Here are several examples. Good times!

Terminology  

Huh? Remapping record identifiers? What the heck?

So, saving a movie is an operation. Good to know.

Controls  

Menu buttons look like a button, but act like a menu. Fine in concept, but the execution—slapping a normal menu against a normal button—is startlingly crude. The menu should really emerge more organically from the button.

 
The sign in dialog contains a useful little flag button that lets you choose a language, but it shouldn’t be in the window title bar.

And lastly, there are some good aspects to the new Help menu, but the way the menu grabs focus and causes selection highlighting to flash in the front window is not among them.

What does the demo show?

Interacting with photos  The presenter pushes, drags, and resizes photos, same as in the multi-touch and table-top Surface demos. He also sends a photo to the other side of the sphere by pressing his palm on it—useful, he says, for sending something to a person standing on the other side, and for providing “pseudo-privacy” because the person on this side can’t see it.

Globe  The Earth is shown mapped onto the sphere, an obvious and interesting application.

360 views   The live video image from an omni-directional ring camera is shown mapped onto the surface, as is a virtual drive through downtown Seattle around Pike Place market using video taken from a moving car.
The presenter says that these provide an equally compelling view to everyone around it in high-traffic areas, but that “if multiple people want to interact with it, it becomes problematic”. He says you can socially mitigate those situations.

Pong  Place your palm on the surface and a ball bounces off of it. The article calls this a game, but there’s no evidence in the video that it is anything beyond the ball bouncing off your hand.

Accessing a menu  Press both palms on the top of the sphere and a ring of menu commands appears encircling the top.

Like the demo of multi-touch in Windows 7, this demo featured technology rather than user-focused solutions. Whether that technology is useful remains to be seen. Showing the Earth mapped onto the sphere is great, but a sphere seems a less appropriate surface once you’ve zoomed in.

Similarly, using the sphere as an interactive high-traffic kiosk would be problematic—only one person could be manipulating the display, for instance.

Whoa, Crash Bandicoot—what is this, the 90s? Pass. Pretty cool to be able to download it for my iPhone, though…Tetris, heh, 80s, yeah right…Enigmo, early 2000? Maybe get that one, yeah…

Click.

Air Hockey? Maybe, but ooohhh, look at Checkers Touch. Now that’s what I want my iPhone games to look like.

Click.

Oh, I’m all over Texas Hold’em. Hell, yeah.

Click.

Scrabble looks a little rough, but still. Click.

Ms. PAC-MAN! Click.

Okay, that should do me for a while. Total’s getting up there.

Pause. Looks at Tetris again.

Click.

Okay, that’s it for the iPhone. I hope it’ll hold it all. I wish they had this for the Mac—hey, why don’t they? The infrastructure’s there. iTunes already supports it.

Hmm…

But, with Transmit buried in the background beneath your browser windows, how do you know when that upload finishes? And is NetNewsWire still downloading? Sure, those apps change their Dock icon, but that doesn’t help you much if you usually hide your Dock.

There’s a better way: try Growl.

Now, when that upload completes, you’ll see an attractive notification telling you the file upload is done. The notification includes the Transmit icon, but it’s really Growl conveying the notification from Transmit to you.

And when NetNewsWire finishes downloading your morning news, here’s what you’ll see:

Growl is a system-wide notification system. Those notifications appear because Transmit and NetNewsWire support Growl. The developers modified their applications to check for Growl when interesting events like completed downloads occur and, when they do, the applications tell Growl to tell you.

If you’re wondering, why doesn’t the application just tell me directly?, the answer is that Growl makes notifications consistent across applications—and you control how those notifications behave and appear. By default, Growls displays notifications like the ones featured above using one of a wide variety of display styles (the one shown here is called “Smoke”), but you can also choose to be notified by e-mail or by voice.

Growl’s flexibility is particularly nice. You can specify your preferences at the system level, the application level, and the event level. Here’s the preferences window for Transmit’s Did complete download event:

There’s a lot more to Growl, so check it out!

In other words, what good is a feature…if you are unable to use it? That Agent Smith—scary, but wise.

Seems obvious enough, but most smart-phone reviews don’t simply overlook this point, they ignore it with complete abandon while distracting you with lists of irrelevant detail.

