Let’s hope they’ll iterate as fast on the Android version as they are the desktop versions.

Chrome for Android appeared on Noscope on February 7, 2012.

I don’t even want to try to explain what’s going on here. I mean, I understand it, but I don’t understand it. I don’t see how it’s in anyones interest for it to be flaming-hoops difficult to sync a device to a new Mac. Seriously, Apple, how did this pass your “it just works” razor?

Erase and Sync appeared on Noscope on February 5, 2012.

One trend in particular I’m following with great interest, and that is the move from text-labels to icons. Here’s Gmail:

It’s interesting because Google used to be a bastion of usability, and having only icons goes against what I’ve learned on the matter (which is that icon + text label reads best, only text label reads okay, icon only reads the least). So why did Google do this?

Google’s a big company. They’re known for being data-driven. So much, in fact, that they were once criticized for A/B testing shades of blue. Which means unless Larry Page has uprooted every previous principle the company was founded on (which I doubt), I’m pretty sure they’re watching the numbers on this one, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in the results on their icon vs. text-label A/B tests. The fact that the icons are still there in Gmail tells me that either the negative impact of icon-only navigation was negligible, or that the decision to go with icons only was forced through despite.

Icon-only navigation can be gorgeous, sure, and well-designed icons or icons based on established metaphors can be really easy to read. The trash-can, for example, is hard to get wrong. But surely some actions can’t easily be translated to icons only? Here’s the Android 4 camera app:

In the above screen capture, I’ve opened up the photo configuration pane. From left — the ellipsis means “more settings”, “SCN” is short for “scene”, the plus/minus is “exposure”, the “AW” is “white balance” set to “auto”, and the lightning is “flash mode” set to off. The icons are gorgeous, but some of them don’t read very well. Particulary SCN means they threw in the towel on an icon.

So where did the whole “icons first” trend start? Android, maybe. From the brand new design guide:

Action bar icons are graphic buttons that represent the most important actions people can take within your app. Each one should employ a simple metaphor representing a single concept that most people can grasp at a glance.

You should really head over to the design guide, the icons really are beautiful, and they are a core aspect of Android 4 apps. To put it briefly: Android 4 apps rely heavily on the action-bar. The action-bar is a bar across the top of the operating system. On phones it features an app icon and app name on the left, and as many icon-buttons as there’s room for on the right. If there are more buttons than there’s room for, these buttons go in to the “action overflow” button, which is the small ellipsis. Click the ellipsis and the icons are shown in a dropdown menu by their text-label counterparts. It’s discussed at length on the Android Developers blog.

As beautiful as icons can be, is the lack of text-labels sacrificing usability? Here’s Photoshop Touch for Android:

Compare and contrast with desktop Photoshop and the UI is a far cry. Obviously the two apps are no-where near feature parity, but UI-wise the difference is stark. The Android app relies on the clean, uncluttered iconography whereas the desktop app fills the top of system-bar with text-labelled dropdown menus.

I really don’t know what’s best. On the one hand, icons certainly make for a prettier UI. If screen real-estate is at a premium, icons can be smaller than text-labels, and the uniform size can make them easier to fit in a clean grid. Icons need no translation either, which is nice. On the other hand, a text label can say what the button does. Right there. On the button.

Icons vs. Text appeared on Noscope on January 31, 2012.

Around new years eve, Automattic’s Data team sends out an annual report — a summary of your blogging in the year that passed. It’s a verbosely written summary of which posts had the most traffic, which images had the most views and overall what happened to your blog. This year we bumped the design and featureset quite a bit and included lavish JavaScript & Canvas based fireworks (built, tweaked, made beautiful and open-sourced by Andy Skelton). We even managed to include Jetpack users this year (counting stats for as long as Jetpack has been installed and active).

A lot of hard work went in to making this happen, and as always it’s such a pleasure to watch my co-workers make magic happen. I invite you to see this blogs 2011 annual report:

Annual report: Noscope 2011 in blogging

2011 appeared on Noscope on January 3, 2012.

I don’t believe in pills

Well good for you. And real fucking good you don’t have allergies. Or Pneumonia.

In all fairness, this is a statement that I hear all the time from all sorts of people. It’s also a statement that probably shouldn’t be taken at face value; I’m sure the host in question was referring to plain headache pills or even vitamin pills. While I’m at it, let me clarify that I harbor a tremendous respect for this particular host, and he does believe in vaccines so he’s not a moron. So let’s not make this about him. Which is why, in the interest of putting myself in the opposing viewpoint, there are many reasons why you might want to avoid some pills. Multi-vitamin pills may or may not work, and if you eat right: fish, vegetables, meat or chickpeas, you’re probably better off without ‘em. Also, make sure you get lots of sunlight so you can skip the D-vitamins. It’s probably also better to search for the root cause of your headache (did you remember to hydrate?) than to eat a painkiller. Finally, there’s a lingering concern that some pills, especially pills involving hormones, have serious side-effects we might not know about until the next generation.

That’s all good and well. But the statement still kills me. “I don’t believe in pills”. Well fuck you: pills can save lives. Pills can cure you. Pills can relieve your pain. Pills can give you a decent life despite chronic illnesses or even ease the passage of someone with a terminal disease. Sure, some of those pills have side-effects, but sometimes you’d rather experience the side-effects than the effects of the illness for which you’re eating the pills in the first place. I personally prefer to eat antihistamines and be just a little bit tired all the time over not being able to breathe. In fact, I really love those pills, despite their side-effects, and I sure as hell believe in those pills. Because those pills work.

I’m not out to lambast anyone for this particular brand of ignorance; everyone is entitled to a modicum of stupidity. But I want to shine a light on the fact that saying “I don’t believe in pills” makes you sound like a dumb douchebag. It’s a simplistic view of life and you could at the very least augment your opinion by clarifying that you prefer not to eat pills if there’s a readily available alternative to your particular needs.

Or do you just want me to grind up your pills and put them in some OJ, sport?

Pills appeared on Noscope on December 30, 2011.

Felt an urge to redecorate the other day, and so I threw some new paint on this old thing. I trimmed a lot of fat, went all HTML5, completely ignored Internet Explorer, threw in a Google web-font and made the site all responsive and scaling to smartphones. It was liberating. If you’re reading this in a feed-reader, I invite you to jump out of it for a brief gander.

For a while I’ve been working on the be-all end-all WordPress theme, a parent theme framework with all sorts of other buzzwords not including synergy. For this theme, however, I simply threw it all out and started with a mix of TwentyEleven (excellent HTML5 base) and the deprecated fallback theme you’re not actually supposed to use (turns out the fallback comments form was much to my liking; don’t worry, I copied the files to my theme directory).

I also deactivated a bunch of plugins. I’ve been a tremendous fan of Subscribe To Comments ever since I switched from Movable Type almost a decade ago (how time flies), but since the introduction of email subscriptions in Jetpack, that plugin is more-so a must-have for me (not to mention the fact that the stats module is now some of my bread and a lot of my butter). I have a bunch of to-do’s still, mostly related to finding a decent way to make my photos section interesting again.

Then of course, I’ve turned down the lights, something you either love or hate. I’ve found myself reading a lot on my smartphone, and somehow it works for me when the little device emits less light in my face. Black will do that to you, and I’m told it’s always a good choice. Plus, I’m a big fan of feed-readers (not so much Google Reader anymore), so if you prefer a white background you may go right back to your reader of choice and I will harbor no ill will towards you.

Part of my urge to redesign has been my want of going long-form. This blog has gone through a lot of iterations based on my whim at the time. Currently, this quote by Brent Simmons appeals to me:

Twitter and Facebook are great for organizing a revolution. Blogs are for explaining why we need one.

I’m not looking to start a revolution, and the truth is I may blog way less these days now that I’m juggling a toddler and a fantastic job. But what I do write, I want to keep, store, cross-reference and archive.

Redesigned appeared on Noscope on December 29, 2011.

This night, Christopher Hitchens passed. He’d been struggling with cancer for a couple of years, yet he’d kept going despite knowing exactly what was in store for him.

A passing always hits a special part of your body, an organ you did not know was there. It’s like losing part of what helped keep your balance. It’s going to take some time to find a new balance in absence of that support.

When Arthur C. Clarke passed, he’d lived a lifetime and written more than one lifetimes worth of work. Knowing that, it was somewhat more easy to celebrate his life and work, knowing he’d more than fulfilled his promise. Douglas Adams life, on the other hand, was cut short like now Hitchens was. Surely both Adams and Hitchens have achieved more in their lives than many of us can ever hope to, but it still makes this no less tragic.

Hitch had a profound impact on me. Through his writing and speaking he logically approached the difficulty of the human condition. In no uncertain terms, Hitch managed to make actual sense of what might not have any sense in the first place. Not believing in God is not as easy as it sounds. The notion that this is it and even if you live a life unfulfilled in the end you’ll return to the void, that is a hard pill to swallow. Somehow it puts the injustice of the world in an even starker contrast.

Through this, Hitch taught me that what I need to strive for in life is to have more good days than bad days. He taught me what I want for my own deathbed; to have made some impact in the lives of the people I spent it with, to hopefully have been an invisible support to give balance. You were that support to me, Hitch, and like walking a staircase missing a step, I expect to stumble in your absence. I will do my best to find a new balance and help others do so. And I will tell my daughter about you.

The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it
– Thucydides

Hitch appeared on Noscope on December 16, 2011.

This is what it looks like in my Gmail (by the way, if you haven’t received this bar yet, here’s how you can get it now):

Collapsing the black bar certainly gives some much welcome extra room (especially welcome in Maps and Reader). Also, I personally never used the plethora of links that sat right at the top of the page starting from left, so the collapsing of those into a dropdown menu makes some sort of sense.

The new bar is now without weirdness, though. First of all, in the implementation I’ve tried (by using the cookie hack linked earlier), the Google logo dropdown menu invokes on both hover and click. I’m personally a fan of click, since hover always feels slow to me, but it gets weird if you’re used to the Google logo taking you to the homepage. Take Gmail, for example, clicking the Gmail logo (which by the way is gone now), you’d be taken to your inbox. To get to your inbox now, you have to click the left-arrow that sits on top of your email.

It’s also a bit wierd that the Google.com homepage features a different Google-bar:

… it’s obvious when you think about it, of course: you can’t have two colorful logos and two searchboxes competing on the same page. Oh by the way, that black dropdown shown in the screenshot above is not invoked by yours truly, it’s now shown by default when you visit the Google homepage. But at least they killed off the horrific white fade they had a while back.

It’s clear Google is in a state of flux at the moment. Some products are killed off, others are mutilated. At the same time, Google is prettier and more consistent than ever. Here’s hoping the dust settles at some point, and what made Google cool gets reintroduced.

Quick thoughts on the new Google-Bar appeared on Noscope on December 1, 2011.

This morning on my way to work I was listening to Macbreak Weekly. A bunch of my heroes, including John Gruber, were talking about iCloud sync and the problems some of them were experiencing. Tonya had factory reset her iPhone several times trying to get contacts to sync properly. Andy jokingly suggested the merging of contacts was painful and would sometimes merge 17 different versions of the same contact into a lean 12. Chris suggested it was a good idea to make sure you had a backup of the contacts, calendar and email setup you considered “canonical”, before embarking on your iCloud adventure. When the team started talking about the supposed iOS 5 battery drain, iCloud was almost universally assumed responsible for this.

Grubers level-headed approach was that, while he apparently had no problems himself, he did believe Apples iCloud transition was going to be monumentally difficult and compared it to stepping from solid ground on to a boat while carrying valuable trinkets. Transitioning MobileMe customers to a new free setup, making sure not only calendars, email and contacts sync, but also documents, was bound to generate some headaches, but they’ll pass in time, he suggested. I agree, I’m sure things’ll improve once Apple is on the boat.

Perhaps there is something to be said about Apples approach to sync. As much as they tout that “the truth is in the cloud” — as Yogi Berra would say: that’s only true when it’s true. It’s no secret Apple loves native apps. Native apps run faster, smoother, nicer than web-apps. You’ll hear many chant this, they might even use allegories such as “being closer to the metal” when describing why a web-app can never be as good as a native app. Let me tell you this: Yogi Berra doesn’t care. If it works, it works. If the app is good, it’s good. If things sync, things sync. And if they don’t sync properly, they don’t sync properly.

Googles overarching approach to sync is to not sync. Push the changes immediately. When you add a bookmark to your Chrome browser, a teensy signal is immediately sent to Googles bookmark sync server pushing the change. When you finish typing a word in Google Docs, changes are saved. There is no sync, because there are not copies of files anywhere. There is only one file. There is only one email. There is only one contact. You’ll never have to worry about whether your Android phone, tablet, or Macbook has the most recently edited version of your document, or which one has the most complete contact, or which calendar you added an event to. Because everything is always in sync. It just works.

You’d think it would get muddy if you scratched the surface and peeked underneath. If you do, you’ll find that Android sync is actually asynchronous, and that if you use Google Docs’ offline editing capabilities, you’ll actually end up with some of the same sync challenges that Apple is facing: which version is the right version? Somehow I’ve never once had a problem with this, though. I don’t know if it’s because Google started with the web-apps and built native apps and offline sync at a later time, but I have no trust issues with Google getting my sync right. I know that if I visit google.com/contacts and edit a contact, my changes will propogate to all my devices seamlessly. I never have to worry about losing contacts, losing appointments, losing emails, getting corrupt data, or even backing up. While these words may smell like famous last words, I wouldn’t even think of backing things up. I expect it to work, I trust that it will work, and has done so far.

