10 posts tagged “apple”

Isaac on the phone

The nice thing about the iPhone v2 software, and the App Store, is all the clever, pretty apps.

The annoying thing about the iPhone v2 software, and the App Store, is all the clever, pretty apps.

This has all obviously been discussed to death, and I don't have much more to contribute on that angle, so I'll leave it at that.

But one of the less-noticed aspects of iPhone v2 and the plethora of App Store toys is that the "springboard" home screen interface from the original iPhone isn't scaling very well. Sure, it worked great at first, when the phone just shipped with 11 applications on top and another 4 on the "dock", and it was still fine when the default list grew to 13 -- even then there were blank slots to fill in, so no problem there.

The main screen started to become problematic when the 1.1.3 release in January 2008 allowed you to turn Safari bookmarks into tappable pseudo-apps, and in turn allowed you to set up multiple "pages" of icons. That was fine as long as you just had a handful of screens to deal with, but -- especially now that you can add both bookmarks and actual applications -- it really doesn't scale well at all if you start to have dozens of apps to keep track of.

On the Mac, handling lots of applications is no problem. They're all kept together in your /Applications folder (aka C:\Program Files for the Windows folks), the ones you're most interested in can be linked to from the Dock (aka the Start Menu), and the system is generally very efficient at letting you sift through to what you want. Not so on the iPhone now.

If I'm on the first screen on my phone right now, and I want to open up Shakespeare, I have to flick through five screens to get to it. So what had been a single action before -- "tap on icon" -- is now a six stage process -- "flick left, flick left, flick left, flick left, flick left, tap on icon" -- plus a much higher cognitive load, because, and here's the really fun part, things keep moving around, so you have to actually read through the intervening screens, just in case it changed.

The App Store application itself, as well as the link to it from iTunes back on the computer, has the ability to seek out & alert you to updated applications. Super. But when you download updates on the phone, it appears to create a second temporary copy of the app at the last screen, then either leaves it there at the end, or moves it back to the screen the original had been on.

If a screen ends up being asked to hold more than 16 apps, even temporarily, then things get out of whack. Let's say you're trying to reorganize an icon from screen 5 back to screen 3, but because screen 4 already has 16 icons, there's no room for the app we're moving to be stored there. "Who cares?," we ask, "it's not staying there anyway, right?" The phone cares, because you can't just go from screen 5 to screen 3 in one motion, you have to drag it over to the left, hover around the middle for a bit, then drag it over to the left again. In the interim, whatever you had at the lower-right corner of screen 4 gets bumped to the top-right corner of screen 5.

Okay, so you could get around that problem by leaving enough "holes" on the screen to keep that shuffling from happening. Fine. But it's already annoying enough as it is to have to go through 6 screens to find anything, padding it out will just mean even more screens to have to sift through. But it's worse than that, too, because if you download anything new, the phone will deposit the new icons on the leftmost screen with an empty slot to use, rather than the end of the list at the right. This approach seems reasonable and predictable, but if you can't remember what screens had free space, then this becomes unpredictable, and worse, it amplifies the problem of things seeming to jump around on you, especially as individual screens fill up.

On the other end of the equation, if having all these apps is more than you feel like dealing with and you just want to delete some, that's a cumbersome process also. The "fastest" way to do it is to hold down an icon until it wiggles, then tap the little (x) that gets superimposed over the icon to delete it from the phone. Fine. But next time you sync to iTunes, the application just gets copied back. Oops. Okay, so you can make a mental note to delete so & so from iTunes next time you're home, but then it's one more thing to remember. You hold your nose & use the Notes app, but then you have to go digging for the icon & flicking back to whatever screen it ended up on now, and by the time you get there, you probably forgot what it was you were supposed to be deleting. You could affix a sticky note to the phone to physically jot down a reminder, but isn't the whole point of productivity gadgets to steer you away from needing to keep track of little scraps of paper?

So that's three primary broken areas of the iPhone main screen that need attention: 

(3) removing things from the screen can be surprisingly cumbersome & unpredictable.

Aside from that, sure, it works great this way, rah rah Apple.

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A way out is already available, of course.

What I'd like to see is for the app management to work something like the iTunes or Phone apps do, allowing you to browse in different ways, set a list of favorites, search, etc. 

iPhone phone keypad screen

So, for example, the bottom row of the Phone app gives you Favorites (obviously useful), Recents (useful again), Contacts (this would be the list of everything, useful again), Keypad (maybe "Search" could go here), and Voicemail (okay probably not useful). 

iPhone iTunes genres screen

Likewise, the bottom row of the iTunes app gives me Genres (corresponding to Categories as provided by the App Store, useful), Artists (probably not useful, unless you happen to be a big fan of certain software developers or companies), Albums (again, not as useful, though I could maybe see "App Suites" -- Microsoft Office-To-Go? Adobe CS-Portable? all the silly Jirbo games? -- organized in such a way), Videos (not useful), and More (possibly useful for allowing users to decide how they want to mix & match what they have quick access to). 