Here’s Twincities.com on the iPhone’s competitors:

SAMSUNG’S INSTINCT (on Sprint network)
How it beats the iPhone: Higher-resolution camera with flash; photo editing, annotating and panorama building; video capture; voice dialing; voice-guided driving directions; instant/multimedia messaging; drawing pad; stereo Bluetooth; expandable memory; removable battery; handwriting recognition; tactile (”haptic”) screen feedback; laptop-modem option.

— How does Apple’s iPhone 3G compare with new touch-screen phone competitors?, twincities.com

Consumers are learning that features like instant/multimedia message are worthless if they’re not designed to be usable.

Example: Nzherald.co.nz’s Debbie Mayo-Smith writes of a friend’s conversion to the iPhone:

“It’s turned my life around, Debbie,” was his response. “Before I had the iPhone, I was a complete technophobe. I’ve had mobile phones, but never bothered much about them. Because the iPhone has been such an easy-to-use application, it has been my eye-opening introduction to the world of technology.

— iPhone - not just for the geeks , nzherald.co.nz

Many people experiencing usability like that for the first time don’t forget it. They start expecting it, then demanding it in products they buy.

So, many of those iPhones being sold aren’t just a sale to Apple—they’re a customer who appreciates that usability is the biggest feature of all. And because no competitor yet is even close to competing with Apple on usability, they’ll likely be an Apple customer for a long time.

Once you’ve pressed Command-Shift-4 and you’re resizing the selection rectangular from the top-left corner, try these new modifier keys:

• Press Shift to grow along one axis only
• Press Option to grow from the center (rather than from the top-left corner).
• Press Spacebar to lock the rectangle’s size and drag it to a new position.

These modifier keys work in concert, too. Press Shift and Option in combination, for instance, to grow along one axis from the center. Here they are in action:

Read more about taking screenshots in Mac OS X.

(Thanks to Macworld for the tip.)

(The status bar is the bar at the top of the screen.)

In a Forbes article published today, some existing GPS developers sound a bit shrill when complaining about the iPhone. For instance, they dislike that you will be able to use your purchased iPhone applications on multiple devices:

A customer could have three iPhones synched to the same iTunes account, and thus would only be paying for one copy of the application, but using it on three devices.

— Steve Andler, vice president of marketing, Networks In Motion, quoted in Forbes, July 4, 2008

Translation: “Apple’s model conflicts with our business plan, which is to charge our customers several times for the same software.”

The writer, Elizabeth Woyke, explains that some developers dislike that iTunes doesn’t support a subscription model:

ITunes also presents billing challenges for developers, which typically charge users a monthly or daily access fee for mapping services. The firms say their billing system keeps users’ data current and helps underwrite the expense of constantly updating maps.

— Forbes, July 4, 2008

Translation: “Apple’s model conflicts with our business plan, which is to prevent the user from owning software they’ve already paid for.” (The bit about “keeps users’ data current” is particularly nice.)

And they dislike that Apple prevents iPhone applications from running in the background:

Citysense Chief Executive and Co-Founder Greg Skibiski says plotting people’s movements enables the service to detect which clubs, restaurants and bars are drawing crowds at a particular time. To preserve battery life, however, the iPhone allows only one application to be open at a time, which means Citysense’s app likely won’t achieve its full potential on the device.

Translation: “Apple’s concern for the iPhone’s battery life and customer experience conflicts with our software, which was designed with the assumption that background applications would be supported and that our customers value our software more than battery life.” (Question: if the software is that highly valued by the customers, why can’t they simply leave the application open and running?)

There are also understandable concerns about Apple’s own software plans. A TomTom spokeswoman says they’re taking a wait-and-see approach.

Might be a long wait.

When you do, just hover over the speech bubble to see a handy display:

I backed up all my project data in the event of catastrophe. (I’m crazy, not stupid) I installed the upgrade, restarted the computer and….

Kernal Panic….Argh!

That’s right, the grey screen of death. I’m thinking, what a drag. Why do I always do this to myself?

— Avid Media Composer 3.0 Mac - First Look, HDFilmtools.com.

