usability

I moved this week-end, and took the opportunity to upgrade from my 32″ 720p Sharp LCD HDTV to a 46″ 1080p 120Hz Toshiba LCD HDTV. As I did basic hookups on Sunday and put in a Blu-Ray disc to test it, I was pleasantly surprised to find out my Toshiba TV’s remote control could drive my Panasonic Blu-Ray player without any programming. This is because the HDMI standard includes, in addition to video and audio, a control channel called CEC.

This is potentially a big win as HDMI should become ubiquitous. CEC is a mandatory part of HDMI 1.3 (but actually having a CEC implementation that does something useful isn’t). As HDMI becomes ubiquitous and consigns analog interconnects to the dustbin of history, we will finally have a control solution that can tie in all the disparate electronics in the typical home theater into a single seamless setup, at least on paper.

Unfortunately, the consumer electronics is doing all it can to muddy the waters. For starters, each vendor insists on maximizing consumer confusion by branding this technology with inconsistent terminology – Toshiba call this Regza Link, Panasonic calls it EZ-Sync. The user interface is also quite inconsistent from device to device. Compare this with how the computer and networking industries managed to create strong unified branding around USB and Wi-Fi. There is yet another digital video standard called DisplayPort, which will presumably be incompatible.

The Toshiba has only 3 HDMI ports and a passel of obsolete analog ports like component video or SVGA. Three HDMI ports are inadequate – I already have 5 HDMI devices waiting to be hooked up:

• Panasonic DMP-BD30 Blu-Ray player
• AppleTV
• Canon HV20 HDV camcorder
• Canon 5DmkII DSLR (awaiting delivery)
• Nintendo Wii (soon)

Toshiba would have been well advised to reduce the number of legacy analog ports instead, specially since they are more expensive than pure digital ports like HDMI, DVI or DisplayPort.

An aphorism often attributed to eugenist and racist Alfred E. Wiggam goes “A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time“. Corporate lawyers (the kind who never see the inside of a courtoom) seem to believe the only way to escape liability is to do nothing. Sometimes, despite their protestations, a company actually does come up with products or services, so they take their revenge in making them as unusable as possible to ensure no one buys them.

I bought a car last December. It is festooned with huge ugly warning signs on the visors. They are painted directly onto the leather and not removable. The car computer shows an annoying disclaimer when started. Every time. And it has to be dismissed manually. My GPS does the same. These are completely mindless ergonomic hurdles that probably do nothing for either safety or even shielding the manufacturer from liability, and make everyone’s life ever slightly more miserable.

During the Macintosh’s development, Steve Jobs famously equated slashing boot times with saving lives. The lawyers with their aggravating disclaimers are doing the exact opposite.