{"id":7858,"date":"2015-11-09T00:01:50","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T08:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=7858"},"modified":"2015-11-07T14:49:36","modified_gmt":"2015-11-07T22:49:36","slug":"my-samsung-nightmare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=7858","title":{"rendered":"My Samsung Nightmare"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s not really a nightmare. Thank the gods I’ve not had one of those in a long time. And I can’t really call it a “dream.” No, it’s one of those times when I try to use a phone in a dream and the results are just nasty.
\n
\nDreams aren’t about details. In fact, you can’t dream about details because the mind isn’t in a receptive state for discrete data manipulation. So when you try to dream about something you can easily do in a conscious state, such as dial a smartphone, the results are disastrous. That’s what happened to me in my most recent smartphone dream.<\/p>\n

No, I don’t dream about smartphones all the time.<\/p>\n

In my dream, I was a mall or some other public place and my ride went missing. So I whipped out my Android tablet to make a phone call. Why did I use a tablet? I don’t know; it was a dream.<\/p>\n

Specifically, I was using a Samsung tablet. In my dream, the tablet had just downloaded a software update. I needed to restart the device before I could make the call and get a ride.<\/p>\n

Other, weird stuff happened in my dream while the update was downloaded. I don’t try to make sense of it, but I do recall what happened after the update was downloaded and I attempted to use the Samsung tablet. Basically, it was an exercise in frustration, which is to be expected in a dream.<\/p>\n

For example, the notification drawer was replaced with a set of icons. The icons were all chess pieces, which made no sense. I wanted to make a phone call and it wasn’t obvious to me which icon I needed to tap to place a phone call: The knight? The rook? The queen?<\/p>\n

I remembered the dream this morning because of that specific incident. I thought, “This must be what it’s like for a beginner to use an Android phone or any other technological device!” Just like in my dream, if you’re unfamiliar with a gizmo and don’t know which icon is which, nothing makes sense. It can be very frustrating.<\/p>\n

When I write a For Dummies<\/em> book on any technology, my instinct is to assume that the reader knows nothing. In my Android books, I place icons in the margin to represent the images a reader is to find on the device’s touchscreen. I call these images margin artwork, though the publisher calls them micons<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For example, the Settings icon is shown in Figure 1. I put similar artwork in the margin whenever an icon is first referenced in a chapter. The same rule holds true in all my Android books for any onscreen icon. This approach beats using the “one thousand words” to describe a picture.<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 1. The Settings icon.<\/p><\/div>\n

If the Android’s touchscreen showed the icon for a chess piece, you can be sure that in my books you’d find that margin artwork handy for immediate deciphering. Too bad I didn’t have such a book in my dream last night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While in a deep sleep, I can imagine what it’s like for someone to face a smartphone for the first time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7858"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7866,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7858\/revisions\/7866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}