Month: December 2011

It’s Kids’ Stuff ⇥

Nielsen Research:

Consistent with U.S. kids’ 2010 wish lists, the Apple iPad is the most desired consumer electronic among kids ages 6-12 for holiday 2011. In fact, the iPad increases its stronghold, with nearly half (44%) of kids expressing interest in the product, up from 31 percent in 2010. Two other popular Apple devices – iPod Touch (30%) and iPhone (27%) – round out kids’ top three

Contrast with this recent statement from Niels Munksgaard, Nokia’s director of product marketing:

“What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone,”

Nokia needs to stop taking talking points from RIM and start strutting their stuff. They make great products, but spout tripe like this.

Hat-tip to John Gruber.

The Apple Blogs vs. Brooke Crothers ⇥

I didn’t bother linking to that CNET post because it’s ridiculous, in the fullest definition of the word.

M.G. Siegler points out exactly why that is:

The loyalty isn’t to some magical unicorn tear voodoo — it’s to the best products. But Crothers can’t write such common sense in 10 minutes and get the same reaction. So he went the other way.

Social Apps ⇥

Shawn Blanc lists a number of apps that he uses on a regular basis, many of which have their own social network. This aspect has its detractors; someone on Twitter [1] recently wrote that they’d use Instagram significantly less if it didn’t have support for also posting to Twitter. There are a number of these single-platform social networking applications (Stamped, Path, etc.) all essentially serving a single function, yet all with the ability to broadcast that to Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr. I wonder how well these apps would be doing if they didn’t integrate with Twitter and focused on their own network. I suspect not well.

Speaking of Path, Louie Mantia articulated a particular complaint I have with it.

[D]on’t get me wrong, the data is useful, it’s just they need a separation between notifications and content.

Posting a photo, waking up, adding a friend and checking in at a location are all of equal priority within Path. Two of these four are things that I care about when opening the app.

  1. I can’t find the specific tweet at the moment, as I neglected to add it to my favourites and there is no good way of searching Twitter. If you know the one I’m talking about, give me a shout.

I would like to thank RIM’s co-CEOs for their incompetence ⇥

Jim Dalrymple:

The holidays are approaching fast. It’s the time of the year where we take stock of the good (and bad) things that happened over the last 12 months, and figure out goals for the next year.

I would like to personally thank RIM’s co-CEOs for their complete and total incompetence in 2011. Without your lack of attention to the market and the details that would make a great product, my year wouldn’t have been so successful.

I don’t think many companies have imploded as spectacularly as RIM has in the past year. Certainly very few have done so due to their utter lack of understanding of the market.

Yet Another Contribution to the UI Fragmentation of Android ⇥

Min Ming:

Google, here is the problem: If you cannot make the UI of your apps consistent, how do you expect developers to follow your design language? Which one should they follow?

I knew Android’s UI was inconsistent, but I didn’t realise just how thorough and pervasive the fragmentation is. It’s almost as if Google has never opened two or more of their own apps at once. For instance, there are nine different tab styles within Google’s own apps.

(via Tristan O’Tierney)

Create ⇥

This is a really smart CMS, which allows an admin to edit a page’s content directly and immediately. It’s the sort of thing I’d love to equip clients’ websites with.

They Should Change it to “AdMitigate Plus” ⇥

From the horse’s mouth:

Starting with Adblock Plus 2.0 you can allow some of the advertising that is considered not annoying. By doing this you support websites that rely on advertising but choose to do it in a non-intrusive way. And you give these websites an advantage over their competition which encourages other websites to use non-intrusive advertising as well.

This is really clever. According to the list they posted, these exceptions are pretty limited at the moment. It would be pertinent of them to add exceptions for The Deck, Carbon, and Fusion.

Motorola Xoom 2 Review ⇥

Motorola’s new tablet has a 1.2 GHz dual core processor, a gig of RAM, an IPS display (finally!) and 4G LTE speeds (along with more initialisms). So what does that get you? Sluggish scrolling, jittery animations, five hours of battery life and a stupid name in the US (“Droid Xyboard”). The entry fee for such an unrefined system? $700, unless you choose a 2-year contract. That’s $70 more than a 16 GB iPad with 3G.

On the plus side, the hardware is much better than the original Xoom, the cameras are decent, and Motorola is promising an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich. In the end, Vlad Savov still prefers the iPad 2.

Galaxy Nexus Availability in the United States ⇥

We’ve had the Galaxy Nexus in Canada for a couple of weeks now, but apparently there’s a big holdup for the American version. As I posted yesterday, this could be due to a delay of the Verizon build of Ice Cream Sandwich.

Interestingly, stores seem to have the devices in stock. Josh Topolsky asks:

Do you work at a Best Buy or Verizon store? Do you want to sell me a Galaxy Nexus?