It sounds like Avid may have improved things…

In the old days I would have had to pledge my first born, or purchased a very expensive yearly support contract. Avid now offers what I believe is a fair price for per-incident support but better than that, on this call they were kind enough to comp me a 24 hour support ticket!

…but customer relations remain bumpy, as someone points out in the comments, saying the product is still too expensive and dedicated to the Avid line alone—hard issues to resolve for a vertical company being undercut by a cheaper and diversified competitor with market momentum.

Avid’s grip on the video-editing and post-production technology field has been loosened dramatically by Apple (AAPL), which swooped in with low-priced offerings that have increasingly gained adoption among independent film makers and editors.

— Fade to Gray at Avid Technology, Barron’s, June 11, 2008.

The article quotes Avid users who switched to Apple’s products, presumably because of the lower price and market momentum:

Describing himself as an early adopter of Avid, Jon Alpert has since switched to using Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Systems that would cost $80,000 to put together from Avid can be had for a few thousand dollars with Apple’s Macs and its ever-expanding array of products.

“It is really, increasingly, financial suicide to consider using Avid,” when the same work can be done with Apple gear, he says.

Alpert’s color-correction expert, who “swore he’d never switch to Apple,” this year made the transition to Apple’s program, dubbed “Color,” with relative ease and is now “quite happy.”

Most interesting comment: “film and TV’s next generation is growing up on Apple’s cheaper platform”.

The likeness largly ends there.

It’s fascinating to see how Samsung studied the iPhone, yet missed so much of what makes it lovely. Let’s compare the two, noting some of those details the iPhone gets right that the Instinct doesn’t.

There are no logos on the the iPhone’s face. The Instinct includes Samsung’s wordmark above the screen and Sprint’s wordmark and logo below. Both wordmarks are larger than any other text on the device. Their inclusion affects aesthetics, obviously, but usability too: when you look at the status bar your eye will keep moving up to the Samsung wordmark. On the iPhone, the status bar is the top of the visual area, above which lies enough blackness to stop the eye; on the Instinct, the Samsung logo lies at the top of the visual area. You couldn’t pick a better spot if you wanted to emphasize the Samsung name, but this little inclusion makes it just a little more Samsung’s device, and a little less yours.

The iPhone’s Home button is the sole target below the screen. It’s a horizontally centered circular depression you can feel when you touch it. This is good, since the thumb you use to hit that button is large and relatively clumsy. The Instinct places a Back button to the Home button’s left, and a Phone button to its right. This compromises the usefulness of this area, since you can no longer just click below the screen to go Home—you have to aim, too. Aim a little left or right and you’ll be confused and probably annoyed. These two buttons compromise your ability to use the Home button with motor memory alone and force you to use it cognitively as well. That’s bound to slow you down, and bound to cause mistakes.

The iPhone’s Home button is black and contains a white rounded rectangle that echoes the shapes of the iPhone’s icons and the iPhone itself. The white rounded rectangle is small and abstract and doesn’t attract the eye, just a hint of white in an otherwise completely black area large enough to rest your thumb on while using the device. The Instinct’s Home button is a flat icon of a house whose odd proportions make it look a little like a thatched hut. Though there’s a bit of room to rest your thumb in the generous Spring wordmark area above these buttons, that area is compromised by being squeezed by screen and buttons. Move your thumb a little and you’ll trigger something you didn’t intend to.

The three buttons on the Samsung are unfortunate when taken as a set. Their white icons are bright and large enough to attract the eye. They are visually asymmetric.

The iPhone’s status bar elements are carefully grouped and nicely balanced: signal strength for carrier and wi-fi on the left, state icons like battery and Bluetooth on the right, and the time in the middle. The Instinct’s status bar elements look jumbled together, and there’s no element in the center. The iPhone is elegant in part because the Home button, status bar time display, and microphone draw a subtle and horizontally symmetric line. There is no such symmetry on the Instinct.

The iPhone renders text beautifully. The labels beneath the bottom four buttons for Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod are a brighter white than the labels beneath the icons in the grid above. The crispness with which these labels are rendered permits a smaller font size without sacrificing legibility. The Instinct’s text is by comparison harsh and difficult to read. The font is displayed with an exaggerated y-height, while the kerning is painfully tight. A glance at the time displays in the status bar is enough to see this difference. The iPhone’s display has visual integrity; the Instinct’s does not.

