I was just updating my Airport Express settings and noticed this rare Apple UI fail. Bad number sorting.
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Looks like a great machine, but the new Macbook Pro starts at US$1999 in the USA but is € 1799 here in Germany, which is $2,444. Imagine that loaded up with overpriced Adobe apps. Seems like a raw deal for Europeans again. Isn’t it America’s economy that’s on the rocks?
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Since we’ve got a couple of MacBooks now I noticed my old 2GHz iMac G5 gathering dust, which seemed to be a shame with that lovely screen. Jon Hicks’s post on setting up his Mac Mini as a media centre prompted me to convert the iMac into a PVR/TV combo (plus it’s still handy as a computer).
The key is the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid tuner stick, which also comes with their great EyeTV software. Although digital coverage is rubbish where I am, we do have analogue cable, so the Hybrid is future-proof-ish.
One of the things that Jon uses is Syncopation, which keeps iTunes libraries in sync across different machines. I don’t really need this as I’m using Airfoil to send audio anywhere, and in any case the iTunes library is shared and my network isn’t that fast to be pinging movies around the place.
But the thing that made me smile was this bit of the blurb on the Syncopation web-site:
Syncopation also allows you to control which files are replicated. Suppose your husband loves Jazz, but you’re not a fan. You can set up a Block List that will keep his Thelonious Monk off your PowerBook.
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Hot on the heels of my post about Director 11 there’s now a web-based version of Hypercard called TileStack. It’s still in beta (aren’t they all?), but you can sign up to test it out or check out the video of it in action.
The original Myst was released as a Hypercard stack and, until the Sims came along, it Myst was the best selling computer game of all time. I’m not just being mysty-eyed (sorry…), for many Hypercard was the forerunner of all that Director and Flash goodness.
(Via Slashdot).
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If you’ve read 5ThirtyOne’s post about setting up Apple Mail with GMail’s IMAP you may be enjoying iPhone goodness and be all happy. But you may also be miserable about the fact that GMail’s implementation of IMAP fakes your IMAP folders based on your labels in GMail, which means you end up with duplicate messages in Mail.app.
Personally I think labels make much more sense as they’re more like smart mailboxes, where you don’t have a duplicate of the message, but rather a flag saying what it concerns. The problem is that if you like to locally cache your IMAP mail for offline viewing, you’ll end up with hundreds of duplicate mails in Mail.app because Mail.app thinks that a message in a label ‘folder’ on GMail is distinct to the version of it in GMail’s All Mail folder (your mail archive on GMail).
Some mail clients, like the powerful but ugly Thunderbird, seem to have more comprehensive settings to subscribe or unsubscribe to certain folders on IMAP servers (and I’m not sure how many people know you can do that in any case). So the solution would be to unsubscribe GMail’s All Mail folder and you’d be fine.
Alas, not only is the subscription/unsubscription is in a relatively obscure place in Mail.app (highlight the mailbox and Get Info brings up the window with Quotas, Mailbox Behaviours and also the Subscription List) but also Apple’s IMAP subscription doesn’t seems to work on almost all IMAP servers, including GMail.
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There are plenty of big announcements and coverage of Steve Jobs’s Macworld keynote. I’m happy to see the new AppleTV, movie downloads and rentals, and of course the MacBook Air.
But it was the the jiggling icons in the new iPhone home screen selection. When you are moving icons around and sorting them the icons jiggle in anticipation (or perhaps fear of being trashed).
Why does this frivolity matter? Well, the first thing for me is, of course, the playfulness of the interface. Die hard functionalists will probably hate it and find it an unnecessary waste of computing resources, but then so is any GUI.
Playful interfaces not only bring some pleasure to everyday tasks, they also encourage the user to explore and through exploring they learn the way the interface works. That’s what playing is all about and the good thing is it doesn’t feel like you are learning, it just feels intuitive or fun.
It also helps add personality to the interface and phones are extremely personal devices.
