Most People Look Like Idiots

A post in The Verge's forums recently went after Apple's retina displays, proclaiming that not only did Apple squander the retina display by simply providing too many pixels, thus draining the battery unnecessarily, but the Surface Pro was better and blah blah blah.

It's a thorough analysis in all but one small detail, namely the distance at which people use their mobile devices. Not only does he assert at what distance he assumes people use these devices (15-22"/38-55cm), he asserts that if you do anything else, "you look like an idiot".

Let me count the ways in which I look like an idiot:

  1. When I'm in bed, with the iPad resting on my chest, just around my nipples at less than 10", I look like an idiot.
  2. When I'm sitting at my desk, head in my hand with my iPad flat on the desktop, at about 12", I look like an idiot.
  3. When the iPad is in its dock on the kitchen counter and I'm leaning in to read a recipe, I look like an idiot.
  4. When I sit in my couch, with a pillow in my lap and the iPad on top of it, I look like an idiot.
  5. When I'm talking to my wife on FaceTime, and I pull the iPad closer because I miss her, I look like an idiot.

And so on…

Maybe I'm just an idiot who doesn't know how to use his iPad. On the other hand, maybe RobbCab should worry less about equations and more about real world usage?

Prior Art? Really?

Samsung cited the viewscreen used in a scene in Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey as prior art in the lawsuit filed against them by Apple over the likeness of the Galaxy Tab vs. the iPad, claiming that:

In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers. The clip can be downloaded (sic) online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ8pQVDyaLo. As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor. (Source)

Setting aside the fact that there can’t be any question in the minds of rationally thinking people, that the Galaxy Tabs treads in the footsteps of the iPad, albeit drunkenly and without much conviction, there’s the small issue that despite Samsung’s claims, the iPad shares almost no properties with the viewscreens in 2001.

  1. It is about twice the size of the iPad.
  2. It’s edges are flush with the screen, except at the bottom.
  3. It has ten physical push-buttons, numbered 1 through 10 at the bottom.
  4. There is no interaction with the device, aside from Bowman turning it on to view a video signal.

Samsung’s claim misleads by using the term ‘personal tablet computers’, when in fact there is nothing to indicate them as such. The claim also links to a YouTube video which specifically uses the words “Apple iPad” in its title.

There’s only one problem; the viewscreen in 2001 are not computers, they are, flat, battery-powered TVs. They look and and operate exactly how you would extrapolate a TV if you were looking to make a film taking place some 30 years in the future. Smaller and portable. And vertical, for the same reasons that hallways in science fiction films are never simply square. And they display no interactive properties beyond that, nor do they share such crucial properties with the iPad as its grapping bezel, or compact size. Not to mention the ability to function as something other than a TV.

It is no more prior art to the design of the iPad, than a TV set is prior art to the design of the Mac.

Read also: Joen and I follow up.

Update: Justice is served in Germany.

Writing on the iPad: A Story of Love, Heartache & Infuriating Bugs

Even when I close any notifiers and twitter-/chat clients, I’m just too easily distracted to get writing done in proper on my Mac. I blame Command-TAB, however I guess I’ll have to take full responsibility myself…

Then I bought a keyboard dock for the iPad, because it hit me: The iPad is single-tasking (in terms of its interface-regime). It doesn’t have menubar items. It doesn’t have Command+TAB or a dock (in the traditional sense). In fact, one of the things I love the most about it is exactly the fact that it becomes the very app you have open at any given time, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

I keep the keyboard dock tucked away in the kitchen, ready to go. Drop the iPad in and it’s off to the races. The kitchen gets me in a completely different mindset than the living room or bedroom (where my normal setup sits). It’s about as ergonomically wrong as it gets, but something in the mixture of the location, the distraction-free interface and the free-form nature of the iPad itself… It changes the nature of the beast, and I can concentrate on writing.

This setup works well, and with the exception of catching a glimpse of a ‘new mail’ badge as I bounce off of the home screen to get a link or reference from Safari, and getting distracted, I so get more writing done this way than I’ve done on my Mac for a long time.

There is a snake in paradise however. Pages. No, I could care less that the buttons are leather, or whatever it’s currently trendy to be upset about. My concern is that the QA department apparently never bothered testing the damned thing thoroughly with real keyboards!

Editing

The on-screen keyboard, if angled right in landscape mode, is actually quite the little trooper. But editing is a hassle. Selecting with the finger is imprecise and has a built-in delay, and writing longer pieces is practical only if a keyboard isn’t an option.

