The Moment After

Prepare For Windows 8 Induced User Rage

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:24:00 -0700

Prepare For Windows 8 Induced User Rage:

Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher has little hope for Windows 8’s reception by the average PC user.

If Apple doesn’t have a plan in place to promote the Mac by capitalizing on Windows 8’s stumble out of the gate, they’re leaving money on the table.

✦ App.Net and Discoverability: A Proposal

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 06:30:59 -0700

I am one of the backers of App.Net, a new social network attempting to serve as a paid alternative to Twitter.

I’ll save the reasons for that for another post, but let’s just say that I am more than happy to spend a little spare cash to create a service whose users aren’t seen merely as eyeballs from which to extract advertising revenue.

Right now the network is rather small - under 20,000 users in total - and the signal-to-noise ratio has been quite good. Due to how it was funded the service skews toward an educated, active type of user and is filled with the sorts of things I find of interest (technology, iOS software development, etc).

Finding people saying interesting things has been pretty easy - you can view a Global Feed of all recently posted messages and it’s not hard to find people talking about topics of interest.

If App.Net is successful, this will not scale.

As the user base grows and diversifies, the global feed will show increasingly less interesting and relevant results. Sheer volume alone will make existing discussions of possible interest impossible to find.

The Importance of Discoverability

Twitter solves this problem, increasingly, by resigning itself to becoming a passive affair. Most Twitter users sign up to listen - not interact with - a handful of celebrities or ‘brands’ (with apologies to Marco Arment). Many of these are learned about through traditional media and advertising. What started as a discussion medium has increasingly turned into a sort of backchannel for old-fashioned broadcast media.

While this is probably fine for Twitter’s investors, it does not seem to be what App.Net users want. We want meaningful, ongoing discussion about topics we care about. For this, we need to be able to discover people to talk to.

Hashtags can solve this to a certain extent, but are too free-form and inconsistent. They may work for trending topics involving current events or clever memes with a shelf lives measured in days, but for ongoing discussion about a particular topic they fall short.

Nobody is going to mark posts with relevant hashtags every single time, and frankly it’d be rather tedious if they did.

My Proposal

I propose that App.Net allow users to associate their account with a limited number of interest “topics” that they find interesting and like to discuss. For instance, from the list, I might choose the following:

Landscape Photography
Software Development (iOS)
Video Games

In addition to the current Global Feed, a personalized feed will then be provided to the user containing only posts from accounts associated with one or more of those same topics.

This would, in effect, provide a personalized “Interests Feed” of sorts - like the Global Feed, but easier to follow and more relevant to what a given user is looking for.

Potential Flaws

This approach does have some potential flaws.

The most obvious is that just because a user has an interest in a given topic, not everything they post will be about that topic. While I still think this will be a major improvement over the Global Feed, it’s not ideal.

To get around that, during the posting process users could be given the option to check only those topics where their post actually applies. Their own interest selections would then function as a preset, speeding up the process of associating posts with topics.

However this is designed, it’s vitally important to make it quick and painless. Optimize for speed. If posting starts to feel more like posting something to a weblog, people won’t bother. Better to have a slightly less relevant Interests Feed.

Interests should be reasonably fine grained, and users shouldn’t be able to associate a given post with more than 2-3 related topics at once. This enforces specificity and helps negate spammy behavior (although the App.Net business model already helps a lot with that).

The Upshot

It’s important for the App.Net developers - and the App.Net community at large - to give serious thought to improving discoverability on the service, and I believe some variation on the above approach would do that. We’re a fairly homogenous group right now (and a small one to boot), but - if the service takes off - that’s going to change very quickly.

Thoughts? Ideas? Let me know. I’m jeffc on App.Net.

PAX Coming to Austin, TX?

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:57:09 -0700

Gamestop reports that, during a Comic-Con panel, Penny Arcade illustrator Mike Krahulik strongly hinted that the Penny Arcade Expo (“PAX”) may come to Austin, TX soon. This would make for a third venue, on top of existing venues in Seattle, WA and Boston, MA.

I went to PAX Prime in Seattle last year and had a blast. It was even better than the E3 of yesteryear, and if this comes to pass it’d make for a great excuse to visit Austin.

How to Retinafy Your Website

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 05:31:17 -0700

How to Retinafy Your Website:

Nice flowchart showing the process of supporting high resolution graphics on web sites.

Makes me happy that I don’t do web stuff as much as I used to, though. Moving into a retina future on the web is going to take a lot of time.

Google Shutdowns Continue

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 04:57:54 -0700

Google Shutdowns Continue:

Seems prudent to me.

If there is any one criticism I can level at Google, it’s that they have a tendency to throw everything against the wall to see what sticks. They make (or acquire) many products and services, yet seem to lack a cohesive vision of how to make it all work together.

