Vikram Madan's Blog: Fun With Windows : UMPC

Dead-(see?)-scrollbar, XP-scrollbar...

VikramMadan — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 10:33:00 GMT

While many people seem pleased with the UMPC scrollbar utility I released earlier this week, reports continue to trickle in that an unlucky few are not seeing the scrollbar when they run the utility. Ouch! - this is just the kind of inexplicable bug I was concerned might surface, given this utility is neither production quality nor well tested. [Now you also kinda know why an OS like Vista takes a long time to ship - we spend a heck of a lot of time/effort/resources pounding the (pardon my french) cr*p out of it under every possible permutation, combination, situation, and condition, so as to flush out as many issues as possible before it gets into the hands of users like yourself!]. Yeah, I knew Vista well. Vista was a friend of mine. And this scrollbar utility sure ain't no Vista... (In fact what it is, is nothing more than an abandoned internal experiment from ages past that I happened to stumble upon a few months ago and then attempted to overhaul in short snatches of (ha!ha!) ‘spare’ weekend-time... )

Regarding the disappearing scrollbar itself, that's pretty hard to correctly debug without an on-hand repro. In re-inspecting the code, the only culprit that jumped out at me was an uninitialized variable that might be messing up the scrollbar's dimensions. (For the curious: 'uninitialized variables' are often actually initialized with unexpected, random values and usually lead to hard to repro bugs that vary from machine to machine). I have updated the UMPCScrollbar EXE with a fix and reposted it in its original location. If you previously ran into the scrollbar issue on Vista, please download and try again.

Also, for those who asked for an XP verison of the utility, you'll be pleased to learn this too is now available. Click here to download. Hope this works for you.

Hopefully the updated utilities will work well. If not, I may just end up posting the Scrollbar utility source code so folks can ~~fend for~~ investigate further themselves. (Despite our deepest hopes, I unfortunately have very limited capacity to service this utility further…L).

Meanwhile, on the lighter side:

Eyeing the Display: Illusion and Resolution...

VikramMadan — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 11:19:00 GMT

Half the human brain (the half not fixated on media celebrities) is directly or indirectly associated with vision. Evolution has apparently decided that what we see, matters. Just as our eyes are our primary windows to our world, the displays on our mobile-computing devices are the primary windows to our information. The bigger we open our eyes, the larger our displays, the more the information we can absorb. Eyes work best when we don’t strain them, displays (LCDs only – I’m ignoring CRTs here) when we run them at their native resolution. We can perceive a few extra details by squinting (i.e. running the LCD display at a higher, non-native resolution) but it doesn’t feel natural. Things get blurry, headaches ensue. No surprise then that it’s in our best interest to find the optimal tuning between eye and display. Eyes you can’t tweak. But displays you can. Thank goodness.

Which brings us to our first topic for today: clarity of text aka ClearType. ClearType technology has been around for a while. Having watched it develop from a very close range – while I worked on the Microsoft Reader product – I willingly profess a certain fondness for it and personally think it’s both under-rated and under-utilized. For best viewing results, UMPC users need to pay special attention to ClearType.

First, a primer. On LCD displays only, ClearType smoothens font edges to make text appear crisp and sharp. Unlike CRTs, where a single un-manipulatable dot represents each displayed pixel, pixels on LCD displays have separately addressable red-green-blue (RGB) component-color sub-pixels (3 per screen pixel). When a character is rendered on the CRT screen, the underlying pixels are either part of the character, or they are not, leading to non-linear edges that make the rendered text look jagged and rough, a miniature version of prehistoric computer graphics on prehistoric displays. On an LCD screen, the jaggies still exist – except ClearType makes them 'more subtle’ by manipulating the 3 RGB sub-pixels under each ‘jaggy’ pixel. Since different RGB combinations produce different colors/brightness, in effect ClearType is manipulating the colors/brightness of the pixels that comprise the font edge. Because human vision is both imperfect and non-linear, from a distance the eye-brain perceives these color/brightness variations as smooth lines and not as colored patterns. In other words, ClearType makes text look good by creating an Optical Illusion. (The illusion itself is effective because the color variations Cleartype creates are themselves based on a model of human vision). And to think you thought Windows was WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)! J Well, it’s not. You’ve been tricked. Talk to your brain! J

There are two key points above that impact your UMPC (or Tablet or LCD...) ClearType experience. Since you probably weren’t paying attention, I’ll call them out explicitlyJ:

