gPodder Maemo 5 Remota Usability Test Videos

Back in August, Jarkko Mikael Palonkangas has been looking for Maemo 5 users without any experience in using gPodder. His Master's thesis is about the Thinking Aloud usability testing method on mobile devices, and he chose gPodder as the example application. The application used for managing the test cases has been written by Jarkko for Maemo 5 and is called Remota - it takes care of displaying the tasks to the users, recording screenshots and audio and retrieving the logging output from gPodder.

Remota log viewer with UI action log at the bottom

If you are interested in seeing how this looks, or if you would like to help to comment on the usability issues and find improvement ideas, please feel free to click through the videos below, which have now been uploaded:

User 1: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7, Task 8, Task 9, Task 10, Task 11

User 2: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7, Task 8, Task 9, Task 10, Task 11

User 3: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7, Task 8 (1st try), Task 8 (2nd try), Task 9, Task 10, Task 11

User 4: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7 (1st try), Task 7 (2nd try), Task 8, Task 9, Task 10, Task 11

Unfortunately, user 4's logging output had problems, so you only have audio and video for these tasks - for users 1 through 3 we also have logging output about UI interactions, which was possible by patching the gPodder source to add additional handlers to buttons and other UI elements while the UI was created on application startup.

Please feel free to add comments to the videos - Jarkko is going to process them and include the finding in his final work, so that would be an easy way to contribute.

Utilize the hardware keyboard with MaePad 1.3 and Vim keybindings

Yesterday, MaePad 1.3 was released. Apart from updates to the Finnish translation and a new Hungarian translation, this release adds Vim-like keybindings to the UI, which allows you to be very productive when managing lots of checklists.

The enabler here is the hardware keyboard that allows for indirect multi-touch interaction with good, tactile, haptic feedback (something that no touchscreen to date can provide - you can't type "blindly" on any touchscreen).

Watch the demo video here:

The package is available as binary .deb from the MaePad homepage and the source is available in the Git repository (no package in Extras until Bug 9070 is fixed). Leave feedback in the forum thread, including ideas for additional shortcuts.

Multiplayer NumptyPhysics (on a MT table)

(Again, not really tablet-related, but multiplayer could be ported to tablets eventually. Feel free to skip :)

The multi-touch table version of Tim Edmonds' NumptyPhysics gained support for multi-player modes and multi-touch drawing, dragging and deleting in the last few weeks. You can watch the evaluation video here or below.

New features and play modes include:

• Multi-player cooperative (single token and goal)
• Multi-token single-goal versus game
• Multi-token multi-goal versus game
• Draw multiple strokes at the same time
• Move drawn items with two-finger-drag
• Delete drawn items with three-finger-tap

Lesson learned: You need to get the level design right.

Word count for "multi" in this post: 10.

gPodder 0.15.0 now in Maemo Extras

The latest release of gPodder, a podcast downloader for Maemo has been released today, and packages for it are already available in Maemo Extras for Chinook, Diablo and Fremantle Alpha (..but there is no Extras-Promoter for Fremantle yet?).

Highlights of this release:

• Download resuming between sessions
• Finger-friendly lists using libmokoui2
• Friendly folder and file names for downloaded files
• Finger gestures for the episode list

The finger gestures are very nice and can be used to show episode details or play back episodes. Enable the configuration option maemo_enable_gestures and then swipe left to display shownotes or swipe right over an episode to listen to it.

Get it from Maemo Extras.