It is another aspect of the present invention to provide a LED blinking pattern along with varied intensity that in combination mimics the rhythm of breathing
Brian Q. Huppi et al
For such an old patent, I’m surprised I hadn’t seen the official reasoning behind Apple’s breathing sleep-indicator before now.
Weird that the rate is at the upper limit of normal adult respiration, though. Way above that of a sleeper.
Rams’ words on colorful kitchen appliances remind me of the rash of color-matched toasters and kettles in the early part of this century. Every one of your appliances could be a bright primary red or blue. But only if you lacked the foresight to know you’d throw them away and replace them in a year.
Disposable design is not design. That’s fashion.
It’s hard to keep everything straight with dozens of tabs all crammed into a little strip along the top of your browser. Your tab with a search to find a pizza parlor gets mixed up with your tabs on your favorite band. Often, it’s easier to open a new tab than to try to find the open tab you already have.
Aza Raskin
Tabs are weird. I don’t use them. Ostensibly they keep your desktop uncluttered and free of too many windows. I think Tab Candy is proof positive that some people have migrated one level deeper, and they’ve come to believe the browser is the operating system. Certainly the browser makers like it that way. I just wish Aza Raskin were doing this work for an OS vendor instead.
Tabs became popular largely because the window management on Windows XP was so horrific that browsers needed their own mini-manager to keep from clogging up the task bar. Years later, Microsoft has unfucked the task bar and now browser makers are scrambling to keep people from clogging up their tab bars. So we have tab groups and groups of tab groups: virtual desktops and a whole pseudo-ZUI built into a browser.
You want to know how I keep from having too many windows open? I close windows. And if I want to come back to read something later I use a quaint technology called a bookmark.
When you stand and work away from your desk you enter into shared space. You’re more approachable and open to feedback.
Bryan Zmijewski
Definitely in line with the boatloads of research linking posture to emotional affect and openness to new ideas.
Without wanting to flog a dead horse, 37signals’ new iPad app Draft is a perfect study in why iOS needs Services. Draft brings nothing new to the digital sketchpad market but Campfire integration, and doesn’t even do that with the radically simplified interface one might expect from 37signals. It’s a nice enough app—probably in the top ten percent of sketching apps interface-wise—but it’s clear that its raison d’être is Campfire integration and little more.
While Campfire has a published API that anyone could use to add the same feature to a competing sketchbook app, nobody bothers because it’s too small a niche. Why support yet another web service when it means more code and more clutter? But consider instead a world where 37signals release a Campfire chat app instead of Draft, with a “Post to Campfire room” OS Service provided to every sketchbook, photo editor and web browser on the device.
37signals shouldn’t have had to make Draft themselves, and shouldn’t have to court third party developers to support their API either. Multitasking—in the sense of using multiple tools to perform a task—should solve this problem for them.
Say you download a document from your company’s intranet to proofread. You look up a few words as you go, and you make some edits before sending it to your boss. If you’re anything like me, the task involves Safari, Pages, Dictionary, Finder, and iChat; with every application relying on the ability to take a file or a snippet of text from your current work context and send it elsewhere. On iPhone OS, where every app lives in a sandbox and dedicates itself to a single task, this kind of work isn’t a walk in the park. Copy and paste make things possible if you take the time to switch between apps, but the experience sucks, so developers add convenience features, web service integration, and custom URL schemes. Apple provides some great APIs for integrating with the system utilities, but they’re slow moving. There’s no standard MFTweetComposeViewController, and there probably never will be.
That’s a shame. Every app with a text field should be able to email, tweet, blog, print, transmute, translate, and read aloud the current selection. Every app with an image view should be able to rotate, crop, set as wallpaper, save to Dropbox, post to Flickr, and upload to an SFTP server. Of course no single developer should add all these features to their application—we have a word for software like that—so a more elegant solution is called for.
If you’re a serious Mac nerd you already know where this article is headed, because it’s right there in the title: A Services Menu for iPhone. If you’re not familiar, the Mac’s Services menu is something it inherited from NeXTSTEP, and it’s not unlike the Unix command line’s pipe. A Service takes the current selection and sends it to another application to be worked on, which may or may not pass the result back to the original caller. Services are under-utilized on the Mac because we’re so accustomed to copy and paste, drag and drop, and the routine of saving a file to the desktop with one application so you can open it with another. But iPhone OS, lacking two out of three of these options, could foster a Services explosion.