Lastly, why not? Everyone appreciates a pleasant physical environment – nice cutlery, a stylish lamp, a lovely pen, a favourite armchair. Most of those are necessary – a packing crate, an old door and a couple of piles of bricks functionally work as a desk set-up, but you wouldn’t want to work like that every day. We all spend an inordinate amount of hours on the computer or phone, it makes sense that it’s pleasant to use.
[tags]iphone, apple, macworld, keynote, interface, play, gui[/tags]
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John Gruber is one of the few Apple advocates that writes with intelligent consideration rather than just being an over-enthused fanboy. He has just written a pretty smart analysis of the Apple iPhone pricing, which Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer lambasted.
Before the iPhone was announced I was in a meeting with some folks at Fjord in which the team were discussing applications for various phones. Like many who regularly browse mobile phone shops to see what’s going on, I have long been thinking that there are simply just too many. But what struck me in the Fjord meeting was just how many different interfaces and products even one manufacturer made.
Compared to the iPod it seemed absurd. Sure there have been various generations of the iPod, but they have all pretty much been minor variations on a theme. The iPhone, as Gruber says, is more complex, but basically an iPod that also does a whole lot more.
All the different phones around are due to some misguided market segmentation, I believe. Much smarter would be to make a product with a broad appeal. Gruber makes a good point here:
Why worry about the iPhone’s appeal to corporate IT? The iPod isn’t marketed to businesses and Apple has sold 100 million of them. The iPod is marketed to people, and the iPhone is, too. RIM sold 2 million BlackBerry devices in its most recent quarter; Apple sold 10.5 million iPods in the same period.
And there’s a huge, fundamental difference between these two markets. Businesses, typically, want to buy the cheapest things possible for their employees to use. When buying for themselves, people want to buy the nicest things they can afford.
Personally I’d rather see less flavours of phones from Nokia and, instead, one or two really well designed ones each year. Much smarter to get everyone to love the one thing you make rather than make a whole spread of things badly.
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I’m going to join what will be an enormous club and blog about Apple’s iPhone. I nearly didn’t, just to not follow the crowd, but given my interest is in emerging technologies, interactivity and interface design I really need to.
So, well, it is amazing of course just as a great piece of product design and technology. It’s great to see a full-screen device that ditches buttons as well as many of the multi-touch interface ideas that Jeff Han has been working on for some time. I’ve been waiting to see these ideas in an everyday product.
Running OS X, with its attention to detail and multimodal ways of working, is also very positive. But the main thing is that it could completely change the landscape of mobiles.
Completely change the landscape?
Yes. When I was chatting the folks at Fjord about some of the work they’ve been doing in the mobile space (incidentally Fjord have just finished this project, Go, for Yahoo! ) I had a thought about the ridiculous range of mobiles, even from one company. Apple have been smart with the iPod in the way they have kept the concept roughly the same even as they make new versions. Nokia, for example, might be much better off not segmenting the market but rather creating a really decent range of maybe two or three phones and then just keep simplifying them. That’s the Apple model and that’s what they have done with the iPhone.
Additionally, the Wi-Fi, the most likely very easy Apple-style manner of setting up your connections will also get over the big bugbear of mobile devices – namely that they’re such an incredible pain in the arse to set up if you want to do any kind of decent network communication.
Some of the user-interface elements (like the multi-touch and drag and throw style interaction) might seem small, but those things have been huge and permanent hurdle to people using mobile services.
Lastly, it’s probably reasonably easy to make nice apps for the iPhone, especially given the widget-style interface. This opens it up to a great deal more innovative development than on current mobiles.
There are probably many more things to be added to this list and probably some downsides, but I’ll have to get hold of one first…
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I was interested to see this video on YouTube for the BumpTop interface that mimics a ‘real’ desktop. Interested but disappointed.
