NOTE: the voice recognition was correct in these examples, kudos to Nuance

After all the hyperbole on the latest natural language app to be released to the iPhone, I gave it a quick test. As my quick test above seems to confirm, it's doing exactly what I thought it would. It's just looking for nouns (places, things) it understands and mapping them appropriately. If it doesn't recognize the noun, it assumes that it's a restaurant or a hotel. It pretty much throws everything else away.

I'm pretty adamant against "natural language" apps, mainly because once people understand the "magic", they realize that they were wasting their breath.

I did a user test with Firefox Minefield while I was out getting my daily coffee (it helps living in Mountain View, home of Mozilla). The user test was trying out a new streamlined/combined location and search bar for Firefox. Before I get into that, I want to mention that I was impressed by the discussions I had with the people running the study.

One of the employees made the point that Mozilla isn't about making Firefox "win". It was pushing the Web towards standards, in other words, it's about not letting IE win. From their perspective, Chrome and Safari are fantastic -- as long as there's someone out there with 30% of the market share, we will not return to the days of "This site is built for Internet Explorer". It reminds me of John Nack's recent post, Adobe isn't in the Flash business. Actions are more important that mission statements, but it's a good start.

I also mentioned that I was excited by all the developer-focused technologies appearing in Chrome, only to have pointed out to me that technologies like WebGL were actually invented by Mozilla; they're just doing a bad job at promoting/pushing these technologies.

As for the user test, there was a little search engine selector in the bar you could click on to select different search engines on the fly (e.g. Google/Bing/Wikipedia/eBay). What was different was that this would appear when it detected you were doing a search task (e.g. visiting Google.com), but otherwise not be visible. The coolest addition was a little preview window that opened below the location bar, i.e. where you normally might see autocomplete suggestions. For example, if you were doing a Google Image search, it would show you images immediately below the location bar, instead of having to wait until you loaded the actual Web page. If you were doing a Wikipedia search, it would list the matching articles. It reminds me a bit of Yahoo's cool Instant Search, which Yahoo! has of course killed.

There were some rough edges as it is a prototype, but what I thought was novel was you could "detach" this little preview into its own window. You could then click on each search result and see it appear in the main window. What's often annoying is you do your search, then you go back and forth between the results page and each search result to find what you're looking for. Or you ctrl-click the results into a bunch of tabs and create a bunch of litter. This was a new tool for temporarily "saving" the search result and maintaining context.

In our post-user-test interview, I mentioned how I had switched to Chrome, partly because I prefer it's location bar, and even more specifically, how it integrates with my keyword bookmarks. If I type "goto ", the location bar immediately inserts a box that says "Search I'm Feeling Lucky..." to the left, which gives me confidence that I'm using my keyword. The little widget I was testing today is activated in the same manner, i.e. typing "g " activates the Google icon.

And yes, I downloaded Firefox 3.6 today (I've been using Chrome the past 2 months). They convinced me that they've started focusing on some of their performance issues (threading issues in the location bar, performance testing the top 100 plugins, changing the plugin API to get rid of common performance hits). It starts faster, we'll see if it can win me back.

To be fair, I've been planning on switching to Android since Android 2.0 came out -- first it was going to be the Droid, but seeing the issues with the camera on that, plus the subsequent announcement of the Nexus One, gave pause to that earlier switch.

So what did today's iPad announcement have to do with it?

I was mainly waiting to see if:

1. The iPad was a device I was interested in
2. If it was, did the 3G options with it impact my decision to switch to Nexus One? e.g. should I wait until Nexus One is on Verizon?

I was expecting #1 to be true, especially given how poorly Apple managed the secrecy around this one. I was surprised to find myself completely disappointed.

I want my phone to be more like a computer, not my computer to be more like my phone. I'm switching to the Nexus One because it is a better computer than the iPhone. The iPad takes everything cool about a computer -- general-purpose freedom, multitasking -- and replaces it with a bill from the iTunes store. I love some of the new UI flair and experience of the iPad, but not at that cost.

