phonezilla

Recently Marco Arment discussed the shift in smartphone design when the iPhone came along and wondered if the iPad would have the same effect on the budding tablet industry. As John Gruber has demonstrated, this seems to be the case: a tablet’s physical design is being defined solely by Apple.

While part of me is comfortable with this - the iPad’s aesthetic qualities are impeccable - I also lament the lack of innovation here. This is essentially a brand new category of device, and it’s a green field opportunity to make something that matters. Instead of coming up with something new and fresh, copying Apple once again seems to be The Way To Do It. What a shame.

I’m keeping an eye on Palm, though; their WebOS 2.0 preview looks impressive. Maybe they’ll choose to walk a different path when it comes to hardware, too.

Everyone knows that the iPad doesn’t support Flash. In the course of my iPad usage I can only recall one time when I truly missed Flash - and that was when I desperately wanted to hear the latest Ceelo Green song, which was not available in HTML5 format on YouTube. (I ended up viewing it on my Mac instead.)

But when I do come across Flash content, predominantly large homepage feature rotators, it is replaced by a message telling me to install or upgrade Flash Player.

Simply put, this message is now obsolete. It is an enormous assumption to think one is browsing a site on a laptop or desktop computer: smartphones, tablets, TVs, and other things we haven’t even dreamed up can and will access the full web. It’s high time to change the approach.

Naturally the best option is to create HTML content as a full counterpart to Flash. This begs the question, “Why use Flash at all?” but I’ll leave that aside for now. Offering a standards-based alternative suggests that your content deserves to be seen by everyone.

If building something out in both HTML and Flash isn’t an option, and you don’t want to ditch Flash, then you need to change the messaging to your users. Now. Putting up a generic message devalues your content to the point of uselessness. It says, “This really isn’t important enough for us to care about showing it to you under any circumstance. So nuts to you.” A brand killer, in other words. A lousy experience, in other other words.

Perhaps you can summarize the content in one or two lines of text? Maybe you can still include a sale price or two? How about not keeping your phone number in Flash?

The great HTML5 v. Flash debate has exposed a flaw in our collective use of Flash: all too often, it is the wrong tool for the job and usually represents a lack of understanding of the audience. There are exceptions. Hulu, for instance, is a very different case than a newspaper site which chooses to use a Flash object to display a photo gallery. And as Hulu spreads out to the masses, they’ll need to be more cognizant than ever about how they engage users with outdated technology.

However, there are many options which don’t involve throwing technology roadblocks in a user’s face. Telling users to upgrade is the hallmark of a bygone era when the only way to access the web was via a desktop computer. Things have changed, and your message should, too.

Something to consider. This past week I was reading an article at a newspaper site which included a supplementary PDF. The full link in the sidebar read, “Click here to view the master plan in .pdf [sic] format.” Below that was an icon for Adobe Reader and a link which read, “To view this document you might need the free .pdf [sic] reader from Adobe. You can download it by clicking here.”

All I wanted to do is view the master plan. So why is this newspaper letting technology get in the way? There’s so much jargon and baggage in those links that I was immediately put off - even though I fully understood it. Even the fact that “.pdf” was in the text includes a high degree of baggage with it: computer file systems, file extensions, file associations…how ridiculous.

Alternative: include a link to the master plan with the text, “View the master plan.” The technological onus belongs on the browsing device and its operating system, not the user.

One of the many free apps I downloaded for my iPad was Amazon’s Kindle app. Between Kindle, Instapaper and iBooks I felt I’d have the majority of my reading needs covered. The good news is that this has indeed been the case; the bad news is that Kindle initially left a bad taste in my mouth with a lousy first run experience.

I downloaded the app, installed it, and ran it. The splash screen was lovely and comforting. I was then presented with a list of available books, one of which was the Oxford English Dictionary. I hadn’t requested this book nor purchased it, so I attempted to stop the download. No dice. I quit the app and returned to it to find the dictionary downloading itself again. This was getting annoying. I couldn’t stop this download. I didn’t know why it was downloading. I didn’t want it. And the Kindle app gave me no indication as to what the hell it was doing.

I jogged over to Amazon’s website to review my Kindle purchases, even though there weren’t any yet, and sure enough the dictionary was there. I was able to successfully cancel the download there. Whew! Finally I could devote my precious bits to important books like Eat Pray Love.

I kid, but I really was glad. Then I was reading The Time Machine and came across a word I didn’t know. I touched the word to get its definition and was told that Kindle couldn’t define it without…ready?…The Oxford English Dictionary in my library. Doh!

