The Price (of the Hardware)

A major selling price of the Apple TV is the price.  In the US it retails at $99 (plus applicable sales tax).  In the UK it retails for £99 (including VAT).  Compare this to the UK rate on Apple’s other offerings and you’ll see it’s a milestone 1:1 exchange.

Personally, £99 seems like a perfectly reasonable price point but it jars knowing that our friends across the pond can pick it up substantially cheaper.  For the record, if you did a currency exchange, the market rate is ~£65GBP to $99USD (excluding fees).

No TV Rentals

At the moment, it would appear that Apple are not offering TV show rentals in the UK.  This is a big mis-step and severely hampers the attractiveness of the Apple TV.  In fact, the new Apple TV is all about renting.  There’s no point in owning content on a device that can’t store it.  Without rentals, there’s no point in picking up an Apple TV.

You can rent movies, at the same quality and price as the current Apple TV.  But here’s the rub, I watch TV shows every day whilst I only watch movies occasionally.  This is the difference between the Apple TV being an every day device and an occasional device.

Aside:  This is a problem that’s been spoken about in regards to the social network LinkedIn.  They were attempting to become an “every day” social network, like FaceBook, rather than a social network that’s only used occasionally.

Content Availability

This is a big issue for me and everyone else in the UK.  The content we want is not available in the iTunes store when we want it.  In fact, the content we want is not available anywhere (legally) when we want it.

It’s still the exception rather than the rule when TV content airs in the UK within a week of airing in the US.  There are only a handful of shows that this is true for (Lost and 24 being two).  Many shows never air over here and therefore never make it to the iTunes store.  And to be clear, we’re talking about some great, Emmy winning shows like Breaking Bad.

It still astonishes me that I can go on the internet and get a high quality, high definition copy of a TV show just an hour after it airs in the US, but not legally.  The revenue that is being lost in the UK (and other non-US regions) because of archaic distribution methods is staggering.

File Formats

Unfortunately, the Apple TV doesn’t help out those of us who may choose to download content that isn’t available over here because of fairly lacklustre video format support.  This isn’t a surprise, and format support doesn’t appear to have changed from the current Apple TV.  That doesn’t stop it being a disappointment.

Streaming Services

I’ll preface this by saying I wish we had a service of the quality of Netflix in the UK.  We do have a DVD-by-post rental service in LoveFilm, and it’s very good at DVDs-by-post.  It also has an online streaming service to go with it.  Unfortunately the selection is nothing short of woeful and doesn’t appear to be improving particularly quickly.  They also don’t have the slick iOS apps that Netflix have.

Netflix streaming to the Apple TV is a major feature for Netflix subscribers.  This is something that we can’t do in the UK.

Unfortunately, there’s no sweetener for British customers in the shape of BBC iPlayer support, which is appearing on multiple devices in the UK (e.g. the PS3).  All we get is YouTube.

Apps, or Lack Thereof

The lacklustre file support and lack of UK centric streaming services wouldn’t be an issue if Apple had used iOS for the Apple TV operating system and therefore allowed developers to build apps for it.  if they did, developers would have stepped in to fill the gaps.

A brilliant example of this is the iOS app Air Video.  Air Video is a fantastic app on iPhone and iPad that allows you to stream video from your PC or Mac, regardless of the format it’s in.  The server app, which sits on your computer, transcodes the video on the fly.  It’s faultless as far as I’m concerned.  And the icing on the cake is that, given a fast enough internet connection, it will work over 3g as well.

Controls

It may sound as if I’ve been a bit negative about the Apple TV so far, and that has been the case, but there are some real positives as well.  One such feature is the ability to control the Apple TV with your iPhone or iPod Touch (iPad conspicuous by its absence by the way).  This isn’t the Remote app we all know but rather something different.  It would appear to be an implementation of a multi-touch trackpad on your iPhone that controls the Apple TV.  It looks like a subset of the functionality found in Mobile Air Mouse.  It will also support using the iPhone keyboard for text entry.

Apple has created the greatest remote control in the world.

One of the benefits of using an iOS device to control the Apple TV is that it won’t require line of sight to operate, meaning you can hide the Apple TV in a cabinet, out of sight.

Hardware

Should the hardware live up to its billing as being “silent” and “cool” Apple would have created something that people actually want in their living rooms.  We’ve heard claims of near silent from media centre PC manufacturers for years, but none have been close.  If Apple have nailed this, and there’s no reason to doubt their claims – the Apple TV runs on the same A4 architecture as the iPad, and that’s silent – it will become a desirable device.  Far more so than the HDD based alternatives out there.

This will also allow the Apple TV to blend into the background, only appearing as an interface on your TV and iPhone.  It’s truly commodity entertainment.

Will I Buy One?

I’m sitting here wondering whether I’ll buy an Apple TV or not.  For me, the viability of the Apple TV will hinge on whether I can stream my existing media to the device.  Much of it is in a format that is no supported by Apple.  However, my DLNA compliant media server transcodes on the fly, so as long as the Apple TV supports DLNA server, it will work fine and by a valuable addition to my living room.

Unfortunately, it looks like the streaming Apple talks of is from iTunes only, and not other file shares, even over a DLNA compliant connection.  That’s not to say it’s a lost cause.  The USB port on the back of the Apple TV gives me hope that it will very quickly be opened up to allow homebrew software to run on the device.  And where there’s homebrew software, there’s bound to be a DLNA compliant client.  And when that happens, I’ll be there, cash in hand.

And one of the aspects of the iPad that makes it such a great content consumption device is the app store, and the thousands of apps therein. And because of the app store, anyone who wants to read their feeds on their iPad has some options.

I’ve picked up a number of feed readers since buying an iPad, so I bought I’d run through three of my favourites, all of which take fundamentally different approaches to reading your feeds.  I’m looking at News Rack, Reeder and Pulse.

News Rack (iTunes £2.99)

You could be forgiven for thinking you're using Mail

News Rack is the RSS reading app I’ve used the most over the last few weeks. Like all the apps I’m looking at it offers Google Reader integration, including folders, starred items and when your read an item in News Rack it gets read in the web version of Google Reader as well.

The drawback of this integration is that News Rack can take an age to sync. In fact, the syncing seems a bit unreliable. On a number of occasions I’ve marked an item as read in News Rack only to find back from the dead in the web version, like an unpleasant zombie news item.  It also seems inexplicable that there’s no “Open in Safari” option, which makes sharing items a painful process for people who use custom link shorteners (like me).

But apart from those slight annoyances, the app works pretty smoothly.

Like most good apps, News Rack exposes additional functionality to expert users.  For example, it may not be immediately obvious that when viewing your list of folders, touching the folder name will take you to a list of feeds whilst touching the blue unread count will take you to the list of unread items across all the feeds in that folder.

Of the apps I’m looking at here, this app is the most iPad like. If you’ve used the iPad mail app, you’ll know exactly how to use this. Sone people will see this as a positive, others a negative. It wouldn’t be far to call the interface utilitarian, on any other platform it would be considered good looking, but on the iPad, it does nothing special to make you want to use it.  The impression you get is that the News Rack developer wanted to deliver a familiar, competent experience, and in many ways they succeed.  As a user, you just have to ask yourself whether that’s the experience you want on your iPad.

Reeder (iTunes £2.99)

From Reeder’s homepage, which shows a list of folders from your Google Reeder account, you can tap a stack to view all unread items or……you can reverse pinch the stack to see a list of feeds within.

Reeder is the newest of the three I’m looking at, but shouldn’t be unfamiliar to those who have come to rely on the excellent iPhone app.  In terms of functionality, Reeder is very similar indeed to News Rack.  It syncs with Google Reader in all the usual ways, lets you view the content enclosed in the feed or the page it links to in an integrated browser.

Where the two differ hugely though is in aesthetics.  News Rack is functional, if not beautiful.  Reeder manages to be beautiful and functional.  If you were using two words describe its looks, they would be stark and minimalist.

There’s a very strong, consistent aesthetic theme to Reeder.  From the icon through to the reading experience it’s like reading a book.  There’s no untextured background anywhere in this app, and the attention to detail is phenomenal.  When launching the app, providing you’ve signed in to Google Reader, you’re presented with various piles of paper.  Each of these represent your Google Reader folders.  From here, you have options.  You can either tap  stack to get a list of unread items in that folder.  Alternatively you can use two fingers in a reverse pinch manoeuvre (isn’t that a submission hold in MMA?) to explode the stack into the constituent feeds, the same interaction that the iPad’s Photos app utilises.  And underlining Reeder’s attention to detail, if there’s a high quality favicon available, it will use it in the list of feeds (as you can see from some of the screenshots, not all sites have these yet).