The iPhone’s icons use color boldly to convey purpose and function. Their rounded rectangles echo the device’s shape as a whole. Their images fill these rectangles, simplifying the negative space of the blackness behind them. The Instinct’s icons use color timidly and without apparent guiding purpose. Their irregular images create complicated negative spaces intensified by glowing borders and dropshadows. Where the iPhone’s icons appear serene, the Instinct’s icons appear disheveled.

The iPhone’s icons float in a grid of soothing blackness, obvious but implied. The Instinct’s icons lie fixed in a grid emphasized with border lines, gradients, and shadows. The result is considerable visual noise in precisely the area where the user would benefit from clarity.

There are more details than these that the iPhone gets right and the Instinct doesn’t, but that’s enough. Some details like text rendering would be hard for Samsung to fix but most would be easier, making it particularly puzzling how anyone would copy the iPhone so obviously while missing what makes it shine.

What makes the iPhone shine must not be so obvious after all. Or, if obvious, not so easy to copy. And that’s just the static visual elements of the device and the Home screen.

In the last few days Apple has added iPhone carriers in two more countries: Movistar in Spain, and SoftBank in Japan.

When I first compiled this list, 8 countries had iTunes stores but lacked iPhone carriers. Now, only Luxembourg and the Netherlands do.

It’s been remarkable to see the gaps filled in as inexorably as the Tholian Web. If you haven’t seen that Star Trek episode, while the Enterprise and its crew are immobilized with Captain Kirk caught in an space-time drift, the Tholians, an alien race, patiently begin weaving a web around the Enterprise to trap them forever.

Apple seems to be weaving a global web now to press their advantage while their competitors seem relatively immobilized by the iPhone’s success and superiority. In the Star Trek episode, the Enterprise and Kirk escape just in time. We’ll see how things fare with the iPhone, but the web is almost complete.

Here’s the updated list of countries, carriers, and whether those countries already have iTunes Stores:

Country	Carrier	Already has iTunes Store?
Argentina	Claro	no
Australia	Optus & Vodafone	Yes
Austria	One & T-Mobile	Yes
Belgium	Mobistar	Yes
Brazil	Claro	no
Canada	Rogers	Yes
Chile	Claro	no
Colombia	Comcel	no
Czech Republic	Vodafone	no
Denmark	TeliaSonera	Yes
Dominican Republic	Claro & Orange	no
Ecuador	Porta	no
Egypt	Mobinil & Vodafone	no
El Salvador	Claro	no
Estonia	TeliaSonera	no
Finland	TeliaSonera	Yes
France	Orange	Yes
Germany	T-Mobile	Yes
Greece	Vodafone	Yes
Guatemala	Claro	no
Honduras	Claro	no
Hong Kong	Hutchison	no
India	Bharti Airtel & Vodafone	no
Ireland	O2	Yes
Italy	Telecom Italia & Vodafone	Yes
Jamaica	Claro & MiPhone	no
Jordan	Orange	no
Japan	SoftBank	Yes
Latvia	TeliaSonera	no
Lithuania	TeliaSonera	no
Luxembourg	-	Yes
Macau	Hutchison	no
Mexico	Telcel	no
Netherlands	-	Yes
New Zealand	Vodafone	Yes
Nicaragua	Claro	no
Norway	TeliaSonera	Yes
Paraguay	Claro	no
Peru	Claro	no
Philippines	Globe Telecom	no
Poland	Orange	no
Portugal	Optimus & Vodafone	Yes
Puerto Rico	Claro	no
Romania	Orange	no
Singapore	SingTel Mobile	no
Slovakia	Orange	no
South Africa	Vodacom	no
Spain	Movistar	Yes
Sweden	TeliaSonera	Yes
Switzerland	Orange	Yes
Turkey	Vodafone	no
UK	O2	Yes
Uruguay	Claro	no
USA	AT&T	Yes

]]> http://watchingapple.com/2008/06/the-iphones-tholian-web-of-coverage/feed/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/how-to-botch-a-demo/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/how-to-botch-a-demo/#comments Thu, 29 May 2008 16:42:45 +0000 John Blackburn http://watchingapple.com/?p=384 (Notes taken while watching multi-touch in Microsoft’s next OS release, Windows 7, being demonstrated for the first time.)