And the replies poured in (all quotes sic). This, from Joseph Ayala:

Haha, you have better luck at Radio Shack. […] they were selling them on Friday in the a.m. until they were told by corporate to stop. Seems like some stores didn’t listen

And this from Chris Johnson:

i work at a verizon store and want to sell myself one. we’re all hoping it launches this week to get them out to people.

To which Josh asked whether they had them in stock, and Chris replied “yep, have since last week.”

Verizon is sitting on the flagship Android phone. They have them in stock. And yet, for whatever reason, they aren’t selling them.

Galaxy Nexus OS Variant Not Controlled By Google ⇥

[According to] an article about Is the Galaxy Nexus Still a “Nexus?” […] there are Google created builds and Samsung created builds for the coming Ice Cream Sandwich, along with what is expected to be a Verizon build for Ice Cream Sandwich. It appears that these may not be compatible when doing upgrades because of the differences between them.

Insert here your favourite snarky comment about how “open” is always better.

iTunes Rewind for 2011 (iTunes Link) ⇥

The iTunes Rewind picks are now live, and it’s no surprise that Instagram was named app of the year. The Mac App Store picks are also live, with Pixelmator taking the top prize. Final Cut Pro X hilariously got a nod, since it’s an Apple application, and it was generally poorly-received. Great picks all around.

More On the Twitter Redesign ⇥

I’ve spent some time with the new mobile site, the updated iOS app and reviewing the publicity material, and I’ve come to the conclusion that these updates make me a happy Twitterrific customer.

The integration of statistics, specifically stats for people who added a tweet to their favourites and users who retweeted a status, is a welcome addition. The integration of media is superb. But with the updates, the website begins to look cluttered and disjointed. It’s the antithesis of what Twitter is really about: short, simple phrases.

The update has made it surprisingly difficult to link to an individual tweet. One must click to open the tweet, then select the vaguely-named “Details” link. The panels that nobody I know cares about (“Who to follow” and trends) have been made much more prominent, landing on the left-hand side. Direct messages have been made less-prominent across all platforms.

The iOS app is really, really clean. It’s so excellent in a number of areas, but in a few it is perplexingly terrible. The timeline, for instance, is set in a table cell group, leaving slight (~20 px) borders on either side. There’s also a distinct lack of whitespace within each cell. The resulting effect is one of claustrophobia (as succinctly put by Oliver Charavel). The screen for composing a new tweet doesn’t use iOS’ native Twitter keyboard. The swiping shortcuts to reveal reply and retweet controls have been removed. On the plus side, the app looks and works decidedly better than its predecessor in most other ways.

The mobile site is more of the same. It still uses a fakey javascript interpretation of inertial scrolling. Tapping the title bar still doesn’t make the tweet list jump to the top, as it should.

Twitter has also changed what they’re calling different segments, and it’s applicable to all official clients. Mentions, new followers, favourites and retweets have been grouped under the very vague “Connect” tab. The “Discover” tab groups together currently-trending topics, hot news stories and a stalker-friendly “Activity” view. I’m not sure if this view was present before (I rarely use the site itself), but it shows what interactions the people you’re following are having, and it updates live.

Notably, Twitter didn’t announce any updates to their OS X application today. And like I said at the beginning, I’m a happy Twitterrific customer. These updates aren’t likely to change that.

Flavour of the Month ⇥

Another interation of Twitter’s site and apps is launching. Curiously, it looks more complicated on the web, and not as simple as Twitter ostensibly is. The new set of applications looks okay. Leaving aside the slogan, which I presume they borrowed from Ontario Travel, I’m curious to give the full suite a spin.

“You can use the donate button to raise money for a sick cat, but not poor people.” ⇥

Certainly you’ve seen this shit-storm of a story. It’s truly shocking. With the amount of incidents regarding PayPal, I’m convinced that the only reason they’re still around is because they are the kings of online payment systems.

Well worth reading is the Green Geeks take, wherein PayPal self-destructs by their own policies.

I’ve reached out to PayPal for a comment and will update this if I receive one.

Don’t Be A Free User ⇥

This is an interesting take that I’m not sure I agree with. On the one hand, I absolutely support independent developers wherever I can by buying apps and clicking on web ads. However, communities and apps like Instagram wouldn’t be as popular if they cost $1.99, or if they were covered in ads.

Gary Vaynerchuk said it really well at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo:

You have to have a business model. I mean, getting a crapload of users and then flipping it is not a business model. Make some cash along the way.

Then he talks a little about the “freemium” business model, where there are certain premium features for paid users (no ads, higher quality x, more space, etc.), and today, I can’t help but wonder why Instagram doesn’t follow this model. Why not have a standard archive amount of the past 90 days, and anything beyond that requires the $1.99 app? Why not offer a paid app with more filters, with more customisation options?

