j a c k *

Grab Bag of Bad Ideas...

Normally here at jaskasterisk.com I try to provide mostly vertical analysis, delving deep enough into one topic to come to some kind of (hopefully) useful conclusion. But this weekend I'm moving from my old computer to my new one and there are some links I've been sitting on which I'm going to pass on without much in the way of additional comment.

(1) The Rise of Rebublican Nihilism is a long but worthwhile piece about why the right wing seems so out of step in understanding modern issues and incapable of offering solutions. Author Jonathan Chait argues that the intellectual core of the conservative movement has its back against a wall -- their policy proposals cannot solve today's problems, yet they cannot retreat from their commitment to conservative ideology. I would only add that perhaps they've succeeded too well. After 30 years of gutting the tax and regulatory code in the name of righteousness, it's reached the point where doing more of the same makes things obviously worse.

(2) Many pundits hyperventilated that Obama made some kind of gaffe, or broke with precedent, or violated something about separation of powers by criticizing the Supreme Court in his state of the Union (yeah, I know, I said these were old links). They need to read this quote from FDR. Pretty strong stuff there, Frankie.

(3) This kos analysis of the poll it commissioned on Republican beliefs kind of book-ends (1) above. The conservative media have done such a great job convincing their base to believe anything that supports their ideology that now they have nowhere else to go.

(4) Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame is an atheist. I've heard him a couple of times in person and he's an engaging public speaker.

(5) The site 538 shows, as it often does, the power of empirical data -- in this case its power to refute conservative tropes. Republicans always argue that not only do Americans pay too much in taxes, but also that the rich have a disproportionate tax burden. The data says no. Not only do we have the least redistributive tax code of all first-world nations, our government is quite cheap as well. Don't expect facts to change any Republican minds, however. See (1) and (3).

(6) Finally, Dan Dennet helped to create a real interesting (but long) study on non-believing clergy. Many liberal pastors don't really accept the basic tenants of Christianity but stay in the church because they have no other form of income. They tell themselves they want to further liberalize the church from within, but end up living a lie. Tragic, really.

- jack*

iPad iReview, pt 3…

Having previously covered the good and the ugly, now we get to the genuinely bad. These are things that really didn’t work for me when using the iPad.

(1) The button. There is one physical button on the face of the iPad. Mirroring the button on the iPhone, the main button does one of two things: it either exits the current app to the main app-selection screen, or, if you’re already there, it opens a search function. That’s it. What justifies an entire button so apps don’t need a close box and the main view doesn’t need a search icon to tap? I suppose there’s the pragmatic concern that since the iPad doesn’t multi-task (in 2010, no less) if an app misbehaves the user still needs to be able to quit. OK, fair enough, but why make the button have such limited function? It could operate as a general escape, so it would first take you back to the app’s main interface, and once there back to the iPad’s interface. I could have used that a few times. (What if the app crashes, you ask? Just hold down the main button, analogous to a reboot.)

And once you’ve gone to the trouble of putting a button on the face, why stop at one? Steve Jobs seems to have a quixotic fixation with one-button interfaces. Was he traumatized as a child by something with multiple buttons, or does he just have an unnatural kink for making people poke things with one finger? A second button would have really helped with the controlling/viewing dilemma. Watching a video, for example, you mostly want to just look at it so the on screen controls fade away. I’m told that to bring them back you tap, but that never worked consistently for me. I’d tap, I’d whack, I’d press and hold, I’d flick – sometimes I’d get the controls, other times not. In a different app once the controls faded they never came back. A dedicated button would have really helped here (as would a finer-grained escape).

(2) The browser. The iPad seems like it should be the ideal web appliance. You can curl up in a comfortable chair, in front of TV or out in the yard, and surf the information superhighway. I wouldn’t recommend it. The experience was uniformly awful.

The first thing you want to do is search. So you tap on the search field and it opens a virtual keyboard which, although it belongs in the ugly category for UI features, does the job. The trouble starts when you try to do a second search. The search field and keyboard open again, but this time with the last search still in the field. If it had been selected, like it is in most browsers, so typing would replace it that would have been fine, but the insertion point is at the end. The reason became clear pretty quickly – there are no cursor keys on the keyboard. You would think, as I did, that perhaps you select the text by tapping or dragging on it directly, but no dice. The only thing I could do – and what I had to do for every single search – was backspace enough to delete the last one. Even if I just wanted to change one letter I was forced to backspace to the edit point and retype the string from there. It’s hard to understand how something so basic is so flawed.