(1) ClearType manipulates the Red-Green-Blue sub-pixels directly. The order in which these sub-pixels occur is called striping. The default striping for most LCD displays is RGB (in other words, Red followed by Green followed by Blue). In both Vista and XP, ClearType assumes by default that it is dealing with RGB striping and happily tweaks the pixel components using this assumption. Unfortunately for some of us, the default striping on some (many? all?) 7" UMPC displays is BGR (Blue, Green, Red – inverse of RGB). When you run Vista (or turn on XP-ClearType) on these BGR machines, instead of crisp, clear text, you get fuzzy, multi-colored, rainbow-fringed text! To a sensitive eye like mine, this basically sucks. The good news is that ClearType can handle BGR striping just as well as RGB striping – but you have to tell it to do soJ. The bad news is that there is no inbuilt UI in either XP or Vista to tweak this settingL. But the really good news is that you can run the ClearType Tuner from the Microsoft Typography web site to fix thisJ. Run, don’t walk. (This tuner has recently been updated for Vista. Hooray!)

(2) ClearType tweaks colors based on a human-vision model. As our choice in fashion (or mates!) shows, everyone’s vision works differently. The ClearType human-vision model is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Your perception of ClearType will vary from the person next to you, however much you like that person. Nicely enough, the ClearType Tuner also lets you pick a setting that looks best to your eyes. Another reason to give the ClearType tuner a spin. Sprint, don’t run!

Once you have ClearType adjusted correctly for your display striping and for your eyes, you’ll be surprised at how delightful it is to read text on the 7” UMPC displays (or any other LCD display). Note that ClearType only works at the native display resolution. This is because ClearType is expecting to manipulate each pixel individually. When you run at a non-native display resolution, you’re trying to squeeze more displayed pixels onto each physical pixel, which creates one big, fuzzy, on-screen mess. Which brings us to our second topic for today: the 800x480 default native resolution on 7” UMPCs.

The 800x480 resolution has an official name: WVGA. But an official name doesn’t make this resolution any less funky and non-standard, at least from the Windows perspective. Given how long 4:3 display ratios have held sway, you can’t quite retroactively blame legacy-app programmers for not foreseeing a future teeming with 5:3, 16:9 or other nifty vertical-horizontal combinations. (You can and should, however, hound programmers of new apps that continue to make the same ol’ mistaken assumptions). Due to this lack of futurist foresight, the poor UMPC user will occasionally encounter an errant app that chokes on the screen resolution, refuses to install, shows UI that runs off the screen, and/or exhibits other heartburn-inducing behavior. Thankfully, though, these issues are mostly in a minority. (The majority of Windows apps do work well on the UMPC today). And over time, the native display resolution is expected to move up a notch, which will hopefully make today’s resolution-related issues yesterday’s footnote.

For most of us though, the promise of a better future doesn’t quite relieve the pain of the moment. If you’re running 800x480 on your 7” UMPC, you’ve likely already experienced the first-hand joy of having ‘certain’ windows dialogs run off the bottom of your UMPC screen, making it impossible to get to the dialog buttons. One work-around is to briefly switch to a higher, non-native resolution (painful). Another work-around is to anchor your Windows taskbar to the side instead of the bottom, giving you more vertical working space (which fixes the issue for many - but not all – dialogs).

A third option, one premiering here for your pleasure and consumption, is to download the attached ‘wholly-unsupported' 'pseudo-power-toy’ UMPCScrollbar utility and run it on your Vista UMPC. This utility runs in the background (no visible/configuration UI) and pops up an on-screen scrollbar whenever it detects a non-resizable dialog taller than the available vertical working screen estate. The scrollbar then allows you to nudge the dialog up and down, so you can access the dialog buttons that would otherwise be inaccessible. See the 'readme.txt' in the zip file for more information.

[Note: The UMPCScrollbar utility is compiled against the Windows Vista SDK and will not run on XP. It was cobbled together as a means to an end and is neither aesthetically pleasing nor perfectly engineered. Plus I couldnt bribe anyone to test it so it would help if you kept your expectations appropriately low...:)]

What the #@#%$ is a UMPC? Orig-ins & outs…

VikramMadan — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 04:40:00 GMT

Mobile technology – it’s everywhere! In the time it took you to read this sentence, a new generation of mobile devices and gadgets probably swept the planet, proliferating faster than the latest unfathomable social-networking fad. Mobility messaging surrounds us, seduces us, engulfs us. A sea of devices. An ocean of choices. Truly, we live in the Age of Mobility™.

And all this because humans are fundamentally mobile! Not only do we want to do what we want to do, we want to do this from anywhere! Have our cake. Eat it too. Thank goodness for wireless - if it didn’t already exist, someone would have had to invent it. (Oh wait...J).