One of my favourite aspects of Reeder is the underlying design philosophy.  The developers put some serious thought into what the reading experience should be like on an iPhone, and then extended that onto the iPad.  Apart from the first tap, you could navigate through all your unread items whilst holding your iPad in one hand and using the same hand to navigate with the thumb.  They pull this off by utilising the swipe move.  Swiping up or down navigates through your items.  Swiping right takes you back to your list of items.  It’s elegant simplicity and means you can churn through a vast number of feeds very very quickly.

After a while it becomes second nature, and all the tapping back and forth in apps like News Rack becomes very tedious.  I think the difference between the two apps is that one was built having seen Apple’s Mail in action, whilst the other was built after being not satisfied with Apple’s Mail.  When people talk about the second generation of iPad apps, Reeder is what they have in mind. Reeder takes what works from existing apps and builds upon them.  Standing on the shoulders of giants, if you will.  Of course, one of the apps that Reeder for iPad is built on top of is Reeder for iPhone, my favourite iPhone RSS Reader.  This really shows in that none of the problems evident with News Rack are problems for Reeder.  It syncs very quickly and I’ve not had any zombie news items yet.

There are comprehensive sharing options available

Coming back to this idea of consistency and attention to detail, I’d like to use the image to the right to demonstrate.  I’m viewing an item and I have the share menu extended.  The 12 icons in this menu all follow the same aesthetic as the rest of the application, but that’s not all that’s going on.  In the bottom left hand corner you can see a refresh button.  Around this button is a semi-circle which acts as a progress bar, growing as Reeder refreshes (and crucially, downloads images) in the background.  Everything fits into the common and consistent minimalist aesthetic.

You might be getting the impression that Reeder is the perfect solution, but it’s not.  One particularly frustrating interface mechanism it uses is swiping side to side in order to star or mark items as read/unread when viewing a list of items.  This isn’t a bad idea in itself, but the implementation makes it frustrating.  It’s just too sensitive, which makes it difficult to scroll up and down lists of items without a certain degree of concentration.  It seems that a user would be far more likely to be scrolling up and down a list than side to side, so maybe they could require more “weight” to move each item sideways than it takes to move it up and down.  Conversely, when reading an individual item it takes probably a little too much effort to move up and down to the next or previous item.  Also worth pointing out is that I’ve caused it to crash a number of times, particularly when switching between landscape and portrait orientation or when viewing a video in the integrated browser.

Some people have also criticised the application for being drab and colourless.  I don’t agree.  It’s minimalist and the splashes of colour come from the feeds you’re reading, not from the app itself.  When I’m trying to read a large number of feeds, I don’t want to be distracted by the app I’m using.  For me, Reeder strikes the balance perfectly.  However, it will come down to personal preference.

Pulse (iTunes £2.39)

The main view in Pulse

So we’ve seen one app that follows Apple’s UI conventions, almost to a flaw, and one that completely breaks away to deliver a stark, minimalist interface.  Pulse, our third application, takes a completely different approach.

It’s so different that even calling it an RSS reader is perhaps a bit misleading.  Rather, it’s an app that uses RSS to pull content.  Pulse offers Google Reader integration, but that integration takes a more restricted form than the other apps we’ve looked at.  All Pulse allows you to do (currently) is select feeds you’ve subscribed to in Google Reader to use here.  Reading items in Pulse does not mark them as read in Google Reader (and vice versa) and there’s no support for starring items nor folders.

To call this lack of integration a flaw would be disingenuous.  Pulse just takes a completely different approach.  Pulse is not about working your way through 100s of feeds, but rather about enjoying a select number of feeds in a particular way.  Pulse, as if to hammer home this philosophy, limits you to a maximum of 20 feeds at any one time.

Pulse’s strength is the way it presents feeds to the reader.  Instead of a list of post titles you get a grid filled with images.  it appears that Pulse goes through the feeds and extracts the first image it comes across, it then adds that image to the grid.  The result is pretty stunning, and it feels like your holding the future of news consumption in your hand.

Text View in Pulse

Tapping an item makes the content behind it slide in from the right, which also pushes the area you touched to the left so that it’s still visible.  From here you have the option to view the text or web version of the article, or share it.  There are a couple of things to note here.  When Pulse says “Text” view, it really means it.  The image you saw on the main grid is presented to the left of the text but all other images are stripped out.  Also stripped out is any formatting you may have added (including headers) and links.  It also seems to struggle somewhat with certain characters – as you can see from the screenshot to the right, apostrophes seem to cause it issues in the body text.  For an app that appears to pride itself on its looks, these seem like strange oversights.  Fortunately the typography is very legible and attractive.

Web View in Pulse

Fortunately you can quickly and easily switch to “Web” view, which shows you the linked article in an embedded web browser.  The image to the right shows the same story as the one shown above but this time in “Web” view rather than text view.  This in itself has some problems.  The area dedicated to viewing the content when in this view is slightly too small for some sites, making it difficult to read comfortably.  This leaves you with a strange choice, you can have an unformatted, readable slab of text which will be missing many of the aspects the content producer wanted you to see – or – an article formatted the way it was meant to be but very possibly too small to read comfortably.

Unfortunately, there are other issues with Pulse.  One that keeps coming up again and again for me is an issue loading the images from feeds.

Pulse does have problems pulling in images

First time I launch Pulse the first couple of rows populate but the rest do not (see image to the left, which is the exact same view as the first image in this section).  Quitting the app and relaunching it seems to pull in the other images.  Be aware that while Pulse is pulling in the images it can become unresponsive to the point where you might think it’s crashed.  The omission of any sort of progress indicator doesn’t help.  You might also find that even once the images have all loaded scrolling through the list still causes stutters.

It all adds to the impression that the app perhaps needed a little more work to perfect.

At this point I feel like I’ve been unduly harsh on Pulse – I actually really enjoy using it.  There are two adaptations I’ve made to my habits in order for me to enjoy it.  Firstly, I made sure that the feeds I loaded into it are image-heavy.  There’s no point loading in a bunch of feeds that don’t include images.  Secondly, I launch the app, wait a few seconds and then close it.  I then launch it again.  This seems to almost guarantee the images load.

Pulse may surprise you in the way it navigates.  Don’t think of it as a table of images on a sheet of paper that you can move around, it doesn’t work like that.  Instead you move each row horizontally independently.  This surprised me, and it may surprise you.

Conclusion

There are only two apps that can be fairly compared head to head, News Rack and Reeder.  Pulse, whilst sounding similar actually occupies a different space and is used for a different purpose.  You aren’t going to use Pulse to trawl through 100s of feeds, reading many of them.  That is the purpose for which News Rack and Reeder were designed.  Out of the two, for that purpose, Reeder wins hands down.  It’s more elegant, it’s easier to use and it feels like it was designed for a tablet.  Since picking up Reeder I’ve stopped using News Rack.  It’s odd that the touches that make News Rack an attractive iPhone app are completely missing whereas Reeder carries through the iPhone app’s look and feel and intuitive functionality.

If Reeder is the app I use to catch up on my feeds, Pulse is the app I use when I’m bored.  It’s a relaxing, enjoyable way to browse through content that suits discovery and inspiration more than heavy reading.

All three apps are competent, similarly priced and the one you pick up will inevitably depend on what you want to do, and how you want to do it.

O2's Tariff means you'll struggle to take advantage of the new iPhone

The Plans

I thought it would be interesting to compare the current plan I’m on to an equivalent plan with O2 at the rates they announced today.  You can see the full list of tariffs here.

Whilst O2 has given unlimited SMS messages, they’ve removed the unlimited data bundle, removed MMS messages from the SMS bundle and halved the number of inclusive minutes.  No matter which way you spin it, it’s a massive step backwards for O2 who have traditionally had very competitive tariffs.

The Justification

O2 clearly understood that this would not be a popular move and have been on the defensive since the announcement.  The official O2 twitter account followed the announcement with links to a blog post by O2 CEO Ronan Dunne and a press release detailing the changes as well as increasingly defensive replies to angry customers.