Compared to the flaming hoops I had to jump through to get just calendars, contacts and Gmail to sync on my wifes iPhone, using an Android device is just a relief.

Sync appeared on Noscope on November 15, 2011.

I’m pretty excited about the visual shakeup that’s going on at Google these days. Gmail and Calendar are prettier than ever, and it looks like there’s even some cues that align with Android now. Google Reader was one of the last properties to get the overhaul, and I was rather nervous about the announced Google+ integration.

I was totally unprepared for the scorched earth tactic Google employed, though. It appears that Google, after applying the new look, systematically uprooted every pretty little flower that made Reader what it was. Google then ground up all the flowers into mulch, burned the mulch, and salted the ground.

What made Reader so great? The social stuff. For every feed item you could click “Share”, and other Reader users who followed you would then get a customized RSS feed with your shares. You could even add a small comment to the top of the shared feed item. This spurned quite a lot of discussion, some of which I’ve archived here. From a “simplify your product line, focus on fewer products”, I completely understand why Google did this. Google+ already supports sharing and commenting, so why not share directly to Google+ instead of to a dedicated RSS feed? Unfortunately, that’s whiteboard philosophy at its best, and it betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of why Readers social ecosystem worked so well. Ironic, because Google+ is Googles social initiative. It’s really quite embarrasing.

I started writing a long blog post about how Google could fix reader and keep the Google+ integration. I thought long and hard about solutions to every problem introduced by the massacre. In the end, the frankenbuild that would have resulted from my advice would have been terrible. I even  went in to detail as to what exactly was massacred, but most of what I had to say has already been said elsewhere.

There’s a saying: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Let me be clear, I loathe that saying. It’s shortsigthed, backwards and reactionary. It stands in the way of progress, and indicates the previous iteration of whatever is being referred to, “ain’t broke”. Let me tell you a secret it took me half a lifetime to learn: nothing is ever perfect, and everything can be improved upon. The notion of “perfect” is silly and highly philosophical. Reader wasn’t  perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Finding people to follow was a ridiculous hassle, and advertising the fact that you were sharing on Reader was nigh impossible. But once you did follow someone in Reader, once you did start sharing and commenting on shared feed items, the experience was easy to follow, highly intimate and very enjoyable.

What remains is a good feed-reader, but everything social about it has been scrubbed. Good feed-readers are a dime a dozen, and the sharing features while really well-implemented, are not that hard to copy. It is not unlikely that someone will eat the lunch Google left on the table here. Perhaps Google is fine with that. Or perhaps they’ll listen to sense:

Dear Google,

Reader is about reading RSS feeds, so please make shared items show up in an RSS feed again. +1 buttons are fine, but “Share” and “Note” should append to your shared feed and nothing else. Google+ is also a fine way to advertise that you’re curating an RSS feed. A theoretical integration with the circles might even make sense. But keep discussions, feed items and shares in Reader — where it belongs.

The Assassination of Google Reader by the Coward Google+ appeared on Noscope on November 8, 2011.

Ode to Microwave Oatmeal appeared on Noscope on October 11, 2011.

That new look and feel for apps is being referred to as “Metro-style”. Metro-style apps run fullscreen and navigation happens through edge-activated interfaces. While I’m concerned about discoverability for edge-activated interface controls (essentially this is classic mystery meat navigation), I do like that apps are full-screen and that Metro-style apps ditch all archaic notions of UI chrome.

Which brings me to Google Chrome, capital C. Really great browser, my such of choice. From a high-level perspective, Google built this browser to accelerate the pace of web technology development, so that Googles own web-apps — Gmail, Calendar, Docs — could adopt newer features sooner. To that end, Google has gone to great lengths to make sure Chrome is not only cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, soon Android), but that Chrome looks native to each platform. This tenet has been taken to the extreme, actually, with Chrome on Windows XP featuring the horrible “Luna” skin, and Chrome on Linux more or less establishing GTK as the de-facto UI toolkit on the platform, just to be able to use said toolkit. It’s really quite impressive, the amount of work put into making Chrome not only look native, but be native.

Of course we’re only on the cusp of the future. The next round of operating systems are likely to be much more mobile inspired. Windows is blazing a trail with adopting the Windows Phone Metro UI, OSX is likely to become even more iOS-like, and Ubuntu is already exploring more touch-friendly UIs. If Google is going to keep following the path of full-on nativity, Chrome engineers are going to be having some nasty headaches in the not too distant future. Is it even technically possible to replace Internet Explorer 10 as your browser of choice? With Windows 8 treating HTML5 web-apps as first-class citizens among native apps, it’s likely that IE is baked in to the operating system more deeply than it ever was before.

It’s also an intereting mind-game, imagining what Google Chrome would look like, if it were to theoretically be re-written as a Metro-style Windows 8 app. The Metro-style UI is already so minimalist in layout, icon style and even interaction patterns that it’s difficult to think of Metro-style Chrome looking very much different from IE10. The racing-car diagonal tabs for instance, which are important to Chrome’s branding, are hard to translate to Metro-style. Though I suppose if Google were to go this way, they could make their tabs look similar to those of the Android Honeycomb browser (which is likely to spell the direction of how Chrome will look like on Android, once that happens).

Will it happen? I think so, but I think Google will want to play the wait-and-see game for a while. Just like Android Ice Cream Sandwich may be a make-or-break proposition for Google, so do I think that Windows 8 is for Microsoft. Could be that Windows 8 adoption is too slow to worry about. Could be Google’s already working on Metro-style Chrome.

Google Chrome, Metro-Style appeared on Noscope on October 10, 2011.

I’m Making Girls! appeared on Noscope on October 10, 2011.

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. #

On the face of it there’s something rhythmic and sensible about this quote. It rings true. But lately I’ve seen it used in the same vein as bumper stickers, T-shirts and yoda-isms — as an awesome display of intelligence, so fierce it concludes a discussion by virtue of being an awesome quote. Because surely no-one knowingly wants to be a product, right? Yet almost like a Godwins law for freemium services, this quote is fast becoming a platitude. The statement is like a safe-for-work version of saying “you’re a prostitute”. It pops up in every discussion comparing native apps to web-apps, Apple to Google or even Facebook to Google+.

I’m here to tell you today that no, smugly uttering that “you’re the product being sold” does not put an end of any dispute. The quote itself is like the old adage: “there’s no such thing as a free meal”, only smugger. Since slavery is abolished, you being the product that’s apparently sold for cash value to ensure your continuing free service can’t well refer to actually selling people as property. So it must refer to your click, your location, your interests – or even your personal information. Talking ad-supported websites as an example, the freemium scale ranges from showing ads that aren’t very personalized such as those from The Deck or Text Link Ads, to contextual ads such as Google AdSense which personalizes ads based on surrounding keywords. Then there are the people that want to scam you, such as the mechanic that legally can’t let you drive out of here without four new tires, or the African prince that needs a favor from you. So long as there are suckers there are predators.

The fact that there exists douchebags, is that an indictment of the entire freemium model, though? If you are to take the quote at face value: undeniably yes. The quote, standing on its own, clearly indicates that if you’re doing something without paying for it, you’re being sold. Right? Which means you’re being sold:

• searching on Google or Bing
• researching Gutenberg for your school project
• using an online dictionary to translate “stupidity” into french
• using Skype to call your grandma
• bidding on an A-Team lunchbox on eBay
• reading up on broccoli on Wikipedia
• watching television
• tasting free samples with a stick in it at Walmart

All those things are free. So it must mean “you’re being sold”, right?

Let’s flip it on its head. What can you do without being “sold”, then? You could:

• read The New York Times using a paid subscription
• buy stuff using 1-Click on Amazon
• buy the Wolfram Alpha app and search the web using only that
• buying 4 new tires because the mechanic can’t legally let you drive away
• use Skype to call grandma’s landline

Because surely none of those services would ever try to milk you for dimes in a non-obvious way, would they?

The truth of the matter is that you’re being advertised to all the time. I’ll let Fry from Futurama elaborate:

Leela: Didn’t you have ads in the 21st century?

Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games… and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

It’s difficult for me to put it more simply than this: when ever you see an advertisement, any advertisement, if this quote is to be believed, it means “you’re being sold”.

I’m not a fan of ads, no siree, but I recognize that they make services possible that would otherwise not be viable. Even the companies that are purportedly not ”selling you” have stats packages installed on their webservers and advertise their products to you on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games… and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky.

There’s a lot of sarcasm in this post, and I’m somewhat apologetic for that. I used the reductio ad absurdum technique to follow the initial quote to absurd consequences and then I criticised the end result. In my mind uttering the quote makes you look inarticulate, but I also acknowledge that it’s just not that simple. I use freemium products every day, and while I’m eternally vigilant to douchebags, I happen to live a pretty good life knowing that ads are being targetted towards me. But don’t call me a prostitute, until you look at the man in the mirror.

Freemium appeared on Noscope on October 4, 2011.

Yesterday, Samsung and Google announced an October 10th event, probably to unveil a long-rumored new Nexus phone running the new version of Android. Today, that new Android version was shakily demoed. Being a huge Android fan I follow this intently. I love Android because it’s so open that Amazon can go ahead and build something entirely different with it. Living in Gmail and Google Calendar, I love that everything syncs headache-free when I sign in to my phone. The Gmail app, specifically, is what makes Android my favorite dish among an increasingly diverse mobile marketplace. But despite my love for Android, I think Android’s next release, “Ice Cream Sandwich”, will be a make or break release for Google.

Make or break? Really? Well, make or break for the Google curated version of Android, yes. Obviously the Linux core is not going to disappear, but Android is at a crossroads. One path sees Android eventually showing a return on investment for Google, the other does not.

I like to pretend I understand the broken windows theory more thoroughly than I actually do, so I often invoke it outside of its criminological roots. The gist of the theory is that if you walk past an abandoned building with a couple of broken windows, there’s a greater chance that you would reach for a rock and break one of the remaining windows, than had the building manager made sure to repair the broken windows before you got there. Evil you!

Android is under fire from all directions. Apple vehemently sues HTC and Samsung for stealing their look and feel, Microsoft is attacking for underlying Linux patents they claim to have, and Oracle arguably has the upper hand in one high-profile lawsuit. If Android was a fortress in a desert, it would be under siege from all directions, and at some point the supplies will run out. Google appears unfazed by the attacks but I bet it’s getting to them. Having recently bolstered their patent war chest with the purchase of Motorola, Google is better positioned to fend off the lawsuits. Heck, they might even turn around Motorola and have the company produce delicious, Google-curated Android devices. But by the time this happens, a little year from now, it may already be too late. Right now, Android has a lot of broken windows.

The attacks against Android are reaching the public ear. “Google’s copying Apple”, “Android isn’t really open”, “Android users don’t buy apps”. It doesn’t even matter whether these stories are true or not — if they persist, they’re likely to make the customer walking into a Verizon store skip the Android phone and pick the platform he thinks is “going to be around”. (Or he’ll buy anything, but that’s not a business model.)

That’s a grim future which sees Android falter. But fortunately that’s just one potential outcome. Android still has a disruptive business model: it’s a free operating system with free top-shelf GPS navigation, and it gets users to use Google apps so there’s a halo effect. Now all Google needs is a decisive victory. They need a phone that just looks great, has a UI that’s responsive, fluid and extremely delightful to use. And Google needs this phone to sell like ice cream. Sandwiches.

I would assume Google knows this, and that it’s why they hired Matias Duarte to up the ante on the UI design. The Nexus S is a gorgeous device, all black like the night without the stars, so clearly Samsung can create beautiful hardware when they put their minds to it, wink wink. If the combination (which may be revealed October 10th) is both user-friendly, snappy and delightful, it might just sell like those aforementioned treats. This’ll inspire HTC and Samsung to stick with Android. It’ll further Androids reach, ensuring a larger portfolio of apps. It might even make an Android tablet a value proposition. Put simply, if Google can rally the forces behind a decisive platform release and instill renewed motivation in its partners, these partners might continue their legal fights with fresh energy as opposed to settle and pick other platforms.

On the other hand, if Ice Cream Sandwich is not the watershed release Google needs, the platform might slowly wither away. As stuffed as Googles pockets are, they’re not going to keep throwing money at Android with no return on investment in sight. There’s no sense in being the number 1 smartphone platform if it’s not making you money. That would be a Pyrrhic victory.

Android Ice Cream Sandwich Might Be A Make-Or-Break Release appeared on Noscope on September 29, 2011.

“Android users don’t buy apps”, people will tell you. I have no idea whether that’s true, but I do know I switched to The Mac in part due to the presence of great apps, apps not present on Windows. I don’t think it’s a stretch to claim that a platform will gain in popularity by virtue of having great apps. Which makes launching new platforms difficult. Inherently, new platforms won’t have many apps at launch and unless some really good ones are written fast, your platform might never take off.

Let’s define a great app as being an app that’s simple, beautiful, solves a problem for you, and is fast and stable.

I like Windows. I’ve used it for a decade. There are window-management features I still miss, having switched. I hope Windows 8 will do great. But I can’t say Windows ever had great apps; Windows had good apps. I particularly miss Directory Opus, an over-the-top-powerful file management application with integrated FTP, regex file renamer and too many nice features to mention. This was a good app, and I would love a Mac version. But it’s not a beautiful app. It’s got an uninspiring icon, the UI is cluttered by default, the bundled icons don’t look good and the app itself is only as pretty as Windows native UI is. But does it matter that an app isnt’ beautiful?

