How many iPhone apps do not have some sort of settings button? And how much screen real estate does that button waste?


Other companies had multitouch before Apple did. Microsoft Surface predates the iPhone by a few months. I know Apple got their multitouch technology by acquiring FingerWorks, though. I don't know how old their patents might be. But Apple is/has been sued by another company for itself violating multitouch patents.


Unlikely when you're wanting to use it in an open source application, especially when its license allows for commercial use.


Android doesn't even require a touch interface, much less a multitouch interface. Given, most Android devices these days do have a touch interface, but there is no requirement that they do.


I understand your point, and it may be a good reason why the iPhone does so well. Any idiot can use it. I don't want to be limited to the proverbial lowest common denominator, though.


You may have intended this as part of "the Apple method", but they have control over the entire iPhone/iPodTouch/iPad/iPhoneOS gamut, and that's the way they want it. That's fine, and does provide for tight integration between hardware and software. But Google is explicitly avoiding that. They may have a reference platform of some nature, but their intention is for Android to be able to run everywhere.


And that approach probably makes sense for those people for whom the web, or even just Facebook, is the entirety of the internet. I guess my general problem with it is that it's little more than a web appliance that happens to be extensible. At least Amazon is up front about the fact that the Kindle is an ebook reader, that maybe might be able to do a few other things.

But text UI users still had arrow keys to fall back on.

(Yes, I know that this is in direct opposition to your point about it being a new interface paradigm. But that doesn't make your analogy more apt.)

Quite a few lack a settings button. I'd guess at least half of the 141 apps I have don't have one. Apps with settings tend to go 2 different ways as well. Some have a settings button on the app directly, other have an entry in the system wide settings app. As far as how much screen space it wastes, not much, as most apps also only display it when needed. The main point I was trying to make here is the difference in how Apple approached the button question compared to Google and the various other handset manufacturers. Apple built a touch screen device that put the screen front and center. The one button on the front of the device does the same thing every time, and is the only universal thing people do with it. Outside that, programmers have a nearly full face screen to do whatever fits best with their app. Google added buttons and other control interfaces that not all 100% of the apps have use for. While it may not be wasting much space, it is adding things to the device that aren't always needed. We can go round and round on the little things, but I'm looking at this from a high level, seeing how Apple has a different approach overall compared to Google. Those high level choices often reveal why the two companies are on highly divergent paths. I can't even guess what an official Google tablet will be like, since they have both Android and ChromiumOS. On the Apple side, the iPad didn't really surprise me too much.


I can understand the reason, but why does a device with multitouch still need the on screen UI clutter to zoom in and out? By sticking them there in all cases, it shows their goal quite clearly. Run on as many devices as possible, but never provide an optimal experience on any one of them.


It is possible to make something easy to use, and powerful. It just takes a lot of work to do it. Can the iPhone do everything I want? No. But no device is ever likely to do so, even if it is the most complex thing out there. I buy products based on what they do, not on what they don't do or who they are catered to. The iPhone does many things really well. And I'm slowly coming to see the same on the iPad.


Google's goal sounds very similar to Microsoft's goal. And for the desktop computer market, that goal worked well. For the PDA/phone market, it didn't work for Microsoft. They had a good start with their early Windows powered PDAs, but Palm still won out. Then as the smartphone market evolved, RIM won out over Microsoft on the business side, and now the iPhone is leading the way in the consumer space.

I don't know what the big deal is about those zoom buttons. They're quite small, and the second you move the map around, they disappear, and only come back if you single-tap the screen. I prefer the have the choice, so that if I don't want to pinch-zoom, I don't have to. That way I can use the phone one-handed.

Of course, we're getting into the nitty gritty here, and this doesn't have much to do with the future of the iPad. Basically I liked the device, but I found it quite heavy...

True, and that may be in part due to the fact that Android targeted WinMo phones as their default architecture, in the same way that Linux targeted IBM-compatible PCs as their default architecture. It was initially conceived of as an alternative OS for the platform you already had. Whether this is philosophical, or because Google just didn't (initially) want to design a reference platform, I don't know.


