Interesting piece by MG Siegler over at TechCrunch about the Magic Trackpad and its potential impact. I largely agree, as we are seeing the start of a significant interface change within the computing space.
That said I think the mouse will live on as a niche device - solely for gamers and specialty apps. It’ll be relegated to that status by continual improvements in trackpads and, eventually, a new physical interface which builds on trackpads. I give it 10 years.
The fact that Google Reader’s columns are off by two pixels is going to bug me forever.
It’s a small thing, but Mark Meeker at Orbitz recently tweeted:
“Username should be 8 to 14 characters long and must contain at least one letter and one number” - A number? In my username? Really?
And while he was rightfully complaining about a number being required in a username (“Hi, I’m paul893429482@aol.com!”) I picked up on the fact that the error message said should instead of must.
Clearly, this username must be a certain length and must contain a number. There’s no way around it. “Should” is a suggestion. “You know, you should really try a Chick-fil-A sandwich” is a lot different than, “You must eat this burger from White Castle.” I suspect this word was chosen to make the message seem softer but, in the end, it just dilutes the message.
How would I rephrase it if I still had those oddball requirements?
“Sorry, but your username must be 8-14 characters long including 1 letter and 1 number.”
Lesson: when writing error messages, say what you mean. And yes, apologize. The system made this mistake - not the user.
ETA: Even this ridiculous error message I blogged last month got “must” right. “Respect these rules” is a curious choice though.
Brilliant commentary on Facebook games via a Facebook game.
Well beyond late to the party, I know, but if you watch these and aren’t moved in some way, your heart is made of stone.
Recently I switched task management apps, moving from The Hit List to Things. I also gave Alfred a go even though I’m a hardcore QuickSilver fan. Last year, I switched from Microsoft Word to Apple Pages. Why switch apps? This isn’t an easy thing to do so there has to be a big dollop of motivation to make a switch and deal with an unknown learning curve.
Let’s start with the easiest case. I don’t use word processors too often anymore but I use text editors all the time: TextWrangler, Mail.app, OmniOutliner, HTML textareas, etc. Part of what bothered me with Word was feature-itis: it felt like this hulking, ridiculously overblown app for simple tasks such as writing a letter or putting ideas together. That feeling came from Word’s myriad toolbars and gee-whiz interface: Microsoft was trying to be too cute with OS X’s once-novel features (look! an entire inspector panel can pour out of a toolbar button!) and yet, I couldn’t just turn them off altogether without sacrificing some degree of functionality. Too much for the job.
In contrast, Pages does have a substantial feature set but uses standard system toolbars to minimize their visual impact. To me, the amount of visual clutter in Pages’ default view is a stark contrast to Word’s. It lets me focus on its core use - working with text - so well that I use it for general purpose writing.
I’ve been hemming and hawing over GTD/to do apps for years. I initially settled on Things and became very comfortable with it.
Until The Hit List came along, that is. It was what I really wanted: a magical legal pad whose line items could be sliced and diced in lots of ways. All tasks grouped by feature? Yep. By due date? Yep. By priority? Got it. Never mind that Things had almost all of these same features; for me, it felt more natural in The Hit List. The workflow to enter a bunch of tasks at once is perfect for me: hit Enter, type, and hit Enter to move on to the next task. To me this is very stream of consciousness and quite beautiful.
I had been using a beta version of The Hit List for what seemed like forever, so I visited the Potion Factory site to check on the app’s development and… well, there’s really nothing doing. At all. The last code update just extended the beta timeout to this autumn. What a disappointment! I’d rather use The Hit List but it’s difficult not to look at the incredible work happening at Cultured Code, the people behind Things, and realize that only one of these apps has a viable future.
So I switched back to Things and it’s better than I remember. I wasn’t able to directly import (drag and drop) my The Hit List tasks but starting anew was painless. If I hadn’t used Things prior to The Hit List, I suspect my discomfort level would be a tad higher but, at its core, the functionality is substantially similar.
Like The Hit List, QuickSilver - a task launcher and all-purpose utility - isn’t under active development. But it’s wedged into my daily workflow and is indispensable for me. I use it for my web shortcuts, files and folders, apps, and controlling iTunes. That said, QuickSilver just doesn’t cooperate with my work Mac. It seems to have a problem with network drives; whenever my machine wakes up, QuickSilver hangs for minutes (minutes!) before responding. In other words it’s useless for me at work.
I decided to give Alfred a go. But after using it for a short amount of time I decided to just not use a launcher on my work Mac and revert to Spotlight when needed.
QuickSilver isn’t under active development and I’m happy to use it; with The Hit List, though, I saw this as a disadvantage. I haven’t yet sussed out why this is - but I’m noting it here as a personal quirk.
The first app I used in the task launcher realm was QuickSilver. It was new and unlike anything else so, for me, QuickSilver defines how a launcher should look and how a launcher should work. Alfred might be superior in other ways (like, say, still being actively developed - zing!) but since it doesn’t have a core metaphor similar to QuickSilver, I’m not currently interested.
Consequently QuickSilver’s language fits well with my workflow because it uses a noun and verb for most tasks. I use QuickSilver’s two-pane display to support this flow. To use QuickSilver, you tell it the thing you’d like to manipulate, and then you describe how you’d like to manipulate it. QuickSilver learns from your previous interactions and tries to predict what you mean as you’re typing. This works extremely well. If QuickSilver biffs a guess I can correct it.