My noodling on the matter says yes. During the formative months or years of a new operating system — case in point, OSX — the apps that come out will generally dicatate what follows for that platform. If a slew of functional, great-looking apps come out, these apps will define where the bar is set. Once the platform, for a variety of reasons including the presence of aforementioned apps becomes popular enough, it will obviously attract a slew of crappy apps as well, sure. But the higher the bar was set initially, the fewer crap apps will follow. There’s simply no need to look beyond that one app that filled a niche.

Back when I was still powerusing Windows, ALT-tabbing and generally working things to my liking, I was surprised at my Mac friends and their utter determination to make sure all their dock icons were pretty. Sure, I can appreciate a good icon design, but an app can be good without a great icon, can’t it? This mac-using-friend-determination went further and involved criticising the lack of native UI in the Firefox browser, an otherwise tech-hipster darling at the time. I couldn’t care less at the time. As Yogi Berra said: if the app is good the app is good. Right?

Right. And also sometimes wrong. Windows has good apps, but few of them are beautiful. That’s how it’s always been. As the PC has grown from its DOS infancy, apps have improved in both features and looks. But Windows itself, although functional, was never particularly beautiful to look at. Almost reflecting this, neither were Windows apps. Still, it was the platform with the most apps by far, probably still is. The downside is that most of them are crap. Google windows video converter and you’ll more results than is funny. How are you going to find the one good one among them?

The Mac, on the other hand, made a clean break with OSX. Apps had to be rewritten from scratch, and the operating system itself had received a “lickable” design — it was very pretty to look at by yesteryears standards. The Mac was in a bad place at the time, marketshare-wise, so the trickle of new OSX-ready apps wasn’t overwhelming. Still, because of the clean break and the presence of a userbase, apps did appear. For some reason, these apps were simple, beautiful and userfriendly. Like the OS. You could think the Mac developers at the time felt their apps should reflect the sense of taste the OS itself exuded. Whatever happened, a philosophy of building the one app to rule each niche seems to have been born at this time. Microsoft never made this clean break with Windows, so there was never an opportunity for developers to stop and rethink their apps, and the standard for “pretty” was never very high. The result is a billion apps that do the same thing, because no developer filled a niche in any significant fashion.

I sound like a long-time Apple lover, which I’m not. I switched to The Mac because of the UNIX commandline. Make no mistake about it, there are things about The Mac Way that I sincerely loathe. OSX Lion, for example, is the worst $29 I’ve spent in years. I’m also firmly entrenched with The Android, the Gmail app and seamless syncing is enough to ensure that.

But thinking about the weird voodoo necessary for a new platform to take off, it’s really hard to get around both the Mac and the iPhones portfolio of apps and the standard they’ve set. While it’s all a bunch of evening noodling and gut-feelings, this all tells me that if you want great apps on your platform, you need to combine a beautiful UI with a clean break. It appears Microsoft may be taking this route. Android take note.

The Weird Voodoo Necessary To Spawn Great Apps On Your Platform appeared on Noscope on September 28, 2011.

The amount of energy spent by the Star Wars fan community discussing the Bluray edits is astounding. One fan (or several, I wasn’t paying attention) is taking it upon himself to restore the “non special edition” of Star Wars in HD:

Note how R2s hologram is actually white in the original version, vs. slightly bluish in the “enhanced” version. I totally cancelled my Bluray preorder when I saw this. George Lucas, you ruined my childhood!

That would be me if not for the fact that I discovered other sci-fi television. Turns out, if you have 400 hours to spare, instead of restoring the original version of Star Wars to HD, you could watch every episode of Star Trek ever made! Think about that for a moment.

Don’t get me wrong, Star Wars was good. Especially Empire. That whole Cloud City thing was way better than what they did in Star Trek. Here’s Cloud City:

And this is Stratos from “The Cloud Minders”:

Still, once you’ve seen Cloud City, you’ve seen Cloud City (that is to say, once you’ve seen Cloud City in all three four versions, you’ve seen Cloud City — but don’t worry if you haven’t, they’re pretty much the same save for a tibanna gas refinery). And say what you will about Star Trek, but that Kirk got down with the ladies, even green ones. And not one of them were his sister!

You could also get into Buck Rogers (just pretend season 2 never happened). Listen to them crunchy grooves:

But wait, there’s more. Here’s Erin Grey as Col. Wilma Deering:

… and let’s not forget Pamela Hensley as the evil Princess Ardala. Always trying to score with Buck. Silly girl, didn’t she know Buck preferred good girls? And damsels in distress? And Amazon Women? Occasionally bad girls. But not Ardala! Except of course when he was brainwashed, but that’s another story:

That may not be a metal bikini, but it sure deserves being restored in HD more than the original Star Wars does.

Next time you get an irresistable urge to spend 400 hours on restoring Star Wars to the way it was meant to be, consider if maybe that time was better spent watching Star Trek or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (season 1). You could also watch Space 1999. Or UFO. Or even the original Battlestar Galactica — heck, any Glen A. Larson show. You could even watch Patrick Duffy as The Man From Atlantis! Patrick Duffy! (It’s all in this pamphlet).

You must do what you feel is right, of course. But sometimes we must let go of our pride and do what is requested of us. It all starts with a choice. A choice to spend your credits not on more Star Wars. Instead, roll up your blinds and let in the light! Then roll them down again and put on Buck Rogers. Season 1.

Nitpicky Star Wars Nerds appeared on Noscope on September 27, 2011.

I consider the cupcake is a fundamentally flawed design. It’s basically a lavishly frosted and decorated muffin. The end result is a messy eat that gets dull as soon as you’ve devoured the top. It’s like starting with the dessert and once you’re full you’re given dinner. And not even a good dinner. Sure you can try to improve the cupcake design by carving chunks out of the cupcake-bottom, filling them with interesting curds and whatnot. The Wife tried, and as usual she succeeded. But that still means cutting chunks out of a muffin. Muffins deserve better.

The problem is not the muffin itself. The problem is the stark juxtaposition of the brilliantly inviting cupcake-adornment on the one hand, and the muffin on the other hand, which benumbs the latter into a damp, dreary affair. By focusing on beautiful swirls and delicious embellishments, the cupcake design turns the phrase “icing on the cake” on its head. Instead of being the glorious enrichment of an already delicious treat, the icing on the cupcake has become its sole raison d’être. I doubt even a cherry on top would help. To make matters worse, once you’re done eating that which you’re so obviously meant to eat first, your sugar intake is likely to be at a point where you’ll consider simply throwing the cupcake bottom away. A tragic fate in its own right, but an indictment of the cupcake design if there ever was one.

The cupcake design follows a pattern I see all too often these days. It’s the razor focus on presentation and appearance over substance and structure. As soon as you scratch the surface, you’ll see it’s all a thin veneer, a set piece hiding a lack of usability, functionality or even nutritional value. The prettified product may vastly outsell the more substantial, more usable, more functional, more nutritional alternative, but somehow people will not only not notice they’re being fooled, when their error becomes apparent they’ll pretend their decision was for the better. It’s like a cupcake reality distortion field.

I don’t readily have an alternative to the cupcake. I don’t have a design handy which alleviates the structural issues with said chow. No, I don’t have all the answers. Does that mean I shouldn’t be allowed to point out apparent problems? I criticise because I love. That’s how it’s always been. And even if The Cupcake Defence Brigade comes out in full force, it’ll still not change the fact that the cupcake is a fundamentally flawed design.

The donut, on the other hand, is an absolutely brilliant design. I wouldn’t be surprised if it follows the basic shape of the universe itself.

The Cupcake Is A Lie appeared on Noscope on September 26, 2011.

I like to ask the waiter for recommendations. I have flexible tastebuds, so I can eat and enjoy the weirdest of meals, and when I go to a restaurant I like to eat something new. I’ve had great success with this strategy during my US travels earlier this year. The waiters have been almost universally accommodating, and my inquiries met with the opposite reaction to the Danish waiter. After all, who better to know what’s good than those that serve the menu on a daily basis.

Denmark is not big on tips. For example, tips are already included in taxi-cab fares, so you’re not expected to give extra. Dinners at restaurants are marked up so that even if you don’t give a tip, no-one will look at you with an evil eye (though you are thanked for an extra tip). In fact, you could live a perfectly normal, not-frowned-upon, life in Denmark, not ever giving anyone a tip.

Let me be clear, I do tip when I’m at restaurants. 10% universally, which due to the already marked up prices is a good tip. When I’m in the US I always ask the locals what the comme il faut for tipping is, and I tip the highest percentage I’m told, usually 20%. I tip the Starbucks lady, I tip the taxi driver, I tip the waitress. I do this because I’m told the US is a tip economy, that wages in many walks of the US life are based on the generosity of the clientele. Minimum wage might be viable simply by virtue of the tip. I suppose the master plan of this system is to reward great service with great tips and not so great service with a not so great or no tip at all.

I’ve never been a fan of this system, not because great service doesn’t deserve a good tip, but because I feel it adds a needless amount of complexity to life. And it feels like an institutional form of reward and punishment, on both sides of the fence. Instead of explaining to your Starbucks-barista-with-an-attitude that in fact everyone has bad days but that’s no reason to let it out on you, you just omit the tip. Instead of the tip being the icing on the cake, something you give for extraordinary service, the tip is expected and not giving a tip becomes a negative signal.

On the other hand, I can’t recall having received anything but great service during american adventures, and yesterday I do wish my missing tip would’ve said “hey, dear waiter, next time I ask for a recommendation, please don’t look at me like I peed in your pool”.

The Tip Economy appeared on Noscope on September 23, 2011.

If you’re on the Mac, you should be using ClipMenu. ClipMenu is a small statusbar app that remembers your clipboard history.

I’ve mapped ALT + V for invoking my clipboard history menu.

Point of note, if you’re a Chrome user, you’ll probably want to unmap ClipMenus CMD + Shift + B shortcut, otherwise you won’t be able to easily show/hide the Chrome bookmarks bar.

You should be using ClipMenu appeared on Noscope on September 23, 2011.

Let’s be clear, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari are all good browsers where it matters. If you use either of those, I really have no beef with you. These are standards compliant, pretty secure browsers and they are not holding the web back. I’m not writing this because I want you to switch from Safari. If that’s your browser of choice, then you and I are friends.

Tim Bray is using multiple browsers, but it appears he’s currently using Chrome primarily. Both he and I expect Safaris issues to be resolved in a future update, at which point he’ll be switching back. Back to the browser with separate search and addressbars. Back to Safari, where http:// is still alive, and updates require a reboot. So long as Tim doesn’t switch to Internet Explorer 6, I’m one happy camper. But I’ll still be as confused as ever.

Why would you ever use Safari? appeared on Noscope on September 20, 2011.

I postponed the Lion upgrade for a long time. Snow Leopard worked just fine, after all. Then last night I plunged and upgraded, and man was it a bumpy ride. Being in the know, now, having seen the giraffe, the pragmatic thing you should do is not upgrade. If you’re reading this, however, chances are you suffer from the same thing that ails me, an irresistable urge for the latest. So since you’re going to upgrade no matter what’s smart, here’s what you need to know.

The upgrade itself

1. Back up. If not all your files, then at least the ones you can’t afford to lose.
2. Run Disk Utility. Repair permissions and verify disk.
3. Buy Lion, download it, but before you click install, copy the “Install OSX Lion” file from your Applications folder — that way you can create a USB thumb stick at a later time.
4. Run the upgrader.

What happened to me was the installer hits some undefined snag, reboots, then shows me no other info than “Mac OSX Utilities”, which includes restoring from a Time Machine, re-installing OSX and running Disk Utility. What happened? Where are my files? What am I supposed to do? Yeah, not very pleasant. I ended up clicking re-install OSX, and 2nd time was the charm.

WiFi not working?

What I found out, right after first boot, was that my WiFi wasn’t working. I managed to get it working again by perusing these tips. Specifically for me, deleting the SystemConfiguration folder, and deleting all stored WiFi acces points seemed to do the trick.

Off-putting changes

Your mileage will vary here. Some of you will like the new changes, some of you will want to try the new setup out for a while to see if you get used to it, some of you will want to turn it off right away. I’m among the latter. Here’s a list of stuff I did.

Restore the hidden Library folder

Install Lion Tweaks and unhide the Library folder. This app will also allow you to perma-enable the janky new scrollbars, which I expect to do, but haven’t done at this time.

Reverse (restore) the scroll direction

This is one of the more stupid decisions (more on that a different time), but scrolling has been reversed. You can change it back in System Preferences > Trackpad.

Restore the history back gestures for Chrome

Three finger swipe left and right is now swipe between spaces, and two finger swipe left and right is back / forward in Safari. The latter isn’t working in Chrome yet, so I went to System Preferences > Trackpad and set space-swiping to four fingers and back/forward to three finger swipes.

Hide the dashboard from Mission Control

I find the dashboard utterly useless. So it’s nice that I’m able to remove it from Mission Control in System Preferences > Mission Control.

[Update]: If you’re in the unique situation where you need to use a hosted PAC (Proxy Auto Configuration) file for your system proxy, you do not want to upgrade. If you do, you’re entering a world of pain. A world of pain.

Postpone upgrading to Lion. Don’t want to wait? At least read this [Update] appeared on Noscope on September 14, 2011.

This question recently incited much heated discussion on Twitter¹. What made this spike my interest in such a fashion is my love for science fiction, and in particular the works of Arthur C. Clarke. Many of his ideas specifically, came to fruition decades later. For example, in 1945 Arthur C. Clarke inadvertently invented satellites. He didn’t patent them; as he put it:

I’m often asked why I didn’t try to patent the idea of communications satellites. My answer is always, “A patent is really a license to be sued”.

Now Clarke merely described what would later become satellites. He didn’t build one, nor did he design how such a thing looks. And indeed satellites today come in all manner of configurations and designs, yet they are still, clearly, satellites.