Once you get to a page you run head-on into the controlling/viewing dilemma again. Here it’s much more serious than in a simple movie player. As usual the multi-touch navigation works beautifully. Gesturing to scroll and zoom is intuitive and fast, and the text and graphics resolve quickly and clearly. The problem is that most web pages are covered with links, and if your finger lands on one of them accidentally you are whisked away to some random location in cyberspace. The borders of many websites are particularly thick with active regions, so just holding the heavy device would often trigger links as the support hand strayed into the sensitive area. As result, scrolling a web page was like navigating a minefield, trying to find inert space for fingertips and ready to pounce on the back button when I invariably followed an unintentional link. The first time a link opened a new window I was really longing for that general escape ability as I tried to figure out how to get back to what I had been trying to read.

It turns out that even areas without links can be active. The browser allows you to select text, as it should, but this is done by swiping a finger over the text to select, which is the same action used for navigation. I never did get the hang of why it would sometimes scroll and sometimes select text; it’s a mystery forever beyond my understanding. Once text was selected it would put up more buttons and widgets for manipulating it, making it even harder to find an open spot to tap to get rid of it without jumping along a random hyperlink.

Finally, this is Apple’s own browser app so why doesn’t it respect the iPad’s orientation like everything else? Many other apps would reshape their content as the device was turned, but the browser stayed strictly in landscape mode. It would have been much nicer to read long columns of text in portrait mode. Not a huge deal, but again it detracts from the experience in a way that seems sloppy and unpolished.

To wrap up, the iPad shows that there is probably a niche between phone and laptop for a flat device with elegant touch-screen UI. Unfortunately the iPad isn’t it, not at this stage. There are three main things I’d do for version 2, or for a competitor. First would be to make about half as heavy, even if that meant a reduction in runtime. Second would be to add grips of some kind, so it can be easily held with one hand without interfering with the screen. Third, and this is the main one, I’d add a physical button for toggling between viewing and controlling. In the view mode the basic controls would work, like navigation or touching explicit buttons, but nothing would get in the way of watching your video or reading your web page.

In the control mode, which could be activated intermittently by placing the button in easy reach of the hand holding the handle, more controls and gadgets would overlay the content, perhaps providing menus or palettes for performing multiple functions. If you need to rewind the video a few seconds you’d hold down the button to bring up video controls, drag to rewind with the other hand, and then release the button to hide the controls again. If you’re viewing a picture and want to make changes you press and release the button to toggle into control mode. Then you’d have control overlays for adjusting levels or doing other markup.

Apple probably won’t do that due to Steve Job’s deep-seated button phobia, so thinking beyond one button will have to rest with someone else. And while you're at it, make the damn thing multi-task for crying out load.

- jack*

Socalism, Schmocialism...

The thing that I do find about Barack Obama is that -- and I think America is starting to catch on to this -- this guy really is a Marxist.

Glenn Beck

This rhetoric confuses me. Does anyone – in the 21st century – really think that Marxism, socialism, or communism are serious political theories? Has any influential American in the last 30 years said anything that could be interpreted by an unbiased observer as promoting Marxism, socialism or communism? Is there any way in which the modern liberal platform can be interpreted as an endorsement of Karl Marx?

The answer to those rhetorical questions – in case you missed it -- is no, of course. Marxism’s heyday was about 100 years ago, when it helped to found the 20th century labor movement. Since then a lot has changed. Yes, we had red scares and domino theory wars and cold wars and then … well, we won. Yay team capitalist! And yet the right wing in America isn’t celebrating. Instead they’re wallowing in a kind of cold war nostalgia that helps to justify the most pro-corporate policies in terms of being – even today – opposed to nasty insidious commies.

This isn’t a simple disagreement over policy – the left and right in American politics don't even agree on what the disagreement is about.

I’m not much of a scholar of history, but it seems to me that in the 1930’s the political spectrum was understood to be from fascism on the far right to Marxism on the far left. (“Socialism” is a more troublesome term since it was used by both extremes.) Even when people disagreed about policy, everyone, on the left and the right, at least agreed that those were the correct parameters for the discussion.

Today we have a complete disconnect. The right defines the possible political spectrum as being from “dyed in the wool Patriot” on the right to “European redistributive Marxist” on the left. Given this is the entire range of political thought that the right even allows, it's no great surprise that the conservative movement has been pushing further and further to the right extreme. Everything evil, from Stalin to Hitler, has been redefined to be leftist. They get away with it because while few modern people are willing to openly defend Marxism, equally few are prepared to condemn the right's so-called patriotism as fascism.

Thinkers on the left, I think, are more realistic, seeing the political argument as being over the relative power of citizens, corporations, and government. But right-wing thinkers aren't having that discussion. They're fighting imaginary battles with modern-day Maoists, which somehow always involves giving giant corporations more power at the expense of everyone else. Funny how it works out that way.

- jack*

iPad iReview, pt 2…

Before: Part 1

This time, I will report on what I consider the more mediocre aspects of the iPad. The "ugly" in the classic trio.

