Good news everybody! Apple’s iPhone OS is (some would say finally) getting into the multitasking game. Well, they are about to get into the game, the new OS was just announced today.

I was following the event via Engadget and saw something that caught my eye. Here’s a quote from the QA session in the iPhone OS 4 event (from Engadget):

“Q: How do you close applications when multitasking? A: (Scott Forstall) You don’t have to. The user just uses things and doesn’t ever have to worry about it. A: (Steve Jobs) It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.”

Now, this is why I have a serious love-hate relationship with open source as a whole: It just seems to be unable (as a process) to provide good UX or usability. Lately I’ve been following the Android camp a lot, and I’ve even became quite giddy about the new HTC Desire: The way it (Android 2.1) handles multitasking, notifications etc. is just amazing. Same couldn’t be said about iPhone, at least so far, until the Android-like multitasking arrives.

However, the problem with Android is that it’s open source, which inherently means that anyone can pitch in, even if they have no experience in the matter. Good example is that some Android developers even keep saying that Android needs a task manager, because it’s a multitasking platform. Which, no matter what way you look at it, is just the wrong way to look at the problem. Or, one could even say that the first step is admitting that you have a problem… Meanwhile, UX/usability experts are trying to tell people that if the most downloaded program in Android Market is a task manager, something is inherently off. When it comes to good UX, the user shouldn’t be worrying about these things, rather than just use the damn thing.

This, is something that open source process has, so far, been unable to deliver. However, commercial projects realize this, just because they do focus group testing, they do UX/usability evaluations etc. I’ve talked this lot before and I will say it again – Open source, as in it’s current form, is just not capable of providing products that deliver good UX. Good UX (like good usability) needs designers and testing, neither of which are present in open source projects. Or, if they are, their voices can’t be heard from all the other opinions making themselves heard.

So tip of my hat to Apple. This might actually be enough to get me into the iPad game, since for me the no. 1 problem, hands down, was the lack of multitasking. If I can’t run for example IM messaging, Spotify and a browser at the same time, the device is as good as dead weight for me. “It has the best browsing experience, ever! Boom!” – Well, it doesn’t matter to me if that’s ALL you are going to do with the device. Besides, my main browsing experience is not going anywhere from my desktop and full size real keyboard (and hopefully soon new big screen). But now, with multitasking, the device just got a whole lot interesting!

Now, if they would just let me use it properly without iTunes, I would be a happy camper. But, knowing S. Jobs, that is never going to happen. Which just makes me a sad panda.

PS. I have to say that, I think Steve was wrong saying “stylus is just making it wrong“, as I have bunch of designer/artist friends who would just looove this thing with pressure sensitive stylus.

Today Apple unveiled the much rumored iTablet called iPad. The abilities of the device (or lack of) have already caused lots of conversation out there. I naturally decided to concentrate just on user interface of the device. So, how does the Apple’s new toy go around the bends? I’ve made a quick analysis via Engadget’s hands-on video, and the pictures I’ve seen since the launch. The pictures in the article are also from that same video.

Now, granted, I do not have an iPhone here and do not possess the greatest of memories, so some of this stuff might have been already on current version of iPhone OS but, nevertheless, I’m addressing the issues still.

The Groundwork

The iPad is running new version of  iPhone OS, version 3.2, so for iPhone owner the basic UI should be rather simplistic experience: few desktops, side by side, full of icons and few “permanent” icons down at the tray. Tap any icon and the application launches, simple as apple pie. Since it has no multitasking, the application handling is also as easy as it gets – There simply is no such thing. You’re either in or out from the application.

The Basics

The basic navigation within applications is simple enough – if you drill down within an application (think of artist -> songs) by tapping the top left corner of the screen, the OS always takes you back one level, to the state where you were earlier. Simple enough. This is the basics of tried and true iPhone OS. However, it’s after this foundation where the things start to get hairier.