These days Apple is busy suing Samsung for infringing on Apples look and feel patents with their Galaxy line of phones and tablets. Put simply, Galaxy S phones are too like the iPhone, and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is too like the iPad. While the comparison photos in the suit filing appear to have been doctored², I’m not going to argue that Samsung TouchWiz is inspired by Apples iOS (which it clearly is)³.

Focusing on what sparked this discussion — could the tablet devices seen in the 2001 movie constitute prior art for the iPad — I do think that’s fair to say and I’ll get to why I think that is. Whether or not they’re merely portable televisions, they are electronic devices and their form factor is certainly strikingly similar to that of the iPad. But is it prior art?

Prior art:

Prior art [...], in most systems of patent law, constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent’s claims of originality. If an invention has been described in prior art, a patent on that invention is not valid.

To be specific, Apple is suing Samsung over 4 patents. Two of those are related to the iPhone form factor. One is related to how iOS works. The fourth patent is over the tablet form factor; here’s the illustration from the patent application:

If you explore the patent application itself (beware, TIFF file), you’ll note that no specific size is noted in the patent application. The tablet illustrated doesn’t necessarily have a 10 inch screen.

Samsung is in a tight spot. While I find it surprising (and disappointing) that these four patents were granted in the first place, they clearly appear to have been infringed upon. Were I in Samsungs shoes, (and if I were I’d never have released TouchWiz in the first place) I’d be doing everything I could to defend against this suit. Certainly if I was able to find prior art that invalidated any of the four patents in question, I’d look wherever I could, even in my old sci-fi DVD collection. In the case of that one patent Apple has on the tablet form factor, I do see why Samsung would try and invoke prior art on that (though I’m surprised they didn’t pick Picards tablet instead). You see, if Samsung can convince the judge that patent #4 is invalid — that the slabs shown in 2001 are reminiscent of the pencil sketch shown above — it would cut their woes by a fourth.

Samsung is not my favorite Android vendor. They’re not even my favorite hardware vendor. Perhaps it would be good for them to suffer a defeat at the hands of Apple.

But I do consider Arthur C. Clarkes description of a satellite to be prior art. I consider Larry Nivens description of a ring-world to be prior art to the ring shown in the Halo video game. And so, hearing Samsung cite Kubricks tablets as prior art to the iPad is not the dumbest thing I ever heard. Apples tablet is a wonderful combination of a well-designed user-experience and durable, delicious hardware. Even so, the form factor described in their tablet patent is not a unique snowflake, as countless sci-fi authors would have you know.

1. I feel I should apologize to those of you who happen to follow both me and Heilemann on Twitter for having polluted your streams.
2. For example, scaling down the Tab and opening the App drawer for the photo op instead of comparing the homescreen to the homescreen.
3. In fact I loathe Android skins in general and would like nothing more than Apple forcing Samsung to improve, or better yet rid the world of TouchWiz

Prior Art appeared on Noscope on August 24, 2011.

Steve Rogers is a scrawny kid from Brooklyn with his heart set on helping his country turn the tide of the war in Germany, but his physical condition keeps getting him rejected. For his good nature, however, Dr. Erskine is willing to give him a chance to come the super-soldier Captain America, so that he can defeat the evil Hydra led by the Red Skull.

As far as superheroes go, the Cap is one of the sillier ones. While the fashion in which Steve Rogers receives his costume is almost believable, Rogers sneaking into a Hydra camp — all flag-clad — is not. Impressively, the intrinsic silliness of being dressed in red white and blue is trumped by something even sillier: a soldier wearing a bowler hat into battle.

I found the music to be quite anonymous. There was an action montage in the middle of the movie that was out of place and annoying. Some of the climactic scenes were a confusingly put together. There was a post-credit scene, a concept which is starting to feel like a waste of everyones time.

Still, there’s a lot to like about Captain America. Hugo Weaving is an inspired choice — he does wonders with the material he’s given. Joe Johnston delivers on his promise to do a Rocketeer inspired period piece and you’ll see are mini u-boats, tricked out motorcycles and delta-wing planes. The good guys wield colorful weapons and the bad guys are all dressed in black. It’s almost Star-Warsian in its simplistic themes. If you’re into that sort of thing, you’ll very much enjoy this film.

Captain America (2011) Mini-Review appeared on Noscope on August 18, 2011.

So I made a replacement. Here’s before and after:

So please, dear Agile Bits (ping @agilebits, @1password), take this icon and run with it (or create your own improved one), I give it to you free of charge:

Please use it, and I’ll love your software even more.

[Update]: A beta version of 1Password finally has an improved icon:

An icon gift to 1Password [Updated] appeared on Noscope on August 3, 2011.

Stephen Horlander has made some very lovely and inspired, albeit very Chrome reminiscent, browser design for a future version of Firefox.

Sure, it’s all speculative and an early iteration, but there’s a lot to like here. I’m particularly a fan of the total rejiggering of the menu item, which looks like it also serves as an extension shelf.

For too long, the topmost menu has served as a dumping ground for features, symbolizing feature creep and a lack of usability focus. Moving towards a single menu button with large finger friendly buttons is delicious.

Future Firefox UX appeared on Noscope on August 1, 2011.

Six kids are making a zombie movie, as they inadvertently capture a train accident on camera. As they wait for the reel to be processed, they learn that the train accident might not have been a simple accident. The processed film doesn’t make things any less mysterious.

Super 8 is JJ Abrams love letter to Steven Spielberg. From the Drew Suzan-esque poster to the music, from the period to the plot, everything about this movie is an homage to the wonderful adventurous Spielberg era of movie making. And Super 8 works well in it’s places. There are moments when Spielbergs magic is captured.

But Super 8 also lacks some of the natural flow of Spielbergs masterpieces. There are a couple of confusing moments, a couple of messy shots, and at least one — significant — plot point that is somewhat unsettled. The music, while good (Michael Giacchino is my new favourite composer) doesn’t reach the monumental heights that John Williams did — though arguably that task was insurmountable. Finally, like all other movies, it’s too long. 90 minutes is the correct length of a movie. Ask anyone.

Still, Super 8 is a good movie. All the actors are extremely well cast and they act well. Abrams loves a good mystery and he delivers. I can definitely recommend this film.

Super 8 (2011) Mini-Review appeared on Noscope on August 1, 2011.

Step 1: If you’re using a PAC file, go to your System Preferences > Network > Advanced > Proxies > Automatic Proxy Configuration and make sure the URL to your PAC file is correct. Because if you were using Auto Switch Rules, the URL might have been replaced with a weird Chrome extension path.

Step 2: Uninstall ProxySwitchy.

Step 3: Upgrade to Chrome 13. (Here’s the technical background)

Step 4: Install Proxy SwitchyPlus SwitchySharp.

Step 5: You should be taken to the SwitchySharp options page. Configure your proxy and switch rules like you did before. On the “Network” tab, make sure the “Revert proxy changes done by other apps” is checked.

Now your proxy switcher as well as switch rules should be working again.

I’m leaving the comments open in case you have additions or corrections to this.

How to get ProxySwitchy working in Chrome again [Updated] appeared on Noscope on July 14, 2011.

[pdf version]

Should you build an iPhone app? appeared on Noscope on July 12, 2011.

Music Beta is Googles new cloud-streaming music service. It lets you to upload all your music files (up to 20,000) to Googles servers and then lets you stream them wherever you are through a web-interface or to your Android phone. It’s US-only at the moment¹.

How it works

There are two ways to access your music once you’ve uploaded it all: via the Android app and the web-interface.

The Android app allows you to “pin” music for offline availability. This will ensure the album of your choice is cached for offline use. This is a very Google thing to do — your stuff is in the cloud, everything simply accesses it from there. You could call this Wi-Fi sync for your music, but it’s better: all the music you want offline you pin until you no longer want it. It works wonderfully.

The web-interface does not at the moment support offline caching. No doubt Google will implement this feature once the kinks get worked out of the HTML5 local storage feature, but for the time being you can only stream from there.

The web-interface works remarkably well. It’s responsive, easy to use, searchable and music plays excellently in full quality with no noticable delay between tracks. I find it a breeze to use compared to iTunes². If you’re a Chrome user, you’ll also want the Better Music Beta extension for easy play/pause controls and hook-ups with Last.fm (it has has revived my account there). I’m also told the web-interface works on the iPhone (without the pinning/caching feature, obviously), though I haven’t been able to verify this.

So why would you want your music in the cloud? Isn’t it easier and faster to have it stored locally? And what about streaming it to the phone, that’s gotta be expensive on 3G!? The answer is that you want Google Music because you want one central location to store all music. One canonical archive from which all your devices access your stuff. Music over 3G is not going to be a problem in the future, and until then — if you’re on Android — the pinning feature will make sure that’s not a problem. It just works.

Except of course, for the elephant in the room.

Google did not manage to get the music labels approval. So there’s no music store. You’ll still have to rip your CDs, buy your music from Amazon or iTunes and then upload it. There’s also no convenient “matching” service, which would fingerprint your MP3 files or your CDs and let you skip the upload³, instead granting you access to an existing copy.

The verdict

It’s a weird situation. I’ve yearned for a service just like this for years. One I could upload my music to — the music I’ve amassed on hundreds of CDs over the years. But now that I have it, it almost feels dated already. To make matters worse, I’m not sure a music store and a fingerprinting service would’ve improved the situation. In fact, my gut tells me the future is in streaming all-you-can-eat, i.e. what Rdio does. What’s so great about owning stuff anyway?

Wait. Let’s back up. Music Beta is awesome. There’s a hump you have to get over in uploading, and at the moment it works best if you’re an Android user. You also still have to buy your music elsewhere. But what Music Beta is, is distilled awesome. I totally love this thing, and the only reason it doesn’t get 6 hearts is because the music industry stole a heart. Hey music industry, I’m right here. I have money. I want to give it to you. Why won’t you let me?

1. That is to say it works outside of the USA, but you have to be in the USA when you request an invite
2. Disclaimer: I have an extreme bias against iTunes
3. It does bear mentioning that the uploader works very well. It sits in the background and eventually it’s done. In “weeks”, as they say, but if you forget it, and chances are you will, then it’s not much of a bother

Google Music Beta review appeared on Noscope on June 28, 2011.

Smartphones have lock-screens that usually require some swiping gesture to unlock. This is so the capacitative screen doesn’t accidentally unlock in your pocket. These lockscreens come in all shapes and sizes; some reqiure swiping left to right, others upwards. A trend started by, I think, Windows Mobile, allows you to swipe-unlock directly into an app. For example, you receive a text message, turn on your phone, see there’s a new message and swipe towards the messaging app to read it. See also screenshot above from the MIUI Android distribution. That’s smart, right?

But what about security? Your smartphone holds your entire digital life. Should your phone be snatched in a bar, the hardware itself might not be the only thing you get stolen — your Google account perhaps being a more severe loss than the $500 phone. Which is why you should have some sort of security code as your lock screen, no matter if that’s a number code or a security pattern.

The short of it is, everyone should go through this hassle to unlock their phones, at which point the fanciness of swiping directly into an app is lost. Would the time spent working on hi-tech lockscreens be better spent improving the homescreen? I’d say so.

Fancy smartphone lockscreens vs. security appeared on Noscope on June 20, 2011.

M: Too many free radicals. That’s your problem.

James Bond: “Free radicals,” sir?

M: Yes. They’re toxins that destroy the body and the brain, caused by eating too much red meat and white bread and too many dry martinis!

James Bond: Then I shall cut out the white bread, sir.

Great poster, and not a bad movie either.

Never Say Never Again appeared on Noscope on June 18, 2011.

In my day job, I work, among other things, with numbers and stats. That makes me interested in the stats space at large and I often watercooler-discuss what counts as a pageview with my colleagues. Which isn’t quite as simple as it might sound at first. Disclaimer: the following is merely the product of my own observations and musings. No opinions presented here represent those of the company I work for.

So, you type in an address and wait for the page to load. That’s one pageview. Right?

Well, what if you were browsing Google with the new Chrome prefetching technology; your browser might load the page in full without you ever seeing it. Is that a pageview? How about unique visitors… what if you reload a page, is that one or two pageviews? What about an AJAX powered photo gallery that loads inline, does each photo count as a pageview? And what about infinitely scrolling pages? Do they count as a single pageview or as an arbitrary number of views based on the length scrolled or time on the site?

As you can imagine, there are numerous ways to interpret these mechanisms and some boost pageviews quite a bit. Considering ad-revenue or measurements of overall service popularity is sometimes tied to number of pageviews, stats are bound to be all over the map depending on who you ask.

I don’t presume to have the end-all be-all answer to how pageviews should be counted, there are legitimate challenges here. As the web evolves beyond pages and hyperlinks, the way to count statistics is bound to change. Perhaps in the future it will make more sense to count unique views correlated with time on site as a measure of success? I don’t know, but it seems to me it would be sensible for there to be an independant standard for pageview-count best practices. Like with organic food, you could slap a sticker on your stats package and proclaim the principles with which you count pageviews. I can see this being in advertisers interest as well; I mean why not put your money where the pageviews give the most bang for your buck?

How would you count a pageview? appeared on Noscope on June 17, 2011.

• I will use inline-posting and/or bottom posting in emails.
• I will write less text, be more concise.
• If I can’t be brief, I will try and write summaries.
• I will try and use bullets and make text more skimmable.
• I will try and end emails and text-communications with next action points.

That ends todays manifesto for growth.

Manifesto for text-communication growth appeared on Noscope on June 16, 2011.

