The dust is settling after a very busy DAC and, as usual, it is now that you realize how much work you have actually created for yourself in those few condensed days! Also, at this stage you have to watch out as the body readjusts to time zones, long-haul flights, climate changes and ‘normality’. The immune system may need a boost - mine certainly does!
DAC success can be measured by many metrics other than how many leads you get. Some of the more practical ones could be:
- How many lunches did you skip?
- How many hours sleep did you get?
- How many planned DAC sessions did you miss?
- How early or late did you have to leave the Denali party?
- How many iPads did you win?
Considering the planned DAC sessions, the one that I did actually make it to was the ESL Symposium on Tue afternoon. Wally Rhines keynote was engaging (although it was difficult to hear through the 200 crisp packets crinkling at the same time). The panel presentations were good and the only swipe taken was aimed at the EDA industry’s policy on standards where Mark Johnstone, chief technologist at Freescale, pointed out that when EDA means a single standard, it actually means 2.
I also liked Mark’s humorous and intelligent presentation as I did the presentation from Mark Stockburger, engineering director at Medtronic, who introduced the type of electronic system ecosystem required for emerging medical devices. During the questions to the panel, Mark Johnstone made the remark that a key problem for complex systems was actually modelling the user environment, which for today’s devices could be considered ‘the world’. This was a topic I touched upon earlier this year regarding the software bug in the Toyota Prius braking system and how difficult it could be to model this type of environment. Sometimes user environment and user interaction are completely outside the bounds of its standard usage scenario.
Consider the iPad. There were so many of them being given away at DAC! The big question I was discussing with my colleagues from Duolog was - how do you actually use the iPad? Is it something you take away with you on a short trip to keep you ‘connected’? Is it an airplane widget? Do you keep one in the car? Is it something that you have around the house for rapid connectivity? Could the iPad be, in fact, ‘the’ new kitchen appliance? You have a smart calendar there which remembers peoples birthdays forever, you have instant access to information to organise your day. You can send a text, email, tweet, skype, flickr or facebook from the centre-point of the house. You could even have access to 100,000s of recipes and get rid of the cookbook shelf forever! We paused briefly to consider the practicalities of using the iPad during a cooking experiment. Imagine, for instance, you’ve just spent 5 minutes mixing and kneading dough to make the latest Italian sounding bread e.g. a pad-ini (a Panini for the nasally congested). Both your hands are covered in a layer of thick sticky corrosive dough and you realise the critical part of the recipe is on the next page. Would you swipe a doughy finger across the iPad to get to the next page or would you do something that is completely outside the bounds of the iPad standard usage scenario? Would you swipe the iPad with your nose? Would it work?
Coincidently (as opposed to consequently) within 10 minutes of stumbling upon this uncommon and probably unhygienic use case, I found myself in an Apple store asking the sales assistant a.k.a. Genius, the very same question. After a few seconds of bewilderment he quickly recovered and said that it 'probably' would work.
Now, where have I heard that before?
- Dave
Ps : Now let’s see if it actually works ….
Sent from my iPad.
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