Binary Bonsai

It is remarkably rare to see your latest iTMS purchase accompanied by a digital booklet in the shape of a PDF file. Remarkable because whereas a physical booklet requires the use of large color-corrected printers, ink, distribution outlets, delivery vehicles (and men), loss in profits and much more, digital booklets require only ‘print to PDF’, and you’re done. Considering that, I do wonder why all my albums don’t come with booklets.

When they do however, it makes for a nice addition to the otherwise pretty non-tangible purchase that is digitally distributed music. In fact, in the degradation from LP to CD to digital audio, the only thing truly missed by the too-busy-with-life-or-too-sane-to-be-anal-audiophiles portion of the population is the art of proper packaging.

Yes, you can still go out and buy your Amon Tobin on LP with beautiful luxurious cover art the size of your head or order up the latest ultra-deluxe limited edition from Nine Inch Nails and get fantastically well-crafted paraphernalia you’ll look at maybe once a decade. In fact, when you take into account the work some b®ands put into creating their packaging, buying digitally is really a damn shame (never mind piracy).

Well played Lars. Well played.

Now for the bait ‘n’ switch in which we turn our the attention to how iTunes deals with those accompanying PDF files in a most annoying manner.

It lists them in the same file-listing as all the music tracks, which makes sense, after all where else would it list it? But what happens when you’re in coverflow view and you double-click an album-cover to play said album and PDF is listed at the top of the album’s files?

The album doesn’t actually play, as you might expect. It simply opens the PDF file! And adding insult to injury, the PDF file opens in your PDF-reader-of-choice — which in my unfortunate case, is Adobe Acrobat — taking you away from iTunes and probably launching you into the teeth-grindingly long process of telling Adobe Updater ‘please, with all due respect; fuck off’. This will probably take up to several minutes, depending on your system and the PDF being opened with what app, before you can return to iTunes and actually play the album you wanted to listen to in the first place.

Listen. No. Alright? Just no. Bad designer.

This is a perfect example of the system performing an ‘expected action’, which in the user’s mind is most likely absolutely unexpected. After all, when would you expect double-clicking an album cover to open a PDF file? And even worse, this is the only action you can perform in iTunes which will actually transport you away from iTunes!

We’ve done some pretty cool work on Habari’s administrative interface over the last months, and I’d like to take a few minutes of your time to walk you through it.

Oh, and if you like what you see, please, by all means, link back here, drop some comments on Viddler and let everyone know about this, because we want to get more people hyped about Habari, and you’re the key to making that happen.

PS: Download the 93MB quicktime file for full non-aliased pleasure.

In laying down this new design — Kalamari — I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.

What’s interesting about fluid-width designs, is that for me, they actually only make sense under OS X. After all, under OS X, no window can be maximized and locked to the screen. Quite the contrary in fact. Not only are windows rarely sized to fit the full size of the screen¹, but all windows are movable at any time. And the ace in the hole, is that you cannot move the upper edge of a window above the lower edge of the menu bar, and you cannot resize a window to be bigger than the size of your screen.

Combined, these factors are very significant, as they directly influence the way you work your windows.

Contrary, on Windows, un-maximized windows most often differ in size and vertical position from window to window. And without the menu bar blocking vertical movement and the screen-size dictating the size of windows, it isn’t quite that easy to quickly move and resize a window, while retaining a tidy workspace; and so I most often simply maximize all windows.

Hang on, I’m approaching the point.

Because of this, I work much better with OS X’s windows paradigm. Much better. My work environment simply remains more fluid than when I’m working on Windows, and I often find myself resizing windows to fit whatever content they contain.

In turn, because I do that², Kalamari felt more natural on OS X, since I find myself resizing the width of the window to where it feels ‘right’. But at work, on Windows, the window was maximized, and… well, it looked almost grotesque actually, because of the vast wasteland of whitespace on either side of the column in a maximized window.

So I have to come up with some way of countering that I suppose.

Yay.

1. The lack of a maximize button in OS X has been known to drive some people to the brink of madness. ↩


2. Well, and because Baskerville looks amazing in Safari on OS X, and Georgia looks like shit in Firefox on Windows ↩

Please, fellow interface designers, look into your hearts and face the fact that pagination navigation has newer stuff on the right and older stuff on the left. Not the other way around.

Consider a blog like a diary. You start writing on the first page and then go towards the right. And since the first page of a blog is the latest entry, to go to the older entries, you have to press the arrow that points to the left.

Left = Old.

Except if you read right-to-left, in which case:

Please, fellow rtl interface designers, look into your hearts and face the fact that pagination navigation has newer stuff on the left and older stuff on the right. Not the other way around.

Consider a blog like a diary. You start writing on the first page and then go towards the left. And since the first page of a blog is the latest entry, to go to the older entries, you have to press the arrow that points to the right.

Right = Old.

Thank you.

I’m back from Rome in one piece, albeit paradoxically now in serious need of a vacation. Touristing it is hard work.

Just before I left, a few thing happened in relation to Habari and Monolith, which I didn’t find the time to comment on, but which may be of interest to those of you following the progress of these two projects.

First of all, I was cordially invited to become a member of the Habari cabal, which — roughly speaking — grants me access to the trunk of the subversion repository for Habari as well as voting rights in discussions on the in- or exclusion of for instance plugins, themes and any other such matter.

This is really helpful in fact, because where the Monolith codebase had previously existed on its own branch in the subversion repository, it was recently rolled right into the trunk. A gutsy move, which I think started paying itself off almost immediately, as the patches have been continually pouring in since then (and I’ve been keeping track of them from my iPhone while in Rome).

I’ve hardly even had the chance to play with it myself, let alone contribute any code; but I’m excited as hell at the prospect of having a fully functional Monolith in the very foreseeable future.

I’ll try and keep the updates flowing as work progresses, though you are of course more than welcome to try it on for size.