The web changed things. It’s dictated the path of Android, iOS and Chrome OS. All three are operating systems that approach menial computer tasks in an entirely different way:

• they store things in the cloud
• they hide the filesystem from you
• they’ve shed the shackles of the traditional desktop and windowing metaphor

We no longer have to discuss whether it was actually Xerox PARC that invented the “Recycle Bin” concept, we can instead discuss whether we even need one¹. It’s exciting. A computer no longer has to have a floppy or a disc drive. In fact, often times you don’t even need a keyboard. In the future, we might not need a physical interface at all, controlling everything with voice and gestures. It’s as if the new way has uprooted us from the rut of putting application links in a dock and discussing whether the window close button should be in the top left or the top right corner. Everything is different, and we can thank Apple first and Google second, for finally bringing us this much needed paradigm shift. In one key area of this exciting new future, however, Google and Apple differ in their approaches.

The Apple approach

Apple has had astounding success with their app store ecosystem. While they used to tout that “the web is the SDK”, they eventually did release an SDK for native apps, an SDK that is now making Apple and a bunch of developers rich of of $2.99 downloads. Sure enough, native apps can do things web-apps can’t do currently: they can sink their teeth deep into the hardware of the iPhone and do wonders with files, storage, GPS, gyroscopes, cameras etc. The biggest weakness with native apps may also be the biggest strength: developers have to go through Apple and sell through Apple. This, incidentally, screens out the malware that’s possible when working with native code.

Most recently, Apple has unveiled the iCloud North Carolina data-center which’ll store your digital life and make sure it pops up on your various digital devices connected. This includes documents and spreadsheets (as well as third party apps using the API). Apps are still native, but the documents are in the cloud. Naturally you’ll need an iOS or Mac device to actually use these apps.

The Google approach

In the other side of the ring stands Google, and they’re putting a bunch of eggs in the basket known as web-apps. To Google, native apps are quaint. Native apps are a necessary evil in what they see as a transitional phase towards the cloud. Android is the transition, Chrome OS is the destination. In Chrome OS, there are no native applications², there will be only web-apps. Chromebooks will sport the Google web-apps you’re already used to: Gmail, Calendar, YouTube and so on; web-apps that may seem simplistic compared to native apps. After all, they’re only HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In fact, most web-apps consist of the website and a glorified bookmark. But this bookmark is synced to the cloud, specifically to your account. So wherever you are, if you have access to the Chrome browser, there  you are.

But how could JavaScript and HTML rival a native app? It can’t, at the moment. But that doesn’t mean it won’t, in the not too distant future.

Google is definitely working on it. They’re working to simplify local data storage for when you need to use your apps offline, or for example “Pin” your Google Music so it plays from the cache rather than stream over WiFi or 3G. They’ll be giving web-app developers access to both the GPU and CPU through Native Client (NaCl), and through HTML5 they’re opening up access to rich animation, audio and video playback. Add to that package their O3D technology, which aims to bring real 3D to the web. These are all the bricks and mortar Google believes are necessary to create web-apps that rival native apps. They believe this so much, that they’re gambling a fair bit of their own future on this.

It’s a risky business. It’s quite evident that Apples app store has its share in this paradigm shift we’re experiencing. Apple has proven that if you do it right, you can not only sell music, but you can even sell TV episodes, movies, apps and books. All the while, without rampant piracy; because Apple sells these things at rather fair prices. $2.99 is a price-point that’s so low, most people see no reason to jump through hoops to pirate an application. Meanwhile, Apple takes 30% and developers are still happy, because they’ve never sold so many apps.

Web-apps are a harder sell, mostly because it’s an untested ecosystem. Google are dipping their feet in the water with the Chrome store these days, but with no success worth mentioning. If you can’t sell web-apps, why should you build them? Developers, like in any other business, need money to live. If the App Store will do that for them, then that’s where they’ll go.

Google’s web-app gamble

So if native apps outperform web-apps in operating system integration, performance, features and even revenue, why even bother with web-apps? That’s the million dollar question. Here’s an excerpt from In The Plex by Stephen Levy — “the Google book”:

At the time [2008], Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar [Pichai] had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, “I don’t think we need GDrive anymore.” Horowitz asked why not. “Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.”

Horowitz was stunned. “Not need files anymore?”

“Think about it,” said Pichai. “You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”

When Pichai first proposed this concept to Google’s top executives at a GPS—no files!—the reaction was, he says, “skeptical.” [Linus] Upson had another characterization: “It was a withering assault.” But eventually they won people over by a logical argument—that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do. That was the end of GDrive: shuttered as a relic of antiquated thinking even before Google released it. The engineers working on it went to the Chrome team.

Zap Brannigan, the illustrious captain from Futurama said it best: “In a game of chess, you can never let your opponent see your pieces”. Well Google’s playing the long chess game, and they firmly believe that the future is web-based. They believe it so firmly that all of their apps are web-apps first, Android apps second. Changes trickle from the cloud and to the apps, not the other way around. Google believes the web will be the operating system, that the new-tab-page will be your homescreen, that URLs are on their way out and that bookmarks are your cloud-synced homescreen app shortcuts. Everything will be updated automatically, and it’ll all be tied to your login.

Opponents argue that you can never get a platform feel with such a diluted SDK; that for the truck apps you’ll always need access to the lowest machine-level code of the system (an access even Google’s Native Client can’t grant due to its sandboxing). I will argue that consistency can be achieved without having your hands held by the operating system developer. Sure, with great power comes great responsibility, and you can bet that there’s going to be a period of web-apps that do the same things in wildly different ways. But if Mac expert John Gruber is to be believed, that doesn’t matter in this day and age. To quote Yogi Berra: if the app is good, the app is good.

It’s a high stakes game Google is playing. But they’re the first player in the game, and if The Google Hunch turns out to be right — that web-apps are indeed the future — Google will have built a new pie for themselves. They’ll own the ecosystem and they’ll be giving it away for free so anyone that tries to go proprietary will have an uphill battle. Web-apps will work in a cross-platform way as yet unseen; once you’ve bought access to Plants Vs. Zombies in a cloud app-store, you’ll be able to play it on your Nexus Three, your television, your home computer, your library, in your car… you’ll even be able to play it on your urban-hipster-friends iPad 2. Native apps will be the new “compatability mode” and “rewritten as a web-app” will be the changelog item you’re waiting for.

1. The answer is yes, but not for files. Could be for closed tabs, or it could hold an “Undo” history perhaps.
2. Okay there will be the Chrome browser itself, a media player and a nerfed file manager.

Whither Web-Apps appeared on Noscope on June 8, 2011.

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar → +1 here

Google +1 button anywhere bookmarklet appeared on Noscope on June 3, 2011.

Google Wallet is the all new “wave your smartphone to pay” solution from Google. The logo is a stylized W (for “wallet” one would assume) which kinda looks like soundwaves, or perhaps radiowaves from a Near-Field Communication chip. Similarly, the GLAAD logo evokes both communication and amplification.

The GLAAD logo was first, by the way.

Google Wallet looks all glaad appeared on Noscope on May 26, 2011.

Cleanup HTML is a new WordPress plugin. All it does is add a button to your visual editor. This button, when clicked, strips your post HTML of any div or span tags you might have, usually (but not always) junk tags to have in a post. The plugin relies on core TinyMCE features so it’s really nothing special, but it might come in handy once in a while. Let me know if you find it handy enough to expand its cleaning capabilities and/or submit it to the official repository.

Download Cleanup HTML 1.0 for WordPress

Update: The core functionality is a snippet of JavaScript. Here it is as a bookmarklet, which only works when you’ve selected the visual editor tab.

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar → Remove divs and spans from visual editor

Cleanup HTML WordPress plugin appeared on Noscope on May 24, 2011.

The BBPress plugin is here appeared on Noscope on May 23, 2011.

I like flying Lufthansa. Feels like flying Helvetica. #

Funny. In Unix, prepending a period means you want to hide what follows. On Twitter, it means you want it seen. #

Even more perplexing are the tweets that get retweeted at all:

I just invented the Joen Asmussen magic eight ball. All it says is no. #

The weirdly chosen retweets of mine appeared on Noscope on May 21, 2011.

Google’s IO keynote is over. One day was dedicated to Chrome OS, another to Android OS — one day for each of Googles operating systems. Here’s what thay said about the next Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich:

Our goal with Ice Cream Sandwich is to deliver one operating system that works everywhere, regardless of device. Ice Cream Sandwich will bring everything you love about Honeycomb on your tablet to your phone, including the holographic user interface, more multitasking, the new launcher and richer widgets.

So naturally, people are asking: if the goal is one OS for all devices, why does Chrome OS exist?

Which is a good question. But it’s not the right one. Without spending too much time diving into the semantics of Googles wordplay, what Google meant to say was “one Android OS for all Android devices”; I doubt Google will adobt a Microsoftian “Ice Cream Sandwiches Everywhere” motto.

The right question is: who’s Chrome OS for? Which I’d like to try and answer here.

For your long-distance phone salesman

Chrome is a whittled-down, fast, web-browser. It’s really easy to use, and when you get Chrome in a Chromebook it’s just the browser and nothing else. It updates itself without asking your permission, so it’s pretty secure through its own doing.

Ever been called up about savings on your long-distance? Did a Best Buy employee ever tell your parents they needed a top-of-the-line PC for emails, documents and uploading photos? Did you ever try and explain to your neighbor why she should really upgrade her IE6 browser, even if it’s only for Facebook?

Each of these use-cases could involve a Chromebook. The Sprint long-distance call-center could probably save a buck on ditching Windows XP, since their call-system is web-based anyway. Your parents could probably do with a Chromebook for what they do, and you’d be saved hours of uninstalling smiley-apps when you visit them come Thanksgiving. And your Facebook-crazy neighbor would love her Chromebook so much she’d call it her Facebook.

No, Chrome OS is not for you. You need the gaming or content creation oomph that’s not yet ready to be done on the web. Yeah, with WebGL, you can do some pretty cool things in the browser, but I won’t argue that any one of you content creators still need a truck for your work. But if all you do is Facebook and email, a Chromebook is perfect for you. It’s got a full-size keyboard, and arguably the best browser in the world. Sure, there’s a good argument that for Facebook and email, an iPad might be an even better choice than a Chromebook.

For your mom

The killer use-case for the Chromebook is any place that uses web-apps only yet would benefit from transparent, automatic security. There’s a plethora of places that buy bulky PCs and proceed to run Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 only to book appointments in a web-based system. Think cubicle-laden warehouses full of people with headsets staring at blue E’s all day long and a sysadmin that lacks sleep because he has to update the computers constantly and make sure the firewall and antivirus is running. This sysadmin is dying to get a Chromebook. And so is your mom.

For the man behind the curtain

Googles sneaky little goal with Android appears to be taking on every OS out there. Android will soon run on PCs, and it’ll certainly get both Chrome and Chrome web-apps. Google’s going to push Android wherever it can, and if Google gets its way, many people will soon both play their games and create their content on Androids. Yet, Google thinks there’s a market for ripping Chrome out of the operating system and putting it on its own little cheap device. Just the browser and the web-apps of the future. Android is where the white rabbit will take you, but Chrome OS is for the man behind the curtain.

Android OS vs. Chrome OS appeared on Noscope on May 14, 2011.

1. Open Finder, navigate to System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/Resources/
2. Note: System/Library/
3. Drag ScreenSaverEngine to dock
4. Profit

OSX security tip: create a screensaver shortcut in your dock appeared on Noscope on May 14, 2011.

So yes. I switched to The Mac, and I’ve found a setup I’m happy with. Yes, I said it, I’m very happy with The Mac. Go on, have your moment. No, please, point at me and laugh because it took me so long to “see the light”. Remind me how long I criticized the OS, the ecosystem and the mere culture of The Mac. Get it out of your system.

But why did I switch? In short: the commandline. In my dayjob, I need to know Linux. Which is pretty much like Unix. Which is pretty much what’s at the core of OSX. Which means, if I’m on this ecosystem, there’s less to learn — and that which I do learn has broader applicability in what I do today. Because webdesigners should code.

Now then. Here’s what I had to do to tweak the system to be satisfying for an ex-Windows user:

• Enable form element tabbing. System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > “All controls”. I can’t believe this is not enabled by default.
• Install Cinch. It’s on the Mac App Store, and it does what “Aero Snap” does on Windows 7. It’s the closest to fullscreen I can get.
• Move the dock to the right side of the screen and make it auto-hide. It makes it less jumpy there as compared to the bottom, and whenever I need to drag a file into an app or the trash, the distance to drag is short.
• Install ClipMenu. It does what CLCL does for Windows, i.e. it’s a clipboard manager. My clipboard history shortcut is ALT + V.
• Install CloudApp. Windows users, see: FluffyApp.
• Configure the screensaver to require a password, and create a shortcut to the screensaver in the dock so I can quickly lock the computer if I have to leave for a moment.
• Learn the shortcots CMD + L for “locationbar” in browsers, ALT + Left for “move caret to previous word” and CMD + Left is the equivalent of “Home” (these shortcuts work in the other direction as well, ALT + Right and CMD + Right). Also CMD + H for “hide current window” — which is almost as useful as the “minimize” feature is useless.
• Remove the CMD + ALT + Space and CMD + Space shortcuts for Spotlight, and remap Spotlight to CMD + $ (on a Danish keyboard, $ is the button right below escape). Yeah I’ve been recommended AlfredApp. I’ll get to it, but for now Spotlight is fine.
• Configure the hot corners: bottom left is desktop, top right is Exposé.

