Amar's blog

Cambio

2008-12-10T22:36:00.009Z

I never used to be particularly interested in designing mobile applications. I just thought it was a hopeless platform, plagued by tiny screens and keys that were designed for inputting numbers (how often do you actually type numbers into your phone?) I also had never thought of my phone as something that I want to use for various applications. This scepticism had become so ingrained that I initially didn't even see much point in Apple opening up the iPhone for third-party developers. I thought it might destroy the purity of this well-designed platform if developers were suddenly given reign over users' mobile screens.

However, two months ago or so, a certain curiosity, a thirst for a new challenge and a feeling that I was missing a boat (to where I did not know) combined to make me go out and buy an iPod touch (I don't want to buy an iPhone because my current phone deal is too good to give up). I almost immediately appreciated both what a well-designed platform it is and what a compelling playground the third-party application market represents, for users and developers alike.

You see, what I had not realised before was that:

My preconception that mobile apps are pointless was based on the fact that previous platforms were so unsuitable for them. I had simply not witnessed how good it can be.
I had forgotten how good Apple are at framework design. The SDK allows you to make rich, highly interactive and very consistent user interfaces rather easily.

I obviously wasn't the first person to think that a unit converter would be an ideal iPhone application. It seemed like the perfect programming exercise, but I didn't want to produce something that was redundant. I had a look at a selection of what seemed like popular unit converters, but none of them worked quite the way I thought they ought to. Like so many times in the past, that was motivation enough for me to sit down and roll my own.

The result is Cambio:

Get it at the App Store. It's free.

I am planning a separate article on the design of Cambio. For now, please give it a spin and let me know what you think. Do you find anything unclear, confusing or annoying about the interaction? Are you missing any units or quantities? Feel free to comment here or drop me an email at contact@amarsagoo.info.

Tofu 2.0.1

2008-09-09T22:47:00.004+01:00

Tofu 2.0 was released yesterday, which allows reading simple PDF documents, has a less obtrusive full-screen mode, supports scrolling on MacBook trackpads and is a Universal Binary (that is, it includes a native build for Intel Macs). An alpha version with most of these features had been available for quite some time, but it had some bugs, and it only recently dawned on me how to solve the trackpad problem.

I have since released revision 2.0.1, which fixes some bugs in yesterday's release.

In case you don't know what Tofu is: it tries to make reading text on the screen more pleasant by wrapping it into columns, which you navigate from left to right without ever scrolling vertically.

Go and get it here.

The science of keyboard design

2008-05-07T22:21:00.022+01:00

The Handbook of Human–Computer Interaction, edited by Martin Helander, Thomas Landauer and Prasad Prabhu, is a book published in 1997 that attempts to summarise research relevant to the design of interactive software and hardware. Its 62 chapters fill 1500 pages and provide advice on a multitude of topics, covering analysis, design and evaluation of interactive systems, as well as the psychological and ergonomic underpinnings of human–computer interaction. One of those chapters is titled Keys and Keyboards and was written by James Lewis, Kathleen Potosnak and Regis Magyar. It considers virtually every imaginable factor involved in designing keyboards, and, by drawing from experimental studies, provides recommendations for each of them. Ever since I read this chapter a couple of years ago, I've been meaning to summarise some of their conclusions and to consider them in the context of modern keyboard design. The recent string of keyboard-related links on Daring Fireball (e.g. here, here, here, here, here and here) moved me to finally sit down and do it, so here it is.

Clickiness

One of the most-cited criteria for keyboard aficionados to prefer a certain keyboard over another is “clickiness”. The idea behind this is that a good keyboard should give you some tactile feedback when you've successfully “actuated” a key, and that you shouldn't have to depress the key all the way to the bottom to be sure, as this would not allow you to type very fast. Some keyboards don't click at all, some give a softer and others a sharper click. The exact behaviour can be described by a graph plotting how the physical force required to push the key varies along its way down and its way up. The sudden dip in force on the downstroke is where you will feel the “click”.

I have to agree with many others that the Apple Extended Keyboard II is the finest keyboard I have used in terms of key feel. I used it for a couple of years in the late 90s, and it was the first to even make me aware of how good a keyboard could feel. I have not found a match since. In 2004 I bought a Matias TactilePro, which supposedly uses the exact same mechanical switches as the Apple Extended Keyboard II. However, it seemed to require more force, wasn't as smooth and seemed more noisy. Keys also kept failing, so I eventually gave up on it and now use a Macally icekey, which uses scissor-switch keys like those found on a laptop, but feels a bit firmer. I have also been quite impressed with a standard HP keyboard that I use at work. It uses rubber dome switches, which usually have a much inferior feel to mechanical or scissor switches, but they are square rather than round, which seems to give it an acute but soft clickiness and a very pleasant overall feel.

Hysteresis

I already mentioned that the key actuates when the click happens, but when should it deactuate? The obvious choice would be to make it the same as the actuation point:

However, this behaviour leads to an unexpected problem: any tiny amount of vibration around the actuation point can mean that the switch briefly fluctuates between the open and closed states, causing, for example, a letter to be inserted twice on one key press. To avoid this happening, keys should have to return some way (0.25–1.5 mm) before deactuating. This distance is called hysteresis:

Astonishingly, plenty of modern keyboards seem to have no hysteresis built into their switches. I get duplicated letters more than occasionally when typing on my Macally icekey or on my G4 iBook. The MacBooks don't seem to use hysteresis either. I haven't had a chance to test one of the new aluminium Apple keyboards or a MacBook Pro for this.

Travel and force

Another common factor mentioned when assessing keyboards is the distance the keys travel. Laptop keyboards and laptop-like keyboards tend to have shorter travel than most desktop keyboards. Related to travel is the amount of force required to depress a key. The Handbook of HCI recommends key travel to be between 1.3 and 6.4 mm, and the key force to be between 28 and 142 g. These are rather wide ranges, and in fact experiments showed that users are not too fussed about these two variables and will simply adapt their typing behaviour accordingly.

Keyboard profile

The book chapter summarises the results of two studies looking into keyboard profiles. The dished profile seemed to narrowly come out on top, with higher throughput than the stepped profile in one study. The flat profile performed worst (ahem), with more errors going undetected by typists and with lower throughput.

Key shape

The vast majority of keyboards have key caps that are either concave or dished. Apple however, has started giving their keyboards flat keys. Unfortunately, the book doesn't give any recommendations in this regard. However, I have my own little theory about this. I think that key shape matters because the direction at which you strike a key is rarely perfectly parallel with the key's travel path. Most of the force you apply may go into moving the key down, but the rest will go into pushing the key sideways and into pushing your finger along the surface. The less force goes into moving your finger sideways, the more force goes into the key. A concave key cap directs more of the force into the key when you strike it an angle, which effectively increases the area that you can comfortably use to depress the key.

As I said, this is purely a theory, and I have no evidence that the key cap shape actually makes any difference. I haven't spent enough time on one of the newer Apple keyboards to really form an opinion about them.

Other factors

Some of the other factors to consider in keyboard design are tilt, key size and key spacing.

All users in the studies referred to preferred having some tilt rather than a completely horizontal keyboard. 50% preferred an angle between 15˚ and 25˚. Not surprisingly, the preferred angle correlates with the seat height and with the user's stature.

Keys should be no less than 19 mm apart, as more tightly spaced keys tend to slow users down. There were no conclusive results on key size, but the ANSI standard recommends a size of 12 mm × 12 mm.

Final thoughts

Clearly, a fair amount of work, time and research funding went into this topic, especially during the years when computers were less of a commodity and still more of a research topic. The work successfully produced empirical evidence that led to very concrete and specific recommendations for the design of keyboards. Even so, today's keyboard makers seem either oblivious or ignorant of all this latent wisdom. Given that we're talking about a device that millions of people have to physically interact with on a daily basis – in many cases for several solid hours – it is sad that we've kept repeating the same mistakes that we've had the potential to avoid for more than twenty years.

