One more thing?

After complaining about how Apple are driving the depreciation of value in their iPods by releasing too frequently, here's my commentary on their recent keynote:

• The remote control is a very good example of Jef Raskin style interface design. Well done!
• Who's going to buy music and videos when you have podcasts and movie trailers?
• Your line-up has never looked this good? What's so great about a black and a white model? Give us some decent colour - what happened to black and red?
• Amazon has had customer reviews for years - what took you so long? (To repeat that phrase used in relation to Apple's switch to the x86 architecture. Do I see a pattern of late adoptism here?)
  
• Where's the productivity?
• You didn't quote Mossberg on the scratchability of your iPods, did you?
• Well done for dropping the eMac - I believe it no longer fits in the line-up (using Jobs jargon).
• Congratulations on your taste of music - I've been following Wynton's music for years!
  

Now, I won't comment on the two major versions of iTunes within 5 weeks of each other, as the marketing strategy behind it, and the numbering scheme, seems straightforward to me.

In any case, hope you get better soon, Steve! (Healthwise, that is.)

Tags:Apple,Mac,imac,Macintosh,front row,iTunes,iPod,podcast,podcasts,video podcasting,podcasting,video ipod,ipod 5g,Jef Raskin,Wynton Marsalis

GNOME 3 vs. KDE 4 - sensible workflows

Mockups for KDE 4 and GNOME 3 (scroll down to the pictures) - looking fairly alike? Which is no bad thing. ;)

Well, I can't say it enough times: there are clear relationships between different data types, especially multimedia, and these need to be taken into account in interface design. An example of this is my Mugar project (interface description at the bottom of page).

What I mean is, slideshows want music, phone calls want to go into the address book, photos may want to have character recognition performed on them, text messages may want to be forwarded as emails, spreadsheets may want to be converted to databases, and address book entries may want to be emailed to colleagues.

So you'd identify the sensible interactions of your datatypes, and implement these in the interface. It looks like GNOME and KDE are beginning to learn this. Also, if anyone can tell me what this strategy is called, do please let me know!

Like I've probably said before, this is what I think Apple are up to with their Automator. Once they've found out what users are actually doing, they'll concentrate on those workflows in their GUI design.

Technorati tags: GNOME, KDE, gui, Linux, Desktop, Usability

Ideas for Website Baker

This is a post for Ryan Djurovich, the developer of Website Baker, one of the most user-friendly web content management systems (CMS) out there.

So here are the first few suggestions I have for the next version (v3):

• in the navigation menu browser on the admin interface, remember which submenus were open and keep them open unless closed by the user
• implement syndication (RSS)
• make links update themselves automatically when a section is moved up or down the navigation menu hierarchy, or when media are moved between folders
  
• make sure all main templates are W3C conformant so that people who enter html manually can check that it's correct without being inundated with error messages actually caused by the template
  
• have an option to have the main menu horizontal and the submenus vertical - there are probably templates that allow this already
  
• the wysiwyg html code generation needs some work - I can't remember the specifics of the problems I had, and for me they're easy to resolve using the raw html interface, but not for other people... Maybe it's still useful for me to mention it.
  

Reply all for marked list

cross-posting from mozillazine:

Would be really nice if I could mark a number of emails, and send a new message to all senders (and optionally other recipients). By marking I mean the normal process of selecting mails with shift and mouse cursor or cursor keys.

The situation I envisage is when you've just sent out some instance of mass communication (a press release, say), and ten people get back to you with the same question. Select those emails, click "send to all", write, send off - simple? I think so. And useful. It's very Apple, but they haven't come up with it yet!

You could even give people the option to save the list into their address book after they send the mail, similar to the way that Yahoo mail always asks.

tags:email,mozilla,email client,thunderbird,thunderbird extension,feature request

Name change: interface design

As my posts have recently concentrated more and more towards interface design, I've changed the title of the blog to reflect this. I'll be moving my population genetics posts over from here to another blog soon. I may also be merging my other blog, brainspark.blogspot.com, with this one.

I'll be announcing changes here.

Apple overdoing it

When Steve Jobs recently introduced the iPod nano, my first reaction was, "Oh my God, they're killing their own business." The iPod nano is an unreasonable proposition:

• The device is too small to comfortably control - certainly not with your thumb!
  
• The screen is too small to view photos - why bother making it colour?
• Enough has been said about the scratching, which, unfortunately, holds for the iPod photo as well.
  