Don’t perform the demo yourself. Bring someone else onstage to distract the audience while making the demo appear complicated enough to require a specialist.

Wear distracting clothing. It’s a small thing, but remember to wear clothing that calls attention to yourself. Bright colors are better than muted, shiny better than flat, and choose a color that contrasts with the microphone you’ll be wearing. Jewelry is good; a large watch is a given. Bonus points for décolletage.

Speak quickly. The faster you talk, the more you can say. Simple, really. And speaking quickly will keep your audience struggling to keep up and less able to understand your message.

Encourage interruptions. If people ask you questions mid-sentence, stop what you’re saying to respond. Fragmenting your presentation like this will make it harder to understand your message, as will the back-and-forth between speakers.

Wave your hands in front of the screen and camera. Motion attracts the human eye. Move your arms around to keep people looking at you rather than the screen.

Use technical terms. The audience doesn’t have to understand.

Focus on the technology, not the solution. Make the technology look like another bullet item you’re adding to the product. Look, we have feature X!

Use uninspiring examples. Focus on obvious ideas the audience has already seen. Avoid glimpses of an intriguing future.

Reveal other features, but refuse to talk about them. This is a great way to distract the audience from your message.

Above all, don’t enthrall. Keep the presentation dry. Show the technology and nothing more. Don’t show excitement or anything else that will raise the audience’s interest.

]]> http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/how-to-botch-a-demo/feed/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/how-about-29-new-international-itunes-stores/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/how-about-29-new-international-itunes-stores/#comments Wed, 28 May 2008 03:38:21 +0000 John Blackburn http://watchingapple.com/?p=381 Apple’s new agreement with Stockholm-based TeliaSonera will bring the iPhone to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland—which already have iTunes Stores—and Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which don’t.

That takes care of half of the countries with iTunes Stores but which hadn’t yet announced iPhone carriers, and raises the number of announced countries without iTunes Stores to 29, as noted earlier.

It’s possible Apple might use the App Store alone to register all these international customers, since creating that many new iTunes Stores would be a tremendous amount of work. But rolling out the App Store to all those countries will also involve a tremendous amount of work. Either way, Apple’s about to get very busy. (Good thing they’ve been taking it easy lately.)

Update: Added Hong Kong and Macau to the list. 5/29/2008

Here’s the updated list of countries, carriers, and whether those countries already have iTunes Stores:

Country	Carrier	Already has iTunes Store?
Argentina	Claro	no
Australia	Optus & Vodafone	Yes
Austria	One & T-Mobile	Yes
Belgium	Mobistar	Yes
Brazil	Claro	no
Canada	Rogers	Yes
Chile	Claro	no
Colombia	Comcel	no
Czech Republic	Vodafone	no
Denmark	TeliaSonera	Yes
Dominican Republic	Claro & Orange	no
Ecuador	Porta	no
Egypt	Mobinil & Vodafone	no
El Salvador	Claro	no
Estonia	TeliaSonera	no
Finland	TeliaSonera	Yes
France	Orange	Yes
Germany	T-Mobile	Yes
Greece	Vodafone	Yes
Guatemala	Claro	no
Honduras	Claro	no
Hong Kong	Hutchison	no
India	Bharti Airtel & Vodafone	no
Ireland	O2	Yes
Italy	Telecom Italia & Vodafone	Yes
Jamaica	Claro & MiPhone	no
Jordan	Orange	no
Japan	-	Yes
Latvia	TeliaSonera	no
Lithuania	TeliaSonera	no
Luxembourg	-	Yes
Macau	Hutchison	no
Mexico	Telcel	no
Netherlands	-	Yes
New Zealand	Vodafone	Yes
Nicaragua	Claro	no
Norway	TeliaSonera	Yes
Paraguay	Claro	no
Peru	Claro	no
Philippines	Globe Telecom	no
Poland	Orange	no
Portugal	Optimus & Vodafone	Yes
Puerto Rico	Claro	no
Romania	Orange	no
Singapore	SingTel Mobile	no
Slovakia	Orange	no
South Africa	Vodacom	no
Spain	-	Yes
Sweden	TeliaSonera	Yes
Switzerland	Orange	Yes
Turkey	Vodafone	no
UK	O2	Yes
Uruguay	Claro	no
USA	AT&T	Yes

]]> http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/how-about-29-new-international-itunes-stores/feed/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/using-animated-icons-in-ichat/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/using-animated-icons-in-ichat/#comments Tue, 27 May 2008 07:32:27 +0000 John Blackburn http://watchingapple.com/?p=380 iChat in Leopard supports animated icons, but they’re a bit quirky.

