I really love computer-generated art, mostly because I believe that it clearly demonstrates the inherent beauty in mathmatics, and therefore nature and all of the universe.
The Complexification Gallery of Computation is home to a series of small computer programs that you can watch create incredible things before your eyes. If you only view one of these, I think it should be Substrate by J. Tarbell. Oh, oh, it’s magic.
Me neither! Wow, what a treasure-trove of design nerd information. If you don’t know who Ed Tufte is, shame on you. Seriously, though… His writings on information design, including The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Beautiful Evidence, and Envisioning Information (my favorite) are some of the most insightful and beautiful books on the subject that I’ve come acrosss.
He has always seemed to me like the type of guy who is really keen on the theory of information design, but not very much in touch with how information design is playing a role in modern technology. How wrong I am. Tufte’s “blog” recently featured a short post critiquing info design in the iPhone, and even features a movie (narrated by his info-ness).
The movie is short but sweet. Tufte emphasizes many of the insightful decisions made by the iPhone design team, and points out some possible areas of improvement. He correctly states that while most of the iPhone screens are pretty to look at (stocks, weather, etc.), they waste a fair amount of space, and lack any means of digging deeper. Right on, Tufte. Great quote: “Clutter and overload are not attributes of information, they are failures of design.”
Interface Design and the iPhone, by Edward Tufte
I’m alone this weekend with nothing to do, so I’m going to fill the void with some blog content. Rest assured, loyal reader, some fresh piping-hot goodness is coming your way. Let’s start off with an oldie-but-a-goodie: my old friend Edward Tufte…
Of course, as an avid computer (mac) user and designer, I pre-ordered a copy of Apple’s newest operating system, 10.5 Leopard. There have been very few times in the past when I have first used a new Apple product and wasn’t immediately impressed with the design and usability. My first few minutes with Leopard, however, were filled almost entirely with disgust. So far, I have found a handful of things that will lower my productivity, and very little that will increase it. Some of these things are only small design details, but they add up to a very lackluster experience, and a step backwards in design for Apple.
In no particular order, here are the chief offenders:
1. The Dock
The thing I expected to hate the most is the thing I hate the least. The reflective shelf dock. The dock itself isn’t absolutely awful, but components of it definitely are. For one, the automatic shadows that Apple has chosen to add to every dock icon do feel weird and unnatural in all but a few cases. The small arrows under each running dock application have been replaced by small glowing lights, which look bad and are much more difficult to see than their predecessors. The line that divided the documents/folders area of the dock from the applications has been replaced by a weird cross-walk looking thing that looks rediculous and unrefined, especially for an Apple product.
If you don’t like the new appearance of the dock and/or you like the dock on the sides of your screen, the dock appearance changes. However, the appearance doesn’t change to the old dock appearance, but instead becomes a “new” dock style with a dark background and white outline. There is nothing redeeming about this new side-dock style. It is flat-out ugly.
The biggest problem with the new dock is the new Stacks feature. In Tiger, when you dropped a folder onto the dock, you could then navigate through the folder by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on it. This was a great feature, and made finding files often much faster than using the Finder. This functionality is completely gone, replaced by Stacks. Let’s say I wanted to put my Application folder on the dock, so I had convenient access to all of the applications that I don’t use often enough to just drop on the dock. This used to be a great idea. Now, with Stacks, it doesn’t work. The “fan” mode of stacks can only display 12 items at a time, and the “grid” view makes it very difficult to pick out one icon in a sea of thirty.
Why, oh why, did you do this to me, Apple? Why couldn’t you at least let me set folders to be viewed the old (better) way? WHY??? I consider this criminal negligence on the part of Apple’s interface designers, and I won’t be a happy camper until this problem is addressed.
4. Window Styling
Apple has finally found a consistent window style to stick with across all windows and applications. Unfortunately, it isn’t that great of an appearance. Now I’m going to start nit-picking (as if I wasn’t already).
The new window style is solid grey with a vertical gradient to it. I think it might be a little too dark, but if it weren’t for other issues it might be okay.
Now, this next item just seems like laziness. The small icons at the top of the finder window are too close to the bottom of the window frame. They should have about the same amount of space under them as they do from the top of them to the close/max/min buttons. This is certainly being picky, but every detail should be considered, and this comes across as sloppiness.
Even the close, minimize, and maximize buttons in the top left of every window are uglier. They have have an overly-glossy appearance that I’ll probably get used to eventually, but for now I don’t like it.
2. The Menu Bar
This one will be much shorter than the last. The new semi-translucent menu bar was a horrible idea from the beginning. Almost everyone outside of Apple realized this all along. I’m sure Apple received hundreds of emails from developers and Apple-enthusiasts begging them not to do this, or at least give us the option to turn it off. They ignored all of that. The new menu bar does not look better, it looks worse and makes it more difficult to read. Period.
