Brilliant Ideas That Found a Welcome
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/technology/28pogue.html
State of the Art
By DAVID POGUE
It may take a village to raise a child, but that's a trivial task compared with the act of bringing
a new electronic gadget to market.
Marketers determine what the masses want, product managers guide the design, engineers
bring the thing to life -- it's a lot of cooks. No wonder so many people across the country are,
at this very moment, staring at newly unwrapped electronic holiday gifts in utter
bewilderment.
Even so, brilliant ideas sometimes make it off the drawing board, past the layers of lawyers
and onto store shelves. Sometimes, a delicious idea is part of a triumphant overall product.
Other times, the flash of greatness is wasted on a turkey.
Here, then, is my second annual Top 10 List -- not of the greatest tech products of the year,
but of the greatest ideas, individual features, that surfaced. It's a little tip o' the egg nog to the
great thinkers whose ideas made it out of committee.
MUSIC BEAMING The Zune, Microsoft's new music player, does something amazingly well
that its rival, the iPod, doesn't do at all: It lets you beam songs or photos wirelessly to another
Zune. It's easy and fast, and it could be a great way to discover new music recommended by
your friends.
In practice, there's more to the story. To avoid lynch mobs from the record companies,
Microsoft designed the Zune so that beamed songs self-destruct after three plays or three
days, whichever comes first -- even, idiotically, your own recordings like college lectures
and garage-band demos.
The Zune, therefore, is that classic case: a killer idea diluted by a ham-handed execution.
THE VIDEO-GAME WORKOUT Nintendo's Wii game console, on the other hand, is a stellar
product that succeeds precisely because its central idea is unencumbered by corporate
baggage -- and is tons of fun.
The masterstroke is its wireless controller, which detects the motion of your arm in three
dimensions and in real time. As you swing, jab or whap through the air, your animated
character on the TV screen swings the corresponding baseball bat, tennis racquet, fishing
rod and so on.
(Perhaps it's a bit much to suggest that this video game may actually help to address
America's problem of sedentary youth. But my own two in elementary school play the Wii's
tennis doubles game nightly with full-body vigor -- and are perspiring after half an hour.)
THE FACE FINDER Several 2006 Canon cameras, including the image-stabilized SD800IS,
offer face-recognition software. In this mode, the camera identifies human features in a
scene, even in group photos. Little rectangles appear around each face (up to nine in a
scene) as you view the back-panel screen; these little rectangles move around, tracking your
subjects as they shift.
The point of all this is to calculate focus and exposure properly for portraits. The facial
recognition eliminates shots in which, for example, the camera locked its focus on
something in the background. And it forces the flash to throttle way back to avoid blasting
nearby faces into whiteness.
POINT WITHOUT POINTING The speech-recognition software in Windows Vista offers anyone
who can't type -- or doesn't like to -- a slick, efficient alternative. Wearing a headset, you can
dictate text into any program and "click" any button or tab by saying its name.
But what if you don't know its name? What if it's some cryptic little toolbar icon? You can't
exactly say, "Click the little thing that looks like a watermelon seed on two beach balls."
What you can say, though, is "show numbers." The program immediately overlays every
clickable thing on the screen with colorful numbers. You can just say "21" (or whatever) to
click the corresponding spot -- a trick that works especially well for navigating Web pages.
Next
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/technology/28pogue.html
State of the Art
By DAVID POGUE
It may take a village to raise a child, but that's a trivial task compared with the act of bringing
a new electronic gadget to market.
Marketers determine what the masses want, product managers guide the design, engineers
bring the thing to life -- it's a lot of cooks. No wonder so many people across the country are,
at this very moment, staring at newly unwrapped electronic holiday gifts in utter
bewilderment.
Even so, brilliant ideas sometimes make it off the drawing board, past the layers of lawyers
and onto store shelves. Sometimes, a delicious idea is part of a triumphant overall product.
Other times, the flash of greatness is wasted on a turkey.
Here, then, is my second annual Top 10 List -- not of the greatest tech products of the year,
but of the greatest ideas, individual features, that surfaced. It's a little tip o' the egg nog to the
great thinkers whose ideas made it out of committee.
MUSIC BEAMING The Zune, Microsoft's new music player, does something amazingly well
that its rival, the iPod, doesn't do at all: It lets you beam songs or photos wirelessly to another
Zune. It's easy and fast, and it could be a great way to discover new music recommended by
your friends.
In practice, there's more to the story. To avoid lynch mobs from the record companies,
Microsoft designed the Zune so that beamed songs self-destruct after three plays or three
days, whichever comes first -- even, idiotically, your own recordings like college lectures
and garage-band demos.
The Zune, therefore, is that classic case: a killer idea diluted by a ham-handed execution.
THE VIDEO-GAME WORKOUT Nintendo's Wii game console, on the other hand, is a stellar
product that succeeds precisely because its central idea is unencumbered by corporate
baggage -- and is tons of fun.
The masterstroke is its wireless controller, which detects the motion of your arm in three
dimensions and in real time. As you swing, jab or whap through the air, your animated
character on the TV screen swings the corresponding baseball bat, tennis racquet, fishing
rod and so on.
(Perhaps it's a bit much to suggest that this video game may actually help to address
America's problem of sedentary youth. But my own two in elementary school play the Wii's
tennis doubles game nightly with full-body vigor -- and are perspiring after half an hour.)
THE FACE FINDER Several 2006 Canon cameras, including the image-stabilized SD800IS,
offer face-recognition software. In this mode, the camera identifies human features in a
scene, even in group photos. Little rectangles appear around each face (up to nine in a
scene) as you view the back-panel screen; these little rectangles move around, tracking your
subjects as they shift.
The point of all this is to calculate focus and exposure properly for portraits. The facial
recognition eliminates shots in which, for example, the camera locked its focus on
something in the background. And it forces the flash to throttle way back to avoid blasting
nearby faces into whiteness.
POINT WITHOUT POINTING The speech-recognition software in Windows Vista offers anyone
who can't type -- or doesn't like to -- a slick, efficient alternative. Wearing a headset, you can
dictate text into any program and "click" any button or tab by saying its name.
But what if you don't know its name? What if it's some cryptic little toolbar icon? You can't
exactly say, "Click the little thing that looks like a watermelon seed on two beach balls."
What you can say, though, is "show numbers." The program immediately overlays every
clickable thing on the screen with colorful numbers. You can just say "21" (or whatever) to
click the corresponding spot -- a trick that works especially well for navigating Web pages.
Next
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