I want to look at the Ronan Dunne post in a little bit of detail, because it provides some insights into O2′s reasoning, flawed reasoning, behind these changes.  In that post, they roll out a few numbers in an attempt to justify the change to data allowances.  They claim that the amount of data passing through their network is doubling every four months (“At O2, we’re seeing a doubling of data traffic on our networks every four months”).  That 97% of their users use less than the 500MB lowest inclusive allowance (“The vast majority of our users will be completely unaffected by the changes – 97% of our smartphone customers currently use less than 500MB of data every month”) and that 0.1% of their users are the ones who are using significantly more (“Nearly a third of our data traffic is accounted for by just 0.1% of our customer base, for example”).

So to be clear, 0.1% of their users are the ones abusing the unlimited data, yet based on current usage, 3% of users will have to pay more for data.  But that’s not the whole story.  In the comments on the blog post an O2 representative makes the following statement:

the average customer uses 200MB per month – by applying these limits across everyone they are fair and transparent.

Now we have some figures to play around with, we can attempt to work out how many people will actually be disadvantaged by these changes.

O2 say that data usage is doubling every four months.  Whilst it’s difficult to get hold of current and past subscriber numbers for O2, I think it’s safe to say that their user base isn’t doubling every four months.  That means the average data use per subscriber is increasing.  Now I doubt that the average data use is doubling every four months (a figure which would be in line with the networks overall data usage increase rate), so let’s say that the average data consumption per user doubles every  6 months, 50% slower than the overall network usage growth.  This means that your average user, who is currently using 200MB will be using 400MB in six months, 800MB in 12 months.  Within 12 months they will be comfortably over O2′s new data cap, and this is an average customer who would be only part way through either an 18 or 24 month contract.  This could leave many users in a difficult situation, having to either curtail their usage or pay more.

This speculation is fairly arbitrary.  The unknown variable is whether mobile data usage will continue to grow at the same pace.  If I were a betting man, which I am, I would bet the house on it growing faster as more capable handsets such as the iPhone 4 and HTC HDs come to the UK market.

What Doesn’t Add Up?

There’s a telling sentence in Ronan Dunne’s blog post:

So while data consumption is growing at enormous rates, our revenues are largely flat – a far from ideal situation for any business, least of all one growing as fast as ours.

So is the real problem O2 being unable to monetise mobile data use?  That’s surely part of the problem, especially with Apple’s iPhone which gives mobile operators far less control than the average handset (many other phones have custom software, custom settings, default homepages etc loaded on them, the iPhone does not), but there’s another problem.  O2, and they aren’t unique in this regard, failed to predict just how popular mobile data would be.  Again from Ronan Dunne:

When the mobile industry first heard the word “smartphone”, few of us realised how smart these devices would eventually turn out to be. Today, though, their extraordinary power is visible to anyone. They have literally changed our world, in ways that the first smartphone creators could barely have imagined; they entertain, help us navigate around unfamiliar cities or countries and keep us in touch with each other in myriad ways. For tens of millions of people around the world, it’s hard to imagine life without one.

To make all this happen, of course, we need data. And that in turn means that we are becoming increasingly reliant on data networks that were originally conceived with far dumber devices in mind. Thanks largely to smartphones, those networks are under greater pressure every day – one streamed YouTube video has the same effect on the network as half a million text messages sent simultaneously, the equivalent of everybody in Newcastle sending a text at once.

Emphasis mine.

They designed their mobile data networks for the phones that existed at the time, rather than the phones that were just around the corner.  Because of this massive oversight, the customer is having to pay, and pay big.

In the table earlier in this post I put the years in which these tariffs were offered to add a bit of context.  Context that shows haw far backwards O2 have gone in three years.

The changes to the tariff, specifically the data changes represent one of two things.  Either it’s a cash grab on O2′s part or it’s a stop gap.  The problem with the first is that they will lose subscribers, the problem with the second is that this issue is only going to get worse.  Data usage will increase, average consumers will consume more and demand more, whilst expecting to pay less.

And The Rest?

As I mentioned at the top of this post, O2 have been firefighting the negative comments all day.  Yet they have completely dodged the questions that ask why the voice allowance has been halved.  All the talk of fairness and transparency is completely lost when they also pull a stunt like this.  It also undermines their claims that this is a data issue caused by Smart Phones.

We’ve also managed to pick up a few more little bits of information regarding the changes, which I’ve listed below:

• When you go over your allowance, you won’t be cut off.  Instead your speed will be capped, gradually decreasing.  No specifics have been given.
• O2 will text you when you are approaching your limit, no doubt trying to sell you a bolt-on for more data.  I don’t want my phone provider texting me trying to sell me something they should (and used to) provide in the first place thankyouverymuch.  This is borderline spam in my book.
• MMS no longer counting as 3 SMS messages from your SMS allowance has apparently been in place for some time.  I’m sure that 600 messages was plenty for most people, and they would have rather kept their MMS deal.  I know I would.
• If you don’t use your entire data allowance in one month, the amount you didn’t use won’t roll over to the next.

Public Perception

The biggest problem O2 now have is one of public perception.  Looking at the tariff comparison it looks as if O2 are going backwards.  They don’t look like a network that’s progressing and improving, despite claims of million pound daily investments.  They look like a network that’s struggling to keep up with demand.  A network that got their future usage predictions completely and horribly wrong.

Me? Well I’ve used 955MB this months and I’ll probably be going on to Three, who have far better 3G coverage than any other network according to Ofcom (PDF).  I can no longer call myself a loyal and long term O2 customer.  This was my reaction when I first saw the new tariffs:

Great. Apple introduce multi-tasking so you can stream music and @o2 counters it with data plans from the 1990s.

Note that the new O2 tariffs are for all Smart Phones, not just the iPhone 4.  However, they come into force the day the new iPhone launches, so I’ll let you put two and two together.

My first experience of this was with BSKYB when I upgraded my satellite system to high definition. To get the same channels I already had, I had to pay £10 a month extra. It’s a curious setup they have that favours no one apart from Sky themselves. If you subscribe to Sky Sports, for example, you can get Sky Sports HD for £10 a month. However, if you don’t already subscribe to Sky Sports you don’t get Sky Sports HD even if you pay the £10 monthly fee. You pay for the content once, and then again for a slightly better version of it.

Sky continue their cash grab by charging for the same content a third time on mobile devices.

This is a practice that’s been working its way into the media industry for some time. If you buy a copy of a song, for example, you don’t have infinite rights to enjoy that song. The media industry lobbying and control groups have been pushing against practices such as backing up and porting for years. If you want to listen to a song in your car, they want you to buy the CD. Want to listen to the same song on your iPod? They want you to download it from iTunes.

So how is this impacting the app store?

Like many stories this month, it’s all about the iPad. The iPad has introduced a new dimension, a new opportunity for developers to exploit. Unfortunately some have chosen the shortest, quickest path to exploiting this opportunity, by lazily porting their apps to the iPad and selling it as a separate app. It’s the Sky HD situation all over again, and developers have fully embraced this analogy by giving their apps a “HD” suffix of prefix.

I’ve come across this already on iPad. Having already paid for apps like Plants Vs Zombies (which I’ve already bought on iPhone and OSX, paying twice), Angry Birds, Flight Control, I find it a bitter pill to swallow that I have to re-buy these games for iPad. Especially since in this specific examples the move to iPad hasn’t really brought anything to the experience, they are fairly lazy ports. Conversely, many apps have simply updated in place to provide iPad support. Air Video, WordPress and others have put time and effort into updating their iPhone apps for iPad and have given it to existing customers for free. This makes you really value the app, and fills you with confidence when considering purchasing an app from the same developer.

The net effect of this approach, and this applies to all three examples above, is that the content (either the apps, or the media) becomes devalued in the eyes of the consumer. If we’re paying for the same content through multiple channels, we will come to value the delivery mechanisms more than the content itself. In the mind of the consumer, we are paying for the delivery mechanism rather than the content being delivered.

This may be the intention of content creators, however, I doubt it. What it does do is align itself with the mindset of pirates, who place very little value on content – it’s not unusual for pirates to invest time and money into the process of illegally downloading content.

To say that this approach is encouraging piracy is perhaps a tad disingenuous. I don’t think it’s something that can be dismissed out of hand either. It leads to an environment where consumers are hesitant to invest in content, particularly content that may be tied to a particular delivery method or medium.