On the iPad, as on OS X, option+delete removes the word preceding the cursor position. Quite useful when the otherwise quite good auto-correction gets something wrong.

On OS X, it only deletes the preceding word, but crucially, leaves the space preceding said word. So if you had: “Steve Ballmer scares me|“ (the orange line after “me” representing the cursor), and you hit opt+del, you’d end up with “Steve Ballmer scares |“. This is immensely practical of course, because the most often usecase for opt+del is to remove a just mistyped word.

On the iPad however, you’d get “Steve Ballmer scares|“.

Other than breaking usage patterns, which is in itself a large enough problem, it also only makes sense to do this if the most often use of opt+del was to follow up with punctuation of some sort. But that is obviously not the case.

Then there’s the fact that if you opt+del in this situation on the iPad: “Steve Ballmer scares |children”, it actually does the right thing, and you end up with “Steve Ballmer |children”.

Huh?

It’s not until you try this for a few minutes you find out just how often you opt+del your mistakes. And of course after you’ve retrained yourself to correct for this behavior on the iPad (opt+del and space), you’ll carry that over into OS X, and you’re even worse off…

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a lose-lose situation.

But it doesn’t end there. Oh, if only.

Limbo, Inception and Oh My!

Another thing fundamental to how we work in text on OS X, is pressing ‘down’ at the end of a document, when the cursor can’t actually go any further down, which sends it to the end of the line. Without this behavior, the cursor would have to be manually moved to the end of the line, which can take a little while (using ‘right’ with a keyboard, or having to touch the screen on the iPad).

On the iPad however, this is not the case. Not, at all.

The cursor can do one of several things. If the line is empty, the cursor will do nothing. If however, the line contains text, the first keypress will leave the cursor in-place, but send its state into a limbo state. Yes, you heard me. The physical manifestation of the cursor remains, but its state is now caught in-between places. Pressing ‘up’ from here will bring the cursor back from limbo, which will leave it in the same place, however it otherwise reacts as you would expect, which means that another ‘up’ command will move it up to the next line.

But, and this the kicker, when the cursor is in limbo, one further ‘down’ command, will send it whirling through a wormhole, to the second line of the document! Not the first; the second. Furthermore, if you pull off this trick, inverse of course, pressing ‘up’, at the top of document, you’ve entered some sort of Inception-like universe behind the scenes of Pages, where you can fill up a buffer with ‘up’ commands without moving the cursor, and only when you’ve emptied it again in the opposite direction using ‘down’ commands, will the cursor once again get the kick and regain consciousness.

Whether time slows down for the cursor in these other dream worlds is unknown.

An Overextended Apple

These are obviously simply bugs. It happens. But I can’t help but feel that when issues like these, caught within 5 minutes of using Pages with a keyboard for the first time, end up shipping, something’s amiss. Even Apple can run out of resources, but given that Pages is meant to prove the iPad as a semi-serious productivity platform, it seems quite odd that these slipped through the QA net.

And yes, as a sidenote, this behavior is only present in Pages. Everywhere else, the behavior is as you would expect it, coming from OS X.

The Home Key Escapes. The Escape Key Saves.

There’s another problem entirely in the decision of replacing the Escape key with the Home key. Surely someone thought the two did kind of the same thing, and that’s a fair mistake to make, though it is certainly not the case, which again, given an hour or two with an iPad and a keyboard, your muscle memory will remind you of quite bluntly.

This is particularly a problem until we get iOS 4.2 where the individual apps states are maintained when you leave them. That isn’t the case with 3.2, which means that when I’m writing a mail to my brother in Danish, a dictionary not included in the iPad, and word suggestions keep popping up, inevitably (I’ve just done it three times in a row), I will try to dismiss the popups with the Escape key and find myself back on the home screen, my draft lost as Gmail reloads the next time I open it.

Auto-correction replacements, document drop downs, selected word bubbles. Whenever one of them pops up unexpectedly I’ll hit Home in less than a second. Boom. Home screen.

This happens more often than you’d think. Escape has become a universal “Get lost kid, you bother me!”-key. A way of getting out of unforeseen trouble without consequences. In fact it’s common for dialogs be dismissible using the Escape key only if that can be done without data loss.

At least on OS X, I have no idea what kind of a clown car Windows is driving these days.

Contrusion

I love my keyboard dock. I love pages. Please fix it Apple, thanks.

XOXO.

