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How Much Design Is Too Much Design?

As we await the launch of Apple’s latest attempt at creating a credible cloud computing service, an editorial at Ars Technica asks whether Apple can really succeed at this game. Writer Timothy B. Lee argues that Apple’s “centralized, designer-driven culture can be a serious weakness when building scalable network services,” and that analysis and iteration is what is truly necessary to make these things work.

This may or may not be an accurate assessment of Apple’s predicament, but I think the debate about whether designer-driven network products — not just cloud services, but social networks too — can succeed is an interesting one. I wouldn’t say that a strongly designer-led corporate culture makes it impossible for a company to create network products that people really want to use. But it does seem to me that, as much as we talk about the cruciality of design to the success of software that it’s also true that having too much design is often counter-productive.

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The First Step Is Admitting You Have a Cloud Computing Problem

Even though Apple’s new iTunes Match service, announced today during their 2011 WWDC Keynote, falls short of the potential that I see for music in the cloud (outlined in this post I wrote last month), I’m still generally encouraged by iCloud, the company’s enthusiastic new push into moving the computing experience off of our local hard drives. If nothing else, Steve Jobs’ tacit acknowledgment that its previous products in this arena have been less than dazzling is a satisfying new sign of self-awareness.

It’s no secret that MobileMe, the company’s current offering, as well as its predecessor .Mac, were both so underwhelming that they left most of their users only to despair that Apple truly didn’t understand the modern Internet at all.

The worst part of MobileMe though — indeed, the worst part of any of Apple’s cloud-based endeavors to date — was the company’s complete and utter unwillingness to acknowledge how bad their efforts were. For the most part, Apple remained impassively tight-lipped about poor performance, gaps in functionality and market-trailing features, all the while moving glacially slow (if at all) to make improvements. If over the past five or so years you were, like me, a user of any of either of these services, you probably felt — again like I did — that aside from paying your annual renewal fee, Apple pretty much didn’t care that you were a customer at all. Four years ago I wrote this rather snarky post that, while a bit sophomoric, still stands as a good summary of what it felt like.

Thankfully, in an offhand but very enlightening remark, Jobs spoke about the considerable and understandable skepticism generated by that approach, supposing that most of us would think “Why should I believe them? They’re the ones who brought me MobileMe.” Too right. Such an open admission is a huge step forward. I hope iCloud follows up with a truly substantive execution.

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Forecast for Music in the Cloud

The just-announced Google Music Beta offers a cloud-based storage locker for your music, theoretically letting you play your files from anywhere or on any compatible device. The initial reports seem to indicate that it doesn’t work very well, but it’s sure to improve. Amazon already offers something similar in its Cloud Drive product, and Apple, it is rumored, will join in at some unspecified point this year with an offering of their own.

There’s an inevitability to storing music on the cloud, but what I’d like to see is something a little more ambitious. It’s great to eliminate the need for local storage of music files, but why simply move those files to a server somewhere? If music can be served with near ubiquity, why not serve more than just the music?

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Adobe on iPad

These are not secrets: I’m no fan of Adobe’s Flash platform, I’ve been pretty vocal about my disdain for their bloated and maddening desktop software, and I’ve gone on record with my dislike for their tablet publishing strategy. So it’s sometimes hard for me to remember that Adobe is not in fact a monolithic company, that they’re not all bad. There are smart, impassioned people working there and they’re still capable of producing surprising, even delightful software.

For example, it’s worth noting that at least one Adobe team is producing some very good apps for the iPad. I’ve been a fan, if not a devoted user, of the company’s surprisingly lightweight and responsive sketching app Adobe Ideas since it debuted. I also think their Photoshop Express app is well done and, thankfully in spite of its name, very un-Photoshop-like.

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A Bookmarklet to End All Bookmarklets

Thank goodness for bookmarklets. I have at least a dozen that I use regularly; one that lets me perform a Google search for text within the site I’m currently visiting, another to submit a publish action within a web app I use (whose own publish button is inconveniently placed), another to generate a Bit.ly link from the current URL, and so on. They’re clever, simple add-ons that are usually too niche-oriented to become a standard part of any Web browser, so for me at least they’re an indispensable complement to the browsing experience.

