Marian’s Happenings

My new lean green fighting machine arrived a while ago. I took photos in anticipation of actually blogging about it, but in true Marian style got distracted by something shiny and totally forgot. So here’s my recount!

I couldn’t wait for my ugly/cute green weird little laptop to arrive.

Unfortuantely I missed out on the OLPC “green theme” party in Norway:
http://howcome.gotdns.com/img/2008/05-07-olpc/
http://www.idg.no/video/article97675.ece
http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=527841
So, we had our own party in the office when they arrived.

Here it is coming out of the box:

Here’s my very excited co-worker unwrapping hers:

And here I am with my new favourite toy:

Unfortunately we were in the middle of a release, so in reality the OLPC sat rather neglected on my desk amongst the mess for a few days:

When I did get time to take a look at it, my attention was drawn to the safety instructions:

Now these are the sorts of instructions I can relate to!  Thank god. Here I was about to do a rain dance on top of my laptop.

Opening it up, it’s pretty sturdy, very green, and overall a very interesting piece of hardware. The keyboard is small, but easy enough for my fingers to type on (two finger typing).

What interests me the most is the user interface. I deliberately didn’t read many reviews about the UI so I could keep an open mind when formulating my own first impressions.

To be honest, my first impressions were “WTF”.

As the OLPC loads, you are presented with a screen with the familiar XO logo. Then something weird happens. Part of the X splits off and proceeds to spin around the O, leaving a trail of dots as it goes. Was it a clock? Was it some strange loading screen? Was it a progress “bar”? What on earth was happening?

I know that this is meant to be designed for kids, but honestly, I think I’m a bit of a big kid, and I found this to be cumbersome and weird. It took me and a developer 5 minutes to work out how to shut the damn thing down! And come on, kids are stupid, so how can they possibly work this stuff out? We eventually worked it out, turned it off, and the world was safe once more.

After being slightly frightened and concerned for my general health and wellbeing, I decided to open it up again. This time at home with the added safety of kitchen knives within reaching length in case of any freaky shit. Connecting it to our wifi was a breeze. My boyfriend decided to check out the “chat” functionality:

“Hello Africa!”, he typed, eagerly awaiting a response.

Alas, Africa did not respond. This was possibly even more of a disappointment than an inability to step on the laptop and leave it in the rain.

One thing this machine does is raise questions. There was a lot of hype surrounding its release regarding design decisions made to suit the needs of its users (being kids in third world countries). I don’t care so much about the hardware side of things (although an ability to have high contrast in direct sunlight and batteries powered by human thought is nice). I’m interested in the UI.

After much deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that it’s cumbersome. The reason why it is designed this way is because the users don’t know any better, so therefore it “suits their needs”. It has been widely publicised that adults are not meant to enjoy using this machine to reduce the likelihood of these machines being sold on. Apparently children think differently, learn differently, and have different user behaviour. I can agree with these notions.

One thing that I simply cannot agree on is that the designers of the sugar interface have tailored the interface with this in mind. I think they’ve used these ideas as an exucse to be completely whacky and do something “outrageous” because they’re bored and need some entertainment. I honestly think that this was the result of some sort of “truth or dare” game that the UI designers had when drunk.

So there, my completely non-academic, unsubstantiated opinion I could back it up with facts and screenshots but to be honest I’d rather spend my time trying to uninstall the Sugar interface.

Peace out

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 11:50 am.
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