Romancing the User

dConstruct 2010 was above and beyond expectations, and it was, as always, pleasant putting real-world faces and mannerisms to Twitter streams. Others will do much better play-by-plays than I could hope for (the talks will be podcast, and I’ll be sure to curate my favorites then). For now, a couple of the highlights that stuck with me:

Confidently opening the day, Marty Neumeier spoke about making products not just good, but different. Really, different. Good points throughout, but a single side-remark, regarding a long forgotten coffee product experiment, an abysmal failure, stuck with me (here paraphrased from memory).

I suppose it’s some sort of coffee you store in your fridge and then heat in a cup in the microwave. Horrible idea. Miserable failure. Where’s the romance in that?

Romance. It’s amazing how the right word can describe an already known set of ideas in such a way that they become clearer. To me, romance is one of the things ho-hum run-of-the-mill products most commonly oversee.

Ridiculous as it may sound, I only just started drinking coffee in the last half year, so perhaps the romance of the coffee brewing process still carries more weight with me than with hardcore caffeine junkies, but I think most people, even non-coffee drinkers (and even Nescafé addicts), know exactly what Neumeier means by that.

Coffee brewing happens to come with romance built into the ritual of preparing the coffee (doubly so if you, like me, are a french press user), but romance isn’t restricted to stuff that smells nice or beans supported by millions of dollars of marketing narrative on their packages.

Mystery, playfulness, trust, courtship and sexuality are all a part of romance.

To me, the way that dock icons bounce eagerly to get my attention. That’s a little bit of romance; it breathes a little bit of life and playfulness into what is an otherwise entirely boring event; a file has finished downloading, or an application needs attention. Had the animation not been given just the right ease-in and -out curves, it would have been inanimate. Boring.

Another, recently much talked about, flourish Apple got right many years ago, is the sleep indicator on their laptops. As if the laptop is at ease. A lover, sleeping soundly in your presence.

The unlocking mechanism on the iPad, perfectly executed, is perhaps closer to the kind of ‘ritual’ brewing coffee requires (computer doing what they can to eschew rituals, being as they are often easily automated). I only set a security code on my iOS devices when I travel, specifically because punching in a code ruins the ritual of bringing my iPad or iPhone to life.

Though it’s been much maligned by some, as being either too unresponsive, or simply too simulationist, I think critics – the same ones bothered with Pages’ leather toolbars – much underestimate the romance of iBooks’ page-flipping animation. Its novelty, while powerful, soon wears off, but I hold that even after that, iBooks sustains a ‘bookness’, which makes it a warmer, kinder experience than that of the Kindle app.

My analytical self, my inner optimizer and minimalist (two of my strongest inhabitants I might add) would have ended up with a design akin to the Kindle app, no doubt. Something to fit the steel and glass look of the iPad. But in my heart, I would have wanted to end much closer to iBooks or Pages, something to complement your journey on the Orient Express, circa the late 1800s. Something with a little romance in it.

Apple isn’t the only company capable of endowing their products with romantic flourishes of course, but they are by far the most consistent (and I would argue, best) in the computer industry. Outside, companies such as Starbucks (obviously), Audi or Mercedes, Kitchen Aid, Dyson (to some odd extent) and others, do equally fantastic jobs at engaging their customers with their products not merely in a functional manner, but in a humane and romantic one.

There’s a fine line between touches that bring that little extra magic into the equation, and overcompensation. I’ve gone too far myself a few times, and I inevitably regret it. It’s what happens when you’ve got some snazzy framework at your fingers and everything starts to look like a nail (luckily I don’t think Apple goes entirely free of a little overindulgence from time to time, which I’ll gladly use as a crutch).

I guess my point, or rather Marty Neumeier’s point, is to remember that yes, it needs to be good, and different to make it out in the great wide world, but whatever you’re building, you’re building for people; and people need a little romance.

Yesterday Afternoon

Yesterday I sent Rikke off to a party and hunkered down in front of my MBP to get some work done. Not content to let Gozer, my newly acquired iPad sit unused next to Vinz Glortho, my iPhone, I ran a couple of video podcasts on it, since most days I can’t seem to find time or in more practical terms actual screen real estate, 27 inches regardless, to do so.

I ended up watching The Big Web show at around the time my internals started sending signals up through the system along the lines of: “Hey moron, you know food? Have some, why don’t you…”

So I walked the iPad into the kitchen, docked on the kitchen counter, nearly flush against the wall, listening to sage usability testing advice while I got out and prepared a particularly scrumptious left-over burrito, of which I should have tweeted a photo, because after all that’s why we—we being someone else—built the internet.

Once I had finished messing up the kitchen counter, being a man’s man and all, I moved burrito and iPad in tandem to the table and proceeded to reenact a less trance-like and considerably less well-designed version of Dave Bowman chowing down.

