Image credit: Dr. Neil
Dr. Neil Roodyn, better known simply as Dr. Neil, has been involved in the IT industry for over 20 years. He co-founded nsquared solutions, a Sydney-based company which develops apps for iPhone OS and solutions for Microsoft platforms, particularly Microsoft Surface. The company is a Microsoft Surface Strategic Partner and has shipped one of the one of the very first Microsoft Surface Certified programs called MakeWords 1.0. Dr. Neil has long been a supporter for and shares his expertise in Microsoft technologies in the last two decades including C++, COM, .NET, Windows Mobile and Tablet PCs, and has become a Microsoft Regional Director for the Asian Pacific and MVP for the Windows Live Platform.Dr. Neil is nice to be here to discuss with me a bit about nsquared and Microsoft Surface.
Tell us the story behind the founding of nsquared. What made you decide to form the company?
The company was formed by 3 Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, when the economy started to slow down and things were not going so well the other 2 guys decided to bow out. I am not the type of person to quit on something and I believe that nsquared has something unique to offer the software development industry. So I kept the company going.
And nsquared wasn’t the first company you’ve founded is that right?
Correct, it is the 6th company I have been involved in forming, I have also helped other startup businesses get going over the years. I love the startup culture, just getting stuff done and not dealing with too much politics.
How would you describe a typical day at work as an nsquared director, Microsoft Regional Director, and MVP?
Busy 
I travel a lot, I am traveling for over three quarters of the year, 2009 was particularly crazy as I spent a lot of time traveling around Europe, delivering training and working with clients. I don’t really have typical days, things are always changing and I am often in a different part of the world.
Why is nsquared focused specifically on Microsoft Surface and education?
We believe that Microsoft Surface offers something very unique to education. We have spent a lot of energy building applications that focus on multiple student interaction. Surface enables a new paradigm for technology use in the class room. Previously technology in the class room has been a fairly solitary engagement, a single student at a computer, with a single mouse and keyboard. Teachers are wary of students spending too much time alone as it can lead to integration and behavioral issues. Microsoft Surface encourages the use of technology to enhance the face to face interaction that students can have. This is something nsquared believes is critical to enhancing the learning experience and the applications in the nsquared Surface Education Pack focus on this.
It seems that Surface is similar to Xbox in a sense that the hardware specifications are fixed (so far) making software development, debugging and performance tuning much simpler than standard Windows programs where they need to be tested against a range of hardware combinations. What do you think of this view?
I think that is partly true. the focus when building software for Microsoft Surface is not on the technology though. The technology is simple, any good developer can build software that will work with Surface, but most developers do not build software that really takes advantage of Surface. When building great Surface applications our focus at nsquared is on the human interactions that occur between the users. This is not something software developers have really thought much about before, which means most software developers don’t have the skills needed to build awesome Surface applications. This is not a technical problem.
In the Microsoft Surface User Experience Guidelines emphasis is given to simplicity in the user interface and trimming of program features. You’ve also mentioned in one of your nsquared videos about the feature creep problem. Do you think that in pursuing simplicity for Surface programs that the richness of desktop applications that users come to expect will be lost and therefore becoming supersized mobile device apps where features are also kept to a minimum?
Features are greatly over emphasized by companies that are selling features The reality with most software is that only about 10-15% of the features are used 90% of the time. If you can identify those features you can build applications that are very rich and provide far better experiences than most of the software we have seen produced over the last few decades. I think people in the technology industry spend too much time thinking about features because they are easy to quantify and put in a nice table for comparison. Great software will leave the user feeling happy about what they have achieved and how they achieved it. Really great software will keep the user happy while they are using the software. How do you put that in a little comparison table?
In Windows, nearly all programs use a standardized UI design featuring menu bars, toolbars, scrollbars, and window panes, making it easy for users to adjust to new programs. But Surface deemphasizes these UI elements and sort of encourages a tailor-made UI for each program based on its function. The question is, is it practical and preferable to have standardized and consistent Surface UIs?
Standardized UIs are super important for general purpose interfaces, such as OS X or Windows, where the interface needs to be used by a wide range of people for a wide range of tasks. What these GUI constructs provide is a ‘Lowest Common Denominator’ for all applications that run on those platforms.
When you have fixed location units (such as Surface) with a defined context of operation then you can get a lot smarter with the user interface and break away from being tied to the general purpose interface. This lets the applications behave in a much more intelligent way that feels more natural to the user, in the context of your deployed environment.
Now that Surface’s touch input can mimic pressure sensitivity (by sensing changes in finger blob size), do you see pen input (from Tablet PC) becoming obsolete?
Absolutely not. The fluid nature of digital ink is something I wish Microsoft would put more emphasis on. Touch and stylus are different things. A stylus is a tool for far more accurate input and manipulation. Fingers are great for availability and they are natural to use but you will never get accurate hand writing or painting with fingers. I worked closely with the Tablet PC team in Redmond for several years to help them engage with developers. I still believe the future will include the stylus for various forms of input, again think about the context of the application and the scenario and then you can get smarter with the interfaces.
Looking over the two decades of work in your career, what would be your greatest achievement so far?
Thats a really tough question. In many ways I feel like we are just getting started. I have done a lot of teaching in my time, COM, agile development, mobility, etc… I know that I have influenced many people but I don’t think it has made much difference to the over all state of the software industry.
I still look around and see companies (big and small) writing buggy code, shipping terrible software and making users unhappy. I would like to change that.
End of Interview
Thanks Dr. Neil for sharing your insights with us!
You can learn more about Dr. Neil at his personal website and nsquared solutions at its corporate website and its channel on YouTube.
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