The Curious Case of the Backwards Touchpad
There's one small change that comes with OSX 10.7 (Lion) that I'm finding fascinating from a user interface perspective: the reversal of scrolling direction with the touchpad. By default in Lion, when you move your fingers down, your view goes to the top of the page, and when you move your fingers up, your view goes to the bottom of the page.
Huh?!?!?
At first, this feels incredibly awkward, and I was thankful that there was a setting to reverse everything back to normal. I mean, of course when I move my fingers down on the touchpad, I want to go further down the page, right? Why would Apple dare change something so obvious and intuitive?
But wait a minute... the obvious way wasn't the way I scrolled on a touch surface like the iPhone or iPad and I didn't remember those feeling awkward. So I decided to experiment with leaving the reverse (back to "normal") setting off.
A few days later, and now the crazy new way of scrolling feels obvious. I suspected that it might, that it just felt odd because I was used to doing things the other way. But I didn't expect to be able to switch back and forth between old and new easily, which is what happened. I now hardly notice the change from a 10.6 default touchpad scrolling style to the 10.7 default style.
Why is that?
Well, the best I can reason is that both are pretty decent mental models. To make the "old" way feel natural, you simply imagine that the portion of a page that you see represents your field of vision, and to see more beyond the last point at the bottom, you need to move your "eyes" (via the touchpad) down. To make the "new" way feel natural, you move the virtual page instead of your virtual field of vision. So, just as you would read the bottom of a real page if you couldn't move your eyes, you push up on the "page" (via the touchpad).
You could make an argument that the "page" model is the more accurate one, as you can actually see other parts of the screen (and thus the page isn't really just out of your field of vision, but rather it's completely obscured by other elements on the page or the bottom of your monitor). If you think of it, it seems like a lot less work to push one element up in order to see the bottom of it, as opposed to pushing all the other elements down. And that's effectively what you're doing with the "old" style of scrolling.
It will be interesting to see if Apple manages to push overall change in this area. I imagine they're going to have a few things going against them: (1) the option they provided to switch back is probably easier than forcing your brain to recalibrate its expectations, (2) most people will probably mistake "habit" (or "tradition") for "natural" (it's not like we don't do this in other areas of life), and (3) the touch interface isn't directly connected to the display like it is with an iPhone or iPad. I think the last of these is why this "new" method feels odd in the first place. When the touch interface is the display, we have to construct even less of a mental model. Most of it's just there for us. With a touchpad and regular monitor, our brain has to do one extra translation step, and that's just enough to make it a challenge to switch models.
To be clear, I think both ways are completely valid and don't think that one provides a huge advantage over the other when the touch interface and viewing interface are disconnected as with a laptop or desktop. But I think it raises an important question that should be on the mind of anyone designing user interfaces: are you adapting the machine to the person, or are you counting on their ability to adapt to the machine? The former can feel frustrating and nitpicky and far more trouble than it's worth, but after you get it right, it's hard to imagine settling for the latter.
iPad: First Impressions
Despite not being completely blown away with it (the "it's indistinguishable from magic" propaganda from Apple was a bit much, even though I think the company is probably still the most innovative out there when it comes to making tech products that are actually a joy to use), I decided to line up for the Canadian debut of the iPad. From a pure software developer perspective, it's hard to imagine the future not being filled with more and more touchscreen devices like this, and I've had a few ideas rolling around about apps that might be cool when used with the larger screen (over the iPhone) that the iPad gives. Maybe I'll even be able to beat the expected dilution of the market as the app store gets flooded with iPad apps to do just about anything. (Need to walk your dog, but too lazy to do it yourself? There's an app for that!)
And, admittedly, although I don't share the love of Star Trek that has become part of the caricature of your average software developer, I do find it hard to resist getting to know a new gadget.
So now that I've had a few days to play with it, here's what I do think is amazing about the iPad. Here's the spoiler: it has nothing to do with the hardware.
That's not to diss the people who actually make those electrons flow down the proper channels in such a way that I'm able to hold a tiny screen in my hand for ten hours per charge that makes the room sized computers of fifty years ago seem like a joke. It's just not my domain. I don't see the value of objects in and of themselves. But if we can do something really, really cool with them, well that's when it starts to get fun.
And I think this might be why Apple's iPad has been met with a more dimmed enthusiasm than previous products. It probably doesn't have any more or any less innovation involved than any of their previous products had at the time. It just doesn't seem like as much of a leap. Why is that? I think that a big part of it this time around is that none of the software that Apple has bundled with the iPad is that much different. Hell, they're even using the same operating system that they use for the iPhone with it. I can have an extra column when I use email? A fuller looking calendar? I can read an eBook on it? Well, woohoo.
