@connerk
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Reading List
my iPhone app
“There are lots of would be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see…or to at least shut up about what you do see that’s different.” Stephen King, On Writing.
(via merlin)
Source: jdickerson
OS X Lion interprets mouse and trackpad gestures as commands. Those commands are actually a language. They have a vocabulary and a grammar. Here’s my theory.
Grammar
In Lion’s gesture language, each gesture is an imperative sentence, composed of a verb and an object. You do a gesture by making a motion or some number of taps. In so doing you use some number of fingers. The number of taps is the verb in the sentence, indicating what action should happen. The number of fingers is the direct object, indicating what the action should be done to.
Vocabulary
If you just move the mouse or swipe the trackpad, that’s zero taps, and it means “move”. One tap (or click) is “use”. Two taps is something like “show me”. On a Magic Mouse, if you use one finger on the touch surface, that’s “the window content”. Two fingers means “the Spaces”, as they relate to the viewport. Zero fingers (not utilizing the Magic Mouse’s touch surface, but using your whole hand) means “the pointer” or the object under the pointer. On a trackpad, you would use one additional finger in each of these cases.
Rosetta Stone
So the gesture language is as follows, assuming a Magic Mouse. For a trackpad, add one finger:
—
Languages must be practical. There are more gestures than these, and there are special cases and exceptions. On a trackpad, Mission Control is actually activated by a three-finger upward swipe, which is easier than a three-finger double-tap. The Launchpad pinch gesture is another outlier. As for the two gestures that do nothing, it’s good that they do nothing. It’s too easy to do them by accident.
You may have been using this language without noticing how it was structured. But this structure makes it easy for your fingers to learn it. So it’s no wonder that Lion’s gestures feel natural after just a few hours.
As for Lion’s new scroll direction, I encourage you to try it for a week. After using it for some time now, I think “natural” was the right name for it.
In summary:
The State of Jay-Z’s Empire - WSJ.com
I’ve recommended this excellent profile on Jay-Z to like 10 people now, but I haven’t had time to write anything substantial about it, so here. Just go read this.
There’s a handful of impossibly useful and non-obvious lessons for indies in this article that had me pumping my fist every few paragraphs.
Okay. Here’s a few (emphasis mine):
Source: merlin
I wrote a script to crawl U.S. App Store customer reviews for the top 100 apps from every category (minus duplicates) and compute the most common words in 1-star and 5-star reviews, excluding words that were also common in 3-star reviews.
Keep in mind that the results are not representative of…
Source: marco
When designing, sometimes you create variants — multiple designs to meet the same goals in different situations. Usually you begin with the “full” version, and then you redesign to produce a lesser variant. But then you end up with Travel Battleship, and nobody likes those damn things.
Some background. Lately I’ve been following @whitneyhess on Twitter, whom I found by listening an episode of the Big Web Show on 5by5. She then attended An Event Apart in Minneapolis, which is this convention that @zeldman puts on, based on the kind of things that you read on A List Apart. She listened to a talk by @lukew called Mobile First. I wasn’t there and I don’t really know the content of the talk. But, synthesizing Whitney’s tweets with my experience as a developer yields this:
Design the variant with the tightest set of constraints first. Then, the other variants will be at least as good. Instead of crippling your product on each iteration from the outside in, you can adjust and embellish from the inside out.
If you’re making a website or web application, @lukew says, do the mobile version first. Since the constraints are tighter, anything that your iPhone can do, your desktop can do too.
Reading List is an app I’m developing as a hobby. It’s on its fourth version, and I’ve mostly made incremental changes so far. I’m hammering out the rough spots on the iPhone before I extend it to other platforms. That means soliciting feedback from users, using the app myself, and lots of thinking in the shower.
But it’s the constraints that determine the details. They are steep:
Moving to iPad, some of these constraints go away. On a desktop PC, they’re almost all gone. On the web, there are some new constraints, but fewer overall.
If I ported Reading List, it would not be a matter of redesigning, or of trimming features. It would be a matter of tweaking the design to suit the strengths of each platform.
