Marco.org

Overdoing the interface metaphor

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:24:00 -0500

We’re often told that we should design our websites and software to mimic real-life objects. The iPhone strengthened this idiom, and Apple has been driving this home hard for the iPad.

But it’s not absolute, and it’s not always the best idea. My favorite counterexample is the typical calculator app:

Nearly everything about a real calculator is faithfully reproduced, but with the good comes the bad: nearly every limitation and frustration has also been reproduced. There’s very little reason to use the software facsimile over its real-world equivalent, and in some ways, the physical object is better.

Despite being faithfully designed to look and work like a real-world object, the Calculator app hasn’t made any progress. It hasn’t advanced technology. It hasn’t made anything more useful or created new interaction models.

My preferred calculator, which I will keep blogging about until it’s ubiquitous, wasn’t designed against any physical objects because there’s no physical equivalent to what it does.

Please ignore the two glaring errors I made while cobbling this together for the picture.

Functionally, it’s almost a calculator. But it’s also almost a spreadsheet and almost a list pad. By not constraining its design to that of a common physical object, it’s able to be and do much more than anything in the physical world ever could.

It does a much better job of a number of critical features than the Calculator app, such as multipart calculations, parentheses, editing existing values, and dynamic value references. Even trivial operations are so much nicer that Soulver converts rarely even open Calculator (or use one), preferring instead to keep a Soulver window open somewhere as a scratch pad.

The interface paradigm of mimicking real-world objects shouldn’t, therefore, be applied universally.

So last week, when good writers (1 2 3 4) started discussing the merits of emulating page-turning, I took notice. Especially since I added pagination to Instapaper Pro 2.2 and had to make some difficult decisions in the process. There was no question in my mind that it was better for reading than scrolling — even better than my semi-automated, low-effort tilt scrolling.

But I didn’t implement it because books have pages and lack scrolling. Books aren’t even the right physical-object equivalent for Instapaper. Not all reading happens in books.

Instapaper is more like a magazine than anything else, but I’m not about to try to reproduce the soggy, wrinkled covers from being shoved in the mailbox, the perfume samples, the ten-page “continued on” jumps in the middle of articles, or the subscription cards falling out as you’re trying to read.

(The iPad version of Instapaper that I’ve made so far, incidentally, doesn’t resemble any physical objects. I haven’t shoved huge newspaper or book graphics in there in a misguided effort to win an ADA. Just as Soulver looks like nothing but Soulver, Instapaper on iPad just looks like Instapaper.)

I implemented pagination because it improves reading, not because a related physical item separates text into pages.

Improving the product, not faithfully reproducing the physical object, always gets priority. I passed on a long, complex page-turning animation because it didn’t make sense (you’re paging up/down, not left/right) and it would have been distracting. And I opted for an extremely brief cross-fade, rather than a slide, because slides take longer and are more visually jarring.

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.

It’s important to find the balance between real-world reproduction and usability progress. Physical objects often do things in certain ways for good reasons, and we should try to preserve them. But much of the time, they’re done in those ways because of physical, technical, economic, or practical limitations that don’t need to apply anymore.

Photo

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:09:34 -0500

News flash

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:52:00 -0500

A popular blog truncated its RSS feeds to boost site pageviews. It’s like last week, when The Atlantic changed to partial-content RSS feeds. And that was like every other week, when some publisher did something that some readers didn’t like to make a few more cents.

I dislike the intrusive advertising on Salon, so I don’t read Salon. I dislike Michael Arrington, so I never read anything on TechCrunch (even when they write about me or my products) and have taken technical measures to ensure that I never even land there accidentally and give them whatever tiny profit that one pageview is worth. I don’t like the timebombed, Unicode-breaking Clickability print-friendly view for New York Magazine, since I like reading NYMag-length pieces in Instapaper and Clickability doesn’t work well in it, so I just don’t read NYMag’s articles. I don’t like Ars Technica’s paginated articles, but since I don’t want to pay for a subscription, I just read every page separately, give them all of their separate-page ad views, and save each page to Instapaper if I want to read them that way.

One reaction I’ve never had is to think that I deserve anything from these publishers.

Valid point: [Publisher] should consider doing it some other way because this will alienate some readers.
Invalid point: [Publisher] should do it my way because all content deserves to be free/ad-free/full-RSS/single-page.

I see a staggering amount of entitlement every day in the form of arguments and blog posts like the latter.

We don’t deserve anything. Publishers can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it, don’t send them nasty emails or browse their sites with ad-blockers: just don’t support them. Don’t read their content, don’t link to them, and don’t talk about them. Since money’s not usually involved, vote with your attention and read elsewhere.

This can’t be efficient.

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:51:36 -0500

This can’t be efficient.

Essential SXSW supplies for two people. Yeah, they‘re...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:07:00 -0500

Essential SXSW supplies for two people.