Fortunately, there are some moves to enabling a “content anywhere” approach. Notably some DVDs and Blu Rays now include a downloadable copy of the movie. As it stands, it’s an imperfect solution as the downloadable content is heavily wrapped in DRM and tied to a specific platform (Windows in most cases). This is charging for two delivery methods, on two platforms, and as such comes very close to completely missing the point.

A better example is that of Steam. Steam launched their client on OSX a couple of weeks ago and have been steadily adding to the library of games available on the platform. As part of the launch, Valve announced a feature that meant you could buy a title on one platform and then play it on any other. So if you buy a title on OSX, you can then play it on Windows, and vice versa. Definitely a step in the right direction. The big surprise for me came when Half Life 2 was released for OSX. I bought the retail box version of Half Life 2 on the day it was released for Windows and registered it with Steam. Upon logging in I was given the option to re-download Half Life 2 to play on OSX. A physical game I bought several years earlier for a different platform. it’s a glimpse of how content consumption should work, and means that the content I bought and paid for several years earlier still holds some very real value.

Surely this is how content producers wish their content to be viewed, rather than simply something that accompanies a platform.

Some of these concerns stem from the way early adopters, and Apple’s marketing team, have described the iPad. There’s been a dearth of tangible benefits in the reviews, which is worrying. Rather, we’ve had words like “magical” used in the marketing materials and many reviewers talking of holding the Internet in their hands and other equally intangible, subjective descriptions.

However, after spending nearly two days with the iPad, and barely putting it down, I can see where they’re coming from.

We can, and probably will, debate the technical merits of this device over the coming months, but that doesn’t go any way to touching on the level of enjoyment you get from this device. It really is like nothing else out there. If you’ve picked up a Windows or Archos tablet over the years, and you think the iPad is cut from the same mould, you couldn’t be more wrong. It is the antithesis to a Windows tablet, and it’s the sort of device the Archos engineers dream of in their sleep.

Social

Something that you may not fully grasp about the iPad is that it’s the most social computing experience you could ever wish to have. When I’m using my MacBook, I’m usually lazing on the sofa next to my partner who’s watching something on TV – it’s quite an anti-social experience. The MacBook’s screen forms a wall between us, and the humming of the fans can be distracting (it’s far more than a distraction if I dare watch a movie in Flash, it’s downright disturbing) to the other person. It’s also a bit of an ordeal to show another person what’s on the screen, usually involving some sort of balancing and/or juggling.

The iPad is different. It’s silent. Completely and utterly silent. Even swiping, tapping, typing produces nothing but a faint muffled sound which wouldn’t disturb a sleeping dormouse. Many computers claim to be silent, or quiet, but this is the only one I’ve come across that actually achieves true silence. And it’s golden.

Another way in which the iPad differs from a laptop is in the mechanics of physically interacting with it. If you’re using a laptop, the form factor dictates a relatively flat surface on which to rest the hardware. No such restriction exists with the iPad, it’s more akin to reading a book or magazine. The wall has been demolished, and sharing content with another person is about as simple as it can get. Flip the iPad over and the screen automatically rotates to the appropriate orientation for them. The IPS screen does a wonderful job of allowing wide viewing angles, making the entire process much easier and less haphazard.

This is social computing not in the FaceBook or Twitter sense, but rather in the more tangible person with you in the room sense.

Simplicity

Apple’s iPad

I said above that the iPad is the antithesis to a Windows tablet, and it is, at least in terms of execution. The iPad is once again a closed system. You have to buy apps from the app store and you have to activate it through iTunes. This approach doesn’t seem to bother people with Blu Ray players or games consoles, but it really seems to bother people when it comes to Apple devices. It doesn’t bother me, and I attribute the stability of my iPhone at least in part to this approach.

Either way, people should know by now what they are getting in to. The more of the eco system you buy in to, the greater the benefit.

When it comes to functionality, Apple have taken a very deliberate iterative approach to their mobile products. Each version does a little more than the last, but they make sure that everything it does do, it does well. Contrast this to a Windows Tablet that will do anything you want, badly. I remember the good old days of Windows Tablets where a massive memory leak ensured that you couldn’t use the tablet for any length of time without is crashing. This bug persisted for years. The applications on Windows tablets are also just normal Windows Applications. There’s very little incentive to adapt applications to work with a touch screen, making them awkward to use.

The iPad is fundamentally different. Every app is optimised for at the minimum a touch screen, and many are optimised for the very screen your using. The iPad doesn’t do everything, in fact there’s a lot that it doesn’t do. But rest assured, everything it does do, it does well.

Metaphors

It’s clear that Apple are rolling with the book metaphor with the iPad. The marketing videos show people enjoying the iPad in positions you might usually find them enjoying a book, The case opens like a book, and stands like a book. The iBooks App is heavy with book metaphors, like the book case and the page turn effect.

But the book metaphor doesn’t stop there. Looking through some of the core apps it’s clear that Apple were using a consistent design language throughout the apps. The address book, for the first time, actually looks like a physical address book. Likewise the notes app. And the calendar app looks like a beautiful planner. It’s all there, and in other devices it may come across as tacky, but the consistency really allows Apple to pull it off.

Content Creation Vs Content Consumption

An interesting debate was raging around the time of the US iPad launch as to whether it’s a capable content creation device or whether it’s purely for consuming content.

Well first, it has to be said that the iPad is a spectacular content consumption device. Possibly the best I’ve ever used. Browsing the internet is a step above any other internet browsing device I’ve tried, even with the gaping hole that Flash leaves. It’s so fast and so responsive that the simple action of scrolling around pages and following links is enjoyable. The iPad also scores highly when it comes to rendering content, typography is crisp and sharp and readable, images vibrant and if video is encoded correctly it can look great.

But what about as a content creation device? Well sorry to be a little coy, but it depends on the type of content being created. Apps like Brushes allow a great freedom to create artwork that would require specialist equipment with a regular computer (namely a tablet). It’s fluid, and easy to use and fairly comprehensive. For text creation, it can be hit and miss. If you’ve got the optional wireless keyboard, or the keyboard dock, it’s a joy. You do have to change your habits somewhat so that you aren’t constantly reaching for a mouse, but you get over that quickly. Without a hardware keyboard, it’s more difficult. The soft keyboard is one of the best, but has the same problems as any soft keyboard. A particular problem I had was accidental key presses.

There are types of content you simply can’t create on an iPad. Video editors for example are left mostly out in the dark, although I’m sure there are video editing apps on the way. Likewise if you’re a developer of any kind, there are no usable iPad IDEs, although that’s no surprise. Music editors and creators are fairly well catered for though.

Multi Media

The big surprise for me was not the quality of the video but rather the quality of the audio. It’s very very good for integrated audio on a device this size. It feels as if Apple are using the case to reverberate the audio internally to give it a bit of depth.

Video is very nice, although the strange ratio of the screen does take something away. Widescreen is to too wide, and if you zoom in it’s a bit too close, leaving you with an unmistakeable feeling that you’re missing something just out of screen.

The iPad app is also a little strange, for lack of a better word. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but it feels like a missed opportunity. There’s enough screen space to do something spectacular, but the current interface feels a little workmanlike. The iPod Touch’s Videos / iPod split is back, which will be a new experience for iPhone users.

Industrial Design

The WiFi only and 3G + WiFi versions

I want to get down a few thoughts on the hardware itself. The iPad itself is heavier than you might expect, but not uncomfortably so (YMMV). It also feels incredibly well put together. All the seems and joins are tight, there’s no flex at all, which is unusual given the huge screen and back, and all the physical buttons, all four of them, move in a satisfying way.

In my two days of ownership the iPad has never become warmer than the room it’s in and battery life has been nigh on unbelievable. I’m writing this on the iPad, using a bluetooth keyboard, so bluetooth is on. WiFi and 3G are also both on and the screen brightness is on auto. I’ve been using the iPad pretty much constantly since 10AM this morning (it’s now gone midnight) for web browsing, video watching app using and even using Google Maps over 3G while out an about. The battery is currently sitting at 34%. There are some things you can do to drain the battery faster though. For example, I played the scrabble app last night using two iPhones as the tile racks. This caused a bit of a hit on battery life, but even so (and bear in mind it meant establishing a constant bluetooth connection with 2 devices and running a game) you shouldn’t worry about getting through a game.

Going back to the screen ration briefly. Whilst it not perfect for video, it’s not far off perfect for reading books and websites. It’s also pretty close for photos. The size of the device also feels right for the sort of tasks you’ll be using it for.

