Your humble TheGlassLogger skeptical but wanting to believe as he tries out Glass for the first time.
If you’re one of the many people who wish they had been able to pick up an Explorer Edition Glass device, you may want to consider yourself a little lucky. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Glass. Taking photos and video is easier than with any device I’ve ever owned (and I’ve owned many cameras, including two pairs of dedicated video glasses). However, the software just isn’t there yet and Google’s UI is a bit too minimalistic to be practical when considering all the cool-as-hell stuff Glass is capable of doing.
In my last post on TheGlassLog, I described how Google Glass doesn’t really run “apps” nor does it really use “cards”. Both “apps” and “cards” are words Google uses to describe how Glass works. In my previous post, I described “apps” as “services” (because they are not really installed on Glass but are run on a server somewhere) and “cards” as “books” on a “bookshelf” (because Google’s “cards” can come with interior content thus causing the “card” metaphor to fall apart).
All Your Eggs on One Bookshelf
Now, imagine the bookshelf I described in my last post. It’s perpendicular and directly to the right of your head. Every service you enable for Glass delivers content to this bookshelf. This bookshelf is also where your texts, emails, photos and videos are kept. This, alone, can make for a very confusing jumble of content to navigate through. Now think about all those services you’ll want to enable.
What it looks like when you are swiping forward to go backward through the books on your shelf (aka your Glass stream). The thumb nails don’t render quickly, so you really don’t have much of an idea of what you’re scrolling past.
When I first got Glass, I enabled almost every service Google had officially sanctioned. Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, CNN, NY Times, and a few others. Suddenly, I had my texts, emails, photos, and videos mixed in with my Tweets, news updates and Japanese pop-culture posts.
The myglass page features each service in it’s own box. This is easy enough to use, but it’s strange that there is no way to disable these services from Glass, itself. You can access this page from a browser on a mobile device (even an iOS device) or the MyGlass app on an Android device, but not Glass.
In short, content on Glass is organized the way it is in a junk drawer. Only, this isn’t junk–it’s your content! You don’t just toss all of the stuff you collect during your days onto a single shelf. You have different shelves for different types of things. It should be the same for Glass.
Here are some more examples of what swiping deep into your bookshelf looks like currently:
Sometimes the icons for the types of files are visible, so that helps in navigating at least a little bit. But, honestly, not so much.
When thumbnails for your files do start to show up, they’re practically off the screen. As a result you have to just randomly stop swiping based on the relative dates that do show up. Of course, I hate relative dating–Google really needs to get more specific. How about marking off the nearest hour for the files created in that hour? Anything is better than only citing a 24-hour window.
So, when you slow down while swiping through your bookshelf, thumbnails generate faster but by then it’s too late for them to really be helpful. If you keep swiping you have to wait for thumbnails for the rest of your files to render. Of course, waiting for thumbnails is a pain on most devices. But really, it’s not just Google that should have gotten past this problem by now, one would think, anyway.
So, What’s a Google to do About It?
The main bookshelf should be for your own stuff–like texts and email. Your photos and video need their own shelf. Then for news services, they should get their own shelf, too. Then your social networking needs to be on a separate shelf, too. Hell, better yet, these shelves should all be customizable.
Currently, the way you enable services for your Glass is by going to glass.google.com/myglass and flipping these little switches. Why not add a pulldown to allow us to decide what shelf each app should be displayed on?
As far as navigating these new shelves, how about swiping up or down? Currently, swiping up does nothing and swiping down functions like the “back” button on Android devices. So, fine, use a two-finger swipe-down to navigate between shelves. Sure, currently, a two-finger swipe-down puts Glass into sleep mode, but why not change that to a three-finger swipe-down?
Having all content on just one shelf is kind of absurd. In fact, it was the very first thing I complained about when I got Glass just over a month ago.
Hopefully, when the next Glass OS update comes in early August, we’ll see this problem fixed. To me, it seems like one of the more obvious problems to solve.
Thanks for reading TheGlassLog! Next time I’ll be reviewing the Twitter service for Glass. Missed any past posts in TheGlass Log? Read them here!
via thepete.com http://thepete.com/theglasslog-why-owning-google-glass-right-now-isnt-as-awesome-as-you-might-think/
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