Hyphens, dashes, et cetera

2008-05-05T12:08:00.008+01:00

I have a thing about correct punctuation, and although I'm aware that most people would find me over-zealous in this regard, I would bring to my defence that it's not just a pointless obsession or a purely aesthetic matter. A bit of poor punctuation will in the best case distract those from the text who notice it and affect their impression of the author, and in the worst case actually give the reader trouble understanding a sentence. Having said that, what I'm going to write about today is more on the aesthetic side, but could nevertheless help you make a good impression on a reader who notices these things.

I have noticed what seems to be a recent trend, especially on the web, to put unnecessary hyphens between adverbs and adjectives when they modify a noun, as in a brightly-lit street (which should be simply a brightly lit street). This habit seems to originate in the hyphenation of compound modifiers, as in real-estate agent or an out-of-date book. But those examples are hyphenated to avoid ambiguity or because the words in that order would not make a valid sentence structure without hyphens. Adverbs that end in -ly are always modifying an adjective or another adverb, so there is no ambiguity. Only adverbs that don't end in -ly, such as well, most or fast should get a hyphen, as in fast-running man.

Here are some examples from sites that I read regularly, including BBC News:

newly-elected councillors
reasonably-sized buttons
poorly-served areas
the highly-anticipated device

These should just be:

newly elected councillors
reasonably sized buttons
poorly served areas
the highly anticipated device

After all, you wouldn't write a really-good movie either.

Another trend I've noticed is around the use of dashes in what are called strong interruptions. When you have the right symbols available, there are two ways to punctuate such an interruption:

You can use en-dashes – Option-Minus on a Mac keyboard – surrounded by spaces.
Or you can use the longer em-dashes—Shift-Option-Minus on a Mac keyboard—without spaces.

Using an en-dash with spaces is common in Britain, while using the em-dash is more common in America. Personally I prefer the British style, because it visually offsets the interruption from the rest of the sentence more. What some people tend to use on the web, however, is an em-dash with spaces — like this — which I think looks odd because it creates a huge gap between words. If you prefer the look with spaces, just use an en-dash.

While we're on the topic of dashes, I'll briefly mention two common cases where an en-dash should be used rather than a hyphen. One is for ranges, such as 1980–2008. Another is when combining two nouns in a way that implies a to- or and-relationship, as in the London–Paris Eurostar or parent–child relationship.

My sources for most of this are The Penguin Guide to Punctuation by R. L. Trask and Type and Typography by Phil Baines and Andrew Haslam.

Surface computing, move over!

2007-12-27T17:08:00.000Z

For a few weeks now, my two team-mates at work and I have been using a “horizontal” whiteboard, lying across the desk surface between us. I had been wanting to try this for a while, but it wasn’t possible because of our previous desk arrangement. Now that we have this large area of space between us and no partitions, this small whiteboard fits perfectly without getting in the way.

We’ve found ourselves using it virtually every day, illustrating explanations, walking through calculations and brainstorming design ideas. Visitors will intuitively pick up a pen and start using the whiteboard when explaining things. It somehow seems to invite people to use it more than most whiteboards. However, it’s not only a collaborative tool: it also makes a great scratch-pad when you’re brainstorming on your own. To ensure that it stays useful, we make an effort to keep the board clean; nothing tends to stay on there for longer than a day or so.

Overall, it’s being used far more than any wall-mounted whiteboards we’ve had near us, and I think this is due to two key differences to wall-mounted boards. Firstly, each one of us can reach the board very easily without having to get up. You just turn your chair slightly and there it is. Secondly, the whiteboard is between us, so it feels less like a presentation aid and more like a collaborative work surface, accessible equally well from all sides.

If your work involves collaborative problem-solving, and if your desk arrangement allows it, I highly recommend setting up a whiteboard like this. Don’t make it too big, because you won’t be able to reach all corners and it will also eat into your desk real-estate. I think ours is 90×60 cm, which is just right. I also recommend investing in some pens with a finer tip than the standard ones you tend to get. Those are designed to be visible from a few meters away, but you’ll find them too thick for handwriting at a comfortable size for close-up work. Edding do quite a range of dry-erase board markers.

Neutech desktop background redux

2007-11-15T17:10:00.000Z

There was once an appearance theme for Mac OS 8 and 9 called Neutech, by Flanksteak Design. I don't think I particular liked the theme as a whole, but it included a desktop background that has been my favourite background for the last eight years or so since I discovered it:

Here's a detail:

I have made sure I that I always have a copy, which has survived across all the different Macs I've used since. However, the image is only 1024 × 768 pixels, which wasn't small at the time, but makes the image look rather pixelated and blurry on modern displays. I have made several attempts in the past to reproduce it in Photoshop, but never got very far. Today, I sat down again with renewed determination and finally found the secret recipe to emulate the look of the original:

One thing that really helped here was Photoshop CS3's Smart Filters, because I could experiment and keep tweaking the many effects I had to apply. This also means that I can easily produce updated versions in the future as screen resolutions increase.

For the time being, here's a 2560 × 1600 version.

Update: I've changed the grid to look more like dried earth and less like reptile skin, and made minor changes to shading.

Namely 2.5

2007-11-04T20:11:00.000Z

Sorry to be late by a week or so, but there are several reasons why I didn't get a Leopard-compatible update to Namely out sooner.

First of all, I didn't have Leopard any earlier than most of you; I bought it on Friday the 26th of October at the Apple Store on Regent Street. That's because unlike many Mac developers who dedicate a lot more time to this stuff and who have an income from it, I don't have a Select membership with the Apple Developer Connection.

Secondly, I decided to try out Leopard's improved support for application launching through Spotlight before putting any effort into updating Namely. Ever since Scott Forstall had hinted at this feature at the World-Wide Developers' Conference in 2006, I had been feeling a bit anxious about Leopard rendering Namely redundant. (I generally think it's a good thing when Apple fills a gap that was identified and addressed by third-party developers, but nevertheless, we do tend to fall in love with our applications.) My verdict: Spotlight is not bad, but it didn't win me over. I didn't spend enough time with it to figure out how clever it is about choosing between candidate matches (it seems to at least take into account which app you chose last time), but long enough to find a few things that I didn't like about it:

A lot of stuff happens visually in the Spotlight menu, which distracts from your main task: quickly identifying the application you want to launch.
The icons of listed apps don't always appear straightaway.

It only shows three matches, so it's effectively a bit less tolerant.

I guess these things shouldn't be an issue if you only occasionally need an application that's not in your Dock. Finding it through Spotlight will still be much faster than navigating to it in the Finder. But I think that if you use Namely (or, for that matter, any other keyboard-based launcher) for most of your application launching, anything that isn't super-fast isn't fast enough. When I launch an application, I don't want to think much, and I don't want to see much. I just want to launch it. Although Namely's sorting isn't perfectly predictable because it adapts over time, it stabilises quickly enough so you can be pretty confident about what it will suggest when you type something.

The third reason for the delay is that I just wasn't sure what to release. I have been (slowly) working on Namely 3.0, which is controlled through a preference pane and doesn't show up in the Dock. So I was considering finishing that off rather than releasing another update to Namely 2.x. However, I wasn't confident that I could get Namely 3 finished and stable within a few days, so I decided to push out a minor update in the meantime.

Here it is. Annoyingly, I couldn't find a way to make it work on both 10.3.9/10.4 and 10.5 (I link against the 10.5 libraries in order to support Spaces, but this seems to stop Apple's secret application-listing function from working on 10.4), so I had to leave version 2.1 available as a separate download.

Coupland and Helvetica

2007-10-10T23:34:00.000+01:00

Douglas Coupland last night at the Bloomsbury theatre in London (at what he said was probably his last ever book reading):

...and someone said making a film about Helvetica is like making a film about off-white paint.
I think in Helvetica. I love Helvetica.

For more of his thoughts on the typeface, also see this piece in the New York Times.

Redesign

2007-09-17T22:12:00.001+01:00

What you're looking at is the first redesign, or in fact the first proper design at all, of my blog. The previous design was just a somewhat tweaked version of a standard Blogger theme. This one, on the other hand, was designed from scratch to match the look of my also recently redesigned web site.

In case you're interested, this uses a grid of 8 columns (one for the left margin, five for the main body and two for the side bar) of 70 pixel each, with gaps of 20 pixels. This gave me more flexibility than the six-times-100-pixel grid I used for my web site and for UIScape, which I needed to make both the side bar and the body a decent width. The trade-off, however, is that the grid isn't as apparent as on the other two sites. One could argue that this is not a bad thing, but I like the framework of a page to show through when one looks for it.