New platforms are new opportunities. New design variants should be too. So if you anticipate creating variants of a design, start with the worst challenges and make something great. After that, you can’t do any worse.
Did I mention I made an iPhone app? Check it out.
Neat idea via @daringfireball: Use Glyphboard to name your folders. Twitter, RSS and Mail fit naturally in the ∞ folder.
“That’s the thing about Apple marketing. They don’t talk about how many gigabytes of memory or how many CPU cycles or how many apps (much). They aim for your heart, and show you how technology can make your life better during its most important moments.”—Gina Trapani, via Daring Fireball
While I also think the new FaceTime video on apple.com is well-done and emotionally affecting, I’m going to call hogwash on the assertion that Apple marketing aims for the heart.
More precisely, I think Apple’s marketing attempts to give you a certain perspective on the product, so you can see yourself owning it.
The “I’m a Mac” ads have a good second-place strategy. First they’d say “I’m a Mac”, “I’m a PC”, which suggests that there are two categories you can identify with. Next they demonstrate some key difference between the two, and then the user is left with the question, “Which am I?” PC users are compelled to switch because they don’t want to be like John Hodgman’s character. Mac users stay Mac users.
(By the way, these ads are no longer being produced. I think that’s because personal computers are not the devices people identify with anymore. Now they identify with their phones and maybe their tablets.)
iPod ads were the most clever. Those dancing silhouettes holding iPods serve three purposes:
Now take the finger-centric iPhone ads and the lap-oriented iPad ads. They’re in first-person. The viewer thinks, “That could be my finger, my lap, my kid’s hands, etc. I could be looking up a restaurant while on a call with my iPhone.” As with the iPod, you put yourself into the ad.
In response to the prior post: There are faces in these ads, but they’re on the iPhone’s screen when, at the end, the invisible user answers a call. After the viewer begins to identify as the user, that phone call makes the personal connection. It’s the punchline.
Source: chrisereneta
When you first use an iPad, you’ll be surprised how quickly you understand it.
Indirect and Direct Input
People see the iPad, and they see a touchscreen, and they think of an ATM. They conclude that it kind of sucks, and you couldn’t do real work on it. But newer touchscreens are better than what we’re used to. Not only can you use multiple fingers, but the iPhone (and iPad I’m sure) are very responsive. You get the sense of physically sliding an email message up and down with your finger, or stretching a map to zoom in. But by and large, people haven’t noticed that modern touchscreens are great.
We have forgotten that a mouse is an odd and clunky thing to use. When the Mac came out in 1984, tech writer John C. Dvorak famously pooh-poohed its focus on such a weird device. But the mouse has been better than everything else — trackballs, trackpads, arrow keys, joysticks — so we got used to it. But once upon a time, you had to learn to physically handle it, and that was difficult because using the mouse involves a chain of delegation:
You move the mouse, to move the pointer, to point at the button. Then you can click, but you have to hold it still. So the mouse and its pointer are tools you have to learn. You get good at it of course, and much like a musical instrument or sports equipment, it can be like an extension of your body. (I should know, I played a lot of PC games.) But you can never control a mouse as well as you can control your own body, and you have to adjust when you buy a new one. It’s still just a tool.
When you scroll a window, there’s another layer of indirection, and another tool that you have to learn:
This is like a game of “telephone”. Everyone knows that when the page is significantly long, a scroll bar becomes imprecise, and it doesn’t scroll right to where you want it. Because there is so much indirection, it’s difficult and sometimes frustrating to get the computer to do what you want.
Enter the touchscreen, and direct input:
You just tap the button, or slide the page. On a sensitive touchscreen running on a responsive device, it works as well as a physical button or a sheet of paper. To the extent that this is easier than using a mouse, iPhone and iPad are easier to use than a PC or Mac. Much like you can “just tap” a button, you can “just use” an iPhone to browse the web or read your email.
The iPad’s big screen will tear down all sorts of barriers because you’ll have enough space to work with two hands. We haven’t explored all the possibilities so we don’t know just how good it will be, but it’s definitely going to be better.