The Proof of the Pudding…

The best summary I can give, and the best endorsement is this. Since the iPad came out I’ve spoken to two people who were absolutely adamant before the launch that they wouldn’t buy one. One of these people is actually fairly anti-Apple. After trying the iPad, they’ve both gone out and bought one, and theta both love it. It’s that sort of device. Apple has been using emotional language to describe it because it’s an emotional device. There are few logical and technical reasons to buy an iPad; you’ll buy one because when you try one you’ll feel an attraction to it.

So have you picked one up yet? Have you tried one? What did you think?

Note: I’ve been using a 32GB 3G iPad and this post, in its entirety was written on it using the free WordPress app.

It all feels a little, well, sleazy.

Unfortunately, there’s not much else we can do at the moment.  Apple are yet to announce either pricing or a release date for the iPad in the UK.  For the record, Apple says “late April” for a release date (rumours peg it at April 24th) and “unbelievable” as the price point (I did a statistical analysis of pricing previously).

This has left me, personally, in a strange position.  I’m almost equal parts excited and nervous for the UK’s iPad launch.  The source of the excitement is obvious.  The reviews are overwhelmingly positive, save for the limitations that we all knew about already (no Flash, no third party multi-tasking, locked down eco-system).  And as I tweeted earlier, “I think complaining about the iPad’s lack of Flash is like complaining that the first plane didn’t have a steering wheel. It’s a new way“.  I don’t think that point is being conveyed enough in the reviews that are out so far.  You can’t compare this to extant computing experiences, it’s completely new, completely different.  Comparing an iPad to a netbook is as pointless as comparing a Boeing 747 to a Model-T Ford.  Yes, they accomplish some of the same tasks, but they take a completely different approach, are aimed at different usage scenarios and should be celebrated for that.  I equally wouldn’t want to compare a netbook to an iPad, or a Digital Camera to a grapefruit.

I’m particularly excited by some of the apps that we’re already seeing.  VNC clients like Desktop Connect offer a window into ay computer in the world, whilst iDisplay expands the window of your desktop.  The iWork suite seems to offer a whole new way to create documents.  And those are fairly work-like apps.  The real heavy usage from me will come from iPad versions of apps like the brilliant Air Video, which currently allows me to stream video from my iMac to my iPhone over Wi-Fi and 3G with on-the-fly encoding.  The iPad version of Scrabble blows my mind (use the iPad as the board and separate iPhone apps to hold each player’s tiles).

And that’s without even mentioning the gaming potential.  Plants Vs Zombies in HD is enough to win me over, despite the fact that’ll be the third platform I’ve bought it for.

So my excitement is palpable, and, in my opinion, well founded.  So why the nervousness?  As usual, it stems from being in the UK.  Let’s start with the price.  When I calculated the price based on previous releases i came out with a figure of between £400 and £650.  Given the current exchange rates, and international markets, I can see this being markedly higher.  I’d love Apple to prove me wrong on this one, but it seems unlikely.

I also foresee some issues with the 3G version, otherwise known as the version I want to buy.  Apple scored a major win with AT&T in the states.  The $30 a month, unlimited, without commitment, cancel-at-any-time bundle they’re offering is groundbreaking, and game changing.  Will they be able to score a similar deal in the UK?  I don’t know.  One of the factors that will work against Apple here is the way mobile operators heavily subsidise phone handsets.  Subsidies are far heavier here than in the states.  In fact, some of the rumours that have been doing the rounds have speculated that Apple have delayed any UK announcement because the mobile operators are trying to work out ways to tie in consumers.

The other elephant in the room is the iBooks app and ecosystem.  Whilst not on the same scale as Amazon’s Kindle bookstore, Apple have managed to get together a decent choice of books for the US launch.  However, take a look at the US iPad and iBooks pages and it makes it clear that iBooks is “US only”.  This isn’t a surprise.  Books rights are notoriously more complicated and entrenched in the UK when compared to the US.  Anyone who’s tried buying an audio book on Audible will know that the selection in the UK is a fraction of that found in the US store.  It remains to be seen whether or not Apple will even bother to offer the iBooks app in the UK so we can take advantage of the ePub support they baked in.

The same issue, availability, crops up with some of the most interesting looking iPad apps that have shown up so far.  The Marvel Comics app, for example, will be horribly crippled in this country due to a complete lack of availability of digital comics in this country.  Anyone who’s looked at the existing iPhone apps for viewing comics will know all about this issue.  Similarly the Netflix app, which looks really cool, won’t be available here and the UK equivalent, LoveFilm, offer an app but there’s no indication that their pathetically limited watch on demand service will be coming to the iPad.

So as you can tell, I’m torn.  On the one hand there’s a device that I believe is going to be truly revolutionary.  On the other, many of its best aspects are going to be crippled in good ‘ol Blighty, not to mention the always evasive release schedule and price.

Regardless, I’ll see you in the queues the morning of release.

Since then, it’s grown significantly in usefulness.  I don’t know when the two features I’m about to describe were implemented (I suspect that one of them, at least, has been there since the beginning), but they’ve only become obvious to me recently.

Image Manipulation

When I redesigned this blog I created several areas around the layout for the insertion of images.  For these areas to work well, they require images of specific sizes (pixel sizes, rather than file size).  After a couple of posts it became a real pain to do this resizing and cropping in the image editing applications I usually use, Photoshop and Pixelmator.  Even with the relative svelteness of Pixelmator (relative to Photoshop), it can take a frustratingly long time just to crop an image.

So it was with a slight air of frustration that I went seeking for a lightweight image re-sizer and cropper.

I looked at a couple of products but none really fitted the bill.  It was at that point I saw various people mentioning this functionality in Preview and, lo and behold, it’s there.  Now this may not be hidden, in the true sense of the word, but it’s hidden in that I didn’t even think to look in preview for it.

Image Adjustments

Preview includes some fairly powerful image adjustment tools

Preview comes bundles with what are some fairly advanced image adjustment tools.  In the same style as iPhone, these aren’t pixel adjustments, but rather whole image adjustments.  These tools include changing the Sharpness, Exposure and Contrast as well as colour adjustments like saturation, white balance, temperature and tint.  You can also have a manual play with the levels.

It’s pretty much the same tool as the one seen in iPhoto, so anyone who’s used to that will be right at home here.  To bring up the Adjustments dialogue head to the slightly conservative “Adjust Color” item in Tools, or press OPTION+COMMAND+C.

Cropping

Crop is in the tools menu

Cropping is predictably easy.  Simply pick a Select tool (there are the usual rectangle, elliptical and polygonal varieties) and draw the area you want to crop.  Then choose “Crop” from the tools menu, or press COMMAND + K.  And there you have it, the image is cropped.  Save it in the usual manner, and you’re done.

Resizing

Choose “Adjust Size” in the Tools menu to get a dialogue that allows for the image to be resized.  There are the usual options present, allowing you to choose absolute sizes based on pixels or real-world measurements (e.g. inches), some presets and the option to lock the aspect ratio.

PDF Slimming

OSX, unlike Windows, provides native PDF support.  You can save pretty much anything as a PDF in OSX and Preview takes care of opening them once created.  However, it doesn’t end there.  OSX’s PDF engine is actually far more sophisticated than many commercial PDF creation tools.

One feature of OSXs PDF engine that comes in particularly useful is its efficiency.  You can take a PDF file and vastly reduce its size.  To demonstrate this I took a random PDF file from my downloads folder (I’ve no idea where it came from, although I think it was linked from the brilliant Photoshop Disasters) and reduced its size.

It's possible to vastly reduce the size of a PDF file in Preview

What the image above demonstrates is the original file’s details on the left and the reduced versions on the right.

There are two levels of file reduction possible, one is lossless (i.e. there is no perceivable loss in quality post reduction) whereas the other is not.

In order to achieve the first level of file size reduction, all you have to do is save the PDF in Preview.  That’s it.  So to reduce the 1.5MB PDF file seen here to 844 KB all you have to do is save it in Preview.  That’s an almost 50% saving.

To achieve the next level of reduction requires some work.  Not a lot, just a couple of clicks in fact.  To make the reduction, fire up the Save As dialogue.  In this dialogue you’ll see a Quartz Filter drop down.  This allows you to apply various effects to the document, one of which is “Reduce File Size”.

Using this option when saving produces a dramatic reduction in file size.  As you can see in my example, the PDF file’s size has now dropped to just under 300 KB.  That’s one fifth of its original size and about one third of its already reduced size.

