Release Candidate One with Chris Clark

Scrolling is neat, and scrolling your way through buttery-smooth tables in iPhone OS is even kinda fun. But when it comes to slow, purposeful reading—as opposed to flicking through a list—it becomes tedious. Dragging through thousands of words of prose isn’t skimming, isn’t navigation… it’s laborious. You’re paginating by hand.

When we’re reading on the desktop we have a quick shortcut for pagination: push the space bar to advance exactly one screenful through a web site or PDF. I rely on it so much that I react poorly when web designers obscure part of the viewport with fluff. When a chunk of vertical real estate is obscured, the definition of “pageful” changes in a way the web browser can’t anticipate. Jason Kottke learned this lesson with his blog redesign last year. He was swift to correct it.

But that’s the desktop, where the combination of scroll bar, wheel mouse, and keyboard gives us a lot of flexibility. Multitouch devices have a more limited set of inputs, and while some developers turned to scroll views with invisible pagination zones, iBooks’ designers evidently went in a different direction. iBooks makes you tap or swipe to advance one whole page at a time. If you discount the page scrubber, iBooks has no free-form scrolling at all.

Argue all you like over the superfluousness of animated page flips, but the aesthetics do little to affect the usability of the design: eliminating scrolling as the default means of advancement means less effort and less risk of losing your place.

A really clever solution to the problem of mistyped email addresses: rather than forcing you to re-type, Russ’ form forces you to re-read by taking your address and displaying it at the end of the form. Writ large outside the context of a text field, you can’t help but look at it and maybe spot a wayward character.

That “maybe” tells us what we all already know, though: it needs testing. The standard retype approach might just work better. Despite the common complaint that “everyone” just copies and pastes their initial input, I would posit that the kind of people who are most likely to make typos in their email address—namely my father—aren’t going to copy and paste. They’ll just do what the form says. I don’t copy and paste either, but I wear a seatbelt when I’m driving, too.

In any case, this approach feels nicer. Taking a piece of information and redisplaying it out of context is my own favored technique for catching typos. When I’m writing an essay or a proposal, I invariably wind up printing a hard copy and attacking it with a red pen. If I’m writing a blog post like this one in MarsEdit, I write in a small, monospace font and proofread in a full-fidelity HTML preview. The difference in typeface, size, and line length is a massive aid. The context switch lets me spot issues I would otherwise have glossed over, and it may be that the same thing works wonders for email forms. We’ll see.

World-famous logos do not become that way—do not become historically significant—without big budget expenditure. They are renowned because the companies that own them are renowned.

Hard to believe it was five years ago I said the same thing about product names:

Extra doesn’t give you any clues that it’s sugar-free, nor that it’s gum. Cap’n Crunch isn’t the name of a cereal, it’s the name of a fun character created specifically to hawk cereal.

Logos are signifiers; empty vessels to be filled with the values of the brand. They are hopefully pretty, and they are hopefully emotionally significant to the people who own them, because then they have a chance of being emotionally significant to their customers. But they’re only signposts. They can’t do anything on their own.

When you have a million-dollar ad budget, then you can shove the logo in so many people’s faces that they recognize it. Even if they don’t love it. Even if they wish they’d never heard of it. Keep that up for a generation or two and you’ll have built something “iconic.”

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.

Oh great. Now I want new business cards.