Affordance
On the Nintendo Wii, the unique Wii Remote affords new ways to control video games, and by extension, new kinds of gameplay. Nintendo’s own Wii games take advantage of that — think of swinging the sword in Zelda. But the Wii Remote and its Nunchuk extension can be used very much like a Playstation or Xbox controller. So for the most part, third party developers don’t bother. They use the same old controls and the same old gameplay. As a result, the Wii doesn’t revolutionize video games like it might have.
On the iPad, user interface designers are forced to make new interfaces, because fingers are stubby and they can’t do what a mouse does. You couldn’t use the current PC incarnation of Photoshop on a touchscreen, because all the buttons are too small for your fingertips. You have to rethink it. So although the Wii Remote didn’t cause the changes in games that it could have, we can expect touchscreens to change computer interfaces.
So how do you adapt mouse-based apps to a touchscreen? iPhone apps typically leave out the functionality that isn’t so important. That makes the important parts very clear, and leaves enough space for fingertip-sized buttons. iPad developers are encouraged to do the same thing.
But the iPad also sets a new interface precedent with “popovers”. You can hide auxiliary stuff off screen, which leaves more screen space for your web page or email. The message list in the portrait view of Mail is a popover. You show the message list by tapping a button in the toolbar. Besides the toolbar, the rest of the screen is dedicated to reading one message at a time.
Time
On an iPad, Photoshop’s main screen might consist of a photo, the paint color, and options for the current tool. Your tool palette wouldn’t be on the screen all the time, it would be hidden behind a button. Tap the button and the palette appears, then tap a tool and the palette goes away. The cost of that extra tap is real, but small. Yet with a mouse, it would be a big hassle to have to click twice just to pick the paint bucket tool.
Here’s an illustrative experiment.
Using your computer, see how long this takes in total:
Then, pretend your desk is a touchscreen, and time the equivalent:
The mouse experiment takes a second or two, and it’s no wonder we have so many buttons in toolbars: They only take one click, in about half the time. Yet the touchscreen experiment takes about a quarter of the time.
A mouse is so slow, compared to your fingers, that minimizing the number of clicks is paramount. Everything that you might want to do at a moment’s notice has to be on the screen all the time.
… and Space
Because Photoshop’s tools are on the screen all the time, they must be small. Screen space is expensive, and there has to be space left for the photo. So they’re just icons, most of which are unclear at first. Photoshop even squeezes multiple tools into one button. But if the tool palette were only shown temporarily, the buttons could be much bigger, with clear text labels. So you could have nice big tool buttons, which are easy to identify and easy to tap.
Screen space is still precious, but taps are cheap. Given the addition of popovers, it’s very cheap to get additional screen space. So even though the iPad screen is only ten inches across, the user interface can be much bigger in total than on a PC. That means it can be clearer and simpler to use. Then, it’s easier and faster for a user to decide what to do, and it’s also easier and faster to communicate that decision to the computer.
So what?
Since taps are cheaper than clicks, and since they enable clearer interfaces, users are going to do more in a minute with their iPads than they would with their PCs. There’s less overhead, both in learning and in operation. In business apps for iPad, users could be demonstrably more productive than in their PC equivalents. (Just don’t forget the bluetooth keyboard accessory.)
Most companies sell electronics by listing features and doing flashy marketing. Then you buy it and it does all that stuff, but it’s only that good. Sometimes you’re let down because it doesn’t work as well as you wanted. Apple definitely does flashy marketing and they do list features. But when you use an iPhone or a Mac for a long time, you slowly realize it’s even better than you thought when you bought it. And that’s how they sell their next product.
DVD players don’t make fake whirring noises for five minutes before letting you eject a disc to simulate rewinding. Similarly, nobody should need to perform a full-width swipe gesture and wait two seconds for their fake page to turn in their fake book, and nobody should need to click the fake Clear button and start their calculation over because their fake calculator only has a one-line, non-editable fake LCD.
— Marco talks about overdoing real-object metaphors in software.