First, make sure they’re enabled:

Next, find an animated icon like the sample one shown here.

Notice how the constant motion is a little annoying? That’s something you’ll need to watch out for with your own animated icons. The human visual system is hardwired to notice movement, making any motion hard to ignore. (…spinning…spinning…)

Your friends won’t like it if your icon drives them insane, so be sure to use restraint with the animation.

Having selected an animated icon, drop it onto your picture in your buddy list, or click your buddy picture and choose Edit Picture… from the popup menu and paste it in. Once you’ve added the new icon you should see it animated, right there in your buddy list. Your friends should also see it.

Now, when you chat, your icon will animate in the chat window. But only your most recent entry animates. The others display the first frame only. And even your most recent entry stops animating while your friends are typing. When you’re typing, your friends see your icon stop animating in the chat window. It stops animating in their buddy lists, too. This behavior seems slightly unpredictable and perhaps will see improvement in an upcoming system update.

]]> http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/using-animated-icons-in-ichat/feed/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/how-apples-contextual-menus-violate-the-human-interface-guidelines/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/how-apples-contextual-menus-violate-the-human-interface-guidelines/#comments Mon, 26 May 2008 04:51:42 +0000 John Blackburn http://watchingapple.com/?p=375 Apple’s contextual menus violate every one of the Contextual Menu guidelines established in the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. You don’t need to look far to find the violations, either: a glance at Safari and Mail is enough.

Safari

Safari displays PDFs in the browser window with a handy contextual menu to control how the PDFs are displayed. But most of the commands are only available in the contextual menu, violating the following guideline:

Always ensure that contextual menu items are also available as menu commands. A contextual menu is hidden by default and a user might not know it exists, so it should never be the only way to access a command. In particular, you should not use a contextual menu as the only way to access an advanced or power-user feature.

— Contextual Menus, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Apple Inc.

No equivalent menu commands  Safari’s PDF support may have started as a plugin and may still be implemented that way, which might explain why none of the PDF-specific menu items are available as menu commands. Nevertheless, many users have no idea this functionality exists because they’ve never thought to examine the contextual menu for PDF-specific actions.

Recommendation: add these items to a View > PDF submenu in the menubar. They’re too numerous and too infrequently used to place within a top-level menu, but a submenu would make a perfect fit.

Inconsistent names  The top three commands also differ inconsistently from their menu counterparts. The Guidelines don’t say that contextual names must match those in the menus, but where they differ they should at least be consistent. Safari’s commands don’t agree on the use of the word “Page”:

Regular		Contextual
Reload		Reload Page in View menu
Save Page As…		Save As… in File menu
Print Page…		Print… in File menu

Although it seems inconsistent to remove the word “Page” from the first menu item while adding it to the next two, it does improve things aesthetically—and might even improve usability since Reload is uniquely short among the most frequently used items at the top of the menu, making the menu item groups more visually distinct.

But appending “Page” to the next two items causes an unfortunate ambiguity by confusing the web page shown in the browser window with the PDF page you’re currently viewing. Next Page and Previous Page at the bottom of the menu refer to pages within the PDF document, while Save Page As… and Print Page… at the top of the menu refer to the the web page within the browser. Because of this ambiguity, you cannot be quite sure whether those top items will save and print all of the pages within the PDF, or only the PDF page you’re currently viewing. That they’ll apply to the entire PDF document you can be reasonably sure, but not entirely so.

Recommendation: Name the commands Save PDF As… and Print PDF….