(1) The design. The aesthetics of the device are pretty weak. It certainly looks like a small iMac or a large iPhone, but is that really a good thing? That’s not really a great goal. For those who haven’t held one in your hands, imagine a large rounded rectangle thickened to about 5 centimeters. While that sounds awesomely thin, in fact the device gets even thicker in the middle, making it unstable when placed flat on a table. No doubt the designers wanted it to seem thin, but making the edges thinner than the middle is like a bald guy with a comb-over or a fat guy in a muscle shirt: it’s just pretending to be something it’s not. If you insist on sticking with the bland design, at least make it uniformly thick.

(2) The affordances. “Affordances” is a fancy word for doorknobs – physical (or virtual) elements that help you use a device. Designed well, they invite you to interact with them to do what you want and need; designed poorly, they confuse and frighten you. The iPad has five physical controls, and they are all terrible. I spent a long time in the graphical UI looking for volume control before realizing that the toggle switch on the side was the only way to adjust volume. There were no clues written on the device for any of the buttons – even simple, standard icons were missing. One of them I never touched because I was afraid of what it might do.

Under affordances I include the lack of any kind of handle. Related to design (see point 1, above), the basic rounded rectangle shape and touch screen provided no useful way to hold the thing. If you want to use it for any length of time you might want to hold it in front of you with one hand, but since there is no handle and any fingers on the front of the machine could be interpreted as input – well, there’s just no way to do that without fatigue of some kind.

(3) The weight. Speaking of fatigue – the first time I held the iPad I was flipping through a colleague’s vacation photos. At first it was awesome. The finger flip UI and the clear, bright screen were clear wins. Then I realized my arm was about to die. The design (see point 1, above) tries to hide the heft, but it can’t be avoided if you hold it up for long. That continued to happen over and over as I used the iPad. The thing is just heavier than it should be for its intended niche. (Maybe a handle would help.)

(4) The phone. Once you get past the signature apps, most of the things you can do with the iPad were actually created for the iPhone. The fact that it looks like a comically oversized iPhone (see point 1, above) is underscored by the apps, that are also comically oversized and incapable of adjusting to the altered aspect ratio as you rotate the iPad to make best use of the relatively large screen space.

(5) The screen. I understand that there are tradeoffs with screen coatings. Non-reflective screens block some of the light so they take more power. Nontheless, the shiny reflective screen makes the iPad pretty hard to use outdoors or in brightly lit environments. I tried to watch a movie in the back yard and even in the shade all I could see in the dark scenes was my own face. It also collect fingerprints, and since it's a touch-screen device that means you have to polish it quite often.

(6) The keyboard. It's kind of a necessary evil on a device like this that the keyboard has to be virtual, without tactile feedback. And to avoid mistyping it has to have big buttons which means that numbers and letters are on different pages. (Although I don't know why you don't flip between keyboards rather than using mode buttons.) But the fact that it's all necessary doesn't make it any less ugly.

Next: the bad!

- jack*

iPad iReview, pt 1…

Our CEO came into my office a few weeks ago and tossed the company iPad at me. He wanted me to come to understand the user interface opportunities that it represents by playing with it for a while. So I did. Here is my multi-part review of the highlights and lowlights of this technological ink blot, followed by my verdict and proposal for an iPad killer.

The good:

(1) Interactivity. The “multi-touch” interface is ideal for navigating 2D content. Google Earth is a perfect example. Zooming in, zooming out, rotating or panning are simple and intuitive. Even for less physically dimensional data sets the metaphor of flipping between pages with a flick of the finger or of scaling up and down with two fingers works really, really well. It helps that the system is fast enough that the UI and graphics respond to touch interactively.

(2) Speed. The essentially zero startup and shutdown time make the device seem like a physical appliance rather than a computer. I don’t know how many hours I spend booting up Windows, or on the other end, shutting it down. In any case it’s too long to make it seem like a tool – it’s more like a chore. The iPad, on the other hand – you turn it on and it’s on, you turn it off and it’s off. Unlike a laptop whose state has to be managed, the iPad is more like a book. You open it and use it, close it when done, just like you want to.

(3) Portability. The battery in my laptop pooped out years ago and turned it into a strictly wired computer. Even when the battery works, the keyboard and track pad on the laptop give it a hands-off, indirect feel. It’s like trying to hold a book with oven mitts and leaf through it with tongs, as if the pages were 500 degrees. The iPad, however, is a truly portable device. The form factor, speed and direct UI make this the only computer I’ve tried to take to bed or to the bathroom with me.

(4) Plants versus Zombies. Not to focus on a particular game, but the iPad platform has an affinity for certain types of applications. In particular anything especially two dimensional that requires minimal interaction, like the aforementioned brilliantly designed RTS game. First person shooters will not be flocking to the iPad, but for some kinds of games and interactive experiences it will provide a unique niche.

- jack*

UPDATE: part 2