There are still some issues I need to fix over the next few days. I hope these won't get in your way too much until then.

Making sense of standard deviation

2007-09-01T12:47:00.001+01:00

I love the feeling of getting to understand a seemingly abstract concept in intuitive, real-world terms. It means you can comfortably and freely use it in your head to analyse and understand things and to make predictions. No formulas, no paper, no Greek letters. It’s the basis for effective analytical thinking. The best measure of whether you’ve “got it” is how easily you can explain it to someone and have them understand it to the same extent. I think I recently reached that point with understanding standard deviation, so I thought I’d share those insights with you.

Standard deviation is one of those very useful and actually rather simple mathematical concepts that most people tend to sort-of know about, but probably don’t understand to a level where they can explain why it is used and why it is calculated the way it is. This is hardly surprising, given that good explanations are rare. The Wikipedia entry, for instance, like all entries on mathematics and statistics, is absolutely impenetrable.

First of all, what is deviation? Deviation is simply the “distance” of a value from the mean of the population that it’s part of:

Now, it would be great to be able to summarise all these deviations with a single number. That’s exactly what standard deviation is for. But why don’t we simply use the average of all the deviations, ignoring their sign (the mean absolute deviation or, simply, mean deviation)? That would be quite easy to calculate. However, consider the following two variables (for simplicity, I will use data sets with a mean of zero in all my examples):

There’s obviously more variation in the second data set than in the first, but the mean deviation won’t capture this; it’s 2 for both variables. The standard deviation, however, will be higher for the second variable: 2.24. This is the crux of why standard deviation is used. ~~In finance, it’s called volatility, which I think is a great, descriptive name: the second variable is more volatile than the first.~~ [Update: It turns out I wasn't being accurate here. Volatility is the standard deviation of the changes between values – a simple but significant difference.] Dispersion is another good word, but unfortunately it already has a more general meaning in statistics.

Next, let’s try to understand why this works; that is, how does the calculation of standard deviation capture this extra dispersion on top of the mean deviation?

Standard deviation is calculated by squaring all the deviations, taking the mean of those squares and finally taking the square root of that mean. It’s the root-mean-square (RMS) deviation (N below is the size of the sample):

RMS Deviation = √(Sum of Squared Deviations / N)

Intuitively, this may sound like a redundant process. (In fact, some people will tell you that this is done purely to eliminate the sign on the negative numbers, which is nonsense.) But let’s have a look at what happens. The green dots in the first graph below are the absolute deviations of the grey dots, and the blue dots in the second graph are the squared deviations:

The dotted blue line at 5 is the mean of the squared deviations (this is known as the variance). The square root of that is the RMS deviation, lying just above 2. Here you can see why the calculation works: the larger values get amplified compared to the smaller ones when squared, “pulling up” the resulting root-mean-square.

That’s mostly all there’s to it, really. However, there’s one more twist to calculating standard deviation that is worth understanding.

The problem is that, usually, you don’t have data on a complete population, but only on a limited sample. For example, you may do a survey of 100 people and try to infer something about the population of a whole city. From your data, you can’t determine the true mean and the true standard deviation of the population, only the sample mean and an estimate of the standard deviation. The sample values will tend to deviate less from the sample mean than from the true mean, because the sample mean itself is derived from, and therefore “optimised” for, the sample. As a consequence, the RMS deviation of a sample tends to be smaller than the true standard deviation of the population. This means that even if you take more and more samples and average their RMS deviations, you will not eventually reach the true standard deviation.

It turns out that to get rid of this so-called bias, you need to multiply your estimate of the variance by N/(N-1). (This can be mathematically proven, but unfortunately I have not been able to find a nice, intuitive explanation for why this is the correct adjustment.)

For the final formula, this means that instead of taking a straightforward mean of the squared deviations, we sum them and divide by the sample size minus 1:

Estimated SD = √(Sum of Squared Deviations / (N - 1))

You can see how this will give you a slightly higher estimate than a straight root-mean-square, and how the larger the sample size, the less significant this adjustment becomes.

On pie charts etc.

2007-08-08T22:29:00.000+01:00

On the subject of pie charts, information design god Edward Tufte has the following to say in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information:

A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart […]. Given their low data-density and failure to order numbers along a visual dimension, pie charts should never be used.

Although I tried for some time to convince myself and others that this is true, I have failed to come up with a really convincing argument against using pie charts. In fact, I have decided that they aren’t useless at all. Consider the following data, shown as a table, a pie chart, a bar chart and a stacked bar:

One basic feature of all the graphical representations is that they give an immediate impression about which are large and which are small contributors. The table, on the other hand, has no physical attribute that is analogous to quantity. Instead, you need to read and interpret the arbitrary symbols we use for numbers, form a more conceptual representation of the quantities in your head and compare them. You can get around this by ordering the table by value, but you’ll lose the original ordering of the items.

With regards to precision, the table obviously wins. The bar chart also offers pretty good precision as long as you don’t make it too small. The stacked bar may seem to have the upper hand over the pie chart because it has a scale, but reading values isn’t as easy as you may think. Only the first and last section are reliably easy to read. For all the sections in between, the grid lines are of little help. For example, can you confidently say at a glance whether the red section represents more or less than 50%? In the pie chart, you can at least tell straightaway that A contributes slightly over a quarter, B more than half and C around one eighth. And often that’s all you want to know. Do you really care whether an item contributes 27% or 29%? (I’m not saying that you don’t, only that that’s a question to ask when deciding what representation to use).

The stacked bar is also pretty impossible to label (no, legends are not a satisfactory solution). However, this can also be true for pie charts, especially if there are many segments and/or if they have long titles.

A further restriction of pie charts is that they don’t allow adding a further dimension to provide comparisons between different sets of data. Multiple pie charts shown side by side aren’t really comparable, because the whole structure of each pie will be different. This is where tables or bar charts can do much better.

In summary, I’d like to suggest the following guidelines for using pie charts:

Use them if you want to give a high-level impression of the distribution of proportions.
Don’t use them if precision is important, or include numbers if you have space.
Don’t use them if order is important.
Don’t use them if you need to show multiple data sets, e.g., changes over time.
Keep labels short. Legends suck.
If the context allows, use colours that are familiar to the viewer, and use them consistently.

Lastly, I’d like to briefly address the recently fashionable “pixel charts”. Although it’s a terrible waste of time, really. I mean, come on:

In case you still have doubts: the four areas in the following chart are all the same size:

Or are they different sizes? I’m not sure, and I can’t be bothered to count right now.

Clickable control labels for the web

2007-07-16T18:17:00.000+01:00

One of my pet peeves in web interfaces has always been that on radio buttons and checkboxes, only the small button itself is clickable. In native Mac and Windows interfaces, you can usually click on the text labels of these controls as well, giving you a much larger target, which, in accordance with Fitts' Law, makes them faster to hit.

Many, or perhaps most, people would probably never notice this difference in behaviour because they have only ever tried clicking on the button proper; the text doesn't visually suggest that it's clickable. But for those of us who are used to this shortcut, the standard web behaviour will catch us out every time. (Actually, I've started to wonder whether I'm the only person on the planet to click on the text labels, since I've never heard anyone else complain about this issue.)

Until a few months ago, I thought this was all just an unfortunate but inevitable limitation of HTML, and that developers found it too much hassle to implement a workaround in JavaScript. Then, I discovered HTML's label element. If you mark up a piece of text as a label and set its for attribute to be the ID of a form control, it becomes the "official" label for that control. The practical effect of this is that in most browsers, clicking the label will actually do something useful. For checkboxes and radio buttons, it will toggle their state, while for text fields, it will put the focus on the field. This works in Internet Explorer 6(!) and 7, Safari (I only checked version 3.0.2), Firefox and Camino. OmniWeb will do it in the upcoming 5.6 release.

