It’s like being a kid on Christmas morning. You know it will be good, but will it be amazing?

By the way, thanks for ruining Christmas last year Gizmodo.

Dicks.

Apple means to fix this in iOS 5 by obviating cable sync with automatic iCloud backups, iTunes sync, and OS updates over wifi. But how to get everyone on iOS 5 when so many users won’t plug in to iTunes to get the update?

iMessage.

Free iOS to iOS texting in iMessage is a fantastic carrot to get users to upgrade. It’s got network effects baked in: every user benefits by getting more users to upgrade. (I wish everyone I know had iMessage right now.)

iOS developers win because going forward they won’t have to worry about iOS version fragmentation. Apple wins for the same reason, plus Apple Store technicians won’t have to worry about data loss when users come in with unsynced iDevices. And not least of all, iMessage disintermediates cell carrier texting while widening Apple’s moat.

Genius.

It’s because double tapping a text column bypasses all web page clutter and zooms in on what you’re trying to read.

That’s it. The secret sauce.

And now iOS 5 will add “Reader” to Safari, a button that promises to completely de-suck the web.

Ads, modal popups, scammy over-pagination, sidebar cruft, and even bad typography will be banished with a single button tap.

You could think of Reader as Apple’s quiet declaration of war on web advertisers.

With any common task like launching programs or flipping through iPhoto images the 13” MacBookAir felt faster than any MacBookPro. At CPU intensive tasks, for example applying a blur to a large PhotoShop file, the Air and Pro lines felt about the same.

Of course, if the MacBookPro floor models at the Apple Store had solid state drives it would make all the difference in performance.

Still, the design of the Air is viscerally appealing in a way that the Pros aren’t. The Pros feel outmoded, bulky.

While I was playing with the laptops a group of junior high kids swarmed the Air table. (It’s the table on the left, closest to the doors. The money table.) I overheard teen girls squealing things like, “These are the smallest, cutest ones!” They didn’t visit the Pro table. The Airs got most of the action from all comers.

So:

1. There’s no point in having a high end computer with a platter hard drive. Go SSD or go home.
2. Expectations about computers have changed. What matters now is heft, portability, battery life, how it fits your bag, and how cool it looks at the coffee shop. Not how fast it is, but how fast it feels. It’s not about specs, it’s about the experience.

1. Most reviewers don’t mind dithery AMOLED screens. Surprising.
2. Apple has raised the bar on hardware design. When gadgets feel cheap or flimsy, users notice.
3. I’m glad the iPhone4 is metal and glass. By the end, my iPhone 3G had serious cracks from plastic fatigue.
4. Expandable storage is a no-no. It degrades a unit’s industrial design. It also tempts manufacturers to skimp on storage, leaving users to make up the difference in complexity and frustration.
5. Same goes for removable batteries.

I haven’t been able to photograph the effect, but here’s an approximation:

Perhaps future phones with higher pixel density (or without PenTile sub pixels) won’t have perceptible dithering, but until then I’d avoid any AMOLED phone.

If you guessed “the tacked-on laminated Westin Hotel podium sign” you get a cookie.

Think of the stage as a user interface. Everything that isn’t the speaker is noise that users must actively ignore. Like logos stamped on phones.

From top to bottom, Apple takes responsibility for the quality of their products. Got a problem? Go to the Apple Store. Need free training? Apple Store.

That’s ownership.

To see what abdicating ownership looks like, check out John Dowdell’s post about mobile Flash (and don’t miss the comments).

When you’ve got an operating system made by Google, a handset made by, well, anybody, sold by a meddlesome carrier, with Adobe’s Flash sitting on top, the quality chain is broken.

I’d pity Dowdell for having an impossible job if his first reaction wasn’t “blame the user!”

When people say that Android vs. iPhone is a replay of PC vs. Mac, in one sense they’re right. Nobody owns the quality chain for PCs, so you get cheap, overdesigned Dell hardware running Microsoft’s uninspired operating system, sold to you by a Best Buy blue shirt.

“To be succinct: I’m not sure that I serve my audience by worrying about how a new approach is going to help or hurt Barnes & Noble.” — Seth Godin on leaving traditional publishing

Think about your favorite products. I bet those with the best user experience are made by companies that align their interests with yours.

One reason Apple products are just better is that Apple’s customers and users are one and the same. Apple profits directly by selling premium stuff that people love.

Contrast that with the PC ecosystem. End users aren’t Microsoft’s most important customers; Dell is. The quality feedback loop between maker and user is broken.

Have you ever read How Buildings Learn? My favorite chapter explains why so many expensive university buildings are reviled by their occupants.

It turns out the architect’s client is not the occupant, but the university endowment. The architect and university both want expensive, novel, “prestige” buildings that photograph well. Meanwhile the occupants are forgotten until the malpractice suit over chronic roof leaks.