Then I threw myself on the couch like the slob I also am, finishing The Big Web Show. Then I may have nodded off for a short while. But when I woke, I checked some feeds, answered an e-mail and bought Invincible #60 and read that.

Then I updated my Things todo list for the project I was working on, wrote a draft e-mail to the client and went back to… ehm.. continued working at the MBP.

The assholes were right, this thing is worthless. Especially without the camera.

I should’ve bought a netbook.

NOT!

Flash Free February

So Alessandrini put out a challenge on Twitter:

All those who think no flash on ipad is A-OK please uninstall flash from your current browser, use that for a month then get back to me.

So I’ve gone halfsies and installed FlashBlock for Chrome, which forces me to click whenever I need to see something Flash-based, and I’ll use this entry to report, as the month goes by, what things I would have been unable to do or see due to the lack of Flash. This isn’t meant to prove that everyone will do fine without Flash, nor even that I will. Rather, it will highlight issues to overcome in the near future as well as tell me and you something about my internet habits in relation to Flash.

Or in other words: I walk the walk, but do I talk the talk?

Now, let me say however, that I undoubtedly will run into problems as there are some sites that straight up need Flash to work. I fully expect this, and I would expect the same for the iPad. However I also strongly believe that the lack of Flash on the iPad will lead sites to either ditch Flash entirely, or at least provide both a Flash and a proper solution, downgrading either way, depending on your point of view. This is a good thing in the long run. Yes, it’s a shame that the internet seems to be in a constant period of transition pain—if it isn’t one thing, it’s another—but that’s no excuse to be lazy. Flash is a nightmare in stability, performance and usability; I’m happy to see it go (as I have explained at length in a previous post).

I’ve started by switching both YouTube (read here) and Vimeo (read here) to HTML5, and they’re both working great, though YouTube seemingly doesn’t allow for choosing quality (Vimeo does). I’ll chalk that up to implementation or backend rather than an HTML5 shortcoming. I asked Colin about Viddler, which is on its way (though it is early).

YouTube already works fine on the iPhone with the native app, and Vimeo already switches to h.264, and I expect they’ll do the same on the iPad.

I will update this post with new findings and update on my Twitter account (with the #flashfreefeb tag).

Problem Log:

February 2nd: Embedded videos from YouTube and Vimeo are always Flash, which means you have to go to the site to watch them. YouTube doesn’t copy over and accompanying HTML when embedding, which leaves users with no easy way to go to YouTube’s own site to watch them in HTML5. Double doh. This wouldn’t be a problem for YouTube on the iPad however, as it would switch to the YouTube app for playback. Vimeo on the other hand includes HTML by default, but it can be deselected (or manually deleted), and that leaves you with no option to easily watch the movie.

Here, by the way, is a brilliant example of why Flash needs to be shot out of an airlock. On Vimeo’s site, they’ve made their own Flash-based scrollbar. Why? Who knows. Yes, it’s the designer who needs a good beating, but Flash is the enabler of this kind of unnecessary silliness, which a) should be left alone or b) done in JS/CSS:

Scrollbar in Flash

February 3rd: Google Analytics uses Flash to display most of (but not all) the various graphs it uses, which is silly; they would be just as good and interactive if they had used web standards. So I’m using my Mint installation instead for the time being; the loss in functionality? None.

Huffduffer’s inline audio player is Flash; I’m not sure what the advantages are, I’m sure there are some (Jeremy can no doubt fill me in), probably supports a wider range of formats or something like that. Or it’s easier to make work across all browsers in one fell stroke. Seems like that should be mostly doable with web standards as is however.

YouTube doesn’t allow for fullscreen, or even filling up the browser window with a video. To my knowledge you can’t go entirely fullscreen using current browsers (Webkit nightly excluded. As usual Webkit is where it’s at), but at least they can fill up the browser window quite easily, like Sublime does it.

And while Vimeo does have HTML5 support, they haven’t implemented it extensively enough yet, making it impossible to use Staff Picks for instance.

February 4th: A friend sent me a link for an Australian military tattoo site made in Flash.

A link for the music video for Massive Attacks song Splitting the Atom came through my feeds today; the embedded video was Flash; I hopped over to YouTube and watched it in HTML5 instead. HTML5 video playback on Chrome on OS X is however still not as nice as Flash’s.

February 6th: Engadget loads some odd little Flash thingie that isn’t supposed to be seen by anyone (it points back to Clearspring does the same by the way), which leads me to believe it could be done just as easily without Flash. Oh and then there’s an ad.