A word of warning though.  Using the “Reduce File Size” option can have some strange effects.  Some of the images in the PDF lost their colours.  All the text remained the same as before.  So be careful and, as always, your mileage may vary.

Are there any hidden Preview gems I’ve missed out on?  This is a little powerhouse app.

The message displayed to the user when the Sky+ HD box attempts to go into standby.

Note for foreign readers:  Sky, or BSkyB, is a provider of satellite television in the UK.  Their Sky+ HD receiver combines a satellite tuner with an Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) and Personal Video Recorder (PVR) functionality.  This particular box, made by Samsung, has been updated with the newest EPG software, which is exclusive to the high definition edition of their service.

While I applaud Sky for implementing a feature designed to reduce the power consumption of their boxes, this dialogue leaves much to be desired.

The first problem is the use of STB as an acronym.  Presumably this refers to “Set Top Box”, harping back to the days when the Sky Satellite Receiver sat on top of an old CRT Television “Set”.  My television is mounted on the wall, so the receiver clearly isn’t on top of it.  This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if STB was a widely accepted and understood acronym, but it’s not.  It sounds like a term an engineer would use to describe the equipment, which is problematic in this, the most consumer of consumer electronic devices.  I have no doubt that my parents would be confused as to what “STB” referred to.

There is an air of uncertainty introduced by the wording of the instructions.  ”Press SELECT to continue” misleads the user.  The implication is that pressing SELECT will continue with putting the box into StandBy.  In fact, it does the opposite.  Whilst this is the least risky position to take (i.e. it would be worse for a user action to accidentally turn off the box as opposed to accidentally leaving it on), any benefit of this is lost through the confusion and uncertainty caused by the poor wording.

There is an easy fix to this:

Your Sky+ HD Receiver is about to go into StandBy mode to conserve power

Press SELECT to leave the receiver on

This particular dialogue, as well as the Auto StandBy feature in general, has been raised by a number of my less technologically experienced friends and family members.  They didn’t realise it could be turned off, and they didn’t know what to do when this confusing dialogue appears.  They also seemed to be confused as to when the receiver would go into Auto StandBy, it would be at different times on different days.

I know that Sky made a fairly big deal of this feature when it was launched, but obviously the pertinent information eluded those who needed it the most.

After giving it a bit of thought, it seemed obvious that the websites of newspapers would be a good place to start.  I chose newspaper sites for two reasons.  Firstly, they have a massive amount of content that’s being added to daily.  Secondly, they’ve had to make the move from one media to another, which makes it unlikely that they feel bound by the conventions of the old web.

What They Get Right

After looking through numerous newspaper websites, I’ve highlighted some aspects that I think work particularly well.  It’s certainly an interesting exercise just examining different sites that effectively serve the same purpose, just to get a handle on what they do differently.  Sometimes the differences between sites are more telling that the similarities.

Drawing Attention

Almost all of the sites I looked at for this article had areas on the front page that highlighted specific pieces of content.  This content is out of the normal flow of the content stream (i.e. arranged by date created) and is meant to draw the reader’s attention to a piece of content that the site editor deems interesting or important.

The Times Online has a featured area within the header

Each site takes a different approach to this.  The Times, for example, has a quote from an article along with a picture of the author in the banner alongside the logo.  Not only is this prime real estate, but the use of the author’s image will immediately draw a reader’s attention to that area (people are instinctively drawn towards faces, particularly eyes, when confronted with a lot of visual information).

The Sun's featured area uses bold text and images to draw attention (click to enlarge)

The Times’ approach is fairly unique.  A more popular technique, and one that is also used by the Times, is to utilise large photographs to draw reader’s attention.  The Sun takes a somewhat bolder approach more in keeping with their style and theme.

They’ve used strong, bold text set against images.  This style, right down to the typeface being used, mirrors the actual paper very closely.  The image to the left shows one of several featured areas that appear on the front page.  There are similar areas within each section, highlighting content from that category.

Some of the more conservative websites, for example the New York Times, use images alongside text to draw the user’s attention.

Branding

Taking the image from The Sun’s featured area above as an example, you can spot multiple ways the design brands itself as belonging to The Sun.  As I mentioned, the text and image combination is very similar to that of the paper, and is immediately recognisable as belonging to the most popular paper in the UK (I know).  They’ve also used their own logo when referring to a story they apparently broke.  All this branding in such a small space.

Whilst the on-site branding varies in quality and quantity between the sites, a common thread is the branding of associated services.  Most papers have associated job sites, especially the higher-end papers (The Times, The Guardian, The New York Times etc.) and continue consistent branding across to these sites.  This is important from a usability point of view as it allows any good will the user has towards the paper to carry over to the jobs listings.  In some cases, this is despite the fact that the job listings are actually managed by third parties (e.g. the New York Times uses Monster to manage their job listings, but pushes the NYT branding over the Monster branding – a strong brand in its own right).

Most of the sites also use consistent fonts, colours and wording to really hammer home a consistent brand identity.

Colour Cues

Given the amount of information generated by newspapers every day, organising that information is critical to the success of the site.  As part of this organisation, it’s important to ensure users feel comfortable and have some form of context.  If your user feels lost in the site, then it’s likely they’ll leave and go somewhere else rather than hunting around.  News provision is a very competitive space.

One technique that’s used by websites such as The Guardian’s and The Daily Mail’s is colour cues for various categories.  The approach of the two sites is broadly the same, using a colour to provide consistent formatting throughout that section as well as providing easily remembered and familiar entry points to the section.

Both The Guardian and The Daily Mail use the colour green to signify the Sport section

The image above shows the Sport section from The Guardian and The Daily Mail respectively.  Note that both papers have gone for the colour green to represent this section (no doubt to evoke feelings of the outside, grass, fields etc.).  Both sites use small colour cues to identify the section, some cues are subtle (note the .co.uk has changed to green on The Guardian’s page) whilst others are more overt.

A slight variation in the use of colour comes in the navigation bar.  The Guardian’s site constantly shows the colour and on mouse-over changes the background of the link to the section’s identifying colour and sets the text to white.  The Daily Mail’s site only displays the section’s colour when the user mouse-overs the link.  For the sake of consistency, and branding, I prefer The Guardian’s approach here, although I suspect the selection of such subtle colours was a tough job.  If The Daily Mail were to take the same approach, utilising their current palette, it would likely look messy and lack cohesion.

What They Get Wrong

I’ve picked up on some design aspects that I think some of the sites have failed at.  It may not be true of all the sites I looked at, but it is true for one specific site.

White Space

The front page of The Sun's site has no white space at all

I’ve inserted a picture of The Sun’s homepage above to demonstrate the complete lack of white space in the design.  They’ve picked a fixed width and then just crammed as much content into it as possible.  It’s as if they didn’t want to waste paper.  The effect is claustrophobic, chaotic and difficult to read.

Fortunately most other sites make far better use of white space and are the better for it.  The Times Online is particularly good in this regard.

Readability

Readability can be a tough thing to get right.  It combines so many factors, all of which need to be finely balanced for optimum performance.  Readability is a combination of the right type face, at the right size, with the right amount of space between lines, the right amount of space between paragraphs, the right amount of contrast between text and background, the right colours and the right width of paragraph.

Readability is also relatively hard to judge.  The average user won’t consciously notice whether a site is easy to read or not, they must just become tired while reading or leave the page because of uncomfortableness.

A comparison of readability on four newspaper sites

The image above takes some text of roughly the same size from four sites and compares them.  This text is actual size, using the actual colours.  The image is a PNG, composited of four PNG screenshots, so there should be minimal quality variation between what you see above, and the actual site.  Read each set of text through as quickly as you can.  Do you notice any differences?

Let me tell you my opinion.  The text on The Daily Mail and The Times is too small.  I find it uncomfortable reading the text, and looking at the respective sites, reading a whole article feels like a bit of a chore.  The Daily Mail compounds this by making their columns particularly wide, which is even more tiring on the eyes.  The relative spacing between paragraphs is too small on The Daily Mail and just about big enough on The Times.  It also looks like there’s a slightly larger differential between font size and line height on The Times over The Daily Mail, which helps The Times somewhat.