So code like the following:

<input
 type="radio"
 name="os"
 id="mac"
 value="mac">
<label
 for="mac">Mac user</label>

<input
 type="radio"
 name="os"
 id="windows"
 value="windows">
<label
 for="windows">Windows user</label>

<input
 type="checkbox"
 name="loving_it"
 id="loving_it">
<label
 for="loving_it">And loving it</label>

results in nice, fully clickable controls like this:

Mac user Windows user And loving it

There's also an alternative, simpler syntax that doesn't require using the for and id attributes. Instead, you can just make the label element a parent of the control:

<label>
  <input
   type="radio"
   name="os"
   value="mac">Mac user
</label>

However, this does not work in Internet Explorer 6, so if you want to be inclusive, stick with the more explicit syntax.

Web site redesign

2007-05-29T19:05:00.001+01:00

I've just launched a redesign of my web site, which makes it the fifth version, if I recall correctly.

It's based on a simple grid with six columns of 100 pixels width and 20 pixels in between. Those are pretty much the same dimensions as I used for UIScape.com, and I've found them to work quite well: narrow enough to allow some flexibility and wide enough for most content. However, it only works if you have a very narrow sidebar. (With UIScape, I had to cheat by adding another 20 pixels on the right.)

I used to have a strange aversion to using non-white backgrounds, but this time I had a very particular look in mind, so I decided to just go for it. I was going to at least use PNGs with transparency for all the graphics, but too many people still use bloody Internet Explorer 6, so the background colour is fixed in the images.

This new site includes Google Analytics code for tracking statistics. I think this may be causing a delay when loading pages. I hope this is not too noticeable or at least not too bothersome for people. (Basically, I load and run the Google Analytics JavaScript at the start of the page, because I make in-page calls to it for tracking downloads and outbound links. If you know of a way around this, please let me know.)

Interview at Cup of Chai

2007-05-05T20:19:00.000+01:00

Talking to Arjun Muralidharan about my approach to design and my thoughts on user interfaces.

A Whiter Greenpeace

2007-05-05T18:18:00.000+01:00

Following Steve Jobs’s essay A Greener Apple, Greenpeace have responded on their anti-Apple campaign website with this article. The link on their homepage proudly reads “Breaking News: Steve Jobs announces change in policy.”

Change in policy? Hm, as I recall, his essay was just a report on what has already been done and what improvements are underway. They must be talking about this bit:

It is generally not Apple’s policy to trumpet our plans for the future; […] Unfortunately this policy has left our customers, shareholders, employees and the industry in the dark about Apple’s desires and plans to become greener. […] So today we’re changing our policy.

What a bunch of clowns. They’ve taken Steve Jobs’s words completely out of context to make it sound as if Apple is doing an about-face on their practices. To put the cherry on top, they then go on to claim responsibility for this “revolution”:

And to all the Apple fans who have contributed their thoughts and blogs and creativity to this campaign, reach over your shoulder and pat yourself on the back. Put a happy tune on your ipod and do a happy dance. You’ve proven you can make a real difference. You convinced one of the world’s most cutting edge companies to cut the toxic ingredients out of the products they sell.

Congratulations! If this was their doing, Greenpeace must also deserve credit for effectively removing the basis for their own campaign being focused on Apple rather than computer makers with more market share. (I really like their anti-Dell web site. Ahem.) They acknowledge:

Apple has declared a phase out of the worst chemicals in its product range, Brominated Fire Retardants (BFRs) and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) by 2008. That beats Dell and other computer manufactures’ pledge to phase them out by 2009.

However, since they obviously can’t admit that the original motivation must have been “Hey, they’re popular. Let’s ride the wave!” they only try to distract from this issue by suddenly changing their tune:

Way to go Steve!

“Er, now what do we do with this web site?”

Way to go indeed, Steve.

UIScape

2007-03-14T18:37:00.000Z

When I spent three months at Microsoft Research last year, I came across a lot of fascinating work related to interaction design. Colleagues would talk about their projects, people would report back from conferences, visitors came in to present their work, and I found things during literature reviews. Some of the designs I saw and read about were so cool that I couldn't believe they weren't more well known. Even my friends and I, who were supposed to be into design and human-computer interaction, hadn't heard about them. There was an obvious problem here.

I think the reason for this lack of dissemination is that the main way for researchers to make their ideas known is through conferences, journal articles and coffee-break chats. All three of these channels have only other researchers at the receiving end.

Most of the published literature is available online, but very often not free of charge. Researchers usually have access to relevant digital libraries through their employers, but designers and other potentially interested people are unlikely to be willing to pay.

Of course, many papers are available for free. However, a further barrier is that the format and language of scientific papers is not what non-researchers would consider an easy and engaging read. Given this "language barrier", as well as the prerequisite knowledge required for a lot of the material, you won't find many people casually reading the latest CHI conference proceedings on the train or flipping through a 20-page research study during their lunch break.

There is one web site which has addressed this same problem, albeit not for interaction design-related research. Ars Technica's Nobel Intent journal supplies those who have a casual interest in science with digests of interesting studies. These are written in a fairly casual style, usually include any necessary background knowledge, and only take a few minutes to read.

It didn't take much ingenuity to realise that such a model may be exactly what is needed to break the barrier that I had witnessed in human-computer interaction research. I got a few friends from university to join me in the effort to get something rolling. Well, after a few months of planning, designing, building and writing, the result is finally here:
http://uiscape.com

I sincerely hope you find it interesting and that it will help get many more people excited about the work that's going on out there.

If you have any questions about the concept or design of the site, you can comment here or email me.

Scrolling and white lies

2007-02-24T15:53:00.000Z

I recently had to implement an HTML table in a web application that would display and allow editing rows of data. However, the number of rows you’ll get in the data is very uncertain. To avoid a ridiculously long web page, the table should not grow beyond a certain height and should instead show a scrollbar when there are more rows than can fit.

One thing that I find can be quite annoying is if a table is just a little bit too short for its contents, so that you end up with a single row off the bottom, for example an eleventh row in a table that is only ten rows high.

As a little experiment, I decided to make use of the table’s flexible height to prevent this situation: we would display an extra row if the number of rows is only one more than our ideal maximum height. So if your ideal limit is ten rows, it would stretch to accommodate up to eleven rows. For twelve rows or more, only ten would be shown at a time. This way it always feels like the scrollbar is justified, because it’s never just to get to that one extra row. I think it’s unlikely that users would notice this behaviour.

However, I am not sure whether this is a valid design decision. One could argue that since your true maximum is eleven rows, not ten, you are making life a little bit harder than necessary for your users whenever they have to scroll. Also, I have no empirical information about whether and how much people actually get frustrated in cases where only one row is out of bounds. It almost becomes an ethical question: is it worth a white lie?

I think the approach may be valid in some cases, but it depends on several factors:

What is your maximum height? If your table can grow fairly high before showing its scrollbar, the cost of sacrificing a single row for this trick is less. However, if it can only be a few rows high, you are depriving users of a significant proportion of display area.
How likely will you exceed that maximum? If scrolling will be necessary in the majority of cases, it may be wiser to grant people the extra height to maximise how much they can see at a time.
How linear is the task? If people only need to read down the list of rows once, having to scroll a single row into view at the end is no big deal. But it might get frustrating when they have to repeatedly jump back and forth to compare or edit rows.

In my case, the table is fairly likely to contain tens or hundreds of data rows, and I only have space to show about a dozen at a time. So scrolling will often be necessary, and users will probably value every row they can fit on the screen. I’m not sure yet how likely people are to scroll back and forth, but the other two factors are probably enough to outweigh any gain in happiness that might result from not having a single row out of bounds.

NSCompositingOperation visual quick reference

2007-01-13T17:28:00.000Z

I have never been able to remember what the different compositing operations in Cocoa's NSImage class do. So whenever I need to use one, I find myself having to read the documentation, which is not particularly easy to understand, because it describes the operations in words rather than graphically.

M. Uli Kusterer has had the same thought. However, I wanted something that would work at a quick glance, at a small size, and that would print easily.

So I decided to fire up OmniGraffle and create this visual quick reference:

You can download it as a PDF here.

Let me know if you find this useful or if you can think of any improvements.

Web 2.0 fun

2006-08-19T13:26:00.000+01:00

Made with the Web 2.0 Logo Creatr Beta.

