Nobody Wants A Stylus

The Future Is Now

Monday May 25, 2009  

So I went to see Star Trek this weekend — I know, you’re totally shocked, right? — and found myself marveling once again at my iPhone. It’s been a while, not because the phone is any less amazing, but it’s now an old friend, and I sadly take the amazing for granted.

See, there’s a great scene in Star Trek involving an antique corvette and the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage. It’s a great use of the song for the soundtrack and a welcome step forward for the Trek universe.

But the amazing thing was that, having the song stuck in my head for the better part of two days now, all I had to do to buy it was fire up the iTunes store on my iPhone and buy it. I don’t know why I didn’t have it before, but I didn’t, and it took all of 20 seconds to find it, buy it, and put it into my playlists. When I sync back with my computer it will go into my general library.

Simple, but very cool. Isn’t living in the future great?

iPhone Copy and Paste

Tuesday March 17, 2009  

I’m not going to make any predictions about today’s iPhone 3.0 Special Event. Not only is my track record at such things is abysmal, but I’m also a wait-and-see kinda guy. In a few hours we’ll know what all the hullabaloo is about.

That said… there’s a persistent rumor that the iPhone will get cut and paste. (Finally, some may say.) I’m really of two minds about this.

On the one hand, there are times I would really like to copy text. I’m not sure how it will work cross-application, but it if it’s anything like the (funny but thoughtful) mockup Adam Lisagor put together after the original iPhone was released:

iPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich on Vimeo.

… then I think it will satisfy a lot of the people who have been asking for it since 2007.

On the other hand… I’ve gotten along fine without copy and paste for two years. I don’t want to start yelling CHANGE IS BAD OH NOES from the window, but if there’s a tradeoff between more functionality and performance, I know that I’ll take performance. I’ve not been happy with the responsiveness of the 2.x codebase on the 1st Generation hardware, and I don’t expect 3.0 to improve it. (2.x seems faster on the 3G hardware, but I suspect that’s my observational bias. Anecdotes are not data.)

Anyhow: Cut and Paste on the iPhone.

I guess we’ll all see if it’s there in a few hours.

(Video via marco.org.)

Update: Well, Cut, Copy, and Paste is in 3.0, and it looks nice. Let’s see how it works out.

On Profanity and App Store Rejections

Tuesday March 10, 2009  

Apple rejected Loren Brichter’s Tweetie 1.3 today for containing offensive words in search results. In the comments on the linked picture, we find out that another new app, Human Weather, was rejected for the same reason.

Human Weather is now available because they implemented a profanity filter. Which is beyond ridiculous when you think about it, given how much vulgarity and porn you can find with Mobile Safari.

Don’t get me wrong. Most everyone involved loves the app store. This isn’t a fundamental flaw with the model, or suddenly the one piece of evidence that turns the App Store into an evil, scary thing.

But seriously, Apple. Fucking knock this shit off.

(Via @tj on Twitter.)

Update: Looks like Tweetie is in!

A Simple iPhone

Monday March 2, 2009  

I love a simple iPhone. I wish I still had one.

Here’s the thing: with the evolution of the iPhone platform and the introduction of web clips and the App Store, my iPhone has gotten cluttered. Very cluttered. There are screens full of applications that I haven’t used in months — including some very good applications!

That’s the thing about clutter. It’s not about the quality of the thing that takes up the space, it’s the utility.

I had the opportunity to play with my mother-in-law’s iPhone 1.0 last week. That’s right, the original software from 2007, with the blue camera tint and original Calculator icon. Core Location? App Store? iTunes Store? Dream on. Just three rows of icons, a black row, and another row of icons.

Were there things I missed? Sure. Core Location and decent camera coloring would have been nice. But, surprisingly the phone was even more a joy to use than my own. Perhaps it’s the nostalgia talking, but the lack of clutter made the phone feel more useful.

I realized how much I needed to declutter my iPhone.

Decluttering your iPhone is much like decluttering your closet. To steal a page from Peter Walsh, if I don’t use it, or it doesn’t ‘fit’, then it doesn’t matter how good of an app it is — it’s clutter. And it needs to go.

I resisted on a lot of the applications. There are some that I thought would be useful in the right situation, like Easy Wi-Fi for AT&T iPhones or Night Camera. But that situation never comes (I have never used the Easy Wi-Fi application) or is so rare that it’s really just a waste of mental space on the screen.

