ClassGet

Everyone who has ever used ARMS knows how hard it is to look up classes and create a schedule where classes do not conflict with each other. One Furman student, Zach Hall, got tired of this all and came up with ClassGet. An easy to use class finder website that is up to date with all the classes that Furman offers for a particular semester. Starting with the clean, sleek interface, one can clearly see why anyone would prefer this over the atrocious Furman based ARMS.

On top of the features that ARMS has to offer, ClassGet offers many extra features that make it that much better than ARMS. Firstly, if a user creates an account and signs up for alerts, if and when his chosen class has an extra seat open, ClassGet will inform them of the opening via email, letting them sign up for the class before someone else finds out about it. Secondly, the option to choose multiple classes and then clicking the compare button allows the user to check for any time clashes, which is way more convenient that anything ARMS has to offer. Finally, not only does ClassGet allow the user to look up classes according to the GER associated with the class, it also allows the user to pick out classes based on the day of the week, a particular time period or a particular time but also according to department and the prerequisites required for that class. ClassGet hence, is an incredible site that has many features that all make a large amount of information, accessible to the user in a small interface, primarily due to the extremely brilliant design strategies involved.

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Snapchat

Snapchat, the brand new social networking tool to hit the shelves, made for both Android and Apple devices and the cross-platform compatibility that it offers has elevated it to the one of the most used social networking tool used by people of all ages but specifically by school and college going folks. However, there are several problems with it from what I have been able to see.

This is one of the images that I was able to retrieve from another review of the app and as you can see from the picture on the right, some of the parts are intuitive and some clearly are not. For example, one can observe that the camera on the top right stands for using the back or front camera of your phone. The flash sign is for turning flash on or off. The box on the bottom left stands for the snapchats that you have received and the big button in the middle could be pressed to take a picture. All of this can be recognized but Snapchat is also supposed to allow the user to send video. This feature was introduced a couple of months ago and even today I meet people who do not know how to accomplish this. Apparently to do this one must hold down the capture button and the app will start recording the video and will stop once the button is released. However, no clue as to how to capture a video is provided to the user beforehand. 

Secondly, although a person is allowed to send a snap for a certain amount of time between 1 and 10 seconds, the person who receives it can take a screenshot of the picture. The app tells you who has taken the screenshot but it doesn't tell you of what picture since the app does not store any pictures internally. This raises concerns over the users privacy. Furthermore, as the app does not store any images, a person cannot go back and see what was on the snaps that they sent. 

Lastly, in order to use the app, one has to create an account and sign in using your email, which the app then uses to find friends for you who already use Snapchat which again raises questions about informed consent and protecting users privacy. Although this is a useful app to have, it has several problems with it and a non existent support setup that the developers need to work on.

Gull Wing Doors

Gull Wing doors were introduced by Mercedes in their 1952 SL300 race car and then integrated into the road legal version of the same car in 1954. Gull Wing doors are basically hinged to the roof of the car instead of the sides. Since then they have featured in many cars, most notably the Delorean DMC-12 of the Back to the Future series.

Even though they give the car character, they are extremely impractical. First of all, if one is sitting inside a car and tries to close the doors, and if by chance they happen to be less than eight feet tall, they wont be able to reach the door handle. Secondly, when a person does arrive at their destination, they will look like a massive pillock getting out of the car and thirdly, if the car rolls over. the people inside will be unable to get out of the car. Today, the Gull Wing doors can be found in the Mercedes SLS. Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear BBC did a review of the car and said that the doors "heavy, unnecessary, embarrassing, bombs!". Therefore, Gull Wing doors, definitely a startling example of bad design! The full video can be seen here!

Bugatti Veyron Air Brake°

The Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the pinnacle of human engineering. Powered by a 8 Liter  1200 BHP behemoth of an engine, it produces 1200 pounds of torque, which is almost enough to jump start a dead planet. The power from this engine is delivered to the wheels via a 7 speed double clutch gear box. This means that the Bugatti Veyron does 0-60 mph in almost 2.5s and 0-100 in less than 4.0s and it tops out at close to 262mph. The problem then arises when one tries to slow down this 2 Tonne monster.

Bugatti had to employ these massive brake calipers just to attempt to slow down and stop it. They calipers were made of a special carbon-ceramic alloy and are able to withstand temperatures upto 1100 degrees centigrade. However, stopping a car this big from such high speeds is extremely difficult and even such large and powerful cannot accomplish this task and fail. 