This has kept them from being truly great at anything except search - and it has arguably worsened that, too.

Tectonic Shift

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 20:12:08 -0700

Tectonic Shift:

Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) plunged 19 percent, the biggest decline in more than a year, after posting a loss and delaying the next BlackBerry operating system, increasing pressure on the company to find an acquirer.

RIM reported a first-quarter loss yesterday of 37 cents a share, excluding some items, more than five times bigger than what analysts had predicted. Sales tumbled 43 percent to $2.8 billion, missing a prediction of $3.05 billion, and the company said it would cut 5,000 jobs.

It has been 5 years, to the day, since the release of the iPhone.

Leap Motion

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 21:22:44 -0700

Leap Motion:

Watch the video.

Pretty amazing stuff, though I’m still not convinced that this will upend traditional input devices in the near future.

A keyboard and mouse are far less tedious to use for long periods of time, and multitouch displays seem like they’d work better when holding a device in one hand.

There are probably a half dozen or so vertical markets, though, where this could be of particular use: Gaming, 3D design, etc.

✦ Sharing an iPad

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 05:37:00 -0700

On his (always excellent) Cocoanetics weblog, Oliver Drobnik shared his Radar feature request for app and folder locking support. This would allow people to lock arbitrary apps - or folders containing apps - on their iPad.

Multiple reasons are given for this feature request, all of which are worth solving. Most notably:

Children (often handed an iPad by their parents) can easily exit apps and begin poking around in places they shouldn’t be poking.
Keeping track of multiple passwords results in a lousy, uneven user experience.
3rd party developers often work around this by creating app-specific locking mechanisms. This is insecure and inelegant for a number of reasons, not to mention a huge duplication of effort for something that could be handled by iOS.

While app/folder-specific locks would technically solve the above problems, I think such a feature risks complicating things. Having to worry about changing lock/unlock states for apps and folders entails extra cognitive load. What happens if you lock a folder and move an app into or out of it - does it keep the lock? Will there be an indication of when an unlock will time out?

Worst of all, it burdens the primary user of the device with having to enter passcodes on a regular basis - even during periods of time when their child isn’t using the iPad. It’s bad enough having to enter a passcode when waking up one’s iPad - prompting for additional passcodes during regular usage sounds like a recipe for aggravation.

The Underlying Problem

While it’s possible Apple could provide a way to streamline this, I think locks would ultimately just be a workaround for a larger, more fundamental problem with the platform.

The iPad is a single-user device, but is quite commonly shared with multiple people.

Even if it were expertly implemented by Apple, the proposed solution breaks down when you realize that iPads may be shared with more than just one person. Apps that you’d allow one child to access might not be appropriate for a child of a different age group. And what about your spouse and the apps they might want to use?

There are different classes of users, each with different needs and ideal privileges. A one-size-fits-all locking mechanism not only complicates the user experience for all users, it also fails to address the fact that as much as Apple has positioned the iPad as a “personal” device, everyone seems to want to get their hands on it.

Why Multi-User is Better

I believe that full-fledged multi-user support would solve the problems that Oliver’s proposed solution seeks to address, but in a more elegant manner.

Upon turning on the device, users simply tap an icon representing them. It could be a photo or chosen image of some sort. Optionally, some users might have set a passcode to enter.

Some users would have access to all apps on the device. Optionally, a parent could configure a child’s account to (for example) only display apps specifically allowed for that child. A fair degree of specificity could be allowed, but I imagine that a simple “hide all apps for this user, except for the following” setting would work in most cases. Different children would see different apps, based upon the parent’s wishes.

In addition to solving the problem in a more fine-grained way that doesn’t require things like timeouts, this would also address the problem in a way that provides significant additional value for any family that owns an iPad.

Multiple users would mean multiple app states for each user. Whether it’s a child’s high score in Angry Birds or a spouse’s personal email account and bookmarks, it is understandable that settings might differ from person to person. Ironically, Apple’s desire to make using an iPad a “more personal” experience has made it less so for many users (I’ve even heard of people using different email clients and web browsers as a means to keep settings apart!).

Supporting multiple users in a more elegant way would make the iPad a far more personal device for many people.

Why Apple Hasn’t Done It

It’s quite possible that Apple simply wants to sell more iPads. One per family member, if possible.

While that might be the case, Apple also knows that selling iPads is highly dependent on providing a great user experience. Even with multi-user support, there are still plenty of reasons why one might want their own device. I hope this cynical answer isn’t also the correct one.

It’s also possible that Apple genuinely feels that this would complicate the user experience. While it would (optionally) add an extra tap upon turning the device on and a way to (optionally) choose who can access which apps, I think this is still much better than having one’s child delete random apps or deciding who gets the privilege of using Mail.