The Sun uses a refreshingly large font size but oddly for the web uses a serif font for the main body text.  The general consensus is that serif fonts work best in print while sans-serif fonts work best on screens.  Apart from the font, The Sun doesn’t give the text enough room to breath.  The line height it too short and there isn’t enough spacing between lines nor between paragraphs.  What you can’t see here, and what sets The Sun apart from the other sites here, is that the width of the paragraph increases drastically further down the page.  From approximately 400 pixels across to approximately 690 pixels across.  A 75% increase mid way through an article.  At this font size, or any other, 690 pixels is too wide for heavy reading.

I think The Guardian is the best of the bunch here.  There’s nice line height, nice paragraph spacing and it’s a fair width that remains constant down the page (unlike The Sun).  I think it could benefit from a slight increase in size, but I’m sure it’s an aesthetic decision rather than a readability decision to size it the way it is.

For the record, The Daily Mail is the worse here by some way, although they do get bonus points for copious use of images in-line with the text.

Natural Linking

One of the great benefits of the web over, say, newspapers, is that a content creator can link to other content in order to provide context, background information or a different viewpoint.  This linking is most effective and natural when it occurs in the body of the text.

Unfortunately, this is an underused technique on newspaper sites.  In fact, only The Guardian appears to use the links to any notable degree and even there it appears to be automatically generated based on certain category and content pages (for example it links to Manchester United, Premier League and Wayne Rooney but not mentions of previous results or news events).

Search…

I’ve found the search functionality to be uniformly awful across all these sites.  So much so that I’ve dedicated the entire next section to the topic.

Dissecting Search Results

It would be easy to dedicate an entire article to the way these sites handle searches.  Each one is subtly (or in some cases, vastly) different.  Each has positives and quirks.  To apply a fair test I came up with a test.  I will search each of these sites for the word “Manchester”.  I chose this search term for a couple of reasons.

Manchester is a city in the North of England.  It has two major football clubs (City and United) who both played English Premier League games on the day of the search.  ”Manchester” also appears in company names and person names.  This gives us quite a range of data that might possibly be returned for the search term, allowing a fair, balanced opinion of the results to be reached.  In particular, the term “Manchester” presents a certain challenge to search engines that attempt some form of semantic analysis of the term.  By this I’m referring to the sort of technique Google applies to certain searches, where it provides data to the searcher which is relevant but not necessarily part of the results set (e.g. search Google for “Weather in Manchester” and above any results Google will tell you what the weather is like in the city of Manchester.  It does this because it has semantically analysed the search term and determined that you want to know what the weather is like in the location “Manchester”).  Will the search functions attempt a semantic analysis of the term or will they perform a “dumb” text match?

So let’s go through each site one-by-one.

The Guardian

The Guardian provides numerous options for sorting and filtering search results.

The Guardian search did appear to perform some semantic analysis and displayed links to the two football clubs as the first two results.  The third result was for the Manchester International Festival.  It’s a promising start, and given the fairly generic search it makes sense to provide generic information first.

It seems that following these first three results are general text-match results from the various different categories.  Handily, there’s the option to filter results by category, date and change their order.  This is particularly useful as the remainder of the results don’t seem particularly well considered.

40% of the results are for the two football clubs, and only 1 is a local result

There are 10 results, not including the first three (which I feel are separate, and treated differently).  Out of these 40% (4 results) are relating to the two football clubs whilst only 10% (1 result) are what I would consider a local result (it was relating to an exhibition being held in Manchester).  The remainder are general news results that just happen to mention the word “Manchester”.

Somewhat baffling is the absence of colour cues on the search page.  Despite the remainder of the site using colours to identify different types of content (a practice I praised earlier), these colours are absent from these results.

If I were searching for the Football Clubs: I would be pleased.  The results themselves aren’t particularly good, today’s results are bizarrely absent for example, but the links provided right at the top of the results are very handy and would no doubt lead me to the information I wanted.  However, if I wanted to see the results at a glance it would require additional clicks which some might deem unnecessary.

If i were searching for local news: I would be disappointed.  Only one result on the first page contains any news that’s actually local to the area.  performing a regular search on this site for news in a particular area does not appear to be an efficient way to keep up with the news.

The Daily Mail

Similarly to The Guardian, The Daily Mail’s results offer numerous ways to filter, sort and refine the results.  I would hazard a guess that if a usability analysis were performed on these search results the “Sort By:  Most Recent” option would be used fairly often.  The results are ordered by “Relevance” by default, but the relevance seems to be calculated based on some sort of algorithm that doesn’t consider timeliness as a factor.  Rather, it must use something like the number of times a term is mentioned, or something similar, as a key attribute for sorting.  Hence, on the first page there are numerous articles about the Manchester Derbys (Manchester United against Manchester City) that occured earlier this year – presumably because the word “Manchester” gets numerous mentions.

This fails to consider that the date of the article is a key attribute when considering relevance when the domain you are searching is related to news.  Some of the news that gets returned is so old, I would hesitate to call it relevant at all to a search on a news site.

The results page features thumbnails, brief descriptions and colour coding.

I criticised The Guardian’s results for not carrying through the colour cues found elsewhere on the site.  This is where The Daily Mail gets it right.  Each result is accompanied by a thumbnail image (if available) along with a colour-coded label telling the user which category the result belongs to as well as a small indicator which displays the type of content (e.g. article, video).

The vast majority of results (85%) relate to the two football clubs

The first result in my search is a review of Manchester as a travel destination, which is interesting in itself.  For a news website to serve an article such as this as the first result, as opposed to any actual news, says much about the algorithm the site uses to prioritise stories.  It clearly doesn’t favour news items.

It does, however, appear to favour sports stories.  A whopping 85% of the first page’s results are related to the two football clubs.  Unfortunately, even if I were looking for news on either club I would be out of luck, as the most recent article is from the 29th of January, an age ago in sporting terms.

If I were searching for the Football Clubs: Whilst undoubtedly there is a heft of results to appease me, they simply aren’t up to date.  There’s no sign of today’s results and the search function hasn’t given me a link to a page covering specifically either club, even though I know such a page exists and can be reached from elsewhere.

If I were searching for local news: This also suffers from the timeliness issue.  There is local news here, but it’s very old.  For example, one of the results refers to the possible building of a “super casino” in Manchester, a plan that’s since been cancelled.  This result would be forgivable, were it not so high in the results (5th!).

Switching the order to show the most recent results, rather than the completely misjudged “most relevant”, favours sports results so heavily (18 out of 20 results are for sport) that any local news is completely drowned out.

The Times

No search results are visible above the fold on my browser

The Times’ search results page loses points with me immediately for not actually showing any results above the fold (i.e. without scrolling the page down, I can’t seen any results).  I may be on a relatively small screen, but it’s the only site which takes this approach.  The image to the right demonstrates what I see upon the page loading.

Having said that, the bottom item on the page, under “Times Recommends” is related to my search term.  It points to an external site (which is branded to appear as if it’s on the Times’ main site) and provides a summary of a company.  This is the search function identifying the company name as partially matching my search term and giving me a result.  The line immediately below the fold points to a page for “Manchester United”.  There is an odd quirk in the results.  The search function has identified, and given a link to the Manchester United page but not the Manchester City page, yet the first three results all relate to Manchester City.

The Times provides a list of keywords to assist the user in narrowing down the search results. Some are helpful, some are not.

Options are provided for filtering the results and for re-ordering them.  Curiously there’s also an option to search in the “archive”, but no explanation is given as to what this actually means, rendering it useless in any practical sense (at what point does an article enter the archive?  Is it still archived if it’s popular? Can I search archived and non-archived articles together?).

All the results were related to sport.

Following the trend set by The Daily Mail, the results are heavily weighted in favour of sporting  news and also fairly out of date.  Once again this comes down to the default sort order of relevance, and the failure of the designers to understand what’s actually relevant to people searching the site.  It’s highly unlikely to the point of being ridiculous that the result I think, as a user, as most relevant to my search for “Manchester” is the result of a football match played a fortnight ago.

And when I say “heavily weighted”, I really mean heavily weighted.  Every single one of the results were relating to sport, and every single one was out of date.

If I were searching for the Football Clubs: Yes, there were a lot of results for the clubs, Manchester City especially, they were all out of date.  Again, none of today’s results were shown.  There were also no links to generic club pages, even though they exist.

If I were searching for local news: Hugely disappointing.  There is news relating to the Manchester area on the site, I’ve seen it, but the search function doesn’t seem capable of finding it and presenting it to the user in an effective manner.