Continue reading “Quick analysis of Apple iPad’s User Interface”

This article goes about to paint a hypothetical future where megacorporations rule the world, plus just how that might happen. Today’s subject is Apple (includes some speculation of new product release).

First things first, what is a Megacorporation?

According Wikipedia,

“It refers to a fictional corporation that is a massive conglomerate, holding monopolistic or near-monopolistic control over multiple markets (thus exhibiting both a horizontal and a vertical monopoly). Megacorps are so powerful that they can ignore the law, possess their own heavily-armed (often military-sized) private armies, hold ’sovereign’ territory, and possibly even act as outright governments. They often exercise a large degree of control over their employees, taking the idea of ‘corporate culture’ to an extreme.”

While the private armies are bit of a stretch still, the rest of it just could be possible.

Why Apple?

For all of you haters out there, even though I tend to criticize Apple a lot, this isn’t personal. The whole thing started when I was thinking about a product concept and came to conclusion that there are couple of things that are vital to the concept, and all of those Apple has a stranglehold. Thus, the idea was scrapped and morphed to Megacorporations article.

First of all, Apple has bunch of special traits that tend to tint it towards possible Megacorporation:

Continue reading “Cyberpunk Megacorporations – Apple”

Everyone, or at least most of us, knows how easy it is to make mistakes when typing with on-screen keyboard in todays handhelds: missing tactile feedback, cramped keyboards and so forth. There are countless of problems, but one of them isn’t actually forced by the dimensions and feel of the device, rather than just being an ancient millstone that the industry drags around: the keyboard layout – the QWERTY.

QWERTY

QWERTY -layout for keyboards was designed during mechanical typewriter era, when it was problem with individual characters to clash and jam together when typing rapidly. In 1870’s fellow named Christopher Sholes designed a layout which would position the characters such way that it would minimize the chances of two sticking together, thus making the machine more reliable.

Wikipedia – QWERTY

DVORAK

Later on along came professor named August Dvorak, with his DVORAK keyboard layout. This layout was inspired with efficiency and fatigue problems of QWERTY keyboard and aimed to fix all these issues by studying letter frequencies and hand physiology. Still, as 99.99% of the computers in the world use QWERTY derived layouts, DVORAK has been unsuccessful to gain actual ground on market shares. There are two main reasons for this A) because people are reluctant of learning a completely new keyboard layout and B) because practically DVORAK layout only applies to cases when you type on English language, other languages have different letter frequencies. Also, when you are typing with most of your digits you are using muscle memory, and this increases the effort needed for learning a completely new keyboard layout.

Wikipedia – DVORAK

Continue reading “Virtual keyboard design for mobile devices”

Note: Also includes a reply to PC Magazine’s article “The Google vs. Apple War Begins“

It’s always sad how the big players don’t seem to realize that user experience and usability matters. Specially when you want to have user created content on your website. I just spent some minutes reading an article from PC Magazine and decided to comment about the speculations in the post. After scrolling some time downwards I eventually found the (quite easy to miss) “Add Your Comment” box:

Like the picture above would lead you to believe that you don’t actually need to register to post a comment, like in any clever web platform (there are other, better, ways of getting rid of the spam), so I happily typed down my reply and pressed post, only to bounce back from this:

Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot?! I still need to register, even though the form clearly said “Post”. So I let out a deep sigh, let my shoulders slump a bit and press “Create an Account”, here we go. And what do I find? A form long & complex enough (PC Magazine – Member Registration), and full of Dreaded Red Dots *, that it could be a registration form for a bank loan. Needless to say that all it took was few quick glances up and down the form, decide it’s not worth the effort and then just forget the whole thing.

One can only wonder how much more content and discussions there would be if the posting wouldn’t require a process equal to launching a nuclear missile (… Note to self: I hope that it’s not THAT easy, or rather more complicated than that), thus bringing more traffic and revenue for the magazine. Take heed PC Magazine. Take heed.

* Dreaded Red Dot means a field that is required for the registration. Usually not a good thing if you want to have a fluid user experience.