As one can see in this video, the Bugatti's brake calipers are glowing red from being too hot. Bugatti had to solve this problem before the Veyron's brakes started failing out and they came up with an extremely effective solution. They took the idea of flaps from airplanes and applied them to the Bugatti and the results were incredible. A flap like brake was attached to the back of the Veyron and it produced as much braking force as a normal four door sedan. It could move. Therefore, it had the ability to be deployed when needed. This was truly a subject of good design as it was effective and solved the problems that the Bugatti design team was facing.

The Reliant Robin

The Reliant Robin; straight from its name is a joke. Developed in England in the 1970s, the Reliant Robin is the epitome of bad design . To truly see what I mean, one must watch the video in which Jeremy Clarkson, a presenter on the British Show Top Gear takes the Reliant Robin on a very brief trip around the town of Sheffield. On this trip, the Reliant Robin proves as reliable as a rattlesnake that has been stepped on. I believe that the designers came up with the Reliant Robin in a pub in the Midlands, because, as you can see, it has just three wheels. Therefore, anyone attempting to turn around a corner in the Reliant Robin ends up with the car either on its side or upside down. Even cars with four wheels going around a corner sometimes lift their back wheel but the Reliant Robin, not possessing wheels on both front ends, is unable to handle the change in momentum and ends up on its side nine times out of ten.

Another major problem with the Reliant Robin was that ever since the car manufacturers fitted it with a bigger, 850cc engine, every time the driver would turn the throttle all the way up, it would lift up as shown in the picture above and this too was not favorable to driving on city streets. The Reliant Robin therefore, can be used by any one looking at examples of badly designed products. For anyone brave enough to venture forth into Reliant Robin territory, this was the fate that awaited them.

The Flappy Paddle Gearbox

The gearbox was invented and integrated into automobiles to deliver the power from the engine to wheels efficiently and to maximize speed and torque. However, there was from the start a major flaw in how the interior of a car was designed. The gear shift lever was, placed between the driver's seat and the passenger's seat. To change a gear the driver had to take his hands off the steering wheel, press the clutch, change the gear (which in itself was an effort) and then put his hand back on the steering wheel. This whole process was tedious and unnecessary and so came the automatic gearbox.

All the driver had to do was put the car in drive and his job was done. The car would shift up when he pressed the accelerator and shift down when the car slowed down. The automatic gearbox though had its own problems. The biggest problem that it had was that it wasn't responsive enough. There was generally a delay between the time the gear change was needed and the time when the gear change actually happened. This was completely acceptable to the petrol head community at large and so the car companies went back to the drawing board.

The flappy paddle gearbox was born, One of the first working models was deployed by Ferrari for use in their F-1 car and surprisingly it won the championship in its year. This prompted other F-1 teams to start using flappy paddle gearboxes as well and the rest is history. Today, flappy paddle gearboxes can be found in most high-end production cars. Probably the best version of the flappy paddle gearbox can be found in the Ferrari 599 GTO which is capable of changing a gear in 60ms.

Cord Input

Cord input is an innovative yet highly researched input method. The paper that I read was presented in CHI 2010 and was titled "Cord Input: An Intuitive, High-Accuracy, Multi-Degree-of-Freedom Input Method for Mobile Devices". The problem that was being addressed was the stagnation of innovation in input methods for mobile devices and the suitability of a cord as an input device. The idea presented was that since a cord has many affordances that advocate its use as an input device, this area needs further exploration. Three students from Carnegie Mellon looked into this problem and found out that a cord has an affordance to be pulled, twisted and pressed in different spots. All of these physical interactions, they devised, could be used to input data.

They developed a cord that could be used in such a fashion, which has sensors attached to it that could detect when someone pulled on the cord, when someone twisted the cord and when someone touched the cord in certain spots. All this data was processed by a computer and then presented to a program as input. Two test cases were devised for each physical interaction. One consisted of a user solely using a particular physical interaction such as PULL to navigate to the option they wanted to choose and then pressing the space bar on a computer to select that particular option. The second test used two physical interactions such as Pull+Twist so that the user pulled the cord to navigate to an option and then twisted the cord to select that particular interaction. 

From their results it is clear that Pull+Twist was the least successful input method whereas the other two had equal success rates. A user survey was conducted after the two tests and the users responded that using Twist solely was the easiest and most helpful. A constraint on this input method that I can see is that the user is constricted to choosing from a 1-D list and cannot make selections or navigate in 2-D without using all three Pull+Twist+Touch together.