Yeah, they‘re dirt cheap and probably aren’t the best batteries in the world (oops, their website is down right now). But they’re also only $14 each and supposedly hold 2200 mAh. I have one of these and it’s nice enough, but at $55 each, I’d never own four of them.

"Sure, some people told us we deserved to die in a fire. But that’s the Internet!"

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:53:05 -0500

“Sure, some people told us we deserved to die in a fire. But that’s the Internet!”

- Ken Fisher on Ars Technica’s experiment to temporarily block content for people running ad-blockers

"If the iPhone didn’t exist, I would have the Nexus One in my pocket right now—but then again, if the..."

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:54:24 -0500

“If the iPhone didn’t exist, I would have the Nexus One in my pocket right now—but then again, if the iPhone didn’t exist, the Nexus One wouldn’t either.”

- Jason Snell: iPhone lessons from Google’s Nexus One

Software patents

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:24:49 -0500

Richard Stallman, transcribed from a talk:

So let’s see what happens if [an inventor] tries to use a patent to stop them. He says “Oh No, IBM. You cannot compete with me. I’ve got this patent. IBM says let’s see. Let’s look at your product. Hmmm. I’ve got this patent and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one, which parts of your product infringe. If you think you can fight against all of them in court, I will just go back and find some more. So, why don’t you cross license with me?” And then this brilliant small inventor says “Well, OK, I’ll cross license”. So he can go back and make these wonderful whatever it is, but so can IBM. IBM gets access to his patent and gets the right to compete with him, which means that this patent didn’t “protect” him at all. The patent system doesn’t really do that.

I’ve considered the arguments by Stallman, John Gruber, and Tim Bray on software patents, and I side with Stallman in that software patents are inherently problematic and are a net loss for society.

The major difference in their arguments is that, while all three mention the realities and dysfunctions of the patent system, Stallman focuses strongly on the difference between what it’s intended to do and what actually happens. He also illustrates the reality of trying to develop any nontrivial software in a patent-filled landscape.

Many argue that inventors should be protected and incentivized by patents, otherwise they would stop inventing. It’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t hold up for software.¹

We can argue about what the system should do, or what it theoretically does, or what it ideally does, but that’s an academic exercise at best. To evaluate whether software patents are a net gain for society, we need to evaluate their reality, which differs quite a bit from most arguments for why patents are necessary.

The USPTO has repeatedly shown that they do not possess the ability to issue software patents responsibly. This isn’t the agency’s fault — it’s impossible in practice. As Stallman says, it often takes advanced computer scientists to even realize that two given patents are functionally identical, or that a patent application represents something trivial and already in widespread use.

Trademarks and copyrights are much easier for an agency to evaluate, but software patenting has resulted in a mess of trivial, invalid, and duplicate patents being issued and dysfunctionally “enforced” by threats and settlements at a tremendous cost to society.

As a working software developer, the thought of accidentally and unknowingly stumbling into someone’s patent is terrifying. There’s no question that it has hurt our industry in the past and will continue to artificially restrict progress indefinitely, and there’s little convincing evidence that the supposed benefits exist in practice at a large enough scale to maintain the status quo.

It’s highly questionable whether it holds up in most fields, but software is a particularly poor fit. Other extremely poor fits include business methods and genetically modified crops. The lack of enforcement and maintenance requirements for patents is also problematic and promotes dysfunction and fraud. ↩

Update: Oops, this is wrong. In small print, at the bottom of the page: “Wi-Fi models...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:29:00 -0500

Update: Oops, this is wrong. In small print, at the bottom of the page: “Wi-Fi models available on April 3. Wi-Fi + 3G models available in late April.”

So I guess this post is completely invalid. Uh, April Fool’s!

The iPad now has a release date of April 3 for both the cellular and WiFi-only versions, and Apple will start taking preorders a week from today.

In the unveiling presentation, we were told that the WiFi-only version would come at the end of March and the cellular version would come at the end of April. So, while it’s technically a few days late for the WiFi version, it’s a worthwhile tradeoff: by consolidating both versions into one release date, they’re going to sell a lot more cellular versions than they previously would have.

Anyone who wanted to get one as quickly as possible — nearly every iPhone developer, tech blogger, early adopter, and gadget lover (myself included, on all counts) — was previously likely to just get the WiFi version so they could have it a month earlier. Now, most of those people are likely to conclude that an extra $130 is worthwhile on the off chance that at some point during their ownership, they’ll be traveling somewhere or have home internet connection problems and will want to spend the $15 for one month of the contract-less, low-cap data plan that you can buy on the iPad.

And then, when we all upgrade to the next iPad in a year and give the first-generation models to our non-technical parents and grandparents who just barely manage to use a craputer to forward terrible emails to us, they’ll all have cellular data capability and can dump those Yahoo! DSL lines and shitty wireless routers we made them get.