Psychologically I could convince myself that this was okay on the iPhone. When it first came out, there really was no possibility of freedom on that platform, and Apple really did change that landscape. Their motivation, however, was just to supplant the cellphone company as mediator and tollbooth. It was really Android that really set things free. Unfortunately, the first release of Android was an inferior product, and I couldn't bring myself to switch. Android 2.0 is worth switching to, so at last I can say goodbye to my first-generation iPhone.

Who knows. The iPod was initially booed, but it eventually succeeded. I didn't buy one until the third generation, and I'd say it wasn't until the fourth that they really had a great product. I'm sure Apple will improve on this initial iPad offering and make it more compelling. What I don't see happening is Apple reversing their trend towards increasingly closed systems that make them tons of money. There are many wonderful ideas that you can bring from the iPhone experience to the computer, but forcing me to buy all my media and applications through Apple is not one of them.

I've been working on ROS for two years and change now. I don't think that we thought back then, when it was just three of us, that we would be where we are today -- the community is awesome. So, thank you.

We unveiled our robot last night, which we will be sending to ~10 research institutions around the world at no cost. It cleaned up pretty nicely.

Life's been keeping me too busy to write regularly here (I've been busy keep this site up-to-date, among other things). Above is a month-old video of my trip to the IREX robot exposition in Japan.

Happy 2010!

My dog Ninja knocked over a full glass of eggnog onto my unibody Macbook Pro. The eggnog turned to glue overnight, so while the electronics survived intact (the backlight was the one fatality), the keyboard was basically useless.

My first thought was to get a new keyboard, but my trips to the Apple Genius Bar were discouraging. Apple wanted five days and $300+ to fix it. It also came with a threat -- if they found anything else wrong, they would "depot it" and charge me $1200. AllMac was much better -- they said they could fix it in a day, but I would have to come back during a weekday. They even offered a cheaper cleaning option instead of full keyboard replacement.

Now that it was clear that I couldn't throw money at the problem and make it go away quickly, I decided to clean it myself. I was able to get the responsiveness back by prying off the individual keys, soaking them in water, scraping out the gunk underneath, and reattaching. You can tell from this entry that my keyboard is mostly working: it went through some weird states where the 4 key stopped working and certain key combos wouldn't work, but these got better the more keys I cleaned.

Before embarking on this, I did some Google searches and eventually found this video, which was the most useful for learning how to remove keys from the Macbook Pro keyboard. Some notes on what you see:

• as you lift up the edge of the key, you have to push a little white tab in to release the key. If you watch the video carefully, you'll see this, but it's not obvious.
• be very careful not to damage the silicon membrane beneath the key as you jab stuff underneath the key. I found this out the hard way

Also, for the stuff not described:

• You need to pull the white scissor clip out from the key before reattaching. It's easiest to detach the big end first. I just ran a small screwdriver beneath the clip and it immediately popped out. The small end is trickier and more fragile. You'll want to rotate it out 90 degrees first. then pull straight out. It's not the end of the world if you break one -- you can order more online.
• the option key is rotated 90 degrees clockwise, so you have to push in the tab on the top right or top left instead.
• the command key is much beefier -- you also have to push in at the top, but it requires much more force
• the white scissor clips can come unhinged from one another. The clips for the letter keys are easy to slide back together, but the Command and Spacebar clips are a pain. I inserted one pin in and then used my screwdriver to create the necessary space to insert the other by lifting the the hole over the other pin.
• the spacebar is a pain and I haven't figured the proper way to get it off, though I did successfully remove it. There are metal bars on the top and bottom edge that you have to work free. Then there are two of the white plastic scissor clips to release. When you put the spacebar back on, there are a lot of things that need to snap together. It may seem like you have it back on, but you really need to press down hard on every part of the bar to make sure.