Retrieved from: http://www.academia.edu/777658/Cord_input_an_intuitive_high-accuracy_multi-degree-of-freedom_input_method_for_mobile_devices

3.5mm Speaker Jack

I was really excited when I found the Logitec Z506 Surround Sound System on sale on Ebay. It had the perfect sized sub woofer for a dorm room and the speakers were small enough to fit in any small nook or cranny. I ordered it immediately and awaited its arrival with bated breath. 

It arrived in a small box in a week and I took it back to my room opened the box, spread the speakers out to all four corners of the room for the perfect surround sound experience plugged the power cable in, picked up the cord which has the jack on it to attach to my laptop and this is what I see.

Three jacks. Not one, not two but three jacks! What am I supposed to do? I check my laptop again and it only has one port for speakers. I try to think of a solution and I remember that I used to have a similar system before with the same three jacks. At that time I owned a desktop with a sound card that had multiple output ports specially configured to work with surround sound systems. My laptop has a sound card as well but unlike its desktop counterparts, it does not come with multiple ports. So I experimented with the three jacks and they all produced sound but none of them produced sound from all of the speakers. I settled with the black jack which produced sound from the sub woofer and two of the back speakers. I went online and found several solutions to this very problem. All the solutions narrow down the input to one jack.

All the solutions however cost more money. Money that I wasn't expecting I would need to pay to get my sound system up and running. I was extremely disappointed with the product description provided and hopefully future sound systems either work out the problem or at the very least list it in the product description.

The Back-lit Keyboard

Is it a good thing when designers start nit picking? I think it is. Steve Jobs was a designer who liked to make sure that everything that his company ever designed was perfect. He commanded his team of designers like a battleship captain and it paid off extremely well for him and Apple. I guess there really is no price for perfection as today Apple can afford to charge exorbitant amounts for ordinary devices. The Japanese do this just as well as Apple. This can clearly be seen from their huge market share in the automotive industry as well as the fact that they are able to charge more than other companies who make similar products. 

I guess this perfection in design can be traced back to the quality movement in the 60's and 70's when after making shabby and badly designed products for decades, Japan decided to put product quality at the top of their list. Another industry that this worked out really well for the Japanese was the home appliance industry. Sony, Toshiba and Panasonic are all companies founded and based in Japan. 

One of the products produced by this revolution that affects me directly is the laptop and one of the design intricacies that I personally enjoy is the back-lit keyboard. Perfect for finding keys when you are lost on a keyboard, the back-lit keyboard has changed the game forever. No more hunting for keys in the dark, no more pressing backspace when you actually wanted to press enter, a back-lit keyboard can be any computer user's best friend. One of the flaws however is that the computers do not take external lighting conditions into consideration. Computers today should be able to use their cameras to look at the environment's light setting and be able to adjust the brightness of the back-lit keyboard automatically.

Apple Mac Charger and Charging Port

In my opinion Apple products are ridiculously overpriced so much so that a laptop with similar specifications to a 15 inch MacBook Pro (Price: $1,999) can be bought for $1,100. I could go on all day about how much Apple overcharges its customers by but there is another side to this whole story. Whatever Apple does, whatever product it develops, whatever the finished product might be, it will always conform to the highest standards set in the industry and then some. Even the tiniest details will be perfect to the point that Apple could set the Germans and the Japanese to shame. Case in point the Apple MacBook Charger.

Whereas chargers for laptops are generally bulky and disproportionately large, MacBook chargers are small, efficient and convenient. One could even call them a work of art. Firstly, Apple has wasted to space in this piece of hardware. The cable attached to the power supply can be detached and stored by itself whereas the cable that connects to the computer can be wrapped around two flap like pieces of plastic that open up on two sides of the charger. Since being mobile is the main purpose of the laptop, Apple has handled this aspect incredibly well. There have been some complaints about the thickness of wire that connects to the power supply but industry standards require a certain thickness in order to deal with heavy currents expected during high power consuming processes. 

Finally, the cherry on top of the icing. When one steps on the charger cable on a normal laptop one of two things happen. Either the laptop comes crashing down to the ground or the cable breaks or gets damaged. Apple though has been extremely smart about this problem. Instead of having a pin that gets inserted into the laptop to keep the cable in the port, Apple uses a magnet which keeps the cable attached to the port. As soon as the force on the cable exceeds the magnetic force, the cable comes out of the port without damaging anything. This truly is a work of genius on the part of Apple. Not only have they employed the use of Occam's Razor and used the simplest solution possible, but their strategy of improving on even the simplest detail over and over again till it is perfect can clearly illustrate why they hold such a dominant position in the global laptop and computer production market.