On the other hand, the iPod minis have just reached cult status and will probably undercut the nano sales.
What is most critical is that Apple have released too many products in too short a time - the mini, the shuffle, the nano (which also competes in the shuffle niche), and the phone - they're wearing out their customers, who will eventually become annoyed that they can't own the most recent thing for long enough before it stops being the most recent thing. The only thing that's keeping the iPod above the competition is the iTunes integration, same as with their computers and the operating system. However, the OS will eventually be hacked to run on other vendors' PCs, and as podcasts (which are also supported by a number of other programs) rise above bought music in importance, and internet radio services such as Pandora, LaunchCast and AudioScrobbler become important, iTunes, too, will no longer push sales of the hardware.

Edit: Ladies and gentlemen - I proclaim it official. Hot on the heels of the iPod nano scratches (and I thought my iPod colour was bad!), we have this report of Apple charging extortionate license fees. May the iPod rest in peace.

Interface design: the window title bar

Wow! Having installed the Windows version of iTunes 5 yesterday, I now have the second example (the other one being RealPlayer) of how the title bar and menu bar should be integrated for more efficient use of screen real estate and better usability. Others please follow! It makes sense. (Damn, I regret never writing down and publishing that recommendation way back then...)


tags:interface design,usability,itunes,realplayer,real player,title bar, menu bar, window bar, window title,window name

Why do we have menus?

We have menus in our user interfaces for two principal reasons:

1. Because screens used to be smaller so that not all of a program's functions could be shown at a time.
2. To reduce visual clutter.

As we started having a little more space, we started having toolbars, but some user interfaces, such as that of Blender, are deemed overwhelming in the amount of functionality that they provide at one glance.
The impression I get is that there is no silver bullet in interface design: toolbars can be useful, but icons are not always clear to decipher - Apple, for instance, introduced the "Show all" button with text in their System Preferences dialogue, apparently because this is easier to understand than any symbol they could come up with.

tags:interface design,menu bar,usability

Debian-based = desktop focus?

These days, a lot of people seem to be talking about MEPIS, Ubuntu, Xandros, Progeny, Linspire and Libranet, all of them Debian-based, and all of them thought of as more user-friendly than the original Debian*, or most other Linux distributions out there, for that matter. Bruce Perens was going to pull off the same trick, but it seems his more business-oriented UserLinux was ill-fated.

I've heard good things about MEPIS and Xandros - I hope that the new efforts to create strong standards within Debian will pay off in terms of interoperability and ability of users to easily change from one distro to another. For anyone wanting to get real work done, this is a very important efficiency question.

* Lycoris is the counter-example, being based on Caldera and having recently been acquired by Mandriva, the merger of Mandrake and Connectiva. (It seems, without me having any specific knowledge, that Mandrake started buying lots of companies after they barely survived at the mercy of customer donations. I find that to be slightly dubious business practice.)

tags:linux, distributions, user-friendly, user friendly, userfriendly, desktop,debian, Ubuntu, xandros, linspire, libranet, mepis, progeny linux, userlinux

Free end user privacy and anonymity tools

I've recently become interested in lightening my electronic footprint. In that line, I'll give you a quick list of the programs I've been playing with.

Instant messaging: For real anonymity, you want the gaim-otr Plugin. Adium already has OTR in it. OTR stands for off the record, and offers the highest privacy you could have in an online conversation, including most significantly, deniability - the other person can provide no subsequent proof that you said what you said. That's what I call privacy! A number of *nix distributions provide a package of gaim-otr, so you can just install it, namely Arch, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, NetBSD and linuxpackages.net for Slackware. If you didn't know, you can easily check package availability using the whohas tool.
Note that the current version of OTR has a flaw in it, but this will be fixed soon.

Browsing: The typical approach to make browsing untrackable is to use the tor proxy, which is actually an encryption and redirection technology, which allows traffic to be bounced through a series of onion servers, so that traffic appears to come from one of those servers rather than the user. Privoxy is a front-end to the tor client, and provides some further privacy filtering. A good summary and installation instructions for Firefox on Windows (Linux, for one, is very similar) can be found here. You can also use tor as a proxy for other internet services, such as IRC - the article describes how.
I think the fact that tor is an anagram of otr is accidental, but I'm not sure what tor stands for - something onion routing? Tor, again, is available for quite a few *nixes, namely Arch, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Source Mage Linux, as well as Mac OS X through DarwinPorts.
There was at one point a LiveCD by the name of Privacy Knoppix, and I read somewhere (but can't find it, please let me know!) about a distribution of portable Firefox with Privoxy and tor - incredible amounts of privacy for internet café usage!

Email: Now, this is an old one, and most of you will know that the way to be safe is with Thunderbird, Enigmail and GPG (or gnupg, as packages are sometimes named). You'll find plenty of instructions by googling for those keywords. I could only find packages for enigmail in Debian and FreeBSD - I suspect this may be due to it having another package name; gnupg, however, is ubiquitous.