The Sun

The Sun’s search mechanism differs from the other sites as it is branded as being performed, or at least enhanced, by a third party.  In this case Google.  I’m not clear what this means, as the results don’t share any visual similarities with Google’s normal results.  The results also differ to those seen by doing a “site:thesun.co.uk manchester” search on google.co.uk.

Unlike The Times and The Daily Mail results, The Sun’s are ordered by date by default.  Does this provide any real benefit?  Possibly.  Unfortunately it’s hard to measure any possible benefit as the latest articles appear to be missing from the results.  For example, there are results covering the build-up to today’s football matches but not any match reports or even the results.

The results page's height is dictated by the uselessly long list of categories. (click to enlarge)

There are some usability issues with the search results as well.  Like The Times, The Sun provides some categories to assist the user with refining their search.  However this list is very very long.  This causes two problems.  The first being that the sheer number of options reduces the usefulness of this feature fairly dramatically.  I count 99 categories, some of which seem wholly unrelated to the search term.  Additionally, some that are highly related to the search term, e.g. Manchester United, have very few results (“Manchester United” appears to have only 3 results.  In contrast “Scottish News” has 93).  This points to a fairly fundamental failure with either the categorisation system, the search system or the content cataloguing guidelines.  In short, extremely poor Information Architecture.

The other problem created by this list is that there’s a very large gap between the bottom of the search results and the links for moving on to the next page.  I’ve labelled this the “Void of Uncertainty” on the image to the right.  On my, allbeit smallish, monitor, I can’t see the links pointing to the next page at all when I’ve viewing the last search result.  The white space is the height of my browser’s viewport.  I would imagine many users get lost at the bottom of the first page of results, believing wrongly that there are no more (I’d love to see usage statistics for this results page, I bet they’d be very telling).

Nine out of ten of the results are to do with sport

By this point, it won’t be any surprise to learn that the results are sport-heavy.  Nine out of the ten results are to do with sport.  The odd one out is actually a bit of celebrity gossip, which I’ve classified as “local” because it occurred in the area, but it’s a bit of a stretch if I’m honest.

If I were searching for the Football Clubs: In terms of actual results, probably the best of the bunch so far.  There’s still no sign of today’s results on the first page, but at least the articles are more up-to-date than the others.  It would greatly benefit from having links to the pages for the relevant clubs placed more prominently though.

If I were searching for local news: Nothing of use, really.

Search Takeaway

If I’m honest, I found the results of this little experiment a little depressing.  It seems as if a minimal amount of thought has gone into designing the search functions on these sites.  They’ve looked at other search functions and produced a tick-box feature list that they’ve then implemented.

Unfortunately it appears they’ve failed to correctly identify and understand the context of the information on their own sites.  They certainly don’t appear to understand what makes an article “relevant”, and that belies a certain lack of research and thought.  As I mentioned earlier, if they think the most relevant result for a user searching the term “Manchester” today is the result from a football match that finished a few weeks ago, they are severely misguided.

The search functions also seem unable to recognise the best landing pages to send users to.  As I alluded to in the introduction to this section, the term “Manchester” presented the opportunity to the sites to understand the search and direct me to specialised landing pages for topics like Manchester United and Manchester the location.  This rarely happened.

The search term did present a challenge though.  If the sites weighted their results purely based on chronology, they would only be showing sports results on a day like today.  Therefore, a touch of craft and guile is required when ordering them for the user.  What I found really odd is that almost all the sites did have a heavy sport weighting, but the results just weren’t up to date.  The curse of irrelevance striking again.

There are a few consistent options that seem to reappear between sites.  For example, most paper sites cover a number of publications.  Each site offers the ability to narrow down the results by publication.  This feature would only be of use in two circumstances.  Where a user had read something in a particular paper and then sought it online or where the publications offered different types of articles, in which case the filter acts as a further category filter.  I don’t think either situation is particularly likely.  The most egregious examples of these useless separations were where the search function distinguished between the website and the paper (The Guardian or guardian.co.uk, The Times or The Times Online? What’s the difference to me,  a normal user?).

The best performer in terms of search results was The Guardian.  The results were ordered by date rather than some ineffective relevance by default, which left them sport-heavy, but it identified some appropriate landing pages for me.  It also suggested some refinements in a more natural way than the other sites (although in the case of my search term, they weren’t particularly appropriate).

Conclusion

I set out to seek inspiration and best practice for a WordPress theme I’m working on, and I found just that.  Some of these sites have some really nice touches, whilst others have taught me valuable lessons on how not to do things.

It’s unfortunate that in many ways we seem to be in the same position we were ten years ago with certain aspects of these sites (e.g. search), and I’d have to question how much research had gone in to each design before hand.

For my money the best sites are The Times and The Guardian.  I like their aesthetics, their readability and their information architecture, and I’ll attempt to build my theme in a similar vein.  I’m also tempted to dig a little further into these sites to extract more information on certain aspects, like article design and homepage design, rather than the high level review I’ve performed here.  I think it might also be an interesting and worthwhile exercise to compare the paper’s online presence to their publication.

What’s your favourite newspaper, and what makes it so good?  Do you use any of the sites mentioned in this article?  if so, what do you think?  Let us know in the comments.

Then you have things you were forced to use (either out of the malevolence of others, lack of choice or misfortune).  You wish they’d go away, but they just don’t.  Even though you’ve made a conscience decision to move away from them, they just hang around.  I’d certainly put Flash and Internet Explorer 6 into these categories (along with Real Player, damn you Real Player).

So it is with great joy that I can report some serious moves being made towards killing off these two web relics.

Firstly, Internet Explorer 6.  After the recent IE6 empowered attacks in China, Google will be dropping support for IE6 in its web apps from next month.  This may seem like a bold move, but one would assume that anyone savvy enough to be using Google Apps would also be savvy enough to not be using IE6.  Possibly an even more important move comes from the UK’s Department of Health, which has told the NHS to stop relying on IE6.  As someone who’s worked on large scale government IT projects over the past six years, some of which have used IE6 (through no choice), I can’t convey how important a move like this might prove to be.

Out of all the organisations in the world, the UK’s government is so hopelessly uneducated, under-qualified and misguided that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that it would be the last place on earth to abandon IE6.  So if the government is moving away from IE6, there may be hope for the rest of us yet.

So what about Flash?  I mentioned in my brief coverage of the iPad that I hoped it signalled the end of Flash, and that sentiment seems to have been echoed around the web.  Rather than seeing the lack of Flash support in the iPad as a bad thing, many commentators see it as a positive.  It’s an acceptable means to an ends, if the end is the death of Flash.

The problem that Flash has is that it’s currently very hard to make a business case for it.  What do you use Flash for that can’t be done better using a more open, or a more user friendly, or a stabler, technology?  Video, for example can be more than adequately handled by HTML 5′s video support, and anyone who’s running a less that stellar machine would be well served to switch their YouTube preferences to HTML5 – it’s made a world of difference to the video performance of my ageing MacBook.  Rich media presentation, for example slideshows, are better handled by JavaScript, a move that’s greatly facilitated by the new breed of JavaScript libraries like JQuery.  JavaScript also has the advantage of not requiring a relatively expensive development environment to get started (i.e. you can code it in notepad if you want, you don’t need to buy Adobe’s Creative Suite).

Zeldman makes a good point that developers may now be forced down the route of best practice because the number of devices supporting Flash is falling, and will continue to do so.  Developers can no longer start with the aim of building a Flash site, but rather should concentrate on the semantic construction of the site and then augment that with Flash should the requirements be there.  I, like many other observers, feel that once developers start building around the actual requirements, and don’t start with Flash in mind, they’ll discover that Flash is surplus to requirements.

Looking more specifically at the future of Flash, Scoble asks “who can save Flash?” and includes a number of insights.  The analogy to the early days of FireFox is interesting.  One key difference between the iPhone platform and FireFox is the audience, though.  Early FireFox adopters were tech-savvy, early iPhone users are not (necessarily), and the same will be true of the iPad one would imagine.  A typical iPhone user will not look at the blue box of failure and blame Apple, nor Adobe, they’ll blame the website.  ”All the other websites work fine on my iPhone, why doesn’t yours?” will be the cry.  And when that cry reaches substantial proportions, websites owners will have to start taking notice.  The smart ones, as Scoble pointed out, are already removing Flash from their future roadmaps.

Given the amount of time I’ve spent “fixing” websites so they work with a broken browser, and the number of browser crashes I could reasonably attribute to Flash, I’m looking forward to the future without these two relics.