Yeah, but how much of that was due to their software being total crap in a market where they didn't already have a virtual monopoly?

Actually, I don't know how we got off on this track: Android vs. iPhone. I have zero problem with the iPhone platform. It's not even "not for me"; Android is merely "for me" more.

I still think the iPad is stupid, even if I do understand its appeal to those who don't want anything more than what an iPhone can do, except they'd like it bigger. Maybe I underestimate the number of people who are fed up with keeping their underutilized computer running and want something that "just works". I have the suspicion that most of its sales are as a toy, and those people who really want to use it might get frustrated with what it can't do, especially considering its (both one-time and recurring) cost. Time will tell.

I think the origin of this might well be the TVI-920C and other such terminals of the era. See this photo:



Note the arrows printed on the H, J, K, and L keys. The vi editor, among others, adopted this particular mapping, which is probably how it found its way into Google's Reader.

Yes, indeed. For a good example of this, look at TiVo.

tanstaafl.

The Comedy Channel consistently lists Important Things coming on when Sarah Silverman is on. I don't really have a problem with it recording an extra program I may or may not watch, but the TiVo thinks it has recorded Important Things when it hasn't, and will therefore not try to record it again.

I'd like to tell the TiVo that the schedule is wrong, but there's not really any way to do that. I can set up an intentionally conflicting show, but that's hardly "easy to use". I can tell it to record Important Things every damn time it comes on, but that might create a problem with other shows. What I want to be able to do is tell it "this wasn't the right thing; try again", but there's no way to do that.

For another example, my wife and I watch a lot of the same shows, but we aren't always able to watch them together. So we have to externally keep track of which shows each of us has watched so that they can be deleted appropriately. The TiVo should have a flag system that indicates if it's been watched or not. I'm pretty sure that it actually keeps track of that data, as if a program is deleted before anyone watches it, it will record it if it comes on again, whereas if you did watch it, it gets marked as "recorded recently" and won't be rerecorded.

Of course, we could just let them fall off if there was a way to set retention priorities, but the only really usable user option is "keep forever". What I mean is that I have recordings set up to get things like MASH and Malcolm in the Middle and a variety of reruns and other programs that I don't watch regularly, but might like to have on hand if I'm bored. But I might have something that I'm more interested in that I don't have time to watch now, but would like to hang onto as long as there's hard drive space for it. But I don't want to prioritize it above other programs that I am interested in, nor do I want to prioritize it below the random stuff I record for boredom's sake. I could manually go and set expiration dates on every recording, but, again, that's hardly "easy to use".

My point is that while the TiVo does the right thing 95% of the time, and is waaaay better than the existing alternatives, it has significant room for improvement, both in ease of use and in power.

Bad guide info isn't Tivo's fault. Still it is a problem.

Whenever a show is recorded, there is a ~28 day block on rerecording that same show. This is to stop the Season Pass from filling the drive with copies.

To get around the recent recording block. In the Now Playing list select the miss-recorded show and choose More Options & View Upcoming Episodes. You will get a list of all the upcoming episodes. This list indicates which will or not be recorded. Select the future airing that Tivo thinks has already been recorded, and you will be given the option to record that one explicitly.

=====

I kind of wish it would be a little smarter in scheduling. Some shows appear in the guide several times, while others only once.

Depending on priorities, the single show can be skipped in favor of a show that might be available for recording only a few hours later.

No, but failing to deal with a widely known issue is.


Yeah, I know, but it's far from "easy to use" to go into the recording, note the episode it thinks it recorded, select "More Options", select "View Upcoming Episodes", find another time that episode is to be aired, filtering through all the other episodes on all the channels, try to remember which channel is the HD and which is the SD feed (probably backing back out to see the channel number for the incorrect recording and then having to navigate back), select that episode to record manually, be told that it conflicts with an existing scheduled recording, find another instance, etc.

