Twilight Universe

If you pay any attention to technology circles, you will have heard about a new device that Microsoft have helped design: codename Origami. Up until today there has been a lot of buzz, but very few concrete facts about this device, even now there is lots of scare-mongering, so what is it?

The specs are interesting: 7″ display (800×480 pixels), 1ghz processor, 30-120gig HDD (depending on model), Wi-fi, Bluetooth, ethernet , Compact Flash, USB ports. There’s a lot of potential coolness about it.

The thing is that, while it runs XP Tablet Edition (and Windows Vista will run on it), it’s not a Microsoft product. They helped design it but currently the only two working models I’ve seen are produced by Samsung (as in the above picture) or ASUS. This is not Microsoft’s iPod, or even Powerbook, it’s an attempt to expand what we know as personal computing, to create a new type of PC. It’s pretty bold, but what use is it?

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Only 10 hours left if you want to bid to talk to a celebrity over Skype. Pretty cool, and the line-up is varied enough to appeal to a lot of people (Melissa Etheridge is currently worth more than either Penelope Cruz or Brooke Shields, which is interesting). Out of all of them I’d have chosen Sara Gilbert though, she just seems the most interesting person out of all of them. Then again… I know none of them. An interesting way to raise money for charity though…

This site, along with around 2.5 million others, uses WordPress. The latest version is aimed at being much easier to use, and it is for the most part, but how easy is that? Is it actually useful for the non geek? Or do you still need a relatively high level of web knowledge to use it?

These questions certainly got put to the test when the rest my family started using it.

Recently my family decided to get into the 21st century and buy our own website. Cunningly enough our last name was available, which is a nice bonus of having a wierd surname I guess.

It’s about the right time, concidering that our little family unit will be splitting up soon - we can use a website as a hub of information - to catch up with each other, and also to bring parts of the extended family closer together.

The upshot of this is that each family member has their own email and subdomain, and each subdomain is their own little website. Naturally I chose WordPress for this, particularly WordPress MU (I installed Lyceum as well, and it seems good, but atm developer support is better for WPMU). Thankfully WPMU doesn’t use Smarty anymore, which I loathe, and is basically the same as WP2.0 for most purposes. Which is great, because WP2.0 is the new easy to use WP right?

Enter… The Family.

The Usual Suspects

My Father is… functionally computer literate, that is to say - he finds most stuff on computers confusing unless it is MS Word or Outlook Express, and even then he only knows what he uses, and the way he uses them. Basically he is the lower end of the knowledge scale of a modern user, without being useless on the machines: the person most companies are probably trying to get to adopt things. He knows this, and he doesn’t really care about computers one way or the other. He is not a geek, he isn’t really a computer person at all - he just uses them when he has to, and sees the internet as occationally useful, but probably also equal parts frustrating and confusing.
Bizzarely though, like the rest of my family, he has been using computers as long as I have. Go figure.

My Mother is much more of a computer user. She has a company laptop, occationally uses cheap Desktop Publishing software for leaflets and other materials, and is generally familar with how computers work. She is, put blunty, your bog-standard modern computer user. While she knows how to use things, and doesn’t have the fear of computing that my dad has, she still tends not to use software and sites out of her general daily pattern of usage. She is probably is representative of one who uses computers in their daily life, but uses them only as a tool. The average user really.

My Sister however is much more comfortable with computers. She works with them every day, has an ipod shuffle, buys a LOT of stuff online (introducing her to eBay was a bad, bad idea for her bank balance). She isn’t a geek though, she just knows how to use computers and isn’t afraid of trying stuff out; basically typical of my generation of computer users - adept and unafraid of the technology. Overall she would probably be in the high-end of the average users skill group.

So my family covers the gamut of skill sets that make up the “average user” group. None of them are computer professionals, they don’t need to know how to use computers, they just happen to regularly do so in their lives.

What better a group to use to test WordPress’s usability?

Over the next week I’ll be posting up their impressions of WordPress, where they had problems, and their general opinion of the software. My sister might take a little longer as she’s off to Indonesia and Thailand today (lucky her huh?).

This should be interesting…

If you can find it (it’s a very popular magazine) and you live in the bay area, check out the latest issue of the San Francisco Magazine. In it you’ll find more about KML Takes a Cruise, and they even mention Miriam’s sketch (she’s in two of the accompanying photos as well).

Page 44, check it out.

So many things to say, so few words. I’m so damn proud of her, I’m grinning from ear to ear

While Matt and Co have their own multi-user version of Wordpress, it’s never really been useful to me. Which is a shame, because I’d have like to use it in a number of projects.

However another one called Lyceum has sprung up (an advantage of Open Source Software) which looks like it will suit my needs a lot better - especially as it supports most plugins and themes with few or no changes, something that WPMU doesn’t do at all. edit - Matt has an interesting few points to make about the differences in design between the two efforts, and corrects me on a few things about WordPress MU.