3. New Icons
For a long time, Apple’s icon design has been some of the best in the industry. Somehow, however, this previous success has been derailed with Leopard. The new folder icons are flat, boring, and in the case of the User Folder standards (Desktop, Documents, Library, Movies, etc) now don’t tell you anything about the folder contents unless you view them at an unusually huge size. Again, I’m not sure how this happened. Maybe Apple is slipping, maybe all of their talented GUI designers were busy with something else?
The other icon that I’ve noticed a major change to is the “System Preferences” icon of dock fame. I loved the old system prefs icon, wish they would’ve kept it forever. I hate the new icon. Hate it. It might look fine on an iPhone where that is the predominant icon style, but not in my OS.
These are just the things I found in the first 20 minutes of using the new OS, and they frustrated me enough that I actually stopped playing with Leopard to write this post. Granted, some of these things I’ll get used to. Some of them I won’t, and they’ll continue to drive me crazy until either Apple fixes the problem (unlikely) or a third-party developer does (incredibly likely). However, I don’t believe that we should have to rely on third-party developers to fix Apple’s mistakes, and I believe that Leopard represents more user interface mistakes than any previous version of OS X. I’m sure I’m not alone on this.
I am definitely not alone in my hatred of DRM (digital rights management), specifically when applied to music. Not only does it create a nightmarish situation for the average technology-user, but it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of music-use by the major record labels and distributors.
Music has always been a communal experience. Clubs, concerts, mix-tapes, custom CDs, and the rise of MP3s have all attested to this. After all of these decades of business, I find it amazing that the major music producers have not accepted this reality as a fundamental part of their business strategy.
DRM ignores all of this. You buy an album for yourself. Only you can listen to it. You can never sell it once you get tired of it (and most of the time you will). You don’t even have any permanent ownership of it, really. At any time your access to it could be restricted or denied.
This is a really long way of saying, I was ecstatic when Steve Jobs announced that Apple was open to the abandonement of DRM, and even more enthusiastic when it seemed that EMI and Apple were actually making it happen.
And now there is iTunes Plus. The entire EMI music catalog can now be purchased on iTunes as “iTunes Plus” music, meaning it has no DRM, and higher-quality than standard iTunes recordings. Great! But… you have to pay 30 cents more per song. At first, this still sounded to me like a fair tradeoff for pure ownership of your music.
In my off-time there isn’t a type of application I use more than a web browser. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of web browsers out there, most of them free. I’ve used almost all of them enough to know where they stand. What really shocks and frustrates me, though, is how almost every single one of them fails to do at least one thing right. Safari has fantastic book-marking and built-in RSS, but lacks in most other areas. Firefox is fantastically customizable, but isn’t very fast or attractive (on a Mac). I tried Camino for awhile (meh), OmniWeb (great browser, but I’m not paying for it), Flock (too MySpace generation for me), and Opera (again, I won’t pay for something I can get for free).
Enter Shiira, a relatively new browser contender that just recently reached it’s 2.0 release. The Shiira philosophy seems to be, “What if Apple would have taken Safari the extra mile?”
For anyone who not only reads this, but also has some interest in what I’m doing with my life: For roughly a month now I’ve been working at the Des Moines, Iowa based design firm On-Purpos. It is truly a great place with great people working there, and they are a relatively young studio with a big future. If you’re interested in what some of the best mid-Iowa design looks like these days, check out the OP web site:
For everyone that I’ve been neglecting while I get settled into my new job, I apologize.
I’m a big fan of Donald Norman’s writing on usability. During my bi-annual skimming of his website I came across a few interesting tidbits. First of all, it seems that the Nielsen Norman usability group consults for H & R block, and that Donald Norman was involved in the development of H & R Block’s Tango online tax application. Unfourtunately, I’ve already done my taxes, but the Tango interface seems nice, and is described as being an “entirely new way to do your taxes”. If you haven’t filed yet, and don’t mind dropping seventy bucks to do your taxes, try it out and let me know what you think. How could tax preparation get any worse?
I also found an interview with Mr. Norman on NPR’s Radio Times. Its a free podcast, what’s not to like?
The new version of chrismalven.com has quietly gone live. I may be making small cosmetic or functional changes over the next few weeks, but don’t let that worry you.
I’m almost finished redesigning chrismalven.com for the first time in several years, and I’ve created this blog to go with it. I don’t expect to update it very frequently, but I’ll use it to write about design, interaction, technology, and anything else that occasionally peaks my interest. I’ll also use it to judge my net worth as a human being, as indicated by the number of comments posted daily. Just kidding, of course.
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