Another option I wouldn't mind seeing would be a reference to the popularity info available on the App Store itself. Already I've had a couple of situations where I came across an article or blog post praising some app or another, and so went to download it, only to realize I'd already downloaded a copy but hadn't tried it yet. Maybe a way to browse the installed apps by popularity (or category, or keyword, or capability such as geolocation or motion sensing) might not be a bad idea.

The iTunes app lets me sift through dozens of video files and hundreds of songs, in lots of different ways, some derived from metadata (album, genre, artist, etc), some by my own organization choices (playlist), no problem. The Contact component of the Phone app (which is now an app by itself, too) also provides an easy way to quickly browse through dozens, hundreds or even thousands of addresses, again breaking them down in useful categorizations that are fast & easy to sift through, no problem. 

An infant could figure out how to navigate through the data in these apps.

(No, really, it's true!)

But the iPhone itself, even with just a few dozen applications, is already getting too cumbersome to deal with. It isn't going to work at all if the number of installed apps keeps growing. 

And, to be clear, providing two interfaces into the same system is rarely a good idea; that isn't what I'm proposing. Whatever gets done here has to supercede or replace Springboard. Yes, that would mean abandoning something really simple that worked fantastically well for the first year, and arguably helped make the iPhone's reputation: "look Ma, see how easy this is?" But the status quo now is already getting too confusing, and the approach offered by the Phone and iTunes -- not to mention a growing number of third party apps like Facebook and the New York Times, which appear to be following a recommended set of interface guidelines -- provides a ready alternative that is already familiar & easy to understand. I say go with something very similar to that. 

Please Apple, provide us with a smarter way to manage iPhone app libraries.

The original Springboard, while suitable for the v1 iPhone, is no longer enough to grow with in the v2 world & beyond.

iPhone App Store order

Seeing as today was the day of the much-heralded 3G iPhone launch -- such as it was -- some thoughts on it seem called for (currently, 33,947 times called for, it seems). (Addendum, 10 minutes later: now we're at 216,814 hits. So there you go, give me a moment and I'll try to get us to 216,815.)

A big part of the question for original iPhone owners has been whether it even makes sense to upgrade. The only hardware changes appear to be GPS, which the original phone can approximate by cell tower or wifi base station triangulation, and 3G data speeds, which also mean a higher monthly phone bill and shorter battery life. The other components -- CPU speed, storage capacity, camera, screen, etc -- all appears to be unchanged.

Graffiti on Scituate Harbor gazebo: "GOOD FORM"

The bigger change, which original iPhone users get for free, is the updated system software, and the new App Store. While this means long overdue improvements to the built in apps -- contact search, wireless push sync of mail, calendars, & contacts, scientific calculator mode, parental controls, and a whole lot more -- the flagship feature is the iPhone SDK that third parties can now use to develop using a toolkit both similar to and unique from the ones available for traditional computers. While some computers are starting to have built-in cameras, the rest of the iPhone hardware remains unique: few if any laptops or desktops have touch screen controls, motion sensors, or geographical self-awareness, not to mention the fact that it's, you know, a phone. There's a line of thinking that this represents the birth of a new generation of ubiquitous computing, an idea that has been on the drawing board for 20 years now, but still just gradually starting to come together.

So, now that the prelude is out of the way, how has the first 24 hours of life with iPhone 2.0 been? Some random observations.  

The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Informa

Donald A. Norman

I should preface this stunted review by pointing out that I absolutely adored Donald Norman's seminal 1990 book The Design of Everyday Things. It was insightful, witty, and one of those books that forces you to step back and reconsider how the ordinary modern world around you really works.

With that in mind, I picked up a copy of his 1999 book The Invisible Computer a few years ago, hoping it would be good in the same way DOET was. Various people have mentioned that it was a good book, and I was looking forward to reading it eventually.

Unfortunately, I never got around to reading it until this weekend, and now, not even out of chapter one yet, I'm seeing real problems with it right off the bat. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, as DOET was good enough to convince me that Norman is no dummy and he generally seems to know what he's talking about, but I'm being tripped up by everything from building up a premise on an assertion that is dubious at best, to a series of internally inconsistent & self-contradictory assertions, to banal observations & predictions that have been overtaken by events of the past decade, to what is simply a dull, repetitive writing style that seems to be the kind of writing a poor student uses to pad out a weak essay question. For a book that isn't very thick to begin with, that isn't encouraging.

