Week-End Special IX

Dear All,

Again a very short week! As promised, here is a small teaser video we were talking about earlier. Lets take a look:

(At the end of this video you will see notionink.in, but its not up (shows the older version till now). Will be releasing the new one in 48 hours)

Its made in-house by 2 of our very special UI Gang Members – Gagan(s), and they have done a good job in the final video as well which will be released soon.

Small update:

* Genesis is up and Running!
* GPS Navigation Software entered beta and it speaks 43 languages!
* Look at the self exploratory image on left
* Email client  (Mail’d) (we will talk more about it in a while) enters beta
* Paint + Photo Editor enters beta (along with 5 more softwares

• Where is the logo? One of our friends sent us, a Company registration page where he found similar logo. It is impossible that the winner had seen it before, but the similarity couldn’t be denied and we had to contact this firm for their confirmation that they are fine with us using the selected logo. They havent replied since then and we are still waiting (our legal team is completely against using it, cos its too similar, but if we can get permission from this firm then they have no issue).

Mail’d

Right now it comes with all the default features you expect from it, plus better “Missing attachments”, “offline mode”, and “UNDO a sent email” feature.

This is one application which will get amazing updates as we enter January and will redefine things a little bit like how big an attachment can be, or when can an email expire, or how can you fix the time of delivery even if you don’t have internet connection! Jaya (the lead and one of the better programmers at Notion Ink) is on fire and will get you these ASAP!

Sniffer: An extremely fast and handy File Browser is a must (especially if you are talking about USB drives, bluetooth etc). Personally I don’t like syncing my device every time I need to show someone a presentation or an image or even to listen a new song, may be I need more freedom in how I access and use my data. And hence we have the ‘Sniffer’ (Murali is the Architect of this one), as shown in the image on your right (please remember, I cannot share the final images, else my investors, design and legal teams will kill me! :)) There is a preview mode as well which works well for most of the important formats. I/O port detection is automatic and fast, and it goes well with the 3 panel layout system.

An interesting use-case: how do I transfer files/folders from one storage location to another, or may be, how to compare the contents?

On Adam, just open these 2 storage locations as panels (distinct instances) and voila!

We wanted to make Adam independent and self-reliable. That would mean it shouldn’t need any other device to think, store, get updates from and rather be able to drive others. It’s there now, in its genes, and all of us will see how it evolves.

The Matt

We told you how much we love Matt (that’s one reason why all the monitors here are from Dell). We have invested a lot of time in figuring out the right surface values which gives the perfect combination of 2 worlds (no reflection property of matt and scratch resistant property of glossy surface). But the first question: “Why every other device we see is Glossy and not matt?” The answer lies in the surface property. In general you can say that glossy surfaces along with giving better photograph of the device for marketing and shelf view, gives scratch-less experience (for its defined life time). And that is very much required. If your surface is rough (matt), it will be susceptible to scratches cos now when you drag a sharp object on it, it will have something to drag along, and leave a mark behind. All of this makes designing matt surfaces for touch screen extremely difficult and costly.

This is a small test I did for you in the morning. You can see one of our engineers dragging a sharp object scratching on of the Matt glass samples we had ordered for.

You can easily see the scratch (though you will not be pressing this hard, but still) and we definitely don’t want this.

After nearly 2 months of tests, we have been able to figure out what exactly should be the parameters and here is the result:

This is Adam’s glass and the result after the same test performed thrice. You can actually notice the speckles left from the last experiment on the other screens.

It took us really long and was really harder for the manufacturers to make what we wanted. We can’t compromise on few things and this was one of them.

Here is the image of the 3 tests which I did for you this morning (Adam is using the improved version of the last one shown here)

But the story between Glossy screen and Matt is not finished yet. One of our friend (working in Pixel Qi) who has an amazing command over LCD technology made us aware of the issue of using the matt surfaces on LCDs.

Look at the image below:

(You need to open it in another tab and see it full screen). If you can see (I hope you do), you will see small green fringes and speckles. Matt surfaces don’t work well with Green colors and creates  diffusion around green pixels. You Dell screens look good for two reason, one they have done good job and two, they don’t have to deal with the gap of touch screen in LCD monitors. Gaps add more refractions. Please see the next illustrations for more understanding.

We have done a good work when it comes to both of these issues and you can observe the same in the final product.

There is a LOT to share, from what all what we did, what were the issues we faced, sometime “the ridicules” and sometimes feelings of satisfaction for seconds as we are always drawn away for the bigger goal. I can keep on writing, but every thing that has a beginning has an end (Neo).

But wait! Did we say beginning? OK, then this is how one of our designers visualizes Adam booting up for the revolution.

[Update: Apologies for forgetting this: There is an un-official forum already up called www.notionaddicts.com I read a lot of peeple had issues in following up comments here and wanted something up. Our friend Avo helped us out and built one from scratch. Please take a look!

Thanks Avo]

With Warm Regards

Rohan Shravan