Alfred’s default behavior is to accept a noun and then present multiple verbs to the user via keyboard shortcuts. If I enter “jQuery documentation,” Alfred will try to determine the best verb options based on what’s on my computer as well as what web searches I might want to do. It then assigns Command-1…Command-n to the top options.
For me this makes communicating the verb feel more laborious than it actually is. The amount of work required to get to my goal isn’t substantially different than it is with QuickSilver and may even be less in some cases. But it’s different, and to my mind the difference is significant enough to discourage me from continuing to use it. For now. Once it’s a little more mature I may give it another go.
Zooming out a bit, though, there’s a big difference between the apps I successfully switched to (Pages, Things) and the one I didn’t switch to (Alfred.)
Pages and Things are both working on established analog models; Alfred isn’t. Pages and Word are, at their cores, word processors. This means that when I use the app, I’m expecting to interact with a big big textarea that looks like a piece of paper even if I’m writing for a non-paper environment. This is an assumption built on years of use: even the oldest word processor programs I can remember had margin and tab rulers at the tops of their screens to evoke physical word processors and typewriters.
Things and The Hit List are task management tools. If you’re not using an app for this purpose then you’re likely using a checklist made with pen and paper. It’s no coincidence that both of these apps use checklists as a starting point for their interfaces and enhance them with computer-y goodness. I can enter a task with notes, and when I’m done I can check it off. Very straightforward.
QuickSilver and Alfred are task launchers, albeit ones with versatile, expanded feature sets. But task launchers don’t really have an offline counterpart so I’m forced to fall back to my first experience with this type of tool. In this case that’s QuickSilver. The mental model has been set by that app and until I see something superior - the unfortunate “I’ll know it when I see it” syndrome - QuickSilver is the best representation of that tool.
Thus, in order for me to willingly move away from QuickSilver I’ll need an app whose interface evokes QuickSilver without explicitly copying it, and offers a degree of enhancement - large or small.
It would be a total bonus round for the people behind such an app to evaluate offline models and determine if there’s one out there that would make sense for such a tool. This isn’t an easy problem to solve, but such an app would have a potentially huge reach beyond people who love task launchers and keyboards like me.
My (current!) colleague Joanna Wiebe has put together a lot of great thoughts on time, how we perceive it, and how we communicate it with websites (in particular.)
Writer and teacher Alice Bailey said, “…time is the sequence of events and of states of consciousness as registered by the physical brain. Where no physical brain exists, what humanity understands by time is nonexistent.” In other words, if a tree falls in the forest and there is no observation of its descent, it fell in no time.
Jeff Bezos, speaking to Princeton’s Baccalaureate Class of 2010:
I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice….
When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Reminds me of this quote.
Beautiful design. Via mathowie.
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - “The Mighty Sparrow”
Chris Wilson. Easily one of my favorite drummers with a giant beard.
Ted Leo for president.
All right, this is the 3rd largest city in America - we tried to get the Olympics! - and somehow this monstrosity is the official site for both O’Hare and Midway airports? This? It came from a “I just learned HTML 3 and Flash!” course. It’s ugly, it’s hard to use, and it makes Chicago look like a bunch of amateurs.
Chicago Airport System, you’re on notice. Oh, and stop charging for wi-fi too. That’s obnoxious.
Click here to see 11 iOS icons made in only CSS, no images whatsoever.
NOTE: This demo will only work correctly on a webkit browser and has only been tested in Safari 5 and Google Chrome 5. Here’s how it will look when rendered correctly. Update: Apparently, there’s a bad bug in…
Reading Derek Powazek’s great post about the emerging mores of social networking sites set off a trip wire in my own brain regarding a feature I wish Twitter, at least, had: squelch.
The squelch feature is something I recall from my days on GEnie, when chat was referred to as a CB simulator because that was the most useful analogy. But it was essentially what we know of as chat: a room with participants talking together and individually. While I didn’t use the CB simulator often - there was an hourly charge - I did once start programming a CB client for the Commodore 128; thus I became familiar with squelch.
Why “squelch?” I found one particular definition quite elegant:
(squelch circuit): A circuit that suppresses the output of a radio receiver if the signal strength falls below a certain level.
If a signal is putting out too much noise, it can be squelched. Talk about a direct and apt analogy! If your conversation has less value to me right now, I can squelch it and choose to unsquelch it at some future time.
More than once I’ve wished that Twitter or a Twitter client supported squelching. There are times when I’d like to not read about a particular user’s goings-on, but I’d like to come back later without any fuss. “PAUL HAS CHOSEN TO BLOCK YOU!” and “PAUL IS READING YOUR TWEETS AGAIN!” should be traded for, “Paul needs a little break” and, “Hey, uh, Paul started listening again.” To steal Derek’s analogy, it’s sectioning off conversations with a butter knife instead of a chainsaw.
There are design and technical challenges which naturally go along with implementing such a feature, but I think offering an alternative to such a severe action would be really useful.
From the Gallery of Questionable UI Decisions: this is from a survey I took regarding an event I attended (specifics have been removed from the screenshot.) But I loved that I had to enter the year of the event… and the drop down started at 1900… and went all the way through 2020. In other words, “We’ve got this default year control. It’s really dumb. Have fun!” I was very tempted to submit a review for the event that will take place on November 16, 2019. As Ryan said, “This class will have been a 4 out of 5!”
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