I recently was sent an article about the Nike's latest shoes which will "talk" to Apple's iPod. The article in question first talks about how the shoes will be able to pass information about calories burned, pace, distanct, and other information to detail hungry fitness enthusiasts.
I could be dead wrong on this, but ultimately I don't think this will catch on. It's a nifty idea, but eventually it will not work. In a few words here's why; not enough buttons.
The iPod is great because it elegant in it's simplicity. It solves a consumer problem, storing and listening to a huge mp3 collection, on a single device that's simple and easy to use. Basically the iPod has one big button. The button can be pushed in four different active regions and also be rotated in order to scroll. It serves playing music and videos very well. It integrates well with iTunes, a one stop application to download, organize, and collaborate your music. From this one stop application you can update your iPod with whatever your heart desires.
Enter Nike shoes. Having at one time been a somewhat avid runner (I say somewhat since as I write this I'm 10 pounds overweight and drinking a Mountain Dew), I realize the value in knowing the details of your running. I like to know all the details of my run; distance, pace, average heart rate, max heart rate, min heart rate, elevation, elevation gained, ect. Currently I use the Timex BodyLink System but there is also the Garmin Forerunner 301 or the Polar S625X. These products excel in that they give huge amounts of information to the user. Each watch has a number of buttons on it to do various functions. There is also software for downloading and interpretting your results.
How can you integrate the two? Add more buttons to the iPod? Does "play/pause" now mean, start the stop/stop the stop watch function? If I have music already playing and push the "play/pause" button does my music stop playing, the stop watch stop/start, or both? Do I have to change mode to do various functions, all while presumably running? I contend that the usability degrades, and quickly, the more functions you have a product do outside it's original intent. Continuing with usability issues, you have the problem of software. Is iTunes now expected to have a Nike section where you can chart, log, and analyze all of your workout data? I hope not. I like I tunes for it's elegant simplicity. Would I now have to have two software applications to get all the information off of my iPod? Start adding things that don't have correlation to play/pause, back, and forward then you're deviating from what made you popular in the first place.
The second part of Nike's announcment talks about new clothes that route wires and hold the iPod. This, on the other hand, is a great idea. It takes a problem, wires and no specific pocket for iPod and fixes it, while maintaining the integrity of the products it is integrating, workout clothes and iPod. It fixes a real consumer problem/desire, from start to finish.
Until the shoe can talk with iPod and the user experience is as easy as the original iPod functions, this combination won't be a winner.
This is my first blog post. I intended to do some introductory speak in my first post, but have abandoned that after having come upon something goofy that I thought I'd write about.
This morning I decided to go online and check the status of some flex spending and impending reimbursements. It was my first time to the site, so, like many other sites, I had to create a login. No problem here, until I clicked "Continue". I received an error,
"The maximum length of the password is 8 characters." Being a software developer, I'm confronted with too many "create an account" pages to actually read the fine print. I probably *should* have read all the text on the page (more on that later). My first thought, "Why would someone limit a password to eight characters?" This doesn't make sense to me. Especially in an age where security is heightened. My password is 11 characters long. Not the shortest, but definately not the longest I've seen. I go back to check to see what "the rules" are for passwords. Here it is:
Must be 6-20 characters long, include no spaces,
begin with letter (A-Z, a-z) or number (0-9). May include !@#$%^&*( ).
Wait a second. Wasn't I just told that my password exceeded the eight character maximum? Apparently, the developer who wrote this never tested this throroughly.
I just changed to some other password, which is probably what every other user who has encountered this error has done, never making aware to the creators of the site that something isn't quite right.
Just for giggles, after logged into the site, I tried to change my password to my original desired password. On this form the "new password" field has it's MAXLENGTH attribute set to eight characters. Why not do this on the sign up page?
This got me to thinking, why would anyone ever limit a passwords length to something that small? Why not instead create a field in the database as NVARCHAR(50) and take anything up to 50 characters? That seems sufficient to me. You could still insist on stronger passwords that just plain text using regular expressions.