Unfortunately, I think a lot of these little apps along the way are just trying to gain a broad user base and then sell out to the highest bidder. How often does that actually work, though?

“Why?” ⇥

Color launched its not-anticipated application update today, and it’s been receiving rave reviews on Twitter, where by “rave” I mean the opposite.

Sebastiaan de With:

Hey, this pivot of Color looks great. No audio, 30 seconds of live video.

Watch out, ‘live webcam’ popups, there’s a new player in town.

Neven Mrgan:

Color has pivoted again, and their new demo video is a pee joke. Great job, everyone, back-pats all around.

Craig Hockenberry:

Apps and websites that require Facebook make it a lot easier for me to decide if I should check them out.

When I previewed the new version of Color back in November, I wrote:

Color is now video, instead of photos. It now uses Facebook instead of trying to start its own social network. And it now broadcasts worldwide instead of sharing with people next to you. […] Color still hasn’t answered the question “why?”.

Still waiting on that.

That “Store” Button in iOS 5’s Music App

The Store button I'm complaining about

Apple has a really great grip on what makes for a superb user interface. It’s rare for them to mess up, especially in a way that mars usability. I feel that the “Store” button in iOS 5’s Music application[1] is an egregious example of one of these rare screw-ups. I see the problem as two-fold.

The first scope of issues with the button is its placement. It is located in a position of the UI that in almost every other instance means “return to the previous level” (the exceptions being Contacts and Calendar, which use it as the place for the refresh control). In Music, it also means this in just about every screen, until you get to a top-level screen — something that you’ve selected from the bottom toolbar. Artists, for instance.

There is no upper level from Artists. Albums are lower in the hierarchy; songs and playlists are lower still. Artists is what music in iTunes is sorted by, by default. Yet Music presents the Store button as the next level of hierarchy. In a way, this makes sense: music is sorted by artist, and music comes from the iTunes Store. But you weren’t thinking that, were you? That’s because it isn’t really the next level. There simply isn’t one, and shoehorning the Store into that position is awkward at best.

To be fair, iBooks does have a Store button, as does Newsstand. But the iBookstore is on the “back” of your shelf, whereas the Store button in Newsstand and Music sends the user to an entirely different application. It isn’t as big of an issue in Newsstand, because that’s presented on the home screen, akin to a folder. But Music is presented as its own app, and there isn’t another button in the “go back a level” position anywhere else on the iPhone that sends the user to a different application.

To be fair, the iTunes Store has a “Library” button that will send the user back to Music, but it’s on the other side of the toolbar. It’s in a logical place, if we use the “iTunes store is the next level of hierarchy after Artists” screwed-up brand of logic.

These problems would be excusable if the button had a point, but as far as I can figure out, it doesn’t. Music is where you go to listen to music; the purple iTunes icon is the one you tap on if you want to buy music. I mentioned iBooks before, which is similar in that it has a local library and the iBookstore. But that’s an anomaly because the store is integrated into the iBooks app (not to mention that the “Store” button is located on the opposite side). Its only point, so far as I can tell, is to capture stray taps.

I suppose I’m less irritated by the idea that the button is there, but that it sends me away from the application I was using. I think that’s the biggest error. It has a high potential to be accidentally activated, it momentarily confuses the user in the event of an accidental selection and generally impairs usability [2]. If Apple so desperately wants traffic to the iTunes Store from Music, they might consider placing the Store view on the “back” of the app. It would be dramatically less jarring. For now, it’s a dumb place for an unnecessary button in a way that creates user confusion.

  1. I’m using iOS 5 as a bit of a shorthand, as this only affects the iPhone and iPod touch. The Store button is also present in Videos, but that’s less of a concern because it has a flatter hierarchy. [↑]
  2. Yes, I filed a radar, number 10529892. Please duplicate it if you share my concern. [↑]

Incorrect ⇥

According to the report, Apple is testing two sets of seven drivers each targeting either dual-core or quad-core chips. Within each set, Apple is said to be testing four drivers targeting the current 960 x 640 display size, two targeting 1280 x 720 displays and one targeting 1440 x 800 displays.

Not only would those displays not fit the @2x paradigm established by the iPhone 4 display, and expected to carry over to the iPad 3, but neither of those other resolutions are at the same aspect ratio as each other, let alone the 3:2 ratio of all iPhone screens.

Update

Oliver Charavel pointed me to this curious patent, which describes persistent overlays distinct from the actual content. If anything about the MacRumors story is true, then I think the main UI will still write to a 640 x 960 area, and the surrounding border of pixels will contain these persistent overlays. The 800 x 1440 display mentioned above is interesting, because that works out to a ratio of 1.8. The current iPhone dimensions are a ratio of 1.94.