On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 09:38:06AM +0800, Texler, Michael wrote: > I have have just installed something fantastic. > It is called Sky(TM). > It is applied to the entire outer surface of the canopy. > Although it is solar powered it doesn't need batteries, or a link to a > GPS unit or any extra holes drilled into your instrument panel.
It's a fairly mature product, but like any ancient system it has exhibited some difficult to fix bugs and usability defects. By far the worst aspect of Sky(TM) is that its rendering of other aircraft defies basic user interface standards. Modern systems have benefited from quite a lot of psychological research which keeps harmless or trivial user interface elements unobtrusive and promotes important elements to the forefront of the user's attention, but Sky(tm) comes from an earlier generation of systems where that wasn't always the case. In particular, the most visually prominent Sky(TM) objects are the ones that are least harmful and easiest to avoid (security in the cloud!). The most visually unobtrusive objects are the ones which can cause irretrievable data loss if you accidentally interact with them, something that even the most well-trained experts occasionally have trouble with. If we were designing it today, we'd make other aircraft as prominent as clouds, and perhaps impose a modal "Are you sure?" dialog when you touch one, to make sure you're really intending to die in a crash before allowing it to happen. The architecture of Sky(TM) makes this usability deficiency very difficult to fix. In the same way that the UNIX community has greybeards who say that "rm -rf /" is easy to avoid if you don't accidentally type it (but seem, to a man, to have accidentally typed it themselves!), the Sky(TM) user community is full of curmudgeons who claim that you can overcome its usability deficiencies by adopting a "See and Avoid" strategy while simultaneously entertaining us with bar stories about near misses^H^H^H^H^H^Hhits, so perhaps part of the problem is architectural, and part of it is lack of interest in finding a fix. Meanwhile, newer users are working-around the deficiencies with toolkits layered on top of Sky(TM), just like we layer GNOME and KDE on top of UNIX to improve its usability. There's an active development community engaged in solving these problems with overlays such as FLARM, cheap ADSB-* equipment, and various PDA applications. Best of luck to them, I say. - mark _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