Adobe. They talk web design, but their products are really about print design and image processing. Dreamweaver and Fireworks, their tools made explicitly for the web, don’t fit today’s best practices and workflows. Dreamweaver is a joke, only good for making old school image maps. Fireworks, while more useful, is clunky, and still is just for making graphics instead of working layouts. The icing on the cake is that Adobe products are known to be bloated, crashy, and unusable.

Web Typography. We’ve come a long way, baby. Kinda. While we have some workable options for embedding web fonts, there are serious caveats. With TypeKit you have to lease the fonts forever. Other web font vendors let you embed fonts, if you can find the license and decipher it. Like Adobe’s software, the way fonts are sold and licensed is optimized for print design, not web design. Even if you manage to find a good embeddable font, it’s going to look crummy in Windows’ type rendering. Which brings us to…

Browsers, especially IE. Things have gotten better on this front thanks to web standards evangelists and the good folks behind Firefox and Webkit. However, even if IE9 comes out and is great, I guarantee it will still be a bother to test, and we’ll still have to support IE7 and 8 for years.

CSS. It just kind of sucks. I think CSS’ biggest problem is that it’s optimized for specifying colors and fonts, but poor at specifying layout. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to specify a grid layout in CSS instead of cobbling it together by styling each HTML element? Also, CSS tends to get bloated since it’s not programmatic and makes you repeat yourself.

I could go on, but you get the point; all our tools to build the web are blunt and rusty.

iPhone development sure is tempting lately.

It’s interesting how people react to the new larger font size. Most readers like it, but for some it’s a bit jarring because so much of the web is still set in tiny Verdana.

Beside the type, Fred’s readers are noticing much faster pages, which is a big win.

What we wanted to do with this redesign

1. Readability: If it looks better in Instapaper than in the browser, back to the drawing board.
2. Mobile Ready: His old template (that I also did) had mobile CSS for the iPhone, but on this go-around we made sure that it looked great on the iPad and Android too.
3. No More Widgets: 3rd party blog widgets tend to be noisy, more about promoting their own brand than being useful.
4. Speed: Widgets are also heavy, injecting a ton of javascripts, images, and HTTP requests into each page view. Even worse, they often don’t use compression or long cache headers. We took AVC.com weight from almost 900KB and 130 HTTP requests to 250KB and  39 requests (and just 40KB when everything is cached). Now pages load in well under a second instead of ~5 seconds.
5. Mobile Ready, Part II: The iPad and iPhone are now my target browsers, their limitations and features informing the design in subtle ways. For example, since getting the iPad, I prefer pages with subtle textured background. The texture serves to subtly anchor the scroll state, making it feel more tangible, and it also takes the edge off the screen brightness, allowing for visual effects like button embossing.

   However, if I had to pick one feature in the iPhone OS browser that changes everything, I’d say it’s the “double tap to zoom a column” feature. It’s a subtle, tiny thing, but it completely subverts clutter on the web, which makes the web a pleasure to read. Column zoom makes the iPad the best web browser yet devised.

Update:

Within an hour of the redesign launch, enough “the font is too big!” comments rolled in that we decided to nudge the base font down from 18px to 16px.

Thoughts on this:

1. After so many years of tiny type, the world isn’t ready for 18px yet. One commenter called it “yelling”.
2. It was too much change, too quickly.
3. Fred’s audience is finance oriented, and they prefer information density to breathing room. Think about Bloomberg machines, stock symbol tickers, and the way stock data is presented in newsprint.
4. The web is such a “your milage may vary” medium. On reflection, the type did look a little big on Arial in Windows, and Windows in general is biased toward making smaller type look good. Plus, you never know whether a Windows user has tweaked their DPI settings because so often the default DPI makes things look too small.
5. Interesting, no Mac or iPad users I ran it by said the type was too big. I think this has to do with type being rendered in a more aesthetically pleasing way on Macs. If a font renders a little ugly when small, it goes all sore thumb on you when large.

How many pixels in that UI are for writing and how many pixels are merely about writing?

Now I want you to look at this screenshot from the demo video of Pages for iPad:

Has the difference between software for creating and software about creating ever been more obvious?

An aside: watching these iPad demos, can there be any doubt that people who said the iPad is just for consuming, not creating are suffering from shrinkwrap Stockholm syndrome?

So how will companies in the “now with more features!” business respond to Apple’s new model for simple, useful, and usable software? Spoiler Alert: they’ll ignore it and ride their market inertia gravy train straight to hell.

• “Desktop OSes aren’t optimized for concentration.” —Craigmod’s blog.
• iPad and the Brain by Dave Troy.
• UX Hero posts: Computers vs. Creativity, iPhone Apps: why closed is better, and Serendipity makes software fun.

But so far, what I’ve noticed most about apps in AppWorld is that they are, for the most part, all about themselves. They’re not connected to the greater web, and they don’t encourage you to move seamlessly from one app to another, depending on your intent.

I replied:

Many of the best apps in the App Store serve as rich clients to web apps. It’s not an either/or proposition.