The Non-Wheel iPod

2006-07-19T10:54:00.000+01:00

Whenever you see the rumoured next-generation video iPod mentioned, the expected features always include a huge screen covering the front of the device and a “virtual”, touch-screen-based click wheel.

I may be missing something here, but what exactly would be the point of that? The reason the iPod has a scroll wheel is to make scrolling easier on a device that doesn’t allow more direct manipulation of screen content. If you had a touch screen, the grounds for having a scroll wheel would disappear, and you could just use a scroll bar, right? A scroll bar would allow scrolling directly to any point in a list and would involve less (and less awkward) physical movement.

Also, if you had such a nonsensical, virtual scroll wheel, you’d be waving your thumb around over the contents of the screen all the time, which doesn’t sound like a clever idea. Of course, you could dedicate a section of the screen for this wheel, but wouldn’t you rather use that space to make the list taller?

So I think either the creative minds behind the rumour sites didn’t think this one through properly, or the creative minds at Apple are making some rather silly decisions. Let’s hope it’s the former.

i use this

2006-07-13T14:16:00.000+01:00

A few days ago, i use this, a nice alternative to MacUpdate and Versiontracker, was launched. It uses a model that’s quite different from, and arguably more useful than, traditional software databases. Instead of the number of downloads (which say more about marketing than about quality) and user ratings (which only a very small proportion of the user population provide), i use this simply lets registered users mark applications they use. The resulting numbers are what drives the rankings. One advantage is that since you can also unmark an application when you’ve stopped using it, the data stays representative over time, so that the Internet Explorers and StuffIts of this world don’t skew the results.

The uptake in the first few days seems to have been quite impressive. I think it’s the aspect of personal expression (”Look, here’s what I use!”) that makes this model so attractive and gets people to happily provide the data. It also has a social component by allowing networks of friends and by showing you “neighbours”, who use similar applications.

It’s also a very useful tool for developers. The data on my applications so far looks quite unexpected. I might do a little review in a few weeks time when the site has a larger set of data.

I hope that in the future they will provide some more interesting data mining results in addition to the list of top and hot applications (which, I’m guessing, take into account how many people “love” an app). For example, I’d quite like to see the fastest recent climbers. Also, an interactive graph of the total distribution might be interesting (which I imagine would be a Long Tail).

Oh, by the way, if you’re interested, i use this.

Don’t let it control you

2006-07-08T22:38:00.000+01:00

Since I got broadband Internet a few years ago, I’ve had my email client at home checking for new mail every 5 minutes. When I started using a dedicated RSS reader, I also set that to check feeds as frequently as possible (every 30 minutes in NetNewsWire).

Earlier this year, I had to spend a few weeks without an Internet connection at home. I was able to check my email only when I made the trip down to the university library, and I stopped following the news altogether. Although slightly inconvenient, this was not as bad a situation as I had expected, and I felt that I got lots more work done this way.

When I eventually got connected again, I really felt the contrast. The RSS reader in particular was very interruptive. Unlike email, which comes in intermittently, there were updates in my subscriptions virtually every time the program refreshed them, so an interruption was almost guaranteed to happen every 30 minutes, with the green badge on NetNewsWire’s icon tempting me to see what was new. I tried to compensate by setting it to check only every 2 hours. However, it turned out that I had got conditioned to expecting news on a regular basis, and found myself glancing at the Dock icon quite often. I actually lost patience and manually refreshed the subscriptions sometimes, which only resulted in me feeling disappointed with my willpower.

My solution to this unfeasible dependency has been to turn off automatic checking in NetNewsWire. As hoped, this seems to have undone the conditioned expectation of updates, and I now manually refresh my feeds when I’m having a break. I’m sure that’s still more often than truly necessary, but at least I can concentrate on my work when I want to.

I’ve also reconfigured my email client to update every 15 minutes. I don’t want to turn off automatic checking altogether here, because sometimes you do get emails that need immediate attention. It seems that since emails are more sporadic, there is no regular interval to get used to, so you don’t actually notice that the program is checking less frequently.

Another highly effective strategy I use is to minimise the number of RSS feeds I subscribe to by using good news “gatherers” such as John Gruber, and even to dump Flickr contacts (except friends, of course) whose photos I don’t end up liking as much as expected.

If you feel like you’re getting an information overload on your desktop, I recommend you take control and make some changes as well. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to get by without being constantly connected.

Stoves revisited

2006-06-21T10:47:00.000+01:00

A lot our interaction with technology is indirect, through controls, such as buttons and knobs, that affect the behaviour of some part of a system in some way. A common principle for making these controls easier to understand and remember is to make their physical functioning and arrangement analogous to the functions they control. For example, you move the mouse on your computer to the left to move the pointer left. This is called a natural mapping. An example of an “unnatural” mapping is the QWERTY keyboard. Some mappings can’t really be made natural, because they involve non-spatial concepts. For instance, there is no right answer as to whether the left or the right button on your mobile phone should pick up a call.

A popular example for illustrating mappings was given by Donald Norman in The Design of Everyday Things and involves kitchen stoves:

Although some stoves at least use the two knobs on one side to control the two burners on the same side, it is not clear, without reading the labels (usually at the front of the stove, out of a standing adult’s line of sight), how they map to the front and back. Personally, I've been close to destroying kitchen utensils and causing minor injuries more than once. Norman suggests the following as better alternatives:

An obvious reason I can see for not using these designs is the extra space they need. I don’t know about America (where everything is big) but here in Europe, stovetops are usually roughly square, and I can imagine that manufacturers of stoves and of kitchens would prefer to keep them that way. In any case, I’m sure most users wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice precious kitchen space for a more natural mapping of stove controls.

Instead of shuffling around burners, why not leave them where they are and just move the controls instead. A subtle shifting is all that’s needed (I included a version for controls on the stovetop as well):

It’s not a perfectly natural mapping, but the arrangement contains enough information to be unambiguous, and I imagine that you’d get used to it very quickly.

Design languages

2006-06-17T16:49:00.000+01:00

I have recently taken a great liking to the idea of design languages, which think of design as a form of communication between the designer and the user, and which provide a framework or style to work within when you’re creating a design.

Design languages are sort of like design guidelines, but specifically thinking of them as a language is helpful at several levels:

It provides the designer with a repertoire of visual “expressions” and constructs that have a specific meaning, helping them to express their ideas without reinventing the wheel.
It encourages the designer to stick to the rules and conventions of the platform. In the same way that you usually wouldn’t just throw a Russian sentence into a conversation you’re having in English, you shouldn’t use interface elements or interactions that your user won’t be familiar with.
A language is something users can learn. They can then transfer their knowledge between systems that use the same design language.
It gets the designer to think of their design as a form of communication, a way to convey the conceptual model and the functioning of the system to the user. It effectively promotes empathy.

On the Mac, the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) define the design language third-party developers (and Apple themselves) are supposed to use in their software. The HIG were once an exemplar of design languages. However, since the introduction of Mac OS X, rather than prescribing the design of interfaces, the HIG have developed a tendency to describe it, being frequently updated to reflect whatever new “conventions” the designers of the Finder, Mail or iPhoto have come up with, sometimes with rather unconvincing logic. The Mac’s design language has subsequently become rather bloated and flaky.

Take as an example one of the simplest interface elements of all: the pushbutton. I’m sure most long-time Mac users can easily recall what a pushbutton looked like on System 6 and 7:

In Mac OS X 10.4, it’s not so easy to say:

Taking the language metaphor a bit more literally, one could say that these are synonyms for the same concept. Worse than synonyms are homonyms, because they introduce ambiguity:

The segmented control can be cofigured to behave in three very different ways, and the only way to figure out which is the case is through trial and error or by guessing from the context. A more traditional way to express the same functionality unambiguously would be:

When Aqua first appeared, it was like a fresh start. It actually seemed simpler than Mac OS 9 in terms of its interface elements. However, Apple hasn’t been very disciplined with keeping it that way, and it’s quite astonishing how quickly the Mac design language has grown through influences from the different application teams' designers.

You could argue that these inconsistencies are just cosmetic matters of graphic design rather than of interaction, since the way Mac OS X’s interface functions is still relatively simple and coherent. But you have to remember that the graphical representation of the interface is the only communication channel from the designer to the user; we rely on it to understand what we can do, in the same way that you’re relying on my use of English to understand this article. It’s a language.