I think I know the technical reasons behind this, but the way Kindle handled this was really subpar. Here’s how it should have gone down: when I first opened the app, Kindle should have asked me if I wanted to download the dictionary - and explain what would happen if I didn’t. Very easy.

Instead the Kindle app left me feeling out of control and helpless. What a terrible way to start a relationship!

This all kind of happened naturally while I wasn’t looking but, in short, I have a hierarchy of meetings - specifically, what I name them.

A chat is usually short (15-30 minutes) and I’m not looking for any enormous details, but high-level stuff. Ideas. Thoughts. “Hey, what about…” types of things.

A discussion is a bit more serious, but will likely run 15-60 minutes. This is where we’re going to get together and really figure a few things out, and hopefully we’ll all know that we have other stuff to do when we’re done.

A meeting is serious. It’s 30-60 minutes. Something really needs attention. We’ve got to do Actual Work in the meeting and afterwards too.

The formality of each is reflected in its name, so I include that in invites when possible too.

I hate to say it, but I guess I kind of am ragging on Tnooz, the site focusing on the travel industry. The latest piece that got me bothered? “Why user experience on travel sites is so important and how to get it right” by Timothy O’Neil-Dunne. All right! UX in travel! Cool! Let’s hear it! First line:

Although not a user experience expert I have the benefit of having built many different ecommerce businesses.

Oh. Hm.

The piece then devolves into a “this is great/this sucks” piece with no data, research, or anything but gut behind it. He’s obviously been deeply involved with Expedia since the start, being a founding manager there and all, but articles like this frustrate me only when they’re portrayed as one thing when they’re really not.

Also, I can’t find a lick of the supposed “how to get it right” piece in the article. The five pieces of advice at the tail end are time-worn phrases (“Time is money”) and offer no actual anything behind them.

Tnooz, get a UX expert to write for you (there are a lot of good ones at, say, Orbitz!) and take it from there. Yes, there’s value in improving UX in the travel space - lots of value. But a laundry list of sites and quick opinions on them isn’t a prescription; it’s just a blog entry.

I’ve now owned an iPad for a week and wanted to share my initial thoughts on it.

First, most of my predictions back in January about how I would use the iPad were correct. My overall usage of the MacBook has fallen off a cliff. Last Sunday I spent maybe 15 minutes with it, mostly getting the iPad synced. I used it about 5 hours during the week to do some work. And I’m using it now, mostly to update our budget (the program we use is Mac only.) In contrast I use the iPad on my commute (2 hours each day), up to 30 minutes over lunch, and pretty much for all of my casual computing at home - an embarrassing amount of time which I won’t share here. I’ll just say that my iPad usage is significant.

One thing I noticed is that the OS definitely forces me to consider my tasks differently. I noticed that I’m doing a lot less idle web surfing. While I still goof around on the web, killing time, it’s less. I imagine some of that time was taken up playing The Incident. But I’ve actually come to appreciate the single track mind of the iPad. Twitterrific helps make Twitter feel more focused and useful, and I’ve come to like it much more than Tweetie on the Mac.

The keyboard is surprisingly usable, although there are a few things I dislike. I hate not having a hyphen on the main keyboard, I hate having to hold down the comma key to get an apostrophe, and I all too often switch keyboards when attempting to press Shift.

Instapaper is my main application here and it doesn’t disappoint (except when multi-page articles aren’t captured properly.) It’s dead simple to save up stuff for later and then read it on the train. It is so, so nice.

The Notes application is sufficient but just barely. It feels bulky and awkward. It’s like using TextWrangler for quick notes on the Mac: it works, but it’s not really the best tool for the job.

I really need a case for it. While my fantastic Timbuk2 Blogger 2.0 bag (highly recommended) includes a padded compartment, there’s no comfortable way to carry it around. I’m saving my pennies for the DODOcase.

All told, I’m very happy with this device. It’s incredibly impressive: the build quality is just about perfect, the OS is rock solid, and it never gets in the way of getting to your app/website/content. It truly is the first big stab at changing the way we interact with computers and I think it’s terribly successful.

markitecht:

Would drivers be more or less likely to stop at this ‘redesigned’ stop sign?

There are calls to action in this world. In many cases these rely on visual cues, signs and symbols. As a society, and even as a species, we communicate through a ‘universal’ visual language. This language comes from experience, from government, from cultural trends and taste, and many other sources.

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