itself.

I read about the process in Wired (I think) a month or two ago. It looks like something that will be wildly popular with certain sub-sub-cultures of younger users. But it's not something I can imagine myself ever having any use for at all. (And I flatly refuse to install iTunes on my computer. I did, once, for something that needed it; iTunes took up way too much storage space and way too many other resources, had some unpleasantly spyware-like habits, and ultimately crashed my machine.)

[mdlbear]

Ah; that explains a lot. I'll still pass along your dislike of iTunes; they need to be beaten over the head with that a couple more times, in my opinion.

I don't use iTunes, either, but I can see myself putting QR codes on, e.g., advertising fliers for my CD or for one of my websites, if it ever became popular.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

While you're at it, also give QuickTime a kick in the sweetbreads. I have never managed to get it to work right.

And, yes, the technology behind iCandy could be very useful in advertising.

[mdlbear]

(If I want to point at a picture, I'd just embed a thumbnail and maybe link to a larger version. When I post a link with text that looks like a URL, you can be pretty certain it's the website itself I'm trying to point to.)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

This isn't a communication failure on your part - this time, it's my fault. People show off all sorts of things by linking to pictures on their Flickr or Photobucket accounts, and that's what I thought I saw. I need to pay better attention to context.

[mdlbear]

... or the status bar -- you're probably used to sites like slashdot that display a link as just the site name and hide the rest. LJ actually gets it right; if you put in a bare URL you see the whole thing. e.g., http://icandy.ricohinnovations.com/rocket2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=37&Itemid=47
(which would have been a much better place to link to.)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I don't read slashdot, but I do use SeaMonkey as my browser, and, like all Netscape products, it displays the real URL in the status bar with a mouse-hover. (I especially like this in email - it helps identify otherwise clever phishing messages.) However, even the URL didn't tip me off... I guess I figured that Ricoh, being involved with photography, might have an online photo-sharing service. And then I saw "click here to sign up", and jumped to a very wrong conclusion. Call it a "senior moment", I guess... *sigh*.

[mdlbear]

We have an online service for shared documents, but its priced for business use.

It's still valuable feedback: if the first thing someone sees on a page is a signup link with no indication of what the site is about...

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I do a bit of web design myself. I think the "about us" page should stand alone, as a splash page, with a "click here to sign up" link under the logo (and possibly again at the bottom of the page), redirecting to a form page with more information, such as the privacy policy. After the service is established, then just put the signup/login field below the logo.

[mdlbear]

Agreed. The home page should give you enough information to decide whether to go further.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Web Pages That Suck (http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com) is extremely instructive... ;-)

[mdlbear]

Indeed -- I've made use of it on occasion.

[(Anonymous)]

The requirements for registration are just email, username and password - no more or less than would be asked if you signed up for Twitter or Flickr for example.

We've been working on the website since it became publicly accessible last Wednesday and continue to evolve it as we get feedback. The team (3 people) comes out of research not website development so we're rapidly moving up the learning curve on implementing all the finer points and details. We didn't want the great to be the enemy of the good (enough) to start getting early feedback on how to make things better.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit paranoid about signing up for things, especially if I don't know whether I'm actually going to use them. (I know I won't use iCandy, because I can't - I don't own a webcam, and the camera on my cell phone only takes still pictures.) I do like the concept, and I'm curious to see where it goes; perhaps in the future I might decide I need it after all (which, of course, would require that I buy some hardware).

You might want to involve a web designer at least part-time, though.

[mdlbear]

I'm pretty sure they have one under contract, but just having one is no guarantee that they'll have any sense of what users actually want. (And they're going after a very young demographic for the initial tests, so for all I know that is what they want.)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Then you can safely ignore all the nitpicking from someone who's been ordering off the "Senior Silver Saver" menu at Denny's for five years...

[mdlbear]

Hasn't stopped me yet. My actual title isn't "resident curmudgeon", but it might as well be.

Eventually they'll want broader appeal, because Ricoh's main customer base is small businesses and workgroups.

[brmj.livejournal.com]

iCandy looks very interesting. It's nice to see an innovative use of existing technology like that. This sort of thing would be particularly cool on a smart phone. I could see this sort of thing being used sort of like hyper links in the real world. If the program doesn't already have it, it would be nice if they added a way to export the code label things (and only that, not the entire card) as an image in a common format. That way, they could be added to all sorts of things to link them to relevant information out on the Internet. For example, the signs in a museum could have use these things to link to more information online. This has a lot of potential.

That future Linux client might be problematic, if itunes is absolutely required rather than just needed for full functionality. There is no Linux version of itunes and, to my knowledge, no one has been able to get it working correctly under wine.

One other note, in case you were thinking of trying to get it running on Linux the quick and dirty way: The Windows iCandy client does not run correctly under wine on my system (32 bit Ubuntu 8.10 with fairly standard software and hardware), though it seems to install just fine.

[brmj.livejournal.com]

Wrote before I sufficiently read up on this stuff. It looks like the vast majority of my excited speculations in the first paragraph are already being done.

[mdlbear]

As far as I know, iTunes is not required.

[brmj.livejournal.com]

The website lists it as a requirement:

PC Requirements

* Built-in webcam
* Windows XP/Vista
* iTunes

http://icandy.ricohinnovations.com/rocket2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=35&Itemid=67

Or were you just saying that it wasn't actually needed, even though it was on the requirements list?

[mdlbear]

Had the impression that it would work without iTunes (though you might not get the full experience), but could easily have been wrong. Will ask.

[(Anonymous)]

iTunes is required for the downloadable application; it's not required if you just want to scan a QR code under the Try It menu option or if you want to create an iCandy card under the Create/Create Card menu option.

[mdlbear]

I'm told by the main developer that iTunes is required. Bah.

Requirements

[(Anonymous)]

The downloadable app (for Mac/Windows) does require iTunes. The web version doesn't.

The advantage of the downloadablee app is that the qrcode reader is *really* fast. The flash qrcode reader on the web does an adequate job but isn't nearly as fast or as satisfying to use. We developed the web version for people who wanted to try it out withoug having to download an app or use iTunes.

iCandy is an outgrowth of multimedia research and tangible user interfaces. We use iTunes because it is a repository of multimedia and writing an application for iTunes was much more focused and straightforward.

Someday we might write a version of iCandy that doesn't require iTunes.