There should be a feature that is "this was recorded improperly; try it again for me". Assuming, that is, that you want it to be "easy to use".

You're right it's no substitute for having a "Try Again" button.

Other way around it seems. Numbers out of the iPhone OS 4 event are 50+ million iPhones sold to date, and 35+ million iPod Touches, for a total of 85+ million iPhone OS based devices.

iPad wise, 450,000+ sold so far, with demand outpacing supply in many areas.

Yeah yeah, but when does Ha! list it?

There's a much easier example of bad design in the Tivo UI, Bitt. Just try searching for...well...anything! Terrible. And the fact that the QWERTY remote isn't standard on the Series 4 means they haven't gotten that it's a necessity. I love how they equated their Series 4 announcement as being just a big a deal as creating the first Tivo, but so poorly backed it up on this front. At least you can use USB keyboards.

Anyway, Comedy Central has been, for the entire span of Tivo's existence, the single worst big channel in the guide. It constantly amazes me how bad they are. In fact, I distinctly remember Jon Stewart of all people making fun of it back when he took over, saying that when he Tivos his own show, he has the privilege of watching it 5 times a day.

Sorry for helping get this topic back off-track.

Dammit! I always get that wrong.


Well, the searching isn't that bad; it's the text entry that's bad. I tend to use this.

That's not Tivo's fault, but I'll give you one that *is*.

I have a Season Pass for "Lost". I have told it to get NEW episodes. This season pass is at the very top of the season pass list. I have told it to do this on our local HD channel for that network on our cable company (comcast).

For the last couple months, we've been wrapping up the new episodes for the final season of Lost. Not a single one of these episodes has been recorded automatically. They're all there in the "Show all episodes" screen, and if I look at their information details, it shows their "original air date"s correctly, i.e., the original air date is the date of the broadcast, so the tivo SHOULD know that it's a new episode and therefore I should want it.

But I've had to manually go in and say "record this episode also" for every single new episode this season. Which is a pain because if I forget to do that every couple weeks, I miss episodes.

I think there's actually a flag in the guide data that says "New Episode" vs. "Rerun" (possibly vs. "Unset"), and that the TiVo uses that flag rather than a comparison between the original date and current date. Otherwise, it wouldn't know that each of the 14 times each week that USA runs the new episode of Psych that it's still a new episode. Of course, it will only record it once, since the "Recently Recorded" filter takes over.

So I think that's also the guide data's fault. Still, the TiVo should be able to work around it.

Bitt is correct. Tribune, the company that provides the data has a data element called "First Airing" which indicates whether or not the episode is "NEW." There is also another data element for "Rerun" however. And of course the "original air date" that Tony mentioned. There's also an episode ID data element which can be compared to existing recordings - as long as it's set correctly.

It's apparent that TiVo doesn't try and make any smart guesses about the validity of the values or lack of values.

TiVo's scheduling is super simple and they don't really do much in the way of advanced conflict resolution or fancy guess work. This has its advantages. KISS after all.

Anyway, my problem is that people say that it is possible to make something both powerful and easy, and they often come up with examples, but few are accurate examples. I think that it's possible in general, but maybe not with every case.

The example I like to use is filtering. (Fortunately, many things can be implemented as filtering, even if they don't look like it on the surface.) While you want to present easy filtering for the average user, it would be nice to provide advanced filtering for the advanced user. This is really very easily accomplished (ignoring the complexity of the advanced filtering implementation) by designing a full featured filtering system, and then prepopulating some initial saved filters. You don't even have to make the advanced filter configuration easy to find, as the advanced user has already thrown out "easy" as a criterion.

And a good real-world example of that is the empeg's shuffling modes.

My point is that it's very possible to make a generic thing specific, but it's totally impossible to make a specific thing generic. The iPad is (relatively) specific, and becoming more so through licensing.

Speaking of UI... I have a cautionary tale... Be careful what you wish for...