Engadget

Also the Fallout: New Vegas teaser trailer site is in Flash.

February 8th: CopyPasteCharacter uses flash. Doh. I love that site.

Got sent a link to a flash-based scratch game. It’s quite fun (well, more novel than fun if I do have to nitpick), nothing I’ll miss though.

February 9th: Bit.ly uses Flash for it’s ‘copy to clipboard’ button. As far as I know there is no cross-browser solution to this, which by the way is the same problem as on CopyPasteCharacter. There are however fairly simply solutions that require the user to only press CMD-C/CTRL-C, which in my opinion is good enough.

February 10th: Flickr’s web uploader (or is it uploadr?) is Flash-based. Gmail’s isn’t as far as I can see, and works just as well.

February 12th: The Danish National Radio broadcasts a 2-hour concert with the Danish band Kashmir live on their site using Flash.

Politiken

Why is it that despite missing 30-40% of Politikens above-the-fold page, I don’t feel like I’m missing out?

February 13th: I went to download the first track from the upcoming UNKLE album “Where did the night fall”, and had to put in my mail address in a Flash field to get a download link. Nevermind that I don’t get why this is needed, but for a mail form to be Flash… This is what you get when lazy Flash developers are set free on the world. The rest of the site is in Flash as well; for no apparent reason, other than to make it slow and unresponsive, it would seem.

February 23rd: Wow, been a while. Haven’t used Flash for anything but embedded videos in the last ten days. But right now I’m watching the MacBreak Weekly live recording stream.

Febeuary 25th: Wasn’t able to play Unicorn Robot Attack. Dammit.

No Flash on the iPad? Who Gives a Crap?

No Flash on iPad

The irony of me lauding how a closed proprietary device is helping oust a proprietary technology is thick, but honestly I couldn’t be happier that Flash seemingly isn’t supported by the iPad. Gruber has written much about Flash and Apple, and he’s a clever guy, so if you haven’t read his stuff yet, you should do yourself a favor and consume his site start to finish, but here’s my take.

I’m not a fanatic when it comes to open vs. proprietary, which should be evident, my Apple fetish taken into account, but in my mind Flash has no home on the net of the future, and I’m happy to see Apple inching it out bit by bit. Yes, it crashes a lot for me, but that’s not the reason I don’t like it, I just want to see the internet of the future absolutely open, and Flash simply won’t allow that. Furthermore, we’re slowly reaching a point where modern web technologies will overlap Flash’s unique functionality.

So why are people vying for Flash on the Apples devices? What is it that Flash delivers that people want so bad? I was tweeting with Matt Brett, who said he’d buy one for his daughter if it had had Flash, for casual games; but I just don’t see what it is that Flash can deliver as a browser plugin, that can’t otherwise be delivered in much more superior ways as apps, be they compiled Flash applications or not.

Besides whatever technical or economical reasons Apple has for not wanting to include Flash on their closed devices, there’s another major issue I never see anyone address, which is very applicable for those pesky flash games.

How do you click-drag on a multi-touch device? Yes, you can concoct some inane scheme (double-click, but hold on the last click and then drag… or something), but that’s exactly what the iPhone and iPad aren’t about. There’s no elegant way to bring over those games to that user interface, you have to build them for it because it straight-up simply is not the same as keyboard and mouse.

Furthermore, and this is really important, for everyone involved, the app store is a working marketplace, which the web isn’t. It’s proven insanely hard to get people to pay for content on the web, but for various reasons people don’t mind dropping gold for apps on the app store. As a smalltime game developer, despite whatever approval process problems the app store has had, this is a much better deal on almost all accounts. It’s easier to develop for, being as it is almost console-like, and it’s a working, proven marketplace.

In fact, hey, it pretty much is a console experience.

So what is it that people want with Flash? What is this coveted thing that Flash does that people can’t live without?

I just don’t get it.

iBooks vs Delicious Monster

The iBooks interface

Maybe he’ll shed some light on it himself at some point, though he’s probably under some crazy NDA. But before people start slinging mud at Apple for ‘ripping off’ the ‘wooden shelves’ look for the new iBooks app from Delicious Library, consider that Mike Matas who designed that interface for Delicious Monster worked for Apple for a couple of years (leaving in july of last year).

Update: “[Delcious Monster co-founder] Mike Matas was a UI designer on the iPad, [former employee] Lucas Newman is an iPhone / iPad engineer, and [former employee] Tim Omernick was an iPhone / iPad engineer but left a while ago to work on games independently.” #