Highly Demographic Language

Tue 12 Aug 200801:14 PM

In a recent blog post, my friend Chris Fahey raises the question of whether or not an interface designer is a salesman. In a way, he’s tackling more seriously a subject that I wrote about three years ago in a post titled “Window Dress for Success,” in which I only half-jokingly inferred possible marketing motivations from the then-proliferating varieties of chrome in Mac OS X applications.

In his post, Chris cannily argues that it’s the designer’s job not only to create a solution that is easy to use, but also to create a solution that looks easy to use. He writes:

“A designer who neglects marketing concerns and designs a product that the target audience sees as undesirable (because, for example, it lacks a sexy list of features or a glossy interface) is just as bad as a designer who neglects production concerns and creates something that is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to build (to manufacture, program, whatever).”

With some qualifications, this statement about the role of designers — and especially, from where I sit, the role of interface designers — strikes me as insightfully true. As I somewhat cheekily suggested in that June 2005 post, it’s my opinion that interface is marketing, and unavoidably so.

Reading Is Fundamental, Steve

Mon 11 Aug 200802:22 PM

Earlier this year, I quietly set out to prove Steve Jobs wrong. You may remember what I’m talking about: in that inimitably dismissive way that he has, the Apple CEO rejected the idea that the Amazon Kindle held much promise, contending that “Americans don’t read anymore.” It wasn’t that I wanted to prove him wrong on the Kindle (a product for which I find it hard to muster much enthusiasm). Rather, I wanted to disprove at least for myself his statement that “the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”

Jobs argued, “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” But somewhere along the way I got it in my head that to really prove anything to, well, myself, then I’d have to read a book a month, at least. So it’s two-thirds of the way through the year now. Here’s my progress.

Four to Six Weeks

Wed 6 Aug 200809:14 AM

Crash Test Dummies

Fri 1 Aug 200801:58 AM

I certainly don’t bemoan the fact that the iPhone now has a robust, creative and genuinely delightful market for sanctioned, third-party applications, but jeebus does my iPhone crash a lot. To me it’s proof positive that, in dividing its attention between this device, Mac OS X, Macintosh hardware, iPods and half-assed Web applications and services, Apple’s previously sterling quality levels have slipped notably. Just try using my post-2.0 update iPhone — or similar iPhones owned by many of my friends — without freezes or crashes. I bet you can’t.

Email As a Bridge or a Wall

Wed 30 Jul 200808:48 AM

People who know a lot more about the future than me tend to predict that someday soon that we’ll use software through voice command or even through dimensional gesturing in the style of “Minority Report.” Maybe that will happen and maybe it won’t. But my favorite alternative — or rather supplement — to the windows, mouse and pointer paradigm of controlling software is here today and it’s underrated: messaging. SMS on my phone, for sure, but definitely email.

Like most people, I’m sure, I spend the majority of my day in front of my email program. So when I can do something outside of the natural capable boundaries of email using that same, highly familiar interface, it feels like a real win.

Woe Is MobileMe

Tue 22 Jul 200801:45 PM

Over the course of several days last week, I spent a pretty sizable chunk of time trying to work out the kinks in Apple’s disappointingly buggy MobileMe service, the new incarnation of their equally error-prone .Mac. By the end of this first prolonged exposure to the service, I’ve decided that I feel exactly the same way about MobileMe as I did about its predecessor: ideally I’d like it to do much more, but at the very least I wish the stuff it does would work a lot better than it does. And when it doesn’t work, which is far more often than I’d like, it is in my view one of the most frustrating experiences that Apple has ever produced.

Like me, lots of folks are dependent on the features that MobileMe provides, so simply voting with our wallets, i.e., canceling our accounts in protest, isn’t as straightforward an option as some would argue. For me, over-the-air synchronization for my iPhone is something I’ve needed since the first day I bought it. Right now, MobileMe is the only viable option.

No Contact Is an Island

Tue 15 Jul 200809:01 AM

There’s plenty to like about the iPhone 2.0 Software Update, not the least of which is the fact that it now officially supports a brand new world of third-party applications. However, I’m only being a little facetious when I say that for me Apple really dropped the ball with its Contacts module.

A Word for .Mac

Thu 3 Jul 200802:29 PM

Apple’s new MobileMe service is due out before too long, and I’m pretty excited about it. In particular, I’m looking forward to what I hope will be a wholesale remedying of the many irritating shortcomings of its predecessor, the useful but error-prone .Mac service.

I know that I’ve said it before, but I’m really inclined to repeat it until a solution for its many problems is actually in place (and not just marketed) — .Mac is a very poor service. In my estimation, it falls far short of the high bar for excellence that Apple has consistently set for itself and met over the past decade.