So out they go (with a nice high rating, naturally.)

If you’re having trouble letting some of these utilities go, just remember — you have the App Store on your phone now, and can download it again in a few minutes.

There are other apps that I know other folks adore, but just aren’t right for me. Pandora Radio is a good example of this. It’s a great application, but I don’t listen to a lot of music on my iPhone (or in my car). Pandora has sat on Screen 6 since I downloaded it, and I’ve launched it exactly twice.

Unless those hypothetical other people are using your phone too, these kinds of apps need to go, too.

(Oddly, I find that I do use Shazam to identify songs I hear in passing. It’s one of those applications that works like magic, and I love trotting it out as part of the dog-and-pony show.)

Web clips are just as bad as native apps in contributing to iPhone clutter. I haven’t read the excellent 538 since November, so why do I still have it on Screen 3?

Also, why did I have both Amazon Mobile and my Amazon wish list bookmarked? Or Twitterrific, Hahlo, and Mobile Twitter on a single screen? Don’t get me wrong — these are all good apps, but in most cases the website is sufficient.

It’s unfortunate that the managing the layout of the iPhone Springboard is so difficult. It’s maddening to get everything the way you like it on the device, only to have iTunes add deleted applications back on your next sync. I quite enjoyed the App Sorting in iTunes concept video:

The only constructive thing I have to add to that idea is that I’d love to be able to remove some of the default applications. These aren’t bad applications, they’re just not what I want on my phone. Stocks, Notes, and Contacts: it’s not you, it’s me. I’m just not that into you.

Decluttering anything is tough. It requires you to envision how you want your life to be, and how you want to interact with your environment. It makes you look at those 7… 8… okay, 9 screens full of icons and ask, do they really add any value to my everyday life?

Because face it: you deserve tools that make you happy to use them.

Always Leave A Way Out

Friday January 30, 2009  

I’m beginning to hate browser sniffing again. I mean, seriously — is it 1997?

I don’t know about you, but every time I visit a site on my iPhone that immediately redirects me to wap.domain.tld, I groan and know that I’m in for a crippled mobile web experience with no way out. I groan even louder when I see that it’s been optimized for the iPhone.

(nfl.com, I’m looking at you!)

The best part about getting trapped on a WAP site is that it loads fast. It’s designed to be read on a mobile phone, after all, and anyone who has developed for mobile devices knows that their browsers are a potpourri of varying broken implementations. It is a hard, hard task to make those sites work, and the only way to do it is to sniff the browser and display an optimized site for the particular device.

But now we have Mobile Safari.

So I don’t really have anything against browser sniffing per se. It’s a valid technique of optimizing content for different browsers and devices. To make many precise CSS layouts work, you have to sniff the browser. That’s fine. And providing optimized iPhone interfaces through browser sniffing is also fine.

What I object to is making your main website inaccessible to a mobile device. And most of them are.

Getting stuck in a WAP site is not just about the UI; they nearly always have less content than the main site, which is almost always the content you’re actually looking for. Attempting to find information about the NFL Network’s airing of the Texas Bowl (where my alma mater played this year) on the iPhone was an exercise in futility. The mobile website uses all the iPhone controls, but has a tenth of the content.

In the parlance of the internet kids these days: you’re doing it wrong.

You know it’s an iPhone reading the page. You’ve optimized for it. But if you’re limiting the content on your WAP site, let the user actually use the main site! Yahoo did this a year ago and thankfully realized what a mistake it was. Don’t force iPhone users to a different domain, even though they’re a mobile device. And give iPhone users a choice between your shiny new interface (which is very nice and easy to use) and your clunky old one (with all the juicy content.)

Unsurprisingly, Amazon gets this right.

It boils down to two good rules of thumb:

1. Always leave your users a way out.
2. When in doubt, copy Amazon.

Seriously.

I continue to be impressed by Amazon.com’s iPhone web interface. Calling it a web app doesn’t do it justice, because it’s more than just a one-trick pony. It’s a faster way to shop when you’re on your iPhone, and it’s accessible to all iPhone users, not just people who have downloaded their web application.

But, much like its web interface has done for years with ecommerce sites, Amazon does the little things right, like letting you go back to the full, non-optimized version if you want to browse comments or multiple entries. This is the right UI behavior — it’s okay to sacrifice some functionality for optimization gains, but not content.

It seems like a simple thing. But simple things are not always easy.