What a Tiger wants

Just playing around with my new machine (iMac G5 20 inch, 2GHz) and OS. Here's a list of things you will probably want to install if you're in the same situation:

Adium
Cyberduck
Firefox (with extensions Document Map, AniDisable, Flashblock, textareatools; Enhanced Bookmark Search does not seem stable, unfortunately)
iTunes Monitor
Quicksilver
Skype
X-Chat Aqua

Unix heads will want to get Fink, which I found to be superior to DarwinPorts, but that's just my particular mileage. I also like Audio Recorder.

You'll also want to switch off auto-installing of Dashboard things (security vulnerability! find it in Safari settings), make Firefox your default browser (ironically, this is also done in Safari settings), get rid of the Dashboard icon, (more to follow...)

You may also want to get the following video players:
MPlayer OS X 2
VLC
Windows Media Player

I don't know what the deal is with RealPlayer at the moment - I don't seem to need it...

These not-strictly-necessary-but-currently-more-compliant messengers (Adium actually supports both protocols):
ICQ
Microsoft Messenger

Document repositories in an online classroom

This is the kind of thing I keep talking and thinking about:

Claroline (ClassRoom online) is a collaborative learning environment that allows teachers or educational institutions to create and administer courses through the Web. The system provides group management, forums, document repositories, a calendar, chat, assignment areas, links, and user profile administration in a single, highly integrated package. It has been translated into 28 languages.

Emphasis mine. By the sounds of it, version control could really make this particular project into a killer app. I'm sure if you sifted through freshmeat, opensourceCMS, the CMS matrix and OngETC long enough, you'd find something that matches the criteria.

Portable devices: lack of consolidation

Even five years ago, things were simple: you had PDAs, you had mobile phones, you had digital cameras and you had mp3 players. Synchronisation, if any, was always with a PC and by USB. Storage media were mostly supposed to stay inside the device. There was no particularly useable or affordable web access outdoors.

Nowadays, you have a head-spinning multitude of removable storage devices; you have various weird and wonderful attempts to unify the PDA and phone, you have camera phones and all intermediates between a PDA and notebook laptop. Everyone wants internet access through mobile networks, and everyone wants to be an mp3 player, even the USB sticks. Not to forget the games consoles that want to be more (anyone remember the Sega handheld games console that doubled as a TV?)

So where's the real innovation, where is the consolidation?

It's easy enough to come up with a concept for an ideal device, and I did so some time ago. But it seems to be incredibly hard for the large tech companies to integrate the technologies into one device in a sensible and user-friendly way. Notable exceptions are gizmondo and the Archos AV. I suspect that the technology companies' lack of confidence in users' abilities is a major part of the problem. Do technology leaders need to look for new methods for developing software that does exactly what the majority of potential users expect?

By the way, I'll probably be up for hire in about a year's time. ;)

The distribution homies

Linux seems to draw a lot of people who want to do specific things, like, say, video editing or bioinformatics. All too often, such groups of people go off and start their own distribution that does only one thing, but does that one thing well. This is a fruitful way to proceed if the issue is porting Linux to new hardware. I myself have been known to propose a dedicated distribution for laptops (and if I were to make the same argument again today, would doubtless include tablet PCs). But making a whole new distribution just because you mostly just need, say, the music editing tools, strikes me as counterproductive. Entrat autopackage, which allows people to define dependency relationships and build instructions in a distribution-independent way - using tools such as this, people could use any standard Debian, Slackware or Fedora base and put their own tools on top, without becoming incompatible with major package repositories.

So if what you're trying to achieve with Linux does not depend crucially on some very specific kernel patching, why not put your own distro aside and contribute to one of the big community-driven Linux projects, like Debian, Fedora or Gentoo?

tags:linux, distributions, autopackage, repository, repositories, packaging tools, software packages

opinion: Firefox and the e-conomy

(This post is a year older than its post date here, so keep that in mind when reading!)

Since starting to use Firefox, my Windows has stopped getting corrupted. IE is now used merely to access windowsupdate.com, and suddenly, I feel safe. Happy to do my online banking. Happy to shop at amazon, buy tickets for transport and entertainment online. In this way, Firefox is indirectly better leveraging the potential of the web economy. Dot com bubble, where art thou?

There is one more step for me to go: from buying real-world goods online to buying virtual goods, online. I imagine that my events magazine could allow me to subscribe, at a small extra cost over what I already pay for the mag, to an online database of movie reviews. Maybe my Linux magazine will do the same. I don't want to subscribe to the mag, because not every issue interests me that much. But not having to keep boxes of old magazines around in case I need some information would be well worth a small investment.