The whole idea of a desktop metaphor is that it is a metaphor not the real thing. There are things about a real desktop that I really don’t like, like piles and piles of stuff to sift through. I realise that it is an interesting route to go down to try and emulate some of the physical signals of piles of paper (i.e. that one on the top at right angles is really important). But the solution isn’t to make it look more real.
BumpTop ends up creating more problems than it solves and seeing that it comes out of the Dynamic Graphics Project from the University of Toronto’s Computer Science department part of the reason why. It’s a great example of why you shouldn’t let computer scientists loose on interface design.
Granted, it is quite slick and cute, but it misses the point. I don’t need my visual metaphor to be given greater attention (all those little icons bouncing around like books). What is needed is metaphor of intention and Apple’s Exposé in OS X has already claimed that major leap in GUI design and most of the good parts of BumpTop.
What struck me about Exposé when I first used it was that it didn’t break the workflow (actually it enhanced it) whilst it did break the desktop metaphor. In the real world I can put documents into folders and sort them, etc. but I can’t make them all expand from a pile and hover in front of me and then ping back to a pile once I have chosen one. I struggled to work out why that was for a while and then it struck me that this is a metaphor for another kind of action, but it’s more about intention than the realism of the action. When you rifle through papers, half lifting the edges of a stack of magazines, for example, you get enough information to recognise the thing you want. Often that’s just the colour or a part of an image or a single word or two. You drag it out of the middle of the pile without unravelling everything and drop the edges back down again.
So that part is quite similar to the action of displaying all your open documents in Exposé, albeit a bit more abstracted in the GUI, which is again the point of a GUI. The ability to clear your ‘desk’ of everything magically and then have it all back in the order it was again is one of intention – something you’d love to be able to do in real life, but can’t. If you get that right, you have a great GUI. If you focus on the literal translation of the real world then, well, you get all it’s problems.
In their paper the BumpTop authors, Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan, realise this at the very end:
Like the GUI desktop, our prototype runs into problems when the number of items gets large. As Whittaker et al. (2001) found, “the main limitation of [piling] was that it did not scale well: pilers found difficulties accessing information once piles had begun to multiply. We intend to explore extensions that might deviate somewhat from the physical piling metaphor but benefit from leveraging the underlying computer.
That’ll be the abstraction of a GUI they’re after. Here is a totally different example of something simple working very well indeed (and okay, they’re computer scientists too, can’t you tell by the thrilling presentation techniques?):
(That last one via Knotty).
p.s. For the anal and academically minded, that Whittaker reference above is: Whittaker, S. & Hirschberg, J. (2001). The character, value, and management of personal paper archives. ACM Trans on CHI, 8(2). p. 150-170
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Businessweek have a great selection of in-depth articles about Apple’s Senior Vice-President for Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive and they give a real insight into his famously secretive design process.
It seems less that Ive is secretive for the sake of it, or even for the sake of rumours getting out about products, but more that he is intensely focussed on the process of design and doesn’t want the distractions.
I think there is probably another aspect which is about trust. Ive and his small team (there are only about a dozen people in it) work through many, many iterations of any design. For that process to work in a group you have to really pour your heart and soul into the process and trust and respect the critiques of those you are working with so that you can evolve the design further. That means you need to trust that the person telling you your ‘perfect’ design (perhaps the 20th iteration) still needs work isn’t out to get you. I imagine it has taken some time to get the mix right and it is probably quite fragile. Innovation isn’t easy – you need people who trust you to go out on a limb, but also others you trust to reign you back in or push you further.
In terms of understanding the importance of the emotional and playful aspect of products, I very much enjoyed this snippet:
During an internship with design consultancy Roberts Weaver Group, he created a pen that had a ball and clip mechanism on top, for no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. “It immediately became the owner’s prize possession, something you always wanted to play with,” recalls Grinyer, a Roberts Weaver staffer at the time. “We began to call it ‘having Jony-ness,’ an extra something that would tap into the product’s underlying emotion.”
(Via Niti Bahn at the excellent Core77 who has posted the full set of links).
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