Let's start with the factually questionable premise, then get into the logical inconsistencies. Basically, Norman is arguing that sometimes, poor execution causes good technologies to fail. Nothing controversial there, except that the example he gives is Thomas Edison, who Norman at first portrays as a strong inventor, but a poor businessman. But hang on, didn't Edison found General Electric, the third largest company in the world? Indeed he did.

Oh, but then Norman goes on to assert that actually Edison did have a knack for business, and that he understood that he had to approach things holistically -- the electric light bulb would be useless without also building out the electric power grid -- but that his real problem was focusing on the technology rather than the customer, and in so doing, lost out to technologically inferior rivals. Here Norman's example is the evolution of the phonograph, Edison's original tin foil & wax cylinder designs, and the rise instead of RCA's shellac based disc design. But hang on again, according to Wikipedia, Edison's General Electric founded RCA, which in turn purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1929, then brought 33⅓ records to market in 1931, the year of Edison's death. This makes Edison's personal role in the portrayed rivalry a bit shaky, but nevermind, it's clearly all about big companies by this point, not individuals. Norman's bigger point would stand -- that Edison's design at this point had technical merits over what RCA was selling, but RCA had better marketing, including understanding the value of then-novel "recording stars", and so would go on to market victory -- but according to wikipedia, both formats ended up failing by the early 1930s, and there was no victor here, technical or otherwise. 

(Norman mentions in passing that the failure of Betamax to VHS was a more recent example of the same kind of phenomenon of a technically superior product losing out to a better marketed one; actually, it's a much better example, not least because it's actually true, and it's frustrating that Norman doesn't expound on this instead. He also mentions working on what I infer was probably the Apple Pippin set top box; it too could have been a good example, but -- maybe because he was bound by non-disclosure agreements, or maybe becase he's saving it for later in the book -- he doesn't quite leverage it as an example here.)

But nevermind, I'm not well versed in the history of the phonograph or Victrola, and maybe if I traced it out a bit more, Norman's portrayal of events & causes would begin to make more sense to me. So let's move past that.

The Design of Everyday Things

Don Norman

Elsewhere, Norman makes the standard "my book is presenting a radical new idea" pitch by describing a staid status quo conventional wisdom that the author will then spend the following chapters proving to be incorrect. This kind of hubris is standard for such books, and any number of other titles can be shown doing the same thing, not least being "Design of Everyday Things". Here, Norman decides to point out the widely asserted idea among late-90s technologists that we are living in revolutionary times, that the accelerating evolution of digital technology is making it ubiquitous, and this in turn is fundamentally reshaping society; in contrast, Norman points out, true technological revolutions unfold on the scale of decades, and the true ramifications of such a change can take a full century to have pervasive societal effects. Fine. But then in the very next paragraph, Norman asserts that we are rigt now in the midst of the very technological revolution that he just said doesn't happen, and is not happening right now. So which is it, Donald, is this a revolution or not? Make up your mind, please.

And on it goes. He spends a few paragraphs telling you what point he's going to make, the he makes the point, uninteresting as it may be, then he spends a few more paragraphs telling you how surprising and unexpected this all is. Except that the points he's making aren't surprising, and they don't require all this buildup and breakdown, and it helps nothing that the examples he's using don't actually support his arguments. And that's the really frustrating part, because as I say at the beginning, I really liked what Norman had to say in "Design of Everyday Things", and from what I've seen on the back cover of "Invisible Computer" -- basically, that information appliances are where all of this technology needs to be heading -- I think he may have a point worth elaborating. But man he gets off to a bumpy start in making his case, to the point that if the book continues to be such a long, confounding slog, it doesn't seem worth finishing.

IPhone 3G B&W

Actually, for the most part, more than enough has been said, and will continue to be said, about the next generation iPhone, announced today.

It looks nice, but for what it offers over the original hardware-wise -- basically, just 3G networking (at a higher monthly cost) and GPS (which is nice, but improvised well enough for my needs using cell tower triangulation on the original) -- I'm happy to stick with the first gen model for another year. The software upgrade & third-party software appeals to me more, but the original one gets that for free anyway, so no loss there.

I will say, however, than I'm awfully glad I won't have to be selling the damn things. For some reason, I was the only person on the payroll (out of of something like 100 people) that had the day off for the original iPhone launch[1] By all accounts, it was a madhouse. A well-organized & efficient madhouse, sure, but a madhouse. It helped tremendously that, especially with the EasyPay handheld registers, each transaction was handled quickly, and the line was cut down to nothing in short order. Unfortunately, that won't be possible this time around.