Mail, for instance, would advertise a Service that says “if you have a file or even a snippet of text, I can send it” and every other app on the platform would get Mail integration for free. Flickr’s app would advertise a Service that says “if you have an image, I can upload it” and then every app—including Apple’s own Photos app—would be able to upload photos to Flickr. Or Facebook. Or Tumblr. Or Posterous. Or an SFTP server. The possibilities are endless, and the beauty of Services is that they’re context sensitive: a Flickr Service would only be visible when you’re handling an image. This keeps the Services menu uncluttered.
Today developers must pick and choose which external features to support, and present a gargantuan list to sate their users’ desires. It’s inefficient and it’s redundant. A system of Services would show only the integration features the user wants, because it can only advertise Services from the apps the user has installed.
On the Mac, Services are a niche. On iPhone OS they’d be nothing short of a revolution.
[Two-column layouts] force you into a paper metaphor and a defined page height
Oliver Reichenstein
I can’t disagree with too much of Oliver Reichenstein’s assessment of the Wired Magazine app, and I’m disappointed to learn that the app consists merely of a gigantic stack of PNG images. That’s a missed opportunity to get copy and paste, search, and VoiceOver for free. But I do think Oliver has the cause and effect reversed when he talks about column width.
Narrow columns didn’t force Wired into a paper metaphor with a defined page height. The decision to paginate was made at the start, and I’m still cool with that. But then the page gave them the freedom to use multiple columns, and they took the opportunity to flex that muscle whether they should’ve or not.
We’re willing to guess the next iPhone’s back will detect multitouch gestures so you can control core features such as the music player while the device is still inside your pocket.
Brian X. Chen
Willing to guess? Willingness to guess and willingness to bet are about as far apart on the prognostication spectrum as one can be. I wouldn’t be willing to bet on analyst speculation either if pocket music controls were the best feature to come of it. I look forward to accidentally skipping tracks and deafening myself every time I reach for my phone, I guess.
That’s not to say a touch-sensitive backplate is a bad idea—a lot of game developers would kill for a control surface that doesn’t obscure your view into the game world—but music controls sound like the least interesting application one could invent for it. There’s a reason every pocket music device for the last two decades has had a Hold switch.
Still in prediction mode, Chen wonders how AT&T will support the bandwidth required by the videoconferencing inevitably tied to a front-facing camera. Simple: they’ll charge like a wounded bull, just as every other carrier on the planet does. Video calls are nothing new to 3G phones; as I recall, it was the only reason to buy one when 3G networks first debuted in the early 2000s. Mobile video calling is an awful, expensive feature that nobody ever uses, but that doesn’t mean Apple won’t support it. Last I checked they support MMS, too.
To this day we’re stuck with two numpad layouts that are incredibly similar, but just different enough to slow you down when you switch between them.
Yours Truly
A post on the company blog I’ve been waiting to write for an insanely long time about why we chose the telephone-style keypad over a calculator-style one for Bistromath.
It had come full circle: From arbitrary style in an Apple UI, to a widely-used visual cue, back to arbitrary style in an Apple UI.
Clayton Miller
The distinction between text fields and search fields is one of the more subtly impressive things about Mac OS X’s design. Not visually impressive like, say, a reflective dock or a backup retrieval system in deep space, but impressive because it’s actually useful. It has semantic weight and, unlike the search fields on so many other platforms, you know what it does without reading the label.
That’s why it’s upsetting to see it abused, as Clayton points out. If I launch Facebook with the intention of looking at someone’s profile I have to ensure I don’t type their name into the first round-ended text field I see, lest Facebook’s twitteresque question “What’s on your mind?” be answered with, say, the name of an ex-girlfriend. When it comes to spotting search fields, false negatives are harmless. False positives not so much.
And while Apple’s own Messages app (née SMS) was the first defector from within, the offense isn’t always so cut and dry. Firefox’s “awesomebar”—a location field and history search in one—straddles an interesting line: when the input field has such a dual purpose, does that make it a search field? My gut says no, and I’d sooner see Mozilla square it up.