To those who still are interested, here is the reply I wanted to post

“I personally don’t think that this whole FCC commotion is specifically about the Google Voice app being pulled, rather than the fact that Apple just yanked a “random app” from the store and is making the developer to pay all of the refunds for the app, even the 30% part that they are taking from the transactions. In my books, FCC just wants to make clear what are the rules of the app store, so that developers might defend themselves when next time Apple decides to pull apps from the App Store and make the developer pay the refunds.

-Mikko Tikkanen”

Some months ago I was questioning if Apple was becoming evil (Is Apple becoming evil?), and at least with some parts, it seems to me it’s steadily steaming towards that direction. In the end I quoted a somewhat famous movie:

“You either die as a hero or live long enough to see yourself to become the villain“

In case you’ve been living in a barrel (on under a rock, respectively) the last few weeks, here’s a brief collection of what’s going on at the moment

Chapter One: App refund policy

If you remember the road, that Apple has been going down with OS X, where they kept taking features from most popular OS X utilities and integrating them into their OS (good example would be dashboard widgets), making the original app obsolete. So, against this road taken, it’s not hard to imagine a situation where Apple is taking some popular apps and integrating their functionality to their iPhone OS. However, the behavior itself is quite everyday business in software world but the situation changes when you look at Apples contribution back to the community. Practically zero. Then you look how insanely aggressively the silver apple has been defending any of it’s IP against anyone, the situation gets bad to worse. Practically this would mean that they just keep taking IP from small developers, not giving anything back to the community and, in worst case scenario, going after the same small developer. Though, this is just nitpicking, and rather just a minor sidetrack.

Couple of days ago, this all took a step towards the dark side: Apple is expecting the developers to pay full refunds in the case any app is removed from the App Store (as Gizmodo reports). This would mean that even if magically you would end up saving all the money that you got from your app sales, you would still end up owing money. How? Remember how Apple takes 30% off from the transactions? That would be the part you’d end up owing since they are expecting you to cough up the full refund, while Apple is keeping it’s part of the sales. Sound like a bad deal yet?

So, imagine yourself as an iPhone developer who got new app out there and it’s making money. Some months later Apple comes up with iPhone OS update which has the exact same functionality, which in Apples books would be a reason enough (not like they need one, see next chapter) to remove your app from the store. Boomf! Within less than a second you went from having a successful career in iPhone development, to a guy who clearly doesn’t have enough money if the refunds start rolling in.

Continue reading “Apple taking steps towards the dark side, hatred, anger”

It’s interesting how the web interfaces, now that the web is actually becoming a  platform for real applications, are doing some of the same exact mistakes that desktop interfaces have done in the past years (well, in all fairness, some are still doing). I’m guessing one of the reasons for this is that the visual designers (who usually do the designs for web sites) usually don’t have user interface background, thus making the same mistakes. Another factor could be the introduction of AJAX, which brought the possibility of cool interfaces, which as an idea is good but often is quite hard to pull off without proper knowledge of the interface design.

Why Modal Windows are bad?

Modal windows (Modal Window – Wikipedia) by themselves aren’t bad inherently but they have only a specific use in the user interfaces, and it is this specific use that it’s usually neglected in these new breed of web interfaces: Modal windows are designed to stop workflow and to force the user to pay attention to specific information and/or task. Good example of this would be an alert of some sort, that is so crucial that the user simply has to pay attention to it, before doing anything else, thus restricting access to the rest of the interface.

An example of modal window would be Digg.com’s login window (even though it’s not actually a true modal window, see below):

In this case, there are another problems: The login window doesn’t fade the background away (with darker overlay, for example) and the background of the window is practically even the same color as the page underneath, thus making it harder to perceive than necessary. What’s more is that the window in question acts like a normal page element, moving with the page when scrolling, thus not coping with the rules of window behavior.

Continue reading “Modal windows are bad, ok?”