There’s a chapter on design languages by John Rheinfrank and Shelley Evenson in Terry Winograd’s book Bringing Design to Software (parts of this book are available online). Donald Norman has also written an essay about this entitled Design as Communication.

Getting there

2006-05-11T01:19:00.000+01:00

Prefling: The State of Affairs

2006-05-02T21:05:00.000+01:00

Some people have been asking me whether there will be an Intel-compatible version of Prefling. Unfortunately, the answer looks to be no.

Prefling relies on a neat little library which was created by Brian Webster and accompanied by an article on Stepwise. This library provided the basis for most docklings that came out when these things had their glory days. Unfortunately, Brian is not planning to port his library to Intel. This is perfectly understandable. Docklings have been deprecated by Apple for a long time, and I’m one of the last developers to still use them. The API could be killed any day, most likely when the Dock gets an overhaul (perhaps in 10.5?). Also, the dockling server is a bit flaky anyway, sometimes stopping docklings from working until you log out and back in.

Most functionality offered by docklings can now be added to normal applications by controlling their icon and Dock menu. But there’s one thing that using an application doesn’t offer, and it’s precisely the essence of Prefling’s concept: that you can show its menu with a simple click. Applications require clicking and holding or control-clicking/right-clicking to show their menu.

The only alternative I can see would be to make Prefling a “menu extra”. However, I don’t feel that it’s worth the effort, since there are already two other such solutions out there: the aptly named MenuPrefs, which is already Intel-compatible but not free, and the also very aptly named PrefsMenu, which has not been ported yet. And anyway, what would I call mine, now that all the possible permutations of “menu” and “prefs” have been used?

So, dear fans, after 29,684 Versiontracker downloads (my record so far), it looks like this is the end of the road for Prefling. I’m glad you enjoyed it while it lasted.

The Grand Unified Download Manager

2006-05-01T13:35:00.000+01:00

Since the introduction of Mac OS X, Apple has been doing a great job of offering more and more functionality at the operating system level that application developers used to have to implement themselves. Spell checking, Address Book, Keychain, Dictionary, disk burning and PDF support are some good examples. Almost everyone wins when this happens: users get a consistent experience and are less dependent on particular applications, and developers have less work to do and can simplify their application code. The only ones who potentially lose out are developers who had seen the gap and were actually trying to offer such a service to other applications, like, for example, Nisus Thesaurus or Adobe Acrobat Distiller.

When I recently saw this post on the Omni Group forums by Jon Hicks, I saw another perfect candidate for Apple to assimilate: the download manager. As it stands, at least six applications on my machine implement their own download managers: OmniWeb, Safari, Firefox, Camino, NetNewsWire and Transmit. And, as Jon pointed out, they all have different UIs.

So what would such an Apple download manager have to offer? It would of course need to support the most common protocols, including HTTP and FTP. (Perhaps even BitTorrent and Gnutella? Maybe not, since Apple wouldn’t want to make life any easier for those not using the iTunes Music Store.) Pausing and resuming downloads would be a must, too. The interface would need to offer enough functionality to compete with most browsers, but be simple enough for the non-geek.

Out of the applications mentioned above, I personally like OmniWeb’s download manager best, because it has a toolbar that offers some useful commands with a single click, like “abandoning” (clearing and trashing) a download. Also, all its commands have text labels. It doesn’t present any puzzles and coordination exercises in the form of little grey circles and pop-up buttons. However, I do like how other apps have managed to be more horizontally compact by putting the progress bar on its own line below the file name.

Again, someone might lose out if Apple were to offer an OS-wide downloading framework. If it offered enough functionality, it could be developers of apps like Download Wizard, iGetter and Speed Download. But, speaking with my user-hat on, I’m afraid I wouldn’t care.

To afford or not to afford...

2006-04-28T11:32:00.001+01:00

I’ve always been a bit of a pedant, and in that spirit, I would like to write about some use of terminology in interaction design that has been bugging me: affordance. If you’re familiar with the field, the lengthy debates around what the word exactly means may be an old hat to you. Here’s some quick background if you aren’t.

Affordance is a term coined by psychologist James J. Gibson in 1977 to denote the actions an object or environment allows a person to perform. For example, some of a stick’s affordances are touching, picking up and poking someone with. The word is simply a derivative of the verb “afford”.

In his popular (and great!) book The Design of Everyday Things (originally published as The Psychology of Everyday Things), Donald Norman reinterpreted the term to mean those actions which a person can readily perceive to be possible, i.e., those the environment suggests or invites you to perform. Norman’s affordances are a thus a special subset of Gibson’s affordances. They also become something that’s desirable in the design of interfaces; if a button doesn’t look like it can be pressed, the user probably won’t press it.

Norman later realised the discrepancy and has been trying to re-educate the world, who love using his earlier interpretation of the term, but to little avail. Most people nowadays still use affordances to refer to those interactions which are apparent.

It is debatable whether this is a problem. Although Gibson’s meaning is the only logical one, people jumped on Norman’s use for a reason: the meaning he introduced is a very useful concept that needed a name. One could argue that a new word should be invented to signify perceived affordances, but that’s not a very realistic undertaking, since even Norman himself has failed to change people’s minds.

What all the discussions about this terminology seem to overlook, however, is that in adopting Norman’s meaning of the noun, people have also re-applied it back to the verb Gibson’s original term was based on. To afford no longer means “to allow”, but “to suggest” or “to advertise”!

What’s wrong with “advertise”?

I get the impression that people of any particular discipline somehow love having terms that only they understand.

If Microsoft had designed Finder Labels...

2006-04-26T13:26:00.000+01:00

... they would look exactly how they do now.

When colour labels made a return in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther after years of waiting, it was a bit of a letdown. For most, this was because they were functionally the same as what the Classic Finder used to offer. Personally, however, I don't really need more than 7 colours, and the colours are distinct enough, so I don't really feel the need to customise them either.

But this doesn't mean that I was happy when I saw the new implementation. It wasn't a matter of functionality, but one of visual design. Consider this:

Somehow this look immediately made me think of Windows XP, with its overpoweringly saturated, bevelled window frames and buttons. It just didn't look like Apple. But even leaving taste aside, it simply doesn't work very well. The colours are so strong and dark that it becomes harder to read the actual names of the folders. And why those gradients? They just add more clutter.

In his book Visual Explanations, Edward Tufte explains the principle of the smallest effective difference, which implies using the most subtle visual distinctions that still achieve the desired effect. The word effective is important here. There's no point using the smallest perceivable difference if it doesn't tell the story you want it to tell. In case of Finder labels, I see two possible desired effects:

To allow you to quickly spot all the files of a particular colour, whose meaning you have memorised, e.g., "All archived stuff is grey."
To bring certain files to your attention that you have previously marked with that intention, e.g., "I must review this document, so I'll make it red to remind myself later."

So applying the principle of the smallest effective difference for Finder labels would mean finding a set of colours that fulfil these two purposes when set against the white background of a window.

You can now easily read all the folder names and ignore the labels if you wish, but you can still choose to focus on all the files of a particular colour. Toning down the labels also makes the selection much more prominent. (Also notice I tried to improve how the labels of selected items are shown.) Although the colours look paler, they are still bright enough to have an attention-grabbing quality, especially in isolation:

It's a real shame how simple, proven design principles like this are ignored for the sake of eye candy (and not very good eye candy in this case). I think what we need is an option in the system preferences to switch from "Shop Demonstration Mode" to "Work Mode".

John Gruber goes full-time

2006-04-20T18:03:00.000+01:00

Following a couple of years of contemplation, John Gruber of Daring Fireball has finally made writing his full-time job.

John is a great writer, and DF is my favourite Mac/technology column. His analyses are always spot-on, making it seem like he has been blessed with an unfairly large share of all the common sense in the industry. Also, through his Linked List he acts as a sort of human news aggregator/filter, saving me from having to read through all those other blogs and news sites myself.

If you make an appropriate donation, you will be rewarded with goodies such as full-text RSS feeds and cool t-shirts.

I really hope this works out for him.