When you think about it, embodied within every mobile-computing device is a Yin-Yang balance of two primal, opposing forces: Functionality and Portability. Ignoring the variable called ‘price’, every single mobile-computing choice involves a trade-off between functionality and portability; too much of one or the other, and the ‘mobile value’ quickly evaporates. For lack of a better imagination, I humbly J name this observation Vikram’s First Law of Mobility: Every useful mobile computing device shall demonstrate the right amount of functionality & portability, but no more. J

So who decides what the ‘right amount of functionality & portability’ is? The obvious answer is: you do. (Compromised-OS? Squint-inducing-screen-size? Repetitive-strain-injured-thumbs? Non-intuitive- interaction-models? Pay-through-your-nose-walled-gardens? Lack-of-compatible-apps? But highly portable? Step right up, folks, all yours for the taking…this offer won’t last! Or maybe it will! J)

Seriously speaking, actively or passively, you’re making that functionality-portability decision whether you realize it or not. In the past, if your functionality needs nudged you into the Microsoft ecosystem (very likely, given the overwhelming range of compatible hardware and software)(or perhaps because you’re the rare soul who just happens to love Microsoft technologies J), your mobile choice was to either adopt something Windows-based (large desktop-replacements, traditional (4+ lb) laptops, lighter ultra-portable notebooks... – all fully functional, but ‘relatively less’ portable) or something Windows-CE-based (very portable, but requiring compromises on apps and data-compatibility). Unlike T-Shirt sizes, the available Microsoft OS-based offerings did not form a smooth continuum from extra-large down to extra-small. Somewhere in the middle, down by the ~8” screen size, persisted a glaring gap. [Meaning if you wanted a full-fledged Windows PC that was smaller than ~8”, hey, happy dreaming... J]

But since nature abhors vacuums, and every healthy eco-system evolves life-forms to fill all available niches, it was only a matter of time before the technology and the desire aligned to fill-in those missing spots, sparking the creation of <ta-daa!> the UMPC</ta-daa!> category. J

The cynical reader may pause at this point to exclaim, “Oy! So it’s just a smaller PC. What’s the big deal?” Wait. Don’t leave yet! J Yes, the Ultra-Mobile PC is a smaller PC. But this is a big deal - at least from the perspective of a deal you did not have before. Consider:

· Functionality: The UMPC is a PC. It runs full Windows. Nothing less. All your existing Windows software works, all your existing Windows peripherals work, all your PC-based data remains compatible. You get to tap into the full value of the Microsoft Windows ecosystem. No compromises. (Ok, maybe a few, but that’s early-adopter pain…we’re working on itJ). Your data lives locally (you’re not at the mercy of web-service uptime or connectivity) and you have some pretty decent computing horsepower at your disposal (allowing you to have the twenty-first century user-experience that you so deserve and crave!)

· Portability: A laptop is still best used on a lap. (Try using one on-the go: e.g. walking from point A to point B). Slate tablets improve this somewhat, but at the 8-12” screen size you’re still going to experience some amount of inconvenience (Anyone been through Airport security lately? J). People carry their laptops on vacation, but not so much in their daily life. Whereas a reduction in size automatically extends the ability to carry a machine to more places and use it more easily in more situations, more spontaneously, adding an element of satisfaction to those otherwise-vacant slices of down-time that punctuate our lives. The less conspicuous, the less cumbersome the technology, the greater ones’ sense of comfort in carrying it around. (Plus, you get to look less-geeky (or more-cool, depending on your perspective). And, for the paranoia-inclined, a much les obvious prospective target for random acts of violence… J ).

· Usability: Try browsing the web on your phone. Or watching a movie on your mp3 player. Isn't that funJ? The 7" UMPC screen (sadly, my stubby fingers and failing eyesight force me to ignore anything smaller for now) absolutely shines when it comes to doing most common computing activities: browsing, music and video, onscreen reading & reviewing, reading/writing email, navigation apps, casual games, photo slideshows, doodling in meetings, surfing on company time, etc … Big enough to be usable with the interfaces you know and love (or hate!), and not-yet-small enough to make UI interaction an exercise in futility and frustration. (I suppose there's a reason DVD-players and in-car navigation systems standardized on 7" screens...) Plus the UMPC has the Baby-Boomer-approved™ ergonomic advantage of being easy to hold in one hand, while simulaneously allowing for comfortable adjustment of viewing angle and screen-eye distance. All the natural-interaction work done in Windows to date surfaces nicely here. Throw in an extended battery, combine it with Vista’s improved sleep-resume functionality, and you can get an awful lot of mileage from this baby. Add a few bluetooth peripherals for that wire-free pizazz. Use it at work. Use it at home. And everywhere else in between.

· Develop-ability: If you are familiar with Windows development, you know how to develop for UMPCs. There's a handful of guidelines to keep in mind, but that’s it. No new tools, no new languages, no need to rewrite apps. All those long nights spent learning Windows (or WPF) programming will still pay off. You get to focus your efforts on unleashing the potential of the new form-factor, not in relearning how to do "hello world" on wannabe platforms J.

· Affordability: Ok, I admit it - this ones a weak point. Relative to where we all want them to be, UMPCs probably feel a tad pricey right now. But there are economies of scale in motion even as we all sit around wasting our time reading and writing blogs.JThe price will come down. We live in hope J...

When you put all that together, what you're ending up with is a new class of pretty-darned-portable, versatile, and useful machines that can enrich many more aspects of your life (than even you suspected were enrich-able), while providing a highly-compatible and familiar experience, backed up by the most extensive technology ecosystem on the planet. So what’s not to like! J

We all have countless mobile-computing choices today. Should your interest in mobility intersect with the Windows world, you kinda owe it to yourself to take a look at the UMPC category, be it for your primary, secondary, tertiary, work, home, kid, companion, travel, or <something-we-never-thought-of> pc.

It’s a new category. It’s not perfect. But there's promise. And potential. Plus we hope to help it grow up and be all that it can be (or at the very least, 'realize it's true potential' J )…

Till next time. Enjoy.

Introducing my Blog: UMPCs, Tablets, and Other Fun With Windows

VikramMadan — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 08:46:00 GMT

Greetings! My name is Vikram Madan and I am currently a Development Manager on the Microsoft team chartered with incubating the relatively-new Windows Ultra Mobile-PC category (aka UMPCs or Microsoft Origami UMPCs).

In the last few years, I have had the good fortune of being involved with several Microsoft projects that have helped prod Windows out of the confines of the traditional desktop into a richer, smarter computing-platform, better able to conform to basic human needs such as – gasp! – mobility and natural interaction (Humans are mobile? And write with a pen? Who knew!J). From my front row seat, it has been inspiring to watch hardware and software evolve in tandem to open up new scenarios in all walks of life, helping make computing more ubiquitous, more relevant, and more accessible to more people worldwide.

Those familiar with the history of personal computing well understand the pivotal role Microsoft Windows has played in unleashing the technological revolution sweeping the world today. Assuming, like me, that you have your own personal inner-geekJ, what could be more exciting than taking the cumulative value of the Microsoft Windows ecosystem and putting it into a fully functional form-factor that fits in your hands, lets you take all your ‘digital stuff’ with you everywhere you go, keeps you linked to your world from anywhere, and enables you to make the best use of your precious time - irrespective of whether you are working, relaxing, traveling, sharing kids’ pictures with GrandMa, pitching ad-funded web startup ideas to VCs, getting sued for copyright-infringing-user-uploaded content, or just plain ol' trying-to-attract-the-attention-of-attractive-strangers-in-cafés.

Enter <ta-daa!>The UMPC</ta-daa!>. A category of Windows PCs whose potential I am personally very, very, very, very excited aboutJ. In this blog, I will try to share my excitement about, my world-view of, and my personal experiences with UMPCs, Tablets (UMPCs are Tablets, if you hadn’t noticed), and Windows Mobility (Note: Windows Mobility != WindowsMobile), with occasional digressions and ruminations about Microsoft, Software Development, computing technologies and trends, behind-the-scene looks, etc. But, for now, mostly UMPCs. If this might interest you, I invite you to tune in.

More to come. Much more. I promise. You won’t be disappointed. J

PS A special thanks to the Tablet & UMPC MVPs: but for their clamoring for more UMPC voices in the blogosphere, this blog would have remained a procrastinated figment of my imagination. Congratulations, folks! You helped birth this baby. (In other words, it’s all your fault!J)

PPS You will see many hand-crafted drawings on my blog. All of these will have been hand-drawn on a Tablet PC. Before arriving at Microsoft I was an aspiring and award-winning Editorial Cartoonist (and failed Bioengineering researcher – but that’s another story!). Unfortunately for my cartooning career, it was far easier to get hired at Microsoft than to find a cartooning position on a newspaper. Not that I’m complaining – there’s much joy in creating software that impacts millions and millions of users worldwide. Usually in a good way. Groovy, baby. Yeah! J

PPPS For more information about me, please see my profile.

PPPS Standard disclaimers apply (especially the one that says "all opinions are mine and not those of my employer ya di ya di ya da ... ").