Includes infrequently used commands   Safari’s contextual menus contain commands for saving and printing the page, in clear violation of the following Guideline:

Include a small subset of the most commonly used commands in the appropriate context. For example, Edit menu commands should appear in the contextual menu for highlighted text, but a Save or a Print command should not.

— Contextual Menus, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Apple Inc.

Recommendation: Remove the commands for saving and printing the page. They’re useful, but they complicate the contextual menus.

Mail

When you’re composing a new message, Mail displays a contextual menu with 6 adjacent submenus, once of which also has a second-level submenu. This violates both clauses of the following Guideline.

Use submenus in contextual menus with caution and be sure to keep them to one level.

— Contextual Menus, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Apple Inc.

Too many submenus  Contextual submenus are a tempting solution for text-editing applications needing to support numerous editing options like font choice, speech, spelling, and so on. An e-mail application like Mail must also support additional options like clickable URLs and quote levels. Put all that together and adding submenus becomes hard to avoid.

Mail groups its many submenus together at the bottom of the menu to get them out the way of the more frequently accessed commands, but this makes it too easy to accidentally choose the wrong submenu.

Recommendation: Remove the Writing Direction submenu entirely and move the Quote Level commands up one level into the contextual menu, as shown at right. Writing direction is changed so infrequently it probably doesn’t need to be in a contextual menu at all, while moving the quoting commands into the contextual menu splits the remaining submenus into two groups, making them easier to distinguish.

Also, adding the Dictionary icon to the Look Up in Dictionary command would lend a welcome touch of color and help to further delineate the different command groups within the contextual menu.

Submenus are too deep  The Spelling and Grammar submenu contains too few commands to justify a secondary submenu.

Recommendation: Collapse the Check Spelling submenu into a single Check Spelling While Typing command, just as many other applications do. The additional choices remain available in both Preferences and the Edit menu.

Contains keyboard shortcuts  The keyboard shortcuts included with the commands in the Quote level submenu also violate another Guideline:.

If a command has a keyboard shortcut, don’t display the shortcut in the contextual menu. Because a user uses a contextual menu as a shortcut to a set of task-specific commands, it’s redundant to display the keyboard shortcuts for those commands.

— Contextual Menus, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Apple Inc.

Recommendation: The Guidelines are right—the keyboard shortcuts should go.

Though these are admittedly minor problems, they do complicate the contextual menus and make them harder to use. They also highlight how hard it is to create a clean and consistent user interface. As hard as Apple engineers sweat the details, violations and inconsistencies like these creep in anyway.

That’s one of the reasons the Apple Human Interface Guidelines are so valuable: they provide a broad perspective easily lost during development when you’re mired in implementation. They may be only guidelines, but they’re well-reasoned guidelines. If, when you disagree, you remember to question yourself as much as you question them, don’t be surprised to find that the Guidelines were right all along.

]]> http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/how-apples-contextual-menus-violate-the-human-interface-guidelines/feed/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/apple-in-2013-wont-be-sony/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/apple-in-2013-wont-be-sony/#comments Thu, 22 May 2008 17:14:58 +0000 John Blackburn http://watchingapple.com/?p=355 For a fee, Forrester Research will tell you their predictions of Apple’s product strategy through 2013, including the kinds of products they believe Apple will create and how they tie together into a coherent vision. $279 U.S. buys you a PDF containing their analysis of Apple’s drive to become “the hub of the digital home”, the “American Sony”.

What kind of products do they envision?

Among the new products Forrester predicts Apple will create are wall-mountable digital picture frames with small high-definition screens and speakers that wirelessly play media, including photos, videos and music, stored on a computer elsewhere in the home.

— Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2008

Digital picture frames?

For the bedroom, Forrester envisions an Apple “clock radio” that pipes in music and other media across a home network.

— Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2008

Clock radios?

Sounds like someone thought “what would Apple do if Apple were Sony”, and took it from there:

Well, Sony makes clock radios, so what value-added would Apple bring there? Easy! Media + wi-fi. And digital picture frames, no question—just a small flatscreen and a wi-fi chip and you’re good. Wait, why not video, too? It will need speakers…

If those predictions fairly represent the quality of Forrester’s analysis, save your 279 bucks. Apple isn’t Sony, and you can’t extrapolate what Apple will be creating in 2013 by imagining Sony with wi-fi and media added. Sony doesn’t do software; Apple does. Software changes things, and software elegantly integrated with hardware changes things a lot.