Stuff that still bugs me to no end:

• No fullscreen feature and a totally inconsistent stoplight behavior. Yep, Cinch in combination with CMD + H gives me the window management I need, but I really think it’s embarrassing for a modern operating system that all three core window management buttons are near useless.
• The selection model is so broken, George W. Bush’s anthropomorphized foreign policy took a look at it and said DAAAYM!
• I can only resize a window in the bottom right corner. Combine this with a dock that pops out when you don’t want it, and you’ve got a recipe for headaches. I hear this is fixed in the next OSX, but as they said when Krusty the Clown retired: “Why now? Why not ten years ago?”
• The topmost filemenu feels so dated. Why not make it a context toolbar instead of a labyrinth of dropdown menus? When was the list time you clicked “Window > Minimize”? Be honest.

Yup. Have your say.

Okay I switched, are you happy now? appeared on Noscope on May 9, 2011.

• The web-app now has 1,632 users, 17 ratings and 282 installs per day.
• When I first added the web-app, there was already an existing Google Tasks web-app, but that one opened Tasks in a popup window.
• About a month after adding the web-app, I received an email from Google that I couldn’t use the “Google” name. So I renamed the web-app “GTasks”, and rewrote the description to clarify that this is nothing but a love-letter to Google and a teensy nudge for Google to release their own Tasks web-app.
• Very likely that other Google Tasks app also received this email, but did not act upon it, resulting in the removal of said web-app. As a result, users are surging to “GTasks” now.
• Searching for “Google Tasks” in the web store gives you this page. GTasks has been both among those immediate results, and for a period it’s been buried in the little “All »” archive — the latter being akin to web-app cemetary.

A brief update on my Chrome web-store experiment appeared on Noscope on May 9, 2011.

Trying out Wuala appeared on Noscope on May 4, 2011.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

One of my favourite poems appeared on Noscope on May 3, 2011.

Mobile sites that don’t allow you to zoom.

Sometimes, no mobile site is better than a bad mobile site. Case in point, Flickr’s mobile, which has a reasonably mobile friendly layout. The problem? The viewport width is fixed so pinch-to-zoom is disabled. Worse yet, the Flickr image you’re likely to have clicked into from Twitter is smaller than Kim Jong Il’s sense of self-esteem. And there’s no “enlarge” to find.

Most common excuse: “Come on, it’s mobile! Who checks websites on their cellphones?”

AJAX sites with janky back/ forward navigation

That wonderful technology that allows developers to load new stuff in the background without refreshing the entire page also allows for loading entire sections of a website faster. These full-on AJAX websites can appear to load faster, and rids of that white flash of the screen that sometimes appear when you go from one “plain” URL to another. The problem is that due to the way AJAX websites are built, the navigation history needs to be tackled in JavaScript rather than by the browser. Which means most of these fancy new AJAX sites have super janky back-button reliability. Case in point: every Gawker site out there; specifically their galleries are terrible.

Most common excuse: “Hmm, it works fine for me when I navigate the site really slowly, and the gallery is a known issue”.

AJAX sites with the hashbang in the URL

Go visit the fancy #NewTwitter. If it loads for you (part of the problem), have a look at the URL in the addressbar. See that little #! that splits up the address? That’s the hashbang, and it not only makes addresses look cryptic and ugly, it breaks a great many things. Sometimes pages do not load and when they do load, they don’t always load what you expected them to load. The reload button gets janky, and the pages themselves are hard if not impossible to index for search engines. Add to that the fact that you can actually make a full-on AJAX site without using the hashbang in the URL due to advances in HTML5. Just try and click the tabs on my Google profile while keeping an eye on the URL. It’s doable.

Most common excuse: “Oh come on, it works fine. You’re just nitpicking.”

Okay, full disclosure, I both AJAX and the hashbang on my company website. My excuse: “I don’t use that site anymore, and besides nobody ever visits it anymore”.

Multiple consecutive redirects that break the back button navigation, on purpose or not

Ever clicked a search result in Google and wanted to go back to your search results only to find the back button doesn’t work and only “blinks” the page? Sometimes doubleclicking the back-button fast enough, or long-pressing it to step two items back in the history fixes this. But it’s completely user hostile. Sure, some sites do this on purpose — this article is likely to be lost on those sites anyway. Other sites do it for a variety of reasons; redirecting to a mobile view, showing an interstitial ad or whatever oddball reason they have.

What these sites don’t know is that they can keep their redirects, so long as they send the correct HTTP header redirection code; modern browsers will detect these codes and omit them from the history, allowing the back button to function as expected.

Most common excuse: “But we need to redirect to a mobile view! … Wait what? Header codes?”

Implementing a scroll behaviour without the scrollbar

Yes, it looks like the general direction for scrollbars is that of the dodo. In the future, there might not be a scrollbar, it might work opposite to what you expect it to, and so on, and so on. That’s all fine. Seriously, whatever usability improvements operating systems might do to make navigating this or that easier, I welcome.

But it’s too early for all you bleeding-edge websites to jump on this bandwagon. So many aspects of web-browsers rely intently on the scrollbar; that if you break it, or create some kind of fancy JavaScript scrollbar replacement (*cough* Gawker *cough*), things are likely to break in serious and unpredictable ways. My advice: love your scrollbar. You can have your fancy iPad scrolling even if the scrollbar remains there on your desktop.

Most common excuse: “We believe the direction websites are going is that of smartphones and tablets. That’s why we want to adopt these new paradigms to ride the golden wave of momentum that space has at the moment.”

Sites that use QuickTime or Flash for video, without providing a fallback video format

You think Flash sucks? Yeah, it does, but so does the QuickTime plugin. Any video plugin, in fact. It’s been this way for a decade, but we’ve dealt with it because it was impressive video on the web was possible at all. This has changed in recent years, however. Web-video is available on smartphones, set-top boxes and in reasonably high quality. Laymen users are no longer impressed when video plays in their browsers, they expect it. So when they encounter a puzzle piece or a blank area, I no longer think it’s unreasonable to call that bad usability. There should be fallback to other video formats. H.264 or WebM, I don’t care.

Most common excuse: “HTML5?”

Netbanking sites that break when using the back-button

Accessing your bank via the web is no longer a “nice-to-have”, it’s absolutely essential for an increasing share of the population. Considering this, it’s high time these netbanking systems get a usability overhaul. That includes building it in a way that doesn’t break your login authorisation when you click your large convenient back-button, requiring you to click an HTML “back” hyperlink instead.

Most common excuse: “It’s as simple as that huh? You will use the software we provide and be happy! What are you gonna do, switch banks over a hyperlink?”

Inflexible form widgets in surveys or profiles

Ever encountered a survey whose “age” field requires you to select a birth year between 1900 and 2010? How about a credit-card input field that wasn’t updated for newer credit cards that don’t expire until 2015? Even a gender radio-group might rub you the wrong way. Either way, building a good form is an excellent excercise in usability; limiting choice is good, but you need to know when to be flexible. Which a lot of sites fail to do.

Most common excuses: “What other genders are there?”, “If age is a textfield, users are going to write ‘ripe’ or ‘timeless’.”

Sites that use flash for Navigation

Yeah Flash, it still kinda has a place in the world. But that place is not for navigation. Are you listening, Vimeo? That related content sidebar sucks! Get with the program!

Most common excuse: “Our target audience is a different one, one that cares a lot about design and visuals. These people will appreciate that our scrollbar matches the rest of the site design. Enough to halve their battery life.”

What else is there?

I hope you enjoyed reading this incomplete list of usability nuisances. Feel free to fill in the blanks.

[Update]: It looks like Gawker has rolled out changes to their janky AJAX stuff removing the hashbang but keeping the AJAXiness. Check it out on Gawker.com, Lifehacker.com and io9.com. I’m sure their SEO will improve, if not the overall loading consistency.

9 violated usability conventions in 2010 and 2011 so far [Update: Gawker] appeared on Noscope on April 18, 2011.

The greatest music painting you’re likely to enjoy in the foreseeable future appeared on Noscope on April 14, 2011.

FluffyApp — like CloudApp — is a tiny icon sitting in your appplication tray. Drag a file onto the icon, and it’s immediately uploaded and the URL to the uploaded file magically appears in your clipboard. Want to share a screenshot? Drop it on the icon and paste the URL. Awesome.

FluffyApp, CloudApp for Windows users appeared on Noscope on April 11, 2011.

Gmail user should press Shift + ? appeared on Noscope on April 5, 2011.

Snackalicious Tron 3 tidbits appeared on Noscope on March 30, 2011.

A couple of weeks ago, I travelled to the USA for SxSW, or South By Southwest, to meet my new coworkers at Automattic as well as help out with the WordPress booth. After a week of SxSW, The Wife joined me as we travelled to San Francisco, to experience California. Here’s a brief travelog.

Prior to visiting (this was my first time in the states), I had my share of prejudice about America and in particular Texas — prejudice mostly attributed to a previous president — and sure enough everywhere smells like barbecue and trucks are as big as they come. But the one bulletpoint to take away from the presentation that was Austin was that everyone was profusely friendly and mindblowingly service-minded. I’ve always been a fan of American culture, but I’m now a fan on a whole different level. I knew these guys could put a man on the moon, but I’d somehow overlooked what such a feat does to a nation. I didn’t hear the words “I can’t do that” during my stay. Still not a fan of trucks, but I’m now a fan of their drivers.

On that note, damn those roads are big. I’ve never experienced a 5-lane one-way road before; sure enough, that’s the norm here apparently. They also tow cars:

That’s pretty funny. But necessary, I assume, with the vast amount of cars that are here. I’m glad we got a rental car, it’s absolutely necessary. I also now understand why my US team-mates wish me “safe travels” whenever I announce in our team chat that I’m about to bike home. Because there are no bike-lanes here, and if there are they aren’t elevated like the sidewalk is. USA is not a bike-friendly country by any stretch of the imagination.

On that note, my new co-workers make up the most concentrated pool of talent I’ve ever encountered. Plus they’re super nice:

Whenever these guys aren’t busy posing for photos, they’re being awesome. Seriously, it’s hard to say this without offending every previous company and colleague I’ve worked with, but I’ve never met this level of talent, maturity and niceness all in one company before. Which is why I guess such a distributed company can work, I guess — it doesn’t matter if you’re right next to each other if you can’t communicate. Suffice to say, these peeps make up the sweetest bunch.

As do Texan donuts:

Zoom right in — it’s high-res. Watch how the light is reflected off the melted marshmallows and fudge candy.

I didn’t finish the donut in the picture. I’m not worthy to call myself a Texan yet, though I did kinda enjoy these bacon-laden sugar glazed donut holes (from the by-the-way totally awesome Automattic party — that Matt guy sure knows how to throw a party!):

Aside from the Automattic party, I’m ashamed to say I really enjoyed the IE9 party. It was like entering the near future while enjoying great free drinks and good music.

What to take away from SxSW, by the way, is the following: RSVP as many parties as you can, and go to as many as possible. Screw the panels. While good (especially #stopling), the parties brought more networking opportunity than any other offer SxSW had on its table. Additionally, Beluga was pretty useful to stay in touch with the group. It’s actually the first time one of the social apps have been anything but annoying to me.

I tried working on my sugar-intake skills on the rest of my trip by stocking up on milkshakes, the best of the rather large bunch being this one:

San Francisco was pretty awesome. Very nice climate. The rain made me feel right at home:

Fortunately, it only rained a couple of days which we spent at the aquarium, shopping, and at museums such as the Computer History Museum:

The days when it wasn’t raining were absolutely gorgeous, and there were enough of these days that we managed to spot all kinds of mindbogglingly beautiful nature around San Francisco:

Seriously, I thought we had it all figured out in Scandinavia with our awesome nature. But those Muir Woods redwood trees are absolutely incredible. Just looking up at them is almost spiritual.

As a whole, this America visit was a raging success. As big as the trucks are, as lacking in bike-lanes the cities are, as ridiculously non-yoghurt the yoghurt is, as verbosely spelled out as the street signs are, as exhausting the ranch dressing turkey highrise sandwiches are, the bottomline is simply as black as the night without the stars. Google Maps navigation can spell out the street names here. There are elephant seals, redwoods, donuts and friendliness. It’s a winning combination.

America, A Review appeared on Noscope on March 29, 2011.

Exciting times at Automattic. We’ve just launched Jetpack, a brand new plugin for your WordPress blog. It brings you features that were previously WordPress.com only. A lot of features, actually — you should visit jetpack.me to find out all the nitty gritty details — but my favourite features are these:

• All new, iPad friendly WordPress.com Stats
• Some unannounced upcoming features!

I’m so completely proud to have played a part in the team-effort design of the Jetpack experience. We really, really hope you like it.

Put a Jetpack on your WordPress appeared on Noscope on March 9, 2011.

Going to SxSW! appeared on Noscope on March 9, 2011.

Looks nice, doesn’t it?

Still, the styling of UI widgets seem to represents a shift in how Google does things. For the longest time, Google has been accused of doing “non-design” — their approach to design being extremely minimalist with little or no styling and whitespace as long as the eye can see. I believe this trend traced way back to the time when Google swayed us from using AltaVista and MetaCrawler; it was the really fast, no-frills search engine that got us the result faster than any of the other search engines.

I have been a fierce proponent of keeping UI widgets unstyled. I’ve always tried to adhere to the usability studies done by Jakob Nielsen which suggest that the less UI you have to learn, the better; that if you let your buttons, select-boxes and radio groups stay the way their operating system made them, users will know natively what to expect. But something has changed. I feel it in the water.