Many of the other apps are games (which have a rich history of being released on closed platforms) or little utilities that work better as widgets than websites.

And don’t forget that the iPhone was the first phone to have a non-godawful mobile browser.

The apps I use most are clients for internet services: Mail, Tweetie, Maps, Instapaper, and Yelp.

What’s interesting is that in most cases, the iPhone versions of popular web apps have a much better user experience than their desktop browser counterparts.

This is true because:

1. iPhone apps never forget who I am. Websites always do.
2. I always have these apps in my pants, ready to use.
3. Apps can use the full range of touch gestures, plus GPS, camera, accelerometers, etc. This is especially important for apps about location and map zooming.
4. The iPhone’s screen is both small and a known size. There’s no room for feature bloat and UI cruft. Designers can stick to a grid instead of sweating different resolutions.
5. When web services have good APIs, third party developers can design front ends that are better than what the designers at the mothership come up with (cough *Twitter* cough).

While screenshots can’t fully convey how good they feel, look at Tweetie and MobileRSS, third party apps for Twitter and Google Reader:

The designers at Twitter.com and Google Reader should be ashamed that third party designers can create a far better experience in far fewer pixels.

So, back to my original point, the open web and iPhone apps aren’t at odds; they’re two great tastes that taste great together.

More important, the iPhone has opened up a world beyond the hoary point and click interface, and software engineers should thank Steve Jobs in prayer every night for creating a platform where users love buying software.

See also: Watts Martin calling out Tim Bray for conflating Apps with the Internet.

Feedburner: Google folded them into their own login scheme. Google added crummy ad options to feeds. Otherwise the product is stuck. Feels undead.
What they should be working on: improving the display of RSS feeds, making RSS feel more like a human connection between publisher and reader, fixing the fact that when you put an RSS button on your site it’s a dumb, non-stateful button (compare RSS buttons to Tumblr or Twitter follow functionality).

Delicious: Yahoo folded them into their own login scheme. Then a crummy redesign. Now feels undead.
What they should be working on: umm… I dunno. It could use a serious UI overhaul, but the whole thing just smells like a zombie so what’s the point?

Flickr: Yahoo folded them into their own login scheme (notice a pattern?) It’s not quite undead because lots of people still use it and rely on it, but the UI is super stale.
What they should be working on: UX, UX, UX. Make everything faster and easier: uploading, managing, and sharing images. Make it simple for users to make money on their work. Fix the UI: it’s outrageous that you can’t view next and previous when you’re viewing the higher resolution versions of images.
Sad but telling fact: Ugly, half-assed TwitPic was able to capture the “post images to Twitter” market while Flickr sat on its hands.

Google Reader: While not an acquired startup, Google Reader is an example of what happens once Google commoditizes and dominates a product category: Google bolts on some half-assed social software functionality then gives up on it.

So here’s the apparent life cycle of a successful venture funded web startup:

1. Founders start working on an idea.
2. They take VC money. Their fate is now sealed because investors demand a “liquidity event“, ie, a big exit.
3. Google acquires startup, founders and investors are happy.
4. Startup’s product enters undead maintenance mode, founders can’t wait for their Google shares to vest so they can bail and write a blog post about how stuck they felt at a big company.

To be clear, I think the dynamic interplay of founders and investors is a big net win for the world. Indeed, it seems most of the best stuff was built this way. I just want everyone to consider what happens after the big payday. Is value created or destroyed when a great product is acquired by a big company with its own agenda?

• I’m not the first to notice this. See also these posts by: yours truly, 37signals, Dare Obasanjo, TechCrunch, and Slate.
• Related Wikipedia entries: List of acquisitions by Google and List of acquisitions by Yahoo.

I took a look at the plugins I need the most and realized that my Firefox setup is my internet immune system.

Consider:

• Adblock protects me from intrusive, sometimes offensive ads.
• Flashblock is inconvenient since I have to approve each Flash piece I encounter, but without it my CPU fans instantly spin up and my browser slows to a crawl. It also protects me from new tabs that autoplay sound and video.
• NoSquint protects me from tiny, unreadable text, and it also remembers my zoom settings for sites I frequent.
• Stylish lets me permanently “fix” ugly sites by adding my own CSS.
• They’re not Firefox plugins, but Instapaper and the Readability bookmarklet make the web readable again by improving typography and removing noisy, bloated sidebars.

Notice that the tools I’ve listed are not for browser security, but just to make the web tolerable.

What’s disturbing is that even reputable sites like the New York Times are much improved not just when ads are blocked, but when the entire site design is stripped away via Instapaper.

The web seems to have reached an unfortunate equilibrium of mostly bad design and mostly bad advertising. Until everybody else wakes up the best thing we can do is be the change we want to see:

1. If you’re responsible for a web site, don’t run intrusive, annoying, irrelevant ads. If you can only pay your bills by annoying your audience, maybe you should think about whether that’s a sustainable model.
2. If your content is more valuable after its design is stripped by Readability, then you should rethink your design.