If you want to imagine Apple products in 2013, start with processors that are faster, cheaper, smaller, and cooler than those we have today, then seat them in devices that are wirelessly networked, auto-discovering, and auto-configuring. Now—and this is the important part—imagine real-world problems these devices might solve so well that you’d happily pay a premium for. Those are the products Apple will be building.

It’s possible that Apple might build simple products like clock radios and digital picture frames, but like the iPod Hi-Fi, they would be curiosities rather than cutting-edge. Handy? Perhaps, but hardly worthy of inclusion in a forward-looking product strategy analysis.

And then there’s the truly strange:

Forrester also thinks Apple could extend into the home the technical assistance currently offered by “Genius Bar” personnel in Apple retail stores. Apple in-home installation services will become especially important as its array of products for the home grows.

— Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2008

Yeah, imagine an Apple Genius talking to you over video chat: “Ma’am, I can’t quite see the connectors. Can you shine a little more light back there, and move the camera in just a bit closer?”

]]> http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/apple-in-2013-wont-be-sony/feed/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/ichats-status-messages-are-nice/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/ichats-status-messages-are-nice/#comments Wed, 21 May 2008 17:39:40 +0000 John Blackburn http://watchingapple.com/?p=354 iChat’s conversation bubbles capture the back-and-forth of chatting nicely by positioning you on one side, and the person you’re speaking with on the other side. The bubbles are different colors for the different parties.

But the status messages shown centered in the window really help the conversational flow, too. They tell about important events that occur during the conversation, like people leaving and changing status, and when these events occur. The limitations of the protocols iChat supports—AOL and Jabber—occasionally cause odd behavior, but iChat does what it can.

In this conversation, Boo starts things off, appearing on the right. A conversation always starts with a clear declaration of who you’re speaking with, including the other party’s address, which is important because, unlike online names, addresses can’t be faked.

Mike responds 17 minutes later, appearing on the left. iChat inserts a timestamp when a response occurs more than a few minutes after the previous one. Notice that Mike’s following post doesn’t have a timestamp, so you know he posted it right after the previous one.

When you leave a conversation window open overnight, iChat inserts a new day status message to let you know the conversation is now spanning multiple days. (It’s odd that the new day status messages appear formatted as “5/11/08″, while the normal timestamps appear in the format “May 11″. They should agree in format.)

You also see when encryption is enabled and disabled, although this is a bit buggy because, as shown below, you don’t always see when encryption has been disabled. If it’s enabled twice in a row as the screenshot indicates, it’s reasonable to assume it was disabled in between at some time—something you’d like to know.

iChat also tells you when a Direct Instant Message starts, though this is not only buggy, it’s confusing and seems unnecessarily technical in nature. Usually, when you’re chatting with someone, your messages are routed through a server somewhere. With a Direct Instant Message, your messages travel directly to the other party without passing through an intermediary. This is useful when sending files, for instance.

But it’s sometimes confusing why a Direct Instant Message starts. In the chat below, there was no file sent or anything else but normal chatting, yet a Direct Instant Message session was initiated. And apparently the Direct Instant Message session never ended, since no status message to that effect was ever added to the chat.

iChat also tells you when you leave a chat, whether by logging out or by being disconnected. It’s not clear why it can’t distinguish between the two, though it’s probably something to do with the AIM or Jabber protocols.

At any rate, despite a few very minor issues, using iChat is a delight. And it keeps getting better.

]]> http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/ichats-status-messages-are-nice/feed/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/tip-go-invisible-in-ichat/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/tip-go-invisible-in-ichat/#comments Tue, 20 May 2008 16:49:22 +0000 John Blackburn http://watchingapple.com/?p=346

You know those times when you go online to chat with Lois, and Jimmy says hey Clark, howsitgoin? You’re not in the mood, but Jimmy’s sensitive, so you politely chat for a moment, though you’d really rather chat with Lois.

Next time, go invisible. Before you sign on, set your status in iChat to invisible. Now you can see your friends, but they can’t see you.

Now you’re free to initiate a chat with Lois without Jimmy knowing you’re online.

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