"If you’ve never owned or used an iPhone, you’ll probably find the Nexus One to be a very adequate..."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:32:11 -0500

“If you’ve never owned or used an iPhone, you’ll probably find the Nexus One to be a very adequate device and will assume that the minor annoyances are just part of owning a smart phone. If you’ve owned an iPhone for any length of time, you’ll likely feel, as I do, that it’s a rather half-baked device with some good ideas but generally weak execution.”

- Nexus One from an iPhone Developer’s Perspective

"The anonymous comments section of any major media site or popular blog will be so crammed with bile..."

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:45:41 -0500

“The anonymous comments section of any major media site or popular blog will be so crammed with bile and bickering, accusation and pule, hatred and sneer you can’t help but feel violently disappointed by the shocking lack of basic human kindness and respect, much less a sense of positivism or perspective.”

- Why are you so terribly disappointing?

"I like it when competitors copy me because it means they aren’t about to leapfrog me: they’ll always..."

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:32:31 -0500

“I like it when competitors copy me because it means they aren’t about to leapfrog me: they’ll always be playing catch-up.”

- Wil Shipley (via David Chartier)

Ordered.

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:05:00 -0500

Ordered.

"The world has become so complex that simple tasks are nearly impossible."

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:41:05 -0500

“The world has become so complex that simple tasks are nearly impossible.”

- Scott Adams: Complexity

Instapaper Blog: Scrollback

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:17:08 -0500

Instapaper Blog: Scrollback:

Why I went to great lengths to implement this tiny feature.

"Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could..."

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:50:20 -0500

“Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could flee easy categorisation by your education, your work, your class, your family, your accent, your politics. You could reinvent yourself, if only in your own mind. You were not caught up in the mundanities of the place you inhabited, any more than you wanted to be. You did not vote for the government, its problems were not your problems. You were irresponsible. Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief.”

- Being foreign: The others

One-Third of U.S. Without Broadband

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:19:58 -0500

One-Third of U.S. Without Broadband:

But that’s misleading.

Of the 93 million persons without broadband identified by the study, about 80 million are adults. Small numbers of them access the Internet by dial-up connections, or outside the home at places like offices or libraries, but most never log on anywhere.

…

Asked about the reasons for not having broadband at home, almost half of respondents cited a prohibitive cost, and almost as many said they were uncomfortable using a computer. Forty-five percent answered “yes” to the statement, “I am worried about all the bad things that can happen if I use the Internet.” Others said they viewed the Internet as a waste of time.

A more accurate headline might be “One-Third of U.S. Without Computers, Mostly By Choice.”

This is fascinating and worthy of discussion in our industry. Collectively, we’ve screwed up. Badly. What can we do to make computers attractive to the third of our country who don’t use any of our stuff?

The F.C.C. was mandated by Congress to produce a detailed plan with specific recommendations to hasten the national adoption of broadband in the United States. […] It will recommend, among other elements, an expansion of broadband adoption from the current 65 percent to more than 90 percent, Mr. Genachowski said in a blog post on an F.C.C. Web site last week.

It’s not a question about broadband versus dial-up, but a question of computer-users versus non-users.

How does the FCC intend to make more people care about computers? How will the FCC address those who can’t afford a computer and internet service?

Without good answers to both questions, which I don’t believe are possible, I don’t see how we can significantly raise this metric. And even with great solutions to both, 90% seems unrealistic.

Instead of trying to raise broadband penetration to impossible levels, why not try to improve the broadband options that the majority of the country uses? That’s the sort of thing that the FCC is supposed to do, despite failing miserably to do so for the last decade.

"Since businesses are obliged by zoning restrictions to locate far away from residential areas, most..."

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:44:06 -0500

“Since businesses are obliged by zoning restrictions to locate far away from residential areas, most Americans drive to every store they visit. This means that store visits are often discrete trips that must be undertaken consciously and planned out ahead of time. As a consequence, shoppers will want to visit stores that carry the most diverse inventory—Wal-Mart, Costco, et al.—and avoid shops that specialize in one particular kind of good—the local paint store or flower shop, for instance.”

- Why Conservatives Should Care About Transit

This is very good, and a nice change of pace from my usual...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 23:03:00 -0500

This is very good, and a nice change of pace from my usual Belgian ales.

I recognize that it’s wrong on some levels to drink other-brand beer from a Chimay glass. But, in addition to appreciating the style, the glass has a great 250ml line on the side. It’s useful for measuring exactly three glasses out of these 750ml bottles, and 250ml is a great portion size to have on a weeknight and still be able to get work done.

Instapaper Blog: Choosing pagination tap zones

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:35:55 -0500

Instapaper Blog: Choosing pagination tap zones:

My reasoning for choosing the tap zones, if you’re curious.