While I’m not going to toe the party line and suggest that the iPad is an entirely new product category, Thurrott’s assertion that the iPad belongs in the same category as netbooks confuses the hell out of me. Since when were netbooks anything but small, cheap laptops? “Smaller and cheaper” isn’t a product category, it’s an inevitability of consumer electronics.
And despite Thurrott’s recognition of the fact that Apple doesn’t half-ass its way through products, I still don’t think he appreciates it at all. I almost sense resentment in that realization. iPods, iPhones, iPads… they’re not “missing” obvious features in the sense he implies—that these features were forgotten or neglected—they were excised. Make no mistake that people inside Apple want these features too, but on the timeline and budget of a 1.0 project they usually can’t be done well enough to justify their inclusion.
People often look at a piece of shitty software, or even a badly-done feature on a piece of good software and say “it’s better than nothing.” But if it’s causing frustration to your customers and harm to the brand, then no, it’s not better than nothing. “Missing” features are as good as your imagination makes them. Missing features inspire anticipation. Bad features inspire hopelessness and disappointment. Cut them out.
The iPad’s impact to computing will be huge, and Steven Frank nails why we’re so uncomfortable with that fact. We computer nerds—we who love to tinker, we who have invested decades in our Photoshop expertise and touch-typing, we who compile our own software and know what command line interfaces are—we’re not important anymore.
Apple’s lesson over the last ten years has been that computer nerds care about a lot of stupid shit that mere mortals don’t, and nerds are outnumbered a million to one. To Apple, when it comes to defining the modern computing experience, we’re the group to ignore.
The iPad is gorgeous, and is enough of a computer to satisfy the 80% (dare I say 95%) of computing experiences that count. Email, Facebook, web browsing, chat, word processing, and a few games. I know that for me, today it’ll only be a casual-use device because I have “real work to do” but for many of my friends and parents and friends’ parents and parents’ friends? It’s all the computer they’ve ever needed.
I helped a friend through the process of downloading and using Handbrake the other day so he could make some home movies small enough to be sent by email. I almost spat coffee on my display when he asked “so am I 32bit Intel, 64bit Intel, or Power PC? And do I want GUI or CLI?”
It’s for that reason, and so many others, I’m wary of all this open source email client business. Open source software projects are notorious for their lousy interfaces, even on the Mac: an email client built by a committee of super-nerds would be a miracle to do any better.
The quote has little to do with the content of the post it’s taken from, because the content of the post is a long and rambly piece on Adobe’s continued slide into a place of Microsoft-level loathing. But I like the quote because it sums up the power of progressive disclosure so succinctly. Consider the antithesis.
Facebook URL Helper
If you’ve used Facebook for iPhone version 3.1 you’ve probably been prompted to sync your friends’ profile pics between the web site and your phone’s contacts. It’s a fun feature, and while I’m hoping it someday grows to rival the Palm Prē’s full address book sync, for now it’s just a novelty.
An interesting side effect, though, is the addition of a field to every synced friend’s address card: a new Home Page link for those hundreds of friends who don’t have web sites. That’s fair enough, since Facebook is the average person’s biggest presence on the web, but it uses the peculiar fb:// URL scheme. Filling your address book with links like fb://profile/219500615 is fine and dandy for an iPhone with the Facebook app installed, but those weird links will do absolutely nothing on your Mac once you’ve synced to your desktop. They’re honestly a bit of a nuisance.
So it was that I came to find myself spending my Sunday night writing a little utility to fix the problem. It’s called the Facebook URL Helper, and it intercepts links with the fb:// URL scheme and redirects them as appropriate.
It’s not a daemon, it doesn’t sit on your computer occupying resources when it’s idle, it just quietly registers the URL scheme and awaits clicks. When it gets one it passes it on to your default browser before terminating itself. Besides the additional icon in your Applications folder, you should never know it’s there.
Download it free. I should probably point out at this stage that neither I nor my company has any affiliation with Facebook, Inc. and I offer this software to you as-is with no guarantee that it won’t kick your puppy. I’d like to thank Andy Kim for his wonderful Let’s Move self-installation code I first linked here back in September, and I hope you enjoy it.
We’ve seen Apple impose design constraints upon itself many times. The original Macintosh lacked keyboard arrow keys, making the mouse a complete necessity. The iPod’s navigation scheme never grew more complicated than “scroll, click center, click menu.” And the iPhone lacks a stylus, ensuring all its apps are fat-finger friendly. By comparison, apps for Blackberry and Android—whose wildly-variable hardware give you no baseline to design to—are generally horrific.
So it is that Andy Ihnatko believes the first generation of the Rumored Apple Tablet will lack any kind of keyboard connection: no USB ports, no Bluetooth keyboard support. By removing hardware keyboards as a possibility, the tablet’s designers and engineers must ensure that on-screen keyboard is top-notch. And I have to agree with him.