Interesting Typeface Facts

2006-04-07T11:00:00.000+01:00

I've just discovered that many of the typefaces in Mac OS X include in their metadata very interesting narratives about their background and history. Just open Font Book and choose Show Font Info from the Preview menu. Arial, Futura, Times New Roman and Trebuchet MS are a few examples.

However, you would have hoped that Monotype know better than to put two spaces after their full stops.

Renaming frustration

2006-03-30T20:49:00.000+01:00

I've been downloading a lot of research articles recently. In order to be able to identify them easily, I like to put the author and full article title in the file name. Many of these articles have titles that sound like "Bla bla bla: A new model for bla bla bla", i.e. something containing a colon. Of course, the Mac doesn't allow using colons inside file names. Although annoying, I think this is forgivable. What is not forgivable, however, is that if you mistakenly include a colon, everything you've typed is lost and the file name is reverted back to what it was before you started:

The same thing happens if you try to use a name that's already used by another file.

Notice also that the message doesn't tell you what is wrong with the name, so novice users have to rely on trial and error to find acceptable file names.

What's going on, Apple? This is basic stuff!

Can you feel the pain?

2006-03-29T08:20:00.000+01:00

What better way to launch a new product than with a promise of maximal pain?

Licensed offers a place to put [your software licenses], and because it does nothing else, it does it very well. Every effort was taken to make entering details as quick and painful as possible.

I guess I'm not paying £3400 on a course about what makes software hard to use for nothing; I hope you can feel the difference.

Debunking Myths about Student Life

2006-03-21T21:22:00.000Z

Before I started my current MSc course, I was looking forward to the many pleasures commonly associated with student life: lots of time (or, in my case, lots of programming), lots of parties (or, in my case, lots of programming), etc.

How wrong I was! I could simply blame it on the workload, but I have to admit I don't really work that hard. No, it's the flexibility that really kills you.

When you're in a stable job, you can use your evenings and weekends as you please, you get real holidays, and you don't have to feel guilty about using those for non-work stuff. In fact, people will tell you off if you do use them for work stuff.

When you're a student, things are very different. Even during evenings, weekends and holidays, a cloud of guilt looms over you all the time, this feeling that you really should be reading some research article or text book. Even if you don't put in as many hours as in working life, you actually feel busier and more stressed because of this.

Thus I haven't been able to work nearly as much on my software as I was hoping to. I know, I know, it sounds like I'm just making excuses. But anyway, to make up for some of my creative absence, I put in a few hours to get Namely 2.0.3b1 ready for release. If you have an Intel Mac, please try this out and let me know if it works. If you don't, try it anyway.

Brewster Kahle

2005-12-13T22:27:00.000Z

Seeing this link about Amazon opening up the Alexa index today reminded me that I've been meaning to blog about Brewster Kahle, the father of Alexa and the Internet Archive.

There's an excellent interview with him on NerdTV. It's actually my favourite NerdTV episode so far. Many of the other guests talk a lot about their lives in general. Kahle, on the other hand, talks about what kind of place he wants the Internet to be, something he's very enthusiastic about. He's someone who really has vision, and who just generally seems to get the plot. It's strange he's not more famous.

Check it out.

Namely 2.0

2005-11-18T14:26:00.000Z

Finished sooner than expected, Namely 2.0 is now ready for your launching pleasure. The most obvious change is that it has a new, customisable look. I spent many hours (literally) tweaking the matte and shiny shading algorithms and the different colour presets. I hope it caters for the majority of tastes.

It is also smarter about how it orders matches. It will keep track of how often you launch which apps, and will give more frequently used ones precedence in the list. The result should be that you can open many of your favourites with just a single letter.

There are other changes as well, so check out the Read Me file.

Have they never heard of scrollbars?

2005-11-16T23:02:00.000Z

When Apple introduced the iTunes Music Store, one thing I hated about it straightaway were those views that have left and right buttons to page through a list of albums. At first I thought it was forgivable, given that the iTMS is more like a web site than a rich client interface. But after a short while I noticed that my eyes had become conditioned to move after clicking those arrows, trying to follow the animation. The problem is that they would never be in sync with the actual animation, especially since there's always a delay, which conjured up my old friend, motion sickness. I've now actually developed a habit of looking away right after clicking the arrows, and look back only after the animation is over.

When Tiger arrived, I was shocked to see the same awful paging view used in the Dashboard when you're adding widgets. The delay there is not nearly as bad as in the Music Store, but why on earth would you not use scrollbars for something like this?

It baffles me how Apple, out of all companies, keeps throwing decades worth of interface design wisdom out the window. They've done it with window title bar controls, with the Dock and with the Mail toolbar, to name just a few obvious examples. Jef Raskin once said that instead of interface architects, Apple has been infested with decorators. I think he had a point.

Got money lying around?

2005-10-30T00:28:00.000+01:00

Although some kind people have offered me money for my software in the past, I never felt accepting it was quite justified, because I was full-time employed and only spent very little time on my products.

Well, starting today, I'll be accepting donations through a link at the top of my website. This is a) because I'm planning to spend more time on my software (within the constraints of my studies), and b) now that I'm a student, I don't mind the extra money so much.

As you may have already noticed, I've put up a pre-release version of Tofu 2.0 which includes PDF support. There are a number of other releases in the pipeline as well: Deep Notes is getting some interface enhancements, I'm looking to improve Namely, and there's a brand new CoreData app for storing software licenses, pending only a name and an icon (if you have an idea less boring than License Manager, let's hear it!)

Mighty Mouse impressions

2005-10-21T10:52:00.000+01:00

I have been using a Mighty Mouse for about a month now which I got as a leaving present from my kind colleagues, so I thought I'd share my impressions. I intentionally waited for a few weeks to allow myself time to get used to it.

Up to now, my mouse of choice has been a Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical, a two-button mouse (three if you count the scroll wheel). I really like the shape, the feel of the buttons, and its durability.

One of my first thoughts when I started using the Mighty Mouse was that the button was too hard to press. I searched for a switch to adjust the firmness, as I had seen on the Apple Bluetooth Mouse, but no luck. I got used to it eventually, but initially this caused my hand to get tired quite easily. It's a shame they don't have the adjustment feature across all their mice. I can't see any obvious reason for not including it.

Another reason why my hand and wrist felt tired was that I was used to resting my hand on my Microsoft mouse, which is quite high at its highest point. The Mighty Mouse is much flatter. Also, I think because the whole surface forms the button, I felt hesitant to put too much weight on it.

What people probably wonder about most is how well right-clicking works. At least I did. As you may have read elsewhere, it requires you to actually lift your index finger off the surface. As long as your finger touches the area to the left of the scroll ball (for the right-handed setting), any clicks are registered as primary clicks. I wasn't sure if this would be a problem, because I didn't actually know whether or not I usually lifted my index finger. Well, it turns out I didn't. On other mice, I was just applying more pressure on the right side. I wouldn't say that getting used to Apple's prescribed technique was hard, but it did take some conscious effort at first. I still fail very occasionally, even after four weeks of using it.

The side buttons are also interesting. You squeeze them to activate them, but although they give slightly, there's no tangible click. Instead, you get feedback in the form of a clicking sound from the built-in speaker. This sounds very natural and I find it actually gives you the illusion of feeling the click as well. It's only when the mouse is disconnected and has no power that you're sure there's no physical click. Of course, this whole concept breaks down if you are in a noisy environment or if you are deaf. Also, the buttons really give only slightly, so I tend to apply quite a lot of pressure, which is tiring.

I have to say I don't really use the side buttons. The main reason is their positioning. When I hold the mouse in a natural position, my ring finger is on the side button on the right, but my thumb is just behind the left one. So to get a grip, I either need to move forward my thumb (and therefore my wrist) or hold the mouse slightly angled to the left. This is kind of crappy, since it seems like an obvious problem and shouldn't be hard to fix (just make the buttons wider, spanning further back).

On to the Mighty Mouse's other big curiosity: the scroll ball. Let's look at traditional, vertical scrolling for now. In a nutshell, it feels great. Scrolling is much smoother than on other mice, because it seems to have a higher resolution. Scrolling produces soft clicking sounds, which are artificial like on the side buttons, but here the illusion of tactile feedback is even more convincing. Also, you have to apply a tiny bit of pressure while using it, so if you touch it very lightly and move it, nothing happens. I guess the reason for this behaviour is to avoid accidental scrolling when you brush over the ball while moving your fingers. Apple did an amazing job of tuning the threshold for this so you probably will never notice.

