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Cory Watilo

Software designer in Orange County, CA

People, there is no such thing as HD Voice

Marketing departments across the country are taking advantage of widely accepted terminology to bring relevance to their unrelatable technology - I guess not a bad idea - but it bugs me when it the terms have no correlation to the technology itself. Take Ooma's new "HD Voice" feature:

High Definition Voice (HD Voice)
Ooma is the first residential phone service to support high-definition voice technology. Compared to conventional telephones, Ooma HD Voice doubles the audio frequencies transmitted to deliver richer, more natural sounding conversation to calls between Ooma customers. Compatible corded telephone or Ooma Telo Handset is required to support Ooma HD Voice.

People, there IS no such thing as "HD Voice"!! The widely adopted definition of "HD" corresponds to a handful of different high quality video formats. This isn't the first time I've seen brands try to leverage the "HD" name on their products to indicate a better quality device. I can think of a handful of HTC devices with HD in the name, even though they aren't actually HD - just a little better than the previous version. And let's not forget HD Radio. It's a brand, people, not a technology.

Apple probably did the best job of trying to introduce a technical term to consumers by calling their faster iPhone the 3G. Although, most consumers have no idea what 3G means. If I recall correctly, nobody else really referred to 3G phones as 3G phones until Apple started marketing their device as such. Now you see Sprint proudly announcing their next-generation network as the country's first 4G network, most certainly a term they wouldn't have used if it weren't for Apple making 3G a household term. But thanks to consumers understanding the basic concept that "one higher than 3G is 4G, so a higher number must be better," this use of 4G is probably quite relatable to consumers.

Maybe I'll start branding myself as an "HD User Interface Designer" because I sometimes use a wide spectrum of colors that makes designs look nicer and makes people more apt to click on things. But maybe that would just be called being a "good designer". Referring to myself as an HD User Interface Designer makes just as much sense as Ooma calling their voice quality HD, when they should really just be say that their voice quality is now improved.

For the record, I own an Ooma Telo and love it.

How the HPC Jornada 720 inspired my career path


I've been a gadget freak ever since I was young. The first gadget I remember buying (in my early teens) was my Diamond Rio, one of the first MP3 players to hit the market. It had 32 MB of storage, enough to store about a single album back in the day. (I think mine may have been the second variation of the device.)

Around the same time, I picked up a Palm device. Eventually, it led me to purchase my Jornada 720, which I still have this day (I think I still have my Rio, too). The Jornada 720 shipped with Windows CE, similar to Windows found on the Pocket PC, but made to be more desktop-like with a start menu across the bottom. It also came with programs like Word, Excel, and Solitare. It was essentially a micro version of a laptop, and what we might even consider today as the precursor to the netbook that we have today.

There was a large online community around these devices found in newsgroups. I remember being quite active in these groups that I would subscribe to them via Outlook Express, the only way I knew how to join newsgroups at the time. (Many posts I was involved in have been archived on websites and can now be found via Google.) It was through these groups that I found out about HPC Factor, run by Chris Tilley and Clinton Fitch, both who were very active in help support new users to the HPC platform.

The Jornada came installed with Windows Media Player, and several skins that allowed for customization of the player's look and feel. Naturally, I wasn't too impressed with any of the choices, so I decided to figure out how to make my own skin for the HPC version of Windows Media Player. I was very big on personalization, and wanted my device to look and work just like I wanted it to. As it turns out, the skin I created and submitted to HPC Factor is still up and available on their website. (If you scroll down, you'll see WMP7.1, the skin I created.)

The design I submitted wasn't anything new - it was a port of the desktop version of Windows Media Player 7. I know it doesn't look like much, but for me, this was huge. It was the first coding project I did, aside from a little HTML for my own personal site.


Here is a screenshot of my port of Windows Media Player 7 for the HPC Jornada 720. Data (song title, track position, volume level) populated this screenshot when a song played.

The best part is how I created it: I used nothing but Notepad and MS Paint. I didn't have anything else other than the programs that shipped with Windows. I simply took a screenshot of the desktop version of Windows Media Player and moved elements around in Paint until I made it look how I liked. Little did I know at the time, but I was actually creating an image sprite.


A simple image sprite for the pause, repeat(?) and playlist buttons.


A mapped out image of the play, stop, volume, previous and next buttons. I then told the skin which color to read for each button.

Then for the code, I opened an existing skin in Notepad and changed elements until it looked the way I wanted them to.

Here's a shot of the code I wrote for this particular skin. The numbers you see above are coordinates that reference the images shown above.

I hadn't realized until recently, but this is what gave me my start in playing with graphics and code.

Fast forward nearly a decade and I now enjoy skinning shopping carts and Posterous themes, and have a career working in graphics and code and doing what I love. I can't say I'd be in the same place today if it weren't for this little experiment, because I wanted to customize the experience on my device. I also have to thank my supportive parents who, despite for never understanding why I wanted to buy the gadgets I did, never refused me from using my own money for these devices. Without their support, I might be in a totally different place in my life.

So here's to experimentation and spending money on devices that don't seem like more than the gadget of the week. Because you never know what they'll lead to.

2009: My year in review

My blog is pretty public, but here's a post that's more for me than it is for you. I figured I should start cataloging a list of highlights from my 2009 for when I want to reminisce in 10 years, and I'd rather do it here, where I have more control of my data, than some place like Facebook that may be totally obsolete in half that time. Most of the links here are to posts I made throughout the year.
January
  • Really started using Twitter
  • Moved into a college dorm for the first time, in my last semester
  • Started working for YSN
  • Experienced Lucky Strike for the first time

April
  • Wrote a 40 page paper for college. Somehow, I passed.
  • Started experimenting with Posterous

May
  • Stopped by the World Trade Center site. Looked much the same as it has when I was there in 2005.
  • Somehow managed to graduate college with a BA in communication
  • Quit Wordpress and started using Posterous fulltime
June
  • Got a personalized license plate that exemplified my nerdiness
  • Camped out to be one of the first to own the Palm Pre. I returned it a week later and got an iPhone.
  • Enjoyed working from home
  • Officially gave up control of my self-hosted email and started using Gmail and a single identity for everything
July
August
September
October
November
  • Admitted to playing a single iPhone game over 80 hours in less than 6 months
  • Bought the Droid Eris the day it came out and returned it the next day (for a Blackberry Tour, which I still have, surprisingly)
  • Set up a magnificent 4-monitor display for my home office. I have since cut back to 3 horizontal screens.
  • Bought a TV for the office, just so Travis and I could watch Arrested Development while we worked
December

Yikes, Microsoft. Yikes...

Having heard a beta of Outlook 2010 was out, I decided to take a look to see how Microsoft might have improved its UI. I googled "outlook 2010" and was about to look at Google Images when I decided that Microsoft would probably have some more polished, more well-presented screenshots on their Outlook 2010 site. Boy, I don't think I could have been more wrong.

Not only does the website look very half-assed (lame design), but some elements on the page make me think they tried to use Microsoft Word to publish this site. And no, the site doesn't look any better in IE 8.

For one, check out the page borders, and how they don't extend more than a few pixels down the page:


Then I scrolled down to check out a screenshot, and this is what I find:


Check out that awesome pixelation action! Come on, Microsoft. Did you save this in Paint? I mean, I know Paint is your program, but it's okay to use this little industry standard program called PHOTOSHOP.

Oh wait, no, it looks like they did. If you click through to the Home & Business page, you'll see the same screenshot, but nicely aliased:


Microsoft, I've always been a fanboy, but when you do stuff like this, it makes me really sad.