In the past few years I’ve found myself acquiring bookmarklets whose principal purpose is to send a piece of content to another service. This is the way Instapaper works, of course; if I want to read the contents of a Web page later, I just invoke my Instapaper bookmarklet, which then stores that page on the server for me to pick up from a different device, at a more convenient time. This is also basically the way my bookmarklets work for Posterous, Pinterest, Tumblr, Delicious and so many others — the user invokes the bookmarklet, specifies the content to be transmitted, and it’s sent to the service.

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Listgeeks Interviews Yours Truly

Listgeeks is a recently launched social list-making application that lets anyone create a list about anything, and every list can in turn be re-edited into new lists by other users. Listgeeks has its work cut out for it, as lists and list-making are an increasingly crowded space — see Top10, List.ly, Listverse and others — but Listgeeks has, at least, a beautiful, spare aesthetic.

That’s probably no accident, as its founders seem clearly interested in design in general. To help launch the product, they’ve conducted a series of interviews with an eclectic gallery of creative folks including illustrator and author Christoph Niemann, Flip Flop Flyin’ artist and illustrator Craig Robinson and several others.

This morning they’ve published a short interview with yours truly . You can read it here and have a look at the lists I’ve made — and even re-edit them — over on my Listgeeks page.

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Two Weeks with iPad 2

Early in April, I decided to order an iPad 2 directly from Apple, after giving up hope that I’d be able to just saunter into an Apple Store and pick one up at my leisure, at least anytime soon. Once ordered it took sixteen days to arrive, which isn’t too bad, and I’ve been using it consistently since.

Here are some random thoughts on my first few weeks of usage.

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An Address Book for Twitter

Yesterday I tweeted that “Twitter needs an address book. Finding users is harder than it should be.” It was a sort of a throwaway tweet, one that I didn’t expect to think about a second time after it was out there, but I was surprised to find that it was re-tweeted at least a few dozen times throughout the day.

We could actually all spend an afternoon making a list of the many things that Twitter needs, but if the service added every single one of them, the end result would be its ruination, I’m sure. Still it really does feel to me that a more robust address book is a serious omission, and now I realize I’m not alone in thinking that. People really want some kind of address book on Twitter.

Some people took my tweet to mean that I wanted some central way of browsing for people that I don’t already follow, but in actuality what I mean is that I want to be able to sort through my current contacts with greater flexibility than is currently possible. Twitter’s current method sorts people I follow in reverse chronological order based on the date that I started following them. That’s moderately useful, but it would be even more useful to me if I could sort that list alphabetically. Or, even better, if this hypothetical address book could translate Twitter handles into real names too, which I’m often (though not always) more apt to remember than the obscure monikers that people often have to adopt when they join the service. I’d also like to see only the people I’ve corresponded with — via both mentions and direct messages — and sort those names by frequency and recency of correspondence, as well as alphabetically. And if these same added capabilities could be applied to the list of people who follow me, as well, that would be great.

That᾿s all I want, really. Otherwise Twitter is just perfect.

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My Column on Columns

For as long as I can remember, designers working in digital media have wanted the ability to lay out text in columns — first on the Web, now within multitouch apps. I’ve flirted with it myself, back when when it was relatively difficult to pull off, but in recent years CSS3 has made it possible, if not probable, that columnar layouts can be delivered to wide swaths of Web users. On multitouch devices, iOS developers routinely columnize text using Core Text and other methods, and their successes with these techniques have led columnized text to be common on that platform, creating perhaps the most ‘print-like’ digital layouts we’ve seen yet.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that, along with other recent improvements in digital typography, columnized text augurs the future of digital layout design. That is, some might argue that screen-based content will over time look more and more like magazine-style pages, where text is flowed from one parallel column to another, rather than the more common Web convention in which a block of text exists in a single column, reading top to bottom within a screen that scrolls.

I take a different position, though. I think that the desire to approach screen-based layout with columnized text is misguided. Multiple columns are an effective layout technique in print because they improve legibility for long blocks of text. But for digital media, it’s my feeling that they make it harder to read text.

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Paper Toss

I consider myself lucky that I have some modest respect from among my peers in the design industry, and I also consider myself fortunate that many of these designers like to keep me abreast of their recent works and new projects. As a result, I get a fair amount of posters, pamphlets, books, magazines and assorted other promotional stuff, usually mailed to me but occasionally pressed upon me in person, too.

Many of these items are very creative and quite stunning, and I’m often impressed by the time, labor and expense that goes into them. But I also find them somewhat bewildering and, if I’m honest, burdensome.

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