It could be that they’ve not yet decided upon a way to address this in a way that suits both the iPad and iPhone. Multi-user is most useful and appropriate, I think, to the iPad.

Finally - and most likely, I suspect - they simply haven’t gotten around to it, and this would be a significant enough feature to warrant careful consideration and a high quality implementation. They’re not at a competitive disadvantage as of yet, as no other viable mobile OS provides multi-user. That may change soon with Windows 8, assuming it gains any traction.

The Upshot

Oliver identified a very real problem with the iOS ecosystem, and one that I hope Apple will address in a meaningful way. I do hope, however, that they do so in a way that doesn’t add complexity while ignoring the root problem.

✦ iOS 6 and the Original iPad

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 02:45:00 -0700

As reported on The Loop, support for the original iPad - released in April of 2010 - will be dropped in iOS 6. Original iPad owners will no longer receive meaningful updates to the operating system on their device.

This was bound to happen at some point, although at a glance it seems a bit premature. Assuming iOS 6 is released this fall, the original iPad will have only received OS updates for about two and a half years. Though short life cycles are somewhat defensible for iPhones (service contracts usually run for two years, so many people trade up before this becomes an issue), it’s significantly shorter than the computers that “post-PC” devices like the iPad aim to displace.

Adding insult to injury, the iPhone 3GS - a device released nearly a year prior to the iPad - will be supported. Many have speculated that this is because Apple still sells the 3GS to price-conscious buyers. Some decry this as a form of planned obsolescence, engineered by a greedy Apple to get people to upgrade.

There is, however, another aspect of this decision to consider.

Anyone who has developed for the original iPad know that it is rather memory-constrained in ways that other devices are not. With only 256 MB (shared with the operating system) to play with, resource-intensive apps can easily bump up against the limit. Released just months later, the iPhone 4 with twice the memory would not have the same problem.

Though the 3GS has the same 256 MB of memory to work with as the original iPad, it also has significantly fewer pixels to render, meaning that it doesn’t need to load nearly as much uncompressed image data as apps are run. Apps running on even recent vintage iPhones require less memory for images than their iPad-native counterparts (yes, even retina displays on iPhone 4-era phones have fewer pixels than a non-retina iPad).

Simply put, the original iPad was released with too little memory for where Apple and developers would ultimately take the platform.

Consider, though, that at the time it was released the original iPad was a major gamble for Apple. While they had found a way to stuff 512 MB of memory in the device from the start, I can see why they chose to keep costs down when introducing a risky new platform.

As painful as it might be to see one’s device left behind, as long as Apple doesn’t make a habit of dropping old hardware in the haphazard manner some other platforms are notorious for, this was probably the right decision.

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 03:08:18 -0700

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

- Computing pioneer Alan Kay, in 1982

Civilization V: Gods & Kings

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 19:39:00 -0700

A major expansion to the turn-based strategy game Civilization V, Gods & Kings, was released today.

I love the Civilization series, although my current computer is only marginally capable of running it (actually, it works, but I hate having to turn down the graphics settings - it’s far too pretty for that). I plan to remedy this soon, and will be giving Gods & Kings a look shortly thereafter.

The expansion brings religion back to the series, allowing players to influence other cultures by way of proselytization. Additional units, new scenarios and a returning espionage element round out what looks to be a major upgrade to the already-great Civ experience.

Reviews (including this one by Ars Technica) thus far have been pretty positive. You can pick up Gods & Kings for $30 through Amazon or direct download via Steam.

Microsoft has announced their Surface tablet.TechCrunch has...

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 17:00:00 -0700

Microsoft has announced their Surface tablet.

TechCrunch has details.

Looks like a pretty capable flagship Windows 8 tablet, though a great deal hinges on pricing and timing if Microsoft plans to compete against Apple in this space (they are, however, competing against their own OEMs - one has to wonder how they feel about it).

Also, companies need to stop announcing things until they’re ready to provide a reasonably solid date when people will be able to walk into a store and buy a product.

Economists demonstrate exactly why bank robbery is a bad idea

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 07:03:35 -0700

Economists demonstrate exactly why bank robbery is a bad idea:

Common thieves are not, as a rule, shining examples of society’s best and brightest.

Why Retina Isn't Enough

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 05:08:00 -0700

Why Retina Isn't Enough:

Cult of Mac makes a reasonably solid case for why the recent trend toward higher pixel densities in Apple hardware isn’t the be-all and end-all of display technology.

While I agree that further improvements can be made, “retina” displays are an enormous leap forward from where we were by any reasonable measure. We’re at a point of diminishing returns.