In the same way, I am already paying for internet radio that came bundled with my broadband connection. And happily so. What else is there that I could become convinced is actually useful for me? Who else is going to reassure me that they are not spying on me, merely providing a transparent service that I feel in control of?

Currently, there is a reluctance on the part of the content providers to invest in such web databases, interfaces and new subscription models. After all, not all users may think like me. But they could. And once they start doing so, the web economy will be running smoothly once again. And Firefox is the key.

Original post published on Jan Fri 21st 2005:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=205381

Edit: What has been missing from the publication model so far is to allow customers to mirror content locally, so that if they unsubscribe from a magazine, they keep their past copies. This is particularly important in scientific publishing, where published articles retain their importance for at least several decades after publication. Unfortunately, this is especially poorly understood in science, and it has been hard for me to communicate the importance of local mirrors to library staff and boards at my institution.

The evolution of the web

What Tim O'Reilly saw many moons ago is now becoming clear even to me. The web is going to take over; the browser will be our window to the world.

In that line, let me revise what I said about tabbing and browsers in a previous post here. What is actually happening is that the tabs are becoming the windows, as the browser increasingly is going to become the window manager. As Bloglines is taking over from desktop news aggregators, other web-based applications (take GroupOffice as an example) will take over from other desktop applications. Web services such as Flickr will take over from local photo management suites. What I said about the browser turning into the operating system was spot on: this will happen. From the perspective of the browser alone, the change is seamless. If you take other applications into account, the migration may be a bit bumpy. I would predict that any desktop environment that smoothly integrated access to web services such as Flickr, Blogs and data storage on Yahoo or simple ftp hosting services, with local applications for file manipulation, such as office and image manipulation software, will do extremely well, even financially.

Curiously, this is what .Mac should have done - I can only guess that its platform dependence made it unattractive, a disadvantage that has been Apple's deliberate bane for a long time.

And hence my post about version control for the desktop, with the link to an article about keeping all your settings in version control on the web.

What Microsoft have never understood...

...is that they have the power to grow or shrink the economy in which they operate. Sell overpriced products, cease to innovate, and you shrink your economy.

This may be why Apple is doing so well. People who use Apple keep getting richer. (No, I have no data for this, let me know if you find some!)

Package lists

All distributions must have package lists that are publicly accessible on the web without downloading iso images.

You must tell your customers what's inside the box - don't expect technically literate people to get interested in your distribution if you don't give them this information. And let's face it, it's the technically literate users you're after, as they're going to be more helpful with bug reports, and are more likely to end up helping with the development of your software!

Domain vs. IP: the future of bookmarks

Since several cases have come to my attention recently of domain registration being borked up by a provider, or due to some threat of legal action, as in this case, I will reiterate my suggestion, originally made on May Sat 7th 2005:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1463579
of saving IP addresses with bookmarks, in addition to domain names, so that when domain registration is discontinued for some website for some reason, the website can still be reached through its IP address (assuming that this has remained the same).

Necessary for this is some mechanism for the user to indicate that the website he was redirected to by a bookmark was not the one he intended to visit, and hence try the IP instead. I suggested to give the user a button in the status bar, maybe labelled "IP", that shows up when he's used a bookmark. The user can then decide whether the page that showed up is the one he was looking for, and failing that, can press the IP button to get to the IP address of the original server (plus the rest of the URL, i.e. the path on the server and/or parameters for php, perl or other (database) scripts).

This will lead to IP-hogging as a new phenomenon, but we're no worse off than we were before, as long as domain is given precedence over IP.

Complete browser history

A common problem with browsing context is that when you go back one page and forward to a different page, you lose the previous branch of the tree you were on:

1) index.html <- about.html
2) index.html -| [snip] about.html
-> contact.html

I can think of three possible solutions:

1) Weaving: under this rule, the above move would imply a history of
index.html -> about.html -> index.html -> contact.html
Problem 1: with larger jumps, it moves recently accessed pages back quite a bit in the history.
Problem 2: the chain grows forward by quite a bit as you go back and then onto a new branch.

2) A nested history interface, where each accessed url is like a folder, containing any pages that you accessed by following a hyperlink in the former. Typing a url in the top bar puts you back in the "root" directory, as does accessing a bookmark.
Problem: The hierarchies thus created are very deep and are difficult to represent graphically.

3) The banana throw: Only pages not immediately adjacent in the chain get appended to the head of the chain upon being visited.
Problem: the historical context in which pages were visited is not preserved.

The original post was made on Apr Fri 8th 2005:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1373879