The nativity argument was a good one, so what ruined it? Could it be the plethora of nasty advertisements that look like alertboxes? Could it be a new digital age where computers are appliances and moms no longer fear them blowing up when they turn them on? Maybe, simply there are so many apps that only the good ones — the well-designed ones — float to the top? Perhaps Jakob Nielsen was wrong all the time — is it enough that a button looks like a button, for people to confident in what happens when pressing it?

Nah, it’s still good advice. I’ll still take a native app over a non-native one any day of the week, and I still think that unless you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t style your widgets. As clear as it is that things are no longer like they used to be — lickable buttons be darned — you can’t go wrong with common UI. This is Unix! I know this!

On native UI appeared on Noscope on March 8, 2011.

We think this new design helps highlight the information that’s most important to you, making it easier for people who visit your profile to get to know you. As the new layout gradually rolls out, current users of Google Profiles will notice that their existing profile will automatically update to the new style. To update and add to your profile, simply click on the new “Edit Profile” button.

Here’s my revamped profile, and here are my thoughts about it:

• It’s good. It’s easy to scan, it’s very easy to create and edit, and it’s a nice overall upgrade to the old style profiles.
• It’s not very pretty. The cleanliness of Googles white color hasn’t bled through and while I’m all for making it easier on the eyes by muting down a bright white, the odd result of gradients, drop shadows and baby blues muddies it all quite a bit.
• Just the other day, I used “truth to materials” as a subtle criticism of a drop shadow that didn’t blend realistically considering the z-index of layers if one considered a website to be physical. It’s worse here; the the white sheet’s left shadow breaks the physics for me. Go on, point at me and laugh for pointing out something so nitpicky. But it gets to me, subconsciously, and my eyes can’t rest knowing the visuals are off like this.
• I wonder what a filled-out profile means for search results.
• Hey, it looks like Google finally got the message, and separated Google Buzz out from Gmail! Maybe it’s useful now!
• Click the “Buzz” tab. Now click the “About” tab again. Fast isn’t it? Must be AJAX. Nerds: notice that the URL doensn’t contain the infamous #! slug. This is HTML5 boys and girls.
• It comforts me that profile items you don’t fill out, don’t show up at all on your profile. There’s nothing worse than an item that says “Gender: Won’t say”.

I’d like a redesign, but everything else about this, I kinda like. That said, it’s no-where near replacing my about.me/joen profile in my email signature yet.

A couple of quick notes on Googles new profiles appeared on Noscope on March 3, 2011.

I Want To Believe, deconstructed appeared on Noscope on March 2, 2011.

We had mistakenly thought mouse scrolling (via scrollwheels or trackpads) and keyboard shortcuts were enough for story navigation—an overly optimistic expectation to say the least. News web sites may indeed become more application-like and readers may grow accustomed to swiping instead of scrolling. But they’re not there yet, as the extensive criticism of the sidebar made clear.

Back when the now almost universally panned redesign was first unveiled, the usual posse and myself had a discussion on Gawkers rather non-traditional new layout. The scrollbar is a good first step, but the real challenge for Gawker will be to get their fancy AJAX layout to load in a reasonable, fast, predictable way and ensuring the back button works properly.

Gawker failed to kill the scrollbar appeared on Noscope on March 1, 2011.

As a ragtag band of survivors on board the lighthugger Nostalgia for Infinity travels to Hela in a desperate search for a weapon against the Inhibitors, a special girl from the badlands of Hela, Rashmika, seeks out to find her long lost brother — a journey that takes her to the largest of the moving cathedrals — as it prepares to cross the Absolution Gap.

Absolution Gap oozes cool. It’s brilliant, hard sci-fi on every level that matters and Alastair Reynolds grasp of the subject is masterful. Absolution Gap is, perhaps, even more cool than my previous favourite in the Revelation Space series — Chasm City (Absolution Gap is the chronological last book in the series).

Alright, it was a bit slow in places — these books are long — but this level of cool deserves no less than five hearts.

Absolution Gap (2003) Mini-Review appeared on Noscope on February 27, 2011.

What happens when you press Enter?

Default appeared on Noscope on February 25, 2011.

It’s also worth noting that the proposed UI change appears to have found its way to the Android Honeycomb browser:

Either way, the direction for Chrome is interesting, and for a number of reasons, it makes sense.

Apple has demonstrated that there’s a great economy in apps, but “app” is an increasingly diffuse term, considering you can create quite complex create apps in HTML and a number of new non-platform-native technologies.

If Google can change the public understanding from an app being something you download and install to rather being a place you visit, the change can help inventorize the web. The result could be easier to make discoverable to users but most importantly, it could be monetized. On the old web, you’d visit The New York Times and throw up in your mouth at the paywall. On the new web, you’d visit The New York Times and get all the free content, but have an option to buy a premium web-app which stores your access credentials while it serves as a bookmark.

The URL bar is the commandline, and like iOS doesn’t need a commandline for you to launch Angry Birds, Chrome doesn’t need a URL bar for you to launch Facebook.

A few weeks ago, I created a Chrome web-app to see how the Chrome web-store works. That app has now been installed a couple of hundred times a week, even though the app is merely a glorified bookmark for a Google service. If we can learn anything from this, it is that pointing at a large fingerfriendly icon on your new tab page is quicker than typing in a URL or clicking a small navigation bar bookmark.

But what about search? Search is the core of Googles business, and Google won’t revamp a proven UI without good reasons. While putting apps front and center makes a lot of sense, there’s a UI challenge in having both search and apps front and center.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Internet Explorer 9s new UI which disconnects the URL bar from the tab:

But with the emergence of Chrome Web-Apps, which are just around the corner, there’s a new, albeit not super strong, argument for disconnecting the addressbar from the tab, and that is that it’s still, despite web-apps, a place people use to launch new webpages. In the case of the omnibar, it’s also where people start searching. In Chrome Web-Apps [...], the omnibar is hidden when you’re inside, say, the Google Maps web-app. How do you launch a new page or search? You have to click “new tab” in order to get the omnibar back.

The solution could be putting the omnibar on the new tab page. Clicking “new tab” would then set text focus on the search field:

It’ll be interesting to see where Google goes with this.

The impending demise of the URL appeared on Noscope on February 22, 2011.

On Feb 17, 2011, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Nathan Fillion said: “If I got $300 million from the California Lottery, the first thing I would do is buy the rights to Firefly, make it on my own, and distribute it on the Internet.”

The Plan:

Phase 1) Generate momentum. We’re going to setup a way people can pledge funding towards the mission of putting the rights to Firefly back into the hands of people who care about it.

I’ll pledge.

Help Nathan Buy Firefly appeared on Noscope on February 19, 2011.

Google is notorious for non-design, though clearly times are changing. Buttons are styled, drop shadows are added. More importantly, links are no longer underlined. For me, that’s the big one.

Certainly the web is transforming, and usability rules are transforming from “don’t style form elements” to “if you style a form elements, make sure they look like form elements”. Are we seeing a similar trend in hyperlink usability? Is the color blue at least sacred?

Quick thoughts on Googles new redesigned topbar appeared on Noscope on February 17, 2011.

Today I’ll use the commonly used names. We have OS called gingerbread for phones, we have an OS being previewed now for tablets called Honeycomb. The two of them… you can imagine the follow up will start with an I, be named after dessert, and will combine these two.

Nailed it:

It’s a good bet the next version after those two is called “sandwich” for a good reason. I bet it’s because the goal of ice cream sandwich is to unify the base again, so phones and tablets run the same system.

Android Ice Cream Sandwich is for phones and tablets appeared on Noscope on February 15, 2011.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of many Googles web-services. I live in Gmail and Google Calendar is my PA. Google also has a little service called “Tasks”, which you might have found it as a little panel in Gmail, though it’s the more accessible canvas view version of Tasks that I’m the most fond of.

I’ve recently thought about Googles Chrome web-store and the fact that most of the apps present there are simply glorified bookmarks; large icons that do nothing but link to a website. What’s the point? Do websites become more discoverable for people casually browsing the web-store?

In the hopes of finding out just that, I’ve wrapped up Googles Tasks service as a Chrome web-app. If you install the app, you’ll get a tasks icon on your new-tab-page, and it’ll take you to the wide canvas view. Since I’m merely piggy-backing on the work of Google, the extension is free forever (or until it’s replaced by a better version, hopefully from the mothership itself). We’ll see how it does and I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, enjoy my first Chrome web-app: GTasks.

My Google Tasks web-store experiment appeared on Noscope on February 5, 2011.

The ending of Lost was ambiguous and fairly hard to grasp, some would say disappointing. I think I’ve finally gotten it, and I’ve decided whether I liked it or not. Here’s what happened.

Spoilers. Stop reading if you haven’t seen every episode of Lost.

Was it all just a dream?

Over the course of several years, we’ve followed a team of plane crash survivors as they explore a super mysterious island. Every episode brought new mysteries and for every answer several new questions popped up. It’s been the best mystery show on television since Twin Peaks.

Sure, going into the final season, a few of us worried that only the God Did It cop out could explain everything that was going on. So when the show finale involved a church and a tunnel of light, I’m sure more fans than myself were confused. Annoyed. Enraged to be frank.

Worse yet; had it all just been a dream? The show famously opened along with Jacks eyes. Since it also closed with Jacks eyes, could it be that six years of television had simply been the lucid dream of the guy from Party of Five?

It’s been a while since the finale, and I have it figured out now. The bad news is, half of season 6 — the “flash sideways” scenes — that was Jacks lucid dream. The good news is, that means five of the seasons were not part of a dream. The island was real, the time travel was real. Most importantly, it means the infamous church scene was also just a figment of Jacks imagination. Which ironically is perhaps the most realistic thing about the whole show, if you think about it.

The Church Scene

What Christian Shepard was supposed to explain to us, but in my opinion failed to, was that the entire alternative universe we saw in season 6, was Jacks dream. Meaning: the hydrogen bomb did go off, but it did not submerge the island to the bottom of the sea. So when Juliet died, she died. When Jin and Sun drowned on the submarine, that was it for them. When Lapidus got the plane up to speed and it flew away from the island, the passengers were pretty much the only survivors of this ordeal — plus Rose and Bernard who stayed on the island of course. When Jack went back to the bamboo forest to lay down and die, in the seconds it took for his mind to dissipate into the ether as his eyes closed, the entirety of what we thought was the alternative universe, flashed before his eyes.

In a way, this fits nicely with the mindfuck we were presented with at the end of season 3; that the flash-backs we thought we had seen throughout the season were in fact flash-forwards. In the same vein, what the Christian Shepard scene was supposed to explain in an  M. Night Shyamalan-esque reveal, was that the flash-sideways were part of Jacks dream. It took me a while to get this, but fortunately this means that Lost didn’t entirely pull a Patrick Duffy shower scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMR5setaS7I

So while Lost might not have answered all the questions it promised to answer, at least the ending wasn’t overly sadistic. Six years of television wasn’t all just a dream. Only half of one season was. Which means:

• It wasn’t a happy ending for everyone. Miles, Lapidus and Claire got off the island on the plane; Rose and Bernard chose to stay on the island.
• Richard Alpert got off the island and got his first gray hair, meaning he can now live out his life normally. Some sort of redemption in that.
• Kate and Sawyer, while also on the plane, both had their sweethearts taken from them.
• Desmond being dragged out of the well and, I’m sure, with the help of now-special Hugo and his number two Ben, had a better way than the plane to get Desmond back to his Penny.
• Faraday, the best character of the show, wasn’t resurrected.
• Sayid died and never got his Nadia; Shannon being the silver medal.

The ending leaves these questions unanswered:

1. What is the island? Alpert teased this question in one of the last season episodes, indicating we’d get an answer to it (Chekov’s gun). We didn’t get an answer to that exact question, but I’m gonna try to piece it together.
2. What exactly was Desmonds role? Why was he the fail-safe for Widmore? What did that machine do to Desmond?
3. What was the loophole that Jacob had found?

So, here’s some speculation.

What is the island?

The Island is the real MacGuffin of the show. Having failed (I no longer think, postponed) to explain what exactly it was, the writers invented The Well in season 6, a mysterious, magical fountain at the center of the island. Having thought about it — I think I approve of this last minute mystery pseudo-explanation. Readers will know that I’m no fan of spiritual answers, and so I’ve been skeptical of this aspect of the final season. But let me explain why I’ve now come to like The Well.

The Well ties up a bunch of hard-to-answer questions in one large bundle of a super-question: what is The Well? Sure, we don’t get a satisfying answer to that one: the well is the source of good and evil in the world. (Which is the kind of “it sounds like magic” Highlander 2 answer I was worried about).

Here’s why I like that answer anyway:

• The well gave Jacob long life.
• The well gave Jacob the mysterious powers that:
  • gave Alpert long life
  • gave the numbers mystical powers
• The well created the smoke monster
• The smoke monster was responsible for the apparitions, including Kate’s horse and Jacks dead dad

Essentially, The Well is the cause of all the most mindboggling events on the entire show. So, while “The Well did it”, isn’t an entirely satisfying answer, as umbrella answers go it’s certainly better than “god did it”.

So what about Backgammon?

Prior to this final season, I speculated my way to an ending. Turns out most of it was right.

Except this:

Forget electromagnetism. Forget time travel. Forget polar-bears, sharks and daddy issues. The real question Jacob and Man In Black has been fighting over since we worshipped celestial bodies and cut hieroglyphs in to walls is this: can we improve or not?

In my mind, there was a delicious duality between Jacob and his nemesis, between black and white, between two players of Backgammon. As it turned out, however, the grand mystery of whether humans are inherently good or evil wasn’t the point of the show.

In retrospect, black and white are good plot devices to build a mythology around. Luke Skywalker wears a white suit, Darth Vader wears a black suit. Good and evil are central to great cinema.