I've been hoping for a new UI my PVR software... Now it's finally coming. And it's horrible. So so bad that I can't even begin to describe what's wrong with it. Even my wife thinks it looks like a POS. More than that I can't really say since it's currently in closed beta.

It's a fine example of powerful back of house with horrendous front of house.

Heh.. sounds like MythTV !

I just took a look a moment ago at the state of MythTV UI and it really misses the mark in a lot of areas - and seems to be a jumble of inconsistency, at least in the images I've seen.

There are some decent looking interfaces for other open source projects, notably XBMC and its spawn (including Boxee). I suppose Myth has the same issue as the PVR software I'm using (which is not open source). The people primarily involved with it are number-crunching engineers and don't really have any style/design sense.

What I can't get over are al the compliments the new UI is getting. WTF? This just assures me that it's only going to get worse. Unfortunately it seems most of the customers also lack any design sense, so I suppose they're catering to their market well.

It does amaze me that with so much good looking software out there to take inspiration from that there's such a phenomenal amount of really crappy looking software. I mean, if you don't have the capacity to innovate something new, at least copy something else that looks good.

My sense of design is abysmal.

Well, that's not really true. If you give me a starting point, I can probably tell you what's wrong and how it could be improved, but I cannot design something from the ground up for the life of me. I'm miserable at it. It's probably the one thing that keeps me from being productive at software.

But I know that, and I try to get someone else to help me design a UI. You'd think a company could hire at least one graphic designer.

Yeah, the Myth UI really sucks, especially the *new* "MythUI" that was released recently.

They take a nice 50" 1080p screen, and then pop-up a program guide onto it that consists of five channels by four 30min timeslots, in a massively huge font.

At least the old UI had options to change that to 9 channels by 12 timeslots, but the new-improved one doesn't. It also suffers horribly from arrow-key sandtraps.. right-arrow gets you into a sub-menu, but left-arrow won't get you back out. Doh!

I've already worked out a personal patch to fix the arrow-key stupidity, but (me) fixing the EPG is taking longer than I'd like. Still, gotta do it, cuz the nice under-the-hood stuff really is improved, but requires the b0rked UI on top.

Sorry.. pushed a button there, I guess.

It's a shame that the file sharing announced and included in the SDK from January has been completely pooched and replaced by manual (multi-step) iTunes-based file syncing which also requires multiple import/export steps in the iPad app and doesn't allow sharing of documents between applications:

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/file_sharing_with_an_ipad_ugh/

Here's a case of Apple both limiting functionality and making the product difficult to use. Shame.

I know how you feel bitt, I have the exact same problem of being able to point out bad bits of design but unable to design anything myself.

The other developers at a previous job used to take the piss out of me over it, accusing me of only ever designing UIs that consisted of red and black. The funny thing was while they could also design better UIs than me they were't so good at spotting other people's bad design as I am.

This was probably my best bit of UI ever and I still know it sucks



You'd think given that I can see that it sucks that I'd be able to fix it...

Crazy Alice in Wonderland "eBook" for the iPad. The link is to YouTube for a "trailer" for the app/book.

Considering the subject matter, the implementation is rather apt. You can get a less intense (you know, regular text) version for free from Project Guttenberg, but where's the fun in that?

Kids will absolutely love it and it'll probably be one of the standard showoff apps when you want to impress somebody. You don't actually get much of the story though so it'll be back to the real paper version or the Guttenberg version if you want to read it properly. Makes sense though since you'd either have way too many pages to animate or you'd just have massive sections of text between the "fun" bits.

This wonderful book includes 52 pages and 20 amazing animated scenes.

It's like a digital pop-up book. This would make an amazing treatment for a number of Dr. Suess books.

Watching my five year old daughter torture her collection of books, let's just say I'd be hesitant to hand her my $500+ iPad (assuming I had one, which I don't).

Also of note, I tried reading Alice in Wonderland to her from my Kindle with text I got from Project Gutenberg. She said, "that's not a book! It doesn't have any pages or pictures." So there you go.