Pity the poor bastards that will have to work at an Apple store on Friday, July 11, from (surely) 6pm to midnight that night.

I'll be thinking of them as I have a nice dinner, and maybe watch a movie, or just have a beer, read, and relax.

This will be of nearly zero interest to anyone else, but it's the kind of dumb thing that I have to remember and look up every now and then, and I can never quite grasp the search terms I need to find it. 

This seems familiar:

[...] Because protectionism is an issue on which [economists] believe they have some special insight, they inflate its importance, and make free trade versus protectionism THE crucial issue in economic policy — which it isn’t. Trade barriers are a minor issue for the United States today; even small wrinkles in health care policy, like overpayment to Medicare Advantage plans, probably matter more to public welfare than all the trade restrictions now in place.

[...]

The gas tax holiday is in this category. Economists really do know something about tax incidence that the laity don’t. So when a presidential candidate says something that conflicts with economistic wisdom, it becomes THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE EVER. Except, you know, it isn’t.

(NYTimes, Paul Krugman, "Gas tax hysterics", 2008/05/06 -- yes, I know, I need to broaden my source material away from just Krugman...)

This reminds me of how a lot of computer geeks approach issues like net neutrality, copyright & trademarks, patents, DRM, ooxml, etc.

It's not that geeks are wrong to have a libertarian stance on these things.

Its that these things simply aren't that important.

Who cares if Comcast wants to throttle BitTorrent users, or the RIAA is upset with people trading music files? Who cares if Disney gets to keep the trademark for Mickey Mouse into perpetuity? Hm? Why was it so terrible for Amazon to get defensive about one-click? Why is it so catastrophic for Apple to use a little DRM on iTunes purchases? So what if Microsoft wants to replace the Office formats, who really cares?

Are these really the things that keep people up at night? We should all be so lucky as to have such small problems as these.

Just because nerds have enough context to know that these things are "wrong" doesn't change the fact that they just aren't important.

Does anyone find bookmarks useful any more? Sure, a handful in the Safari / Firefox [recent IE?] "quick links" bar, but beyond that? 

From David Pogue's NYT blog, A Humble Idea for MP3s:

Hey David: Along the lines of, “Why don’t the designers think about these things?,” I have a question about MP3 files.

Why can’t you tag a song as belonging to more than one album?

If you have a song that appeared on a soundtrack, as well as a regular album by the artist, why can’t you tag it as belonging to both, instead of having to keep two copies of it in case you want to play the complete album?

I've wanted this for a long time now.

I filed a bug for iTunes a couple of years ago (2004 or 2005) asking for something like this, but it never happened. This would actually be easy to do with Unix hard links -- basically the same trick that makes Time Machine work on OSX 10.5/Leopard -- and some clever masking of the ID3 data that MP3 files use to denote all the track info (name, album, artist, genre, etc).

The other change I'd like to see in iTunes (also filed as a bug, also never acted on) is to repurpose the "Grouping" field into a more general purpose "Keyword" field. The way Genres work now is just broken -- "Soundtrack" isn't a genre, it's packaging and it says nothing about the content of the recording. Additionally, genres can be broken down to ridiculous degrees ("rock -> alternative -> punk -> emo", just to pick an example). You could set up some kind of hierarchy of sub-genres, but even that is nasty -- are the Kinks "rock", "oldies", "proto-punk", "punk", "new wave", or something else? Opinions will, naturally, differ.

The "Grouping" field in iTunes offers a way out here. Use it to denote arbitrary keywords, including the sub-genre if you want, but also things like "instrumental", or "love songs", etc. So if you have some international music in your library, it's not all just "world music", but can be broken down to, say, "Asia, Pakistan, qawwwli, vocal, devotional", or "Europe, Ireland, celtic, dirge, bagpipe", or "United States, south, gospel, devotional, holiday, Christmas", etc. That way, you can set up Smart Albums that play off these keywords and can work across genres, playing both the Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the southern gospel recordings can end up in the same mix.

For bonus points, if you could share your keywords to CDDBxxxx Gracenotexxxxxxxxx Sony the same way that other track metadata is shared, then you could also see the keywords that other people have attached to the same songs, allowing you with relatively little effort to get a rich library of song descriptions for your library.

This is roughly how I use Grouping now (well, not the sharing bit, obviously), but the interface for doing so is cumbersome, as it's not really meant to be used this way (not that anyone else appears to use the Grouping field for any other purpose). Apps like iPhoto have had keyword tagging support for years now, and it's long since time that iTunes gained such ab ability.