What I was looking forward to most in this mouse is the idea of being able to scroll horizontally without having to hold the Shift key. Unfortunately, the result here has been disappointing. It works, but it doesn't work very well. The problem is one of ergonomics. To scroll vertically, you can use about an inch of your index finger's length to move the ball, from the tip of the finger to just behind the first joint. This not only gives you a fairly good range, but also very fine control. In contrast, when scrolling horizontally, only a very narrow part of you finger can make contact with the ball, so you have to keep scrubbing to scroll longer distances. That could be fixed by accelerating horizontal movement more than vertical, but the other problem is that horizontal scrolling is very hard to control. This is partly due to the limited range, of course, but also because your finger sticks to the shiny surface of the mouse on either side of the scroll ball. When you apply more force to overcome that stickiness, your finger suddenly sweeps across the ball much faster than you intended, resulting in very jerky movements. It can be quite frustrating.

I can think of two possible improvements. One is to make the surface rougher, at least around the scroll ball. The other is to expose a bit more of the sides of the scroll ball, by making the surface of the mouse slightly concave at the top.

The other thing you can do with the scroll ball is click. The thing to note here is that it's not the depressing of the scroll ball which causes the click, but pressing the whole mouse down while your finger is on the scroll ball. In fact, the same pressure detection used to activate the scroll ball when scrolling also seems to give the condition for a middle click. This means that a middle click doesn't actually feel any different from a normal click, which can be a bit confusing. But at least you don't have to lift up your other fingers in order for it to work.

So the Mighty Mouse delivers many novel ideas, but how well these work is quite a mixed bag. Vertical scrolling is the only real winner. Once you're used to this one, traditional scroll wheels will feel clunky and primitive. Although some of the other features, like horizontal scrolling, are potentially useful, others feel like they're just there to make the mouse as unconventional as possible.

Innovation is appreciated, but not just for the sake of innovating.

Lots of pasta ahead

2005-07-28T20:41:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the lack of activity on this blog recently. I do have a list of things I want to post about, but I've been so busy at work that when I get home, I just want to switch off and play Myth II, because my brain's too tired for anything more constructive.

The main reason I've been so busy is that I'll be leaving my current job at the end of September. Instead, I'll be studying for a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction with Ergonomics at University College London's Interaction Centre.

Although it's a full-time course, I think that being a student will give me some more time to work on my software, post on this blog, and watch my bank balance dwindle.

buzztracker

2005-06-30T21:36:00.000+01:00

http://www.buzztracker.org/

If you aren't using it yet, you have to try it.

This is a great piece of information design. I've been checking it regularly for the last two weeks or so, and I find that I pick up news that would have previously completely passed me by. This is because buzztracker draws your attention to the most significant (from the press's point of view) news, whereas on traditional, headline-based news sites you are most likely to notice news associated with regions or topics familiar to you.

I only wish the article titles weren't truncated.

Also check out the About page, which is quite interesting.

Scroll-ahead

2005-05-12T23:27:00.000+01:00

Although scrolling on the iPod is famously easy compared to other music players because of its wheel, it still has one problem: when scrolling quickly through a long list, for example all your artists, you are very likely to shoot past the artist you want to select. So the typical procedure is:

Scroll down quickly until you see the desired artists whizzing past.
Scroll back up more slowly until they re-emerge at the top of the screen
If you missed them again, scroll down one or two rows until you've finally got them.

The basic problem is that most of the time while scrolling, the selection is right at the top or right at the bottom of the screen, meaning you need superhuman reflexes to stop in time when the correct artist's name appears.

A solution would be to keep the selection near the middle of the screen (unless you're right at the beginning or the end of the list, of course). That way, you can see a few rows ahead while scrolling, because your artist's name will become visible just before it becomes selected.

I sent this as a suggestion to Apple a while ago, but I'm not too optimistic about who actually gets to read what's sent through their feedback page.

Smart Library drops

2005-05-07T21:41:00.000+01:00

Ever since Mac OS X came out, I have been missing how the classic Finder used to try to recognise what kind of file you dropped on the system folder and would offer you to move it to the right place automatically, for example Extensions or Conrol Panels.

With new kinds of extensions being introduced in every version of Mac OS X (Preference Panes, Contextual Menu Items, Screen Savers, Widgets, Dictionaries, Image Units), it would be very convenient if we could just drop these on one of the Library folders and let the world’s most advanced operating system handle the details.

You but me

2005-04-28T22:05:00.000+01:00

It would be nice if English-like programming languages such as BASIC or AppleScript allowed using but in place of and.

Logically, and and but are the same; only but carries some additional semantics implying contradiction or contrast. (Note how I cleverly avoided using two successive buts there).

Why bother? Well, consider the following example:

If License.IsValid And License.IsBlackListed Then
    LectureUserAboutPiracy
End If

Now read this:

If License.IsValid But License.IsBlackListed Then
    LectureUserAboutPiracy
End If

Although interpreted the same by the computer, the second version makes the programmer's intention more obvious to a reader of the code.

This is similar in spirit to how you can use the in AppleScript and HyperTalk to make code more readable without affecting its behaviour. But this would be even more useful, because complex logical propositions can be quite a pain to decipher when you don't know the original intention. In fact, even constructing them can be difficult when you're having to translate from real-world terms into and and or-terms.

Becoming one with the machine?

2005-04-25T22:30:00.000+01:00

For the past few weeks, when using my computer at work, I have been getting unpleasant onrushes of a feeling that’s probably best likened to motion sickness. What seems to happen is that right after performing an action such as scrolling or dropping down menus, my eyes move automatically, anticipating where my attention should be focused next. However, that reflex is sometimes quicker than the software, and this mismatch between what I expect and what I see seems to have a slightly nauseating effect. I think it’s especially bad with animated (smooth) scrolling under Windows, because it behaves quite unpredictably, with some increments moving faster than others for no obvious reason. That’s actually where I started noticing this feeling, but it has since started happening in other, non-animated situations as well. On a few occasions it’s been so bad that I had to look away and my eyes started watering, although that could have just been general tiredness of the eyes. I also think my awareness of the effect makes it worse.

Have I used the computer so much that my brain has started treating what’s on the screen like a real environment, or have I just not noticed before? I’ve been using computers for more than half of my life now (and I’m only twenty-five!) and very regularly for the past nine years.

I’d quite like to test myself with an eye tracker and see if my eyes really move ahead of the graphics, and if so, by how much, and how it compares to less extreme users.

Maybe how we use animation and how responsive our systems are is more important than we think, especially with what’s happening with Aqua on the Mac.

Update: I think the worst situation for this motion sickness is when the expected motion doesn't occur at all. That happens quite often when using the mouse's scroll wheel in Windows IE, because this sometimes stops working until you click in the window's content area, as if it lost its focus.

I'm also pretty sure now that my eyes watering is a separate problem, but the two combined make for a particularly unpleasant scrolling experience.

CSS3 multi-column layout

2005-04-24T14:19:00.000+01:00

http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-css3-multicol-20010118/

As you can maybe imagine, I'm quite excited about this. I wonder when WebCore- and Gecko-based browsers will start supporting this. Although I guess adoption by web designers will be scarce until Microsoft gets its act together.

Introduction

2005-04-16T14:38:00.000+01:00

In the past year or so, a lot of thoughts about usability have been floating around my head. Since there aren't that many people in my physical proximity that I can discuss these with, I decided to write down some of them and put them online. I was originally planning to do this in the form of essays on my web site. However, I discovered that writing these essays kept throwing up new ideas that made them longer and longer, and less and less coherent. I therefore decided to publish shorter pieces here instead, each about a single thought.

I want to make this accessible to both technical and non-technical readers, so if you are technical, please bear with me when I explain some concepts in more detail than you need.

I am not great at writing, but I hope it will be enough to communicate what I'm thinking. I also think doing this should help me improve my writing. As Paul Graham puts it:

"Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated."