Douglas on Tumblr

"Abolishing the “top” lists from all App Store interfaces and exclusively showing editorially..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:30:42 +0100

“Abolishing the “top” lists from all App Store interfaces and exclusively showing editorially selected apps in browsing screens would do a hell of a lot more than trials to promote healthy app economics and the creation of high-quality software.”

- Marco Arment

URL encoding with DuckDuckGo

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:30:00 +0100

DuckDuckGo will perform URL encoding and decoding. For example: ‘url encode $’ and ‘url decode %23’. Handy.

Medieval Name Generator

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:13:59 +0100

Medieval Name Generator:

This would be useful if one was to play Dungeons and Dragons (like these folks), or start playing Fire Emblem: Awakening and need to name the tactician.

Sleep is important

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:43:35 +0100

Sleep is important:

Professor Russell Foster, New Scientist

Sleep is not a luxury or an indulgence but a fundamental biological need, enhancing creativity, productivity, mood and the ability to interact with others.

If you are dependent upon an alarm clock, or parent, to get you out of bed; if you take a long time to wake up; if you feel sleepy and irritable during the day; if your behaviour is overly impulsive, it means you are probably not getting enough sleep. Take control. Ensure the bedroom is a place that promotes sleep – dark and not too warm – don’t text, use a computer or watch TV for at least half an hour before trying to sleep and avoid bright lights. Try not to nap during the day, and seek out natural light in the morning to adjust the body clock and sleep patterns to an earlier time. Avoid caffeinated drinks after lunch.

I find reading from Instapaper in dark mode with the lights off works well to promote drowsiness.

Zelda: Oracle of Seasons & Ages coming to 3DS in May

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:00:56 +0100

Zelda: Oracle of Seasons & Ages coming to 3DS in May:

Andrew Brown at Nintendo World Report

This is exciting. I’ve been after these games for years, but was never convinced with the cost and hassle of buying from Ebay.

Touchfit: Georges St-Pierre

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:04:00 +0100

Touchfit: Georges St-Pierre:

Since I started at Zolmo in October, I’ve spent a lot of my time working on Touchfit: Georges St-Pierre, which we released on the App Store yesterday.

I’m so happy with how the application turned out. The user interface is both familiar and exotic; you have to see it in motion. Watch the trailer and download now for iPhone and iPod Touch.

I posted a couple more photos on the cat’s Tumblr recently. I...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:49:28 +0100

I posted a couple more photos on the cat’s Tumblr recently. I might post some more, but no more than one per week.

Grouped table view background colour

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 15:57:58 +0100

I was just updating some old code and found that UIColor’s + groupTableViewBackgroundColor returns a clear colour in iOS 6. This isn’t mentioned in the documentation, but comments in UIInterface.h — where this method is declared — state that the method is deprecated.

joncrowley: alexcarantza: Decision tree for using a QR...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:48:49 +0100

joncrowley:

alexcarantza:

Decision tree for using a QR code

I feel like the QR code is the litmus test for whether your ‘digital experts’ are actually digital experts.

(Although, I have seen some data that suggests that they work in a few specific situations.)

The Time Machine menu bar icon does not spin when preparing backups on Mountain Lion. It now spins...

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 12:11:04 +0100

The Time Machine menu bar icon does not spin when preparing backups on Mountain Lion. It now spins only when copying, providing less feedback. I don’t like this.

If I had a Mac that supported Power Nap (continues backing up after being put to sleep) and was convinced the backups reliably completed, then I would remove the icon from the menu bar and forget about it. But I don’t, so I want to babysit the backups.

Luigi’s Mansion 2

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:22:00 +0100

I started playing yesterday. So far I would says it’s alright, which is about what I expected. It looks great considering how awful the 3DS XL screens are. The game uses too many buttons. I am very tempted to use the ‘Dual Scream’ ringtone on my iPhone.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director’s Cut

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 22:29:34 +0100

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director’s Cut:

Jonny and Scott’s impressions on Nintendo World Report

I was intrigued by Deus Ex when it came out. I’m more likely to buy a Wii U than an Xbox 360, so maybe I’ll be able to play it. I’m getting a Resident Evil 4 feeling from this, which is my favourite Wii game, so I hope this turns out similarly.

The Trend Against Skeuomorphic Textures and Effects in User Interface Design

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:30:42 +0000

The Trend Against Skeuomorphic Textures and Effects in User Interface Design:

by John Gruber, Daring Fireball

I think John is right, and he’ll appear very astute looking back on this article in a couple of years. Time will tell.

Development Notes on Glassboard 2.3.3

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 23:33:47 +0000

Development Notes on Glassboard 2.3.3:

by Brent Simmons

I love hearing how OS X and iOS app veterans are doing things. Brent has been doing this for such a long time, but is still always looking for ways to improve his craftsmanship.

Concrete, tarmac and asphalt

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 18:29:52 +0100

Concrete is a technical term for a material composed of a mineral aggregate bound by a binder. Cement is a powder that, when mixed with water, gives a binder. In everyday use, ‘concrete’ usually refers to Portland cement concrete, which uses Portland cement.

Our use of the word ‘tarmac’ referring to road surfaces is historical. Tarmac was popular for surfacing roads about a century ago. Almost all road surfaces have been replaced by asphalt concrete, which is often called ‘asphalt’ in everyday use. Technically, asphalt refers to the binder used in asphalt concrete. Asphalt is also known at bitumen, and is a viscous liquid present in most crude oil.

Cantab.net

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 11:49:27 +0100

The University of Cambridge offers email accounts to alumni on their Cantab.net service.

Firstly, do you really need another email account?

IMAP access is only available for payed accounts. I really don’t want data as important as email locked up like this. I would have to get a paid account if I used the service seriously.

I really didn’t like their advertising message. So they’re offering “lifelong email” that is “ideal for keeping in touch with your Cambridge peers”. The same could be said of most email services. Unless you want the “prestigious @cantab.net address”, in which case I am very sorry indeed. I don’t want to cling to the past. “Sponsored premium accounts” is a nice way to say ‘we’ll give you a taster, then cripple the service by restricting access to your account unless you pay’.

The worst bit: “Just because your student account is being shut down does not mean you have to lose all those valuable emails!”. FUD. This is disgraceful. IMAP was created in 1986; it allows messages to be stored on your own computer, and transferred to any email account easily and quickly.

In conclusion, I don’t like how they’re positioning the service, or the business model. There are much better free email services that you probably already have an account with, and better paid services too.

Setting Paste and Match Style as default

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:58:48 +0100

Setting Paste and Match Style as default:

by Thaweesak Suksuwan

An old tip, but a good one. Use the Keyboard System Preferences pane to set ⌘-V to “Paste and Match Style” or similar commands. I’ve just set it up for “Paste With Current Style” in OmniOutliner.

"When people ask me how much I work I will usually answer: as little as possible. The odd part is..."

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:38:54 +0100

“When people ask me how much I work I will usually answer: as little as possible. The odd part is that this comes across as a joke to most people — when really it should be our goal.”

- Ben Brooks

Clear

Thu, 03 May 2012 19:04:00 +0100

Clear is exciting. It pushes the boundaries of how we think software interfaces work and is full to the brim with delightful interactions. Below are some thoughts on the app. I’ll also refer to Portmanteau’s Listary for comparison.

Navigation

Standard iPhone parent-child view navigation employs a spatial model that arranges views left-to-right; lower levels move in from the right side of the screen. This spatial model and the means of navigating are unrelated: nothing about tapping a list item suggests moving to the right. The back button implies a direction, but is just tapped. Listary uses this standard navigation design.

Clear has a fresh take on parent-child navigation. Interestingly there are two ways to navigate, with conflicting spatial models.

One model shows views stacked in the ‘z’ direction, with lower levels presented by spreading out the current view to show the child underneath. Going back up is done by pinching to collapse the child view — an action that matches the spatial model. This feels like the preferred way to navigate in Clear; it’s what is shown in the product video.

The other way to go up a level is to pull down, as if the views are stacked vertically (in the ‘y’ direction). The spatial model and user input match perfectly. This child-to-parent transition exists to enable full navigation with one finger. The reverse transition — pushing up to go to the last used child view — conveniently undoes going up.

The matching of input with on-screen movement and the spatial model is what makes Clear feel a little magical. Tracking finger movement in real-time is so important. Apple’s navigation bar feels dull by comparison.

However, I almost always use my iPhone in one hand, so two finger actions are inconvenient. Jason Kottke wrote about the importance of single-handed operation of the iPhone in 2009. When using Clear, I always drill down by tapping an item (which uses the ‘z’ spatial model), and go back up by pulling (the ‘y’ model). This combined spatial model is nonsensical.

This is all very theoretical. Is it a usability problem? I don’t know. When using Clear I have a sensation of always moving up but I never end up anywhere different, which bothers me. Shouldn’t software leverage humans’ excellence at spatial thinking? There’s not much point in having a spatial model if it doesn’t make sense.

Modes, and other interface problems

The action of pulling down on a list is overloaded: it can either create a new item or go up a level — depending on how far you pull. Regarding this, Lex Friedman said in his Macworld review:

It’s kind of a crapshoot, and you can expect to make the wrong thing happen with alarming consistency.

This was my experience too. The problem is that after trying to go up and not pulling far enough, you’re stuck in a mode. Trying to escape by repeating the pull down action doesn’t work. Instead you must dismiss the keyboard, then try again.

Invisible tap targets are another problem. “Make things visible” is one of Don Norman’s four “principles of design for understandability and usability” in The design of everyday things, but Clear doesn’t do well here. Lex Friedman again:

Tap on a list’s name, and you don’t go to that list, you start editing its title. Instead you need to tap on the much smaller tap target—the number of incomplete items on that list, or any blank space after the list’s name before that number appears.

When I was first using Clear, I accidentally tapped the name every single time! Of course I always want to view a list and never want to change its name. Frustratingly, it again takes two actions to recover: tap once to exit the editing mode and again to finally get where you wanted to be.

So each cell has two tap targets, with no clear visible separation; the target sizes aren’t proportional to how common their action is; and it is not as easy as it could be to recover from frequent ‘mistakes’.

The emphasis on being able to edit items is also present inside a list. I very rarely want to edit an existing item, so it’s odd that the primary action (tapping) is for editing and swiping is used for marking items as done. This was annoying in the supermarket. As I walked the aisles, I would accidentally tap items instead of swiping, which then requires dismissing the keyboard and trying the swipe again.

Data lock-in

Listary works fantastically with the clipboard. You can copy entire lists, and paste in blocks of text (each line becomes a list item). Michael Schechter wrote about Listary and Clear, and prefers Listary because of the paste feature.

Since Clear does not have these features, it was harder to try the app out. I wanted to move my lists over from Listary, but instead I had to tediously recreate them. And I don’t feel inclined to put long lists in Clear, because I will not be able to conveniently get them out. This brings to mind Joel Spolsky’s Strategy Letter III — not being able to get stuff out of an application is a barrier to entry.

Listary syncs with Simplenote. I occasionally make use of this to access my lists in Notational Velocity, but I could cope without this feature. Data liberation via the system clipboard is more important to me than syncing.

Colours

From what I’ve seen, only the Heat Map theme makes the list of lists a different colour from lists themselves. I like having this distinction, so that I better know where I am in the app.

I don’t buy into the whole ‘heat map is the priority’ thing. Order might show priority if I decide to use it like that, but the feature of the app that enables this is reordering.

On a practical note, checked items are way too dark. I can’t read them in brightly lit environments, such as in the supermarket or by a window. My desk is by a window.

Arrogant design

Some aspects of Clear come across as arrogant. Specifically, the hiding of the status bar and the twenty-eight character limit on items. The good news is that both of these problems were addressed in the 1.1 update, although the length of list names is still limited.

The sound when trying to enter more characters says that you, the user, are doing it wrong. Whatever well-meaning motivation may have been behind this decision, the result was that I was forced to spend time thinking how to truncate what I wanted to jot down, perhaps by removing spaces or vowels. I had to adjust to suit the app’s desires — and still do for list names.

Marketing

Clear is marketed as a ‘productivity’ app for keeping ‘todo lists’. This is surely responsible for the demand for features such as due dates and alerts, which make sense in the context of a task management application. But that isn’t what Clear is; it’s an app for making lists. I rather like how Portmanteau are unassuming about how you’ll use Listary. They say it’s an app for making lists: lists of anything you want.

Christopher Jones wrote a review of Clear, and lack of due dates is his main complaint. The problem is framing. There are many uses for a lists app without dates, and it’s reasonable to have a separate tool that can remind you of time-critical tasks. Clear’s marketing screen shots show three lists: “Things To Do”, “Shopping List” and “Movies to Watch”. For me, these lists apps work best with lists similar to the latter two.

Conclusions

Clear is off to a great start, and the improvements in 1.1 are in the right direction. It introduces us to two new navigation design patterns, which have advantages and disadvantages over Apple navigation bar. I don’t like getting stuck in modes, or having my data stuck in the app.

Clear shows us new ways that software interfaces can work. I look forward to seeing where it goes in the future, but also how ideas from Clear trickle into other apps — particularly Listary.

Clear

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:34:01 +0000

Clear:

I have many thoughts on Clear, but I’ll need to use it to do real stuff before I feel qualified to talk about it. In the meantime, check out Portmanteau’s Listary, which I’ve been using since its release in May.