Lost was all about creating a mystery show that could last for several seasons. To that end, J.J. Abrams created a mysterious location, an Island on which weird things happen. If the show took off, it could run for years, and the mysteries could always be explained simply: The Island did it.

Cynical that may be, it doesn’t destroy the fact that we received five years of intense television. A plethora of gorgeous of Lost artwork has been created. A beautiful soundtrack was composed. The episode “The Constant” was made.

So there’s that.

Post mortem: Lost appeared on Noscope on January 28, 2011.

What’s so special about Android mail? Well it’s one of the plain apps, an app that is likely to be used the most on Android devices, and it’s got to be designed to just work, and from that perspective, this is one gorgeous piece of UI design. It’s deliciously almost flat, a design trend I expect to see explode like Apples noisy backgrounds. It’s got very few lines, and it’s got a delicious color palette. Dark blacks contrasting gray and white with a splash of accent color — Matias Duarte clearly gets contrast. It’ll look gorgeous on an OLED screen.

Which brings me to the System Bar — that line at the bottom which holds soft buttons for back, home and multitask, the notification bar, a clock, and battery info.

Wait, always present?

According to the SDK preview, yes.

But isn’t that a waste of precious pixels?

Depends on your point of view. The thing doesn’t use more than 48 pixels, and so it’s probably not a coincidence that these screenshots betray a device that’s 1280×800 px in resolution. That’s HD (1280×720) + 80 pixels. So this particular Android device will be able to play an HD video that’s almost perfectly vertically centered, while still permanently having a system bar present. Combine that with an OLED screen which uses the least power displaying the color black, and I approve.

Android 3.0 SDK preview reveals flat UI goodness appeared on Noscope on January 26, 2011.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever”, said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

In other news, the pope now acknowladges that god was behind the big bang.

Turtles all the way down appeared on Noscope on January 21, 2011.

More interestingly, however, could this mean that the much rumoured digital locker which rumors have had Google building for a year, is near? Yes please.

Googles digital music & video locker right behind that next corner? appeared on Noscope on January 19, 2011.

Mileage will vary, and I’m certanly not applying all the rules, mechanisms and methods Merlin Mann has laid out for us to follow, but the few rules I have adopted, work really well for me.

With the goal of less stress and a more manageable inbox, here’s what I’ve done:

• Whenever I check my inbox, I empty it. Completely.
• Emails that warrant attention are triaged;
  • emails that can be dealt with in less than five minutes, I deal with right then and there
  • emails that require I follow up at a later time, say after a related task is done, I archive under the label “Followup”
  • emails that require that I followup in the future, say a week from now, I archive in the “Hold” label
  • every other email is archived or deleted
• Every day I go through all the “Followup” email through the day
• Every monday, I move emails from “Hold” to “Followup”

So how is this different from having your inbox be your Followup folder, and have starred items be the ones you need to remember? Well, it’s all subjective. For me, the empty inbox translates to less stress, and the division of the followup into “stuff I can do now” and “stuff I can’t do now” further reduces stress.

The trade-off? You need to remember to go through your Followup and Hold folders.

A well-working, minimalist, approach to Inbox Zero appeared on Noscope on January 13, 2011.

The tech pundits are up in arms and snarkily ask simple questions. And sure enough, this kinda sucks, there’s no denying that. On the surface of this, dropping H.264 support (which currently works just fine in Google Chrome) is a desperate attempt from Google to get the web as a whole to flock to WebM, the open alternative to H.264. Presuming Google goes through with this, I have a few questions of my own as to what and why:

• What will happen if Google Chrome surfs on to a website that has an H.264 video? Will the file download, or open in a media player installed on the computer? Or will it simply show a “missing plugin” icon? Or will the playback be handled by the Flash Player?
• If this is indeed a codec-war standoff, does Chrome have a large enough user base to make a difference? And wouldn’t it then be a better play to simply transcode all YouTube videos and have them play back best in Chrome?

I’m not ready to drop Chrome as my browser — it’s still the best one out there. Are you dropping Chrome?

[Update]: Playing devils avocado, here’s food for thought:

Google Chrome to drop H.264 support [Updated] appeared on Noscope on January 12, 2011.

Beware of light spoilers in the above video.

Please watch this film in the cinema while you still have a chance. I absolutely loved it, and I want a sequel.

The Making of Tron Legacy appeared on Noscope on January 8, 2011.

The App store is software for Macs which makes it easy to find, download and buy new apps. It’s generally acknowledged that it’s going to be a huge success, though there’s been some controversy, mostly from developers:

• Apple takes their usual 30%
• Buy once, download as many times as you like (the Steam model)
• There are no demos

The demo aspect is what’s interesting to me. Supposedly this mimics the Apple iOS App Store, where demos apparently arent’ available either. Which confuses me, because I’m sure I’ve tried free demo versions of full games on a number of occasions. Oh right, they were called “Lite” versions. So what’s the deal here? Are demos actually fully welcome in the App Store, as long as they’re simply named “Lite” or “Express”? Is it simply an issue of silly semantics?

Here’s the Apple law of the land:

2.6 Apps that are “beta”, “demo”, “trial”, or “test” versions will be rejected.

7.4 Apps containing “rental” content or services that expire after a limited time will be rejected.

I don’t particularly object to these rules, though I do like to try a demo version before I shell out the dough. If Apple had gone the Android route, however, this problem could probably have been solved with a refund window. As it stands, however, we have Lite and Express versions, but no demos. So what’s the difference between a Lite version and a demo version? Particularly in the context of games, this is what I was able to come up with:

1. Some game demos expire after a set amount of time. I’m pretty sure this is a rejection reason.
2. Some game demos have, say, 10 levels of a game and require you to purchase the full version to get the remaining levels.
3. A few game demos, say space shooters, provide all the levels but don’t allow you to upgrade your weapons or try better ships.

Barring #1, would #2 and #3 reject you from the App Store if you called your demo “lite”? And how about circumventing these rules by simply linking to a downloadable demo from the App Store product page? I don’t have any answers, only a confused look on my face. Are we looking at an App Store that for all intents and purposes still have demo versions, just a different kind of demo version?

Apples App store demo policy: does “Lite” count? appeared on Noscope on January 7, 2011.

This must be Matias Duarte’s art style. Or perhaps the movie Tron Legacy designed the new Android?

No matter, I loved Tron Legacy (please go watch it so I can get a sequel!), I’ll learn to love this as well.

Nice lock screen. It’s still “something you drag from A to B”, but it’s probably not something Apple’s patented this time. Also, there’s a good chance this won’t unlock in your pocket (if you could fit a 10 inch tablet in your pocket, that is). That font though… It’s very 1993. The wallpaper is very 2001 though, which is actually not bad, just very techno.

New homescreen still shows select app shortcuts and widgets. So that’s classic Android with a new coat of paint and a nice new ubiquitous app launcher button (so you can launch a new app without going to the homescreen first).

The three buttons in the bottom left reveal potential awesomeness. We’ve been told (at one point) that Android tablets won’t have any facing physical buttons — no permanent context buttons — which in itself is a step forward. But these buttons, to me, look like “back”, “home” and “switch between apps”. Which, if true, spells the not-soon-enough death of the infamous “menu” button. Why is this good? It means that lazy Android app authors can no longer hide settings and help links in a mystery-meat hidden context menu. If they want their apps to be tablet compatible, that is.

Hey, that almost looks like Google Chrome, doesn’t it? Does that mean improved speed, standards support, bookmark sync, tabs and extensions? Oh my. I can see myself wanting one of these tablets now.

Overall, this looks really nice. Some of it is a bit off, but the sharp diagonals and mostly flat colors aesthetic seems to land in a good place between the delicous but spartan Windows Phone 7 UI and the overly textured and glossy iOS UI. It’s got some growing to do, but this a good place to grow from. The best thing: this UI feels like a serious jab at skin vendors like HTC and Motorola. People are going to want this UI, not “Sense” or “Blur”.

Notes on Androids new Honeycomb UI appeared on Noscope on January 6, 2011.

CSS only 3D text effect appeared on Noscope on January 5, 2011.

Abstract helper monkey paintings for WordPress.com Stats appeared on Noscope on January 4, 2011.

1. Download a VPC image of your choice.
2. Rename the .exe file to .rar, then unpack using a RAR unpacker on the Mac
3. Create a new Virtual Machine in Virtualbox. When you get the chance to select an existing disk, do that and point to the VPC image.
4. Boot. The VPC image may require activation and/or a password (which resides inside the .txt file that came with the VPC image)

Yep. There’s the activation hassle. It’s Microsoft. What did you expect? It’s still easier than manually installing Windows XP.

Use Microsofts official Internet Explorer Virtual PC testing images in VirtualBox on OSX appeared on Noscope on December 28, 2010.

Opening files isn’t the problem

I wanted to solve this issue for her — because hooking up with iTunes, or emailing the document to yourself, sure isn’t any kind of elegant. So I set her up with Dropbox. She puts a document in her dropbox on the Macbook, opens it in Pages from the dropbox on the iPad. Now that’s elegant. Until she wants to save the document back to the dropbox. Which as it turns out is a huge hassle, but one that can be solved, nonetheless.

See, in order to make things userfriendly on the iPad, the filesystem is abstracted away. This is a good thing. Photos are stored “in the photo app”, documents are stored “in Pages”. The problem is, one iPad app can’t save files “in to” another iPad app. So Pages can’t store files in the dropbox.

The solution

The solution is semi complex and inelegant. To save documents from Pages to your dropbox, right on your iPad:

1. Sign up for DropDAV. If you have a free dropbox account, your DropDAV account will also be free.
2. Once you’ve signed up, open Pages on your iPad. Click the little “Save” icon below a document in Pages overview mode.
3. Now select “WebDAV”. You’ll be shown a login page. Type in https://dav.dropdav.com, then your dropbox login and password.
4. If you logged in correctly, you can now save the Pages document to your dropbox, even overwrite the version stored there if the filename is the same.

Note: DropDAV is flaky, and this is a hacky solution. It will not work if your Pages document filename contains “odd” international characters such as æ, ø or å.

Here’s hoping Apple will one day embrace the cloud and spool back the reliance on iTunes. In fact, even a global documents folder with an API that opens access to dropbox would be an improvement.

How to save documents from iPad “Pages” app back to Dropbox appeared on Noscope on December 28, 2010.

I abhor anyone who tries to close WikiLeaks through force, political pressure, threats or circumvention of the law. If anyone is to blame for a leak that shouldn’t have gotten out, it’s the source of the leak, i.e. the person who uploaded files to the WikiLeaks website.

I’m not a particular fan of WikiLeaks, or Julian Assange. Neither of those things matter, because no matter how much Assange wants it to be about him, it’s really not.

Because the thing about WikiLeaks is that — like Pandoras Box — once opened, you cannot close it again. You can’t bring back a file an embassy once it’s been mirrored. You can’t unsee a cable once read. You can’t unleak a leak; once the snow is yellow, it’s yellow until we don’t care about it anymore and it melts on its own. It’s so easy to build a WikiLeaks-like website — it’s so easy to make leaking 100% anonymous. Even if Joe Lieberman and team PayPal somehow managed to close down WikiLeaks and all its mirrors and delete all leaked cables and documents, a new leak site would spring up like a mushroom. Whether you, I, or the government like this or not, this is now the world we live in. There’s no going back. The only way to move forward is for governments to conduct business in a way that survives transparency.

Three thoughts on WikiLeaks appeared on Noscope on December 22, 2010.

In 1982, Kevin Flynn succeeded in creating a virtual computer world which he could physically enter. In 1989, Flynn disappeared, leaving his 8 year old son, Sam Flynn, heir of his Encom computer empire. As adult Sam inadvertantently gets digitized into Flynn’s “digital frontier”, he finds things are no longer quite as rosy as the childhood stories he was told of The Grid.

Tron Legacy is a visual and musical get-together in your prefrontal lobe. Within the first five minutes, the remarkable Daft Punk soundtrack will be blasting at you as Sam rides his Ducati through the city. This is the soundtrack Daft Punk were born to make, and this is the perfect movie to go with it. Just a few days ago, I finished re-re-watching Interstella 5555, the Daft Punk anime musical that accompanied their fantastic Discovery record; I kept thinking I wanted another Daft Punk musical. As it turns out, you can consider Tron Legacy to be such a musical — a visual interpretation of the dark house tones of the tunes.

A nice point of note on the 3D — this is the best use of 3D I’ve seen; because most scenes aren’t in 3D — it even says so before the movie.

While the music propels this movie to greatness, the film itself is a delight. Jeff Bridges is great as usual, and the director understands his mannerisms. There’s even the occasional trademark Bridges “man” uttering thrown in for good measure, and it’s all such a perfect fit. Jeff Bridges, gorgeous techno-world designs, booming sound-design. Light-cycles. Olivia Wilde. A reference to “Sweet dreams” by Eurythmics.  Daft Punk in soundtrack and canonized in situ. This film has got it going. I was absolutely and exhileratingly entertained for two hours, more than I’ve been in years. I completely love this film.

Okay, so the story isn’t over the top great. There are moments — most of them — when Clu, a.k.a. digital Flynn, looks mostly rubber. At a couple of points, the pace of the film grinds just a little bit, and let’s face it the concept itself isn’t terribly deep. In fact, if you didn’t enjoy video games in the eighties or early nineties, you’re probably — most likely — going to find Tron Legacy to be confusing.

If you did enjoy videogames in the eighties or early nineties — even if you just like Daft Punk — Tron Legacy is absolutely something you should watch.

Tron Legacy (2010) Mini-Review appeared on Noscope on December 20, 2010.