Then I decided to pull down the first iPad edition of Wired Magazine and I saw the full potential of what devices like the iPad might bring to at least one very troubled industry.
It's mainly about the advertisements.
I found myself almost more interested in them than the various articles. If this isn't the moment for the advertising industry to lead a full charge away from old media forms and onto the Internet, I don't know what is. While everyone uses television commercial breaks to go to the bathroom or refill their drink, the ads in Wired magazine actually made you want to poke around and learn more. They were able to prove you with a simple and elegant, non-intrusive introduction. No blinking neon signs here. Just flip the page to be onto the next article. But maybe something caught your eye? Well, there's a play button you can press to see a video version of the advertiser's message. And if you touch some of the headings, they'll pop up more info for you. Just if you're curious. You don't have to. It's up to you. And hey, if you're really, really interested, here's a link that will take you to their website to actually buy the thing.
Wow.
It's like being able to have an entire website of information about your product embedded into a single page of a magazine. The purpose of advertising is to interrupt your routine. And that's not always a bad thing. Imagine if you had to actually go out and search for that brand new technology that will make your life so much simpler. How would you even know what to search for? While convincing us of needs that we didn't even know we had can be predatory, and in the current world of advertising it often is, there is nothing inherently evil about wanting to inform people about something they don't know about. What ads like these allow is for the advertiser to catch your attention with the typical "this will change your life" sort of appeal. But it also allows them to be more honest and give you more information right away so that you can decide for yourself how much your life will change and whether it will actually be for the better. I'm not so silly as to be utopian about this and say it's the end of deception in advertising. But I do believe that it provides an avenue for companies to get their message out in a way that doesn't litter our day-to-day lives so much. And that's good for everyone involved.
I imagine there'll be more than a bit of money out there in making these sorts of content rich ads easier to produce and embed. And I don't think there's much argument anymore that the Internet friendly ads like those in the e-edition of Wired are more valuable for advertisers and consumers alike than their old-media predecessors. It must be a heady time for the ad networks to consider the exciting possibilities ahead of them if they decide to go for quality over quantity.
So what else am I interested in seeing on the iPad? Textbooks. Imagine being able to open your calculus textbook, look at a graph it uses to explain a concept, and actually change values to see what changes on the graph? Or to be able to step through a virtual chemistry experiment? How about seeing the effect of your incorrect physics solution on the orbit of a space shuttle around a planet? I think that this level of interactivity could have an amazing affect in the area of education. And who out there doesn't believe that this is an area that we need to pay more attention to?
It's never the hardware that changes the world. It's how we decide to use it. And I can't think of any other device at the moment where this is more apparent than in the iPad and it's soon-to-be brothers and sisters. They could easily be a throw away fad or the future of computing, depending on whether or not they're able to capture the collective imagination of the software development world...
Caveat:
As this article points out, the Wired app may be, technologically speaking, a horrible mess. I agree that simply slicing up images to build your interface when you could be using a lot of HTML 5 to get the same effect is incredibly kludgy, and the amount of space that requires for an app is unacceptable in the long term.
However, I disagree profoundly with the idea that it was a mistake to move away from a more browser-like experience for the e-version of a magazine. I think us techies are sometimes too dismissive of the importance of how something looks. The success of Apple in recent years should have proven that to some degree, but maybe it's one of those never ending arguments. I've read other articles that suggest it's a step back that the Wired app doesn't try to more closely resemble a regular web browsing experience.
But I'd suggest that we shouldn't be so quick to say that the way information is organized right now on the web is at all optimal for every situation. In fact, an article in the current edition of Wired (which, granted, I couldn't have linked to in the app version) points out what I think anyone who still enjoys sitting down to read a real book or even magazine article will intuitively know.
The fact that we tend to follow links, etc. while reading content online, often only skimming content for something in particular that we're interested in, can result in a much more superficial form of learning. To be sure, we're able to get many more viewpoints around any particular issue, and thus get a more well-rounded perspective on it (and I think this is a very positive result of the web), but we're also less willing to sit down and give a lot of time to considering a single viewpoint before going elsewhere. There is a value that you get from sitting down with a single work (be it a novel, essay, or whatever) from a single mind, and giving it your full attention that you can't get in any other way. It may not seem as useful in the fast paced world of the web, but I think we ignore that at our own peril.
So I actually like the fact that the Wired App presents a unique and visually engaging experience that makes me want to actually sit down and read an article all the way through. It doesn't leave me feeling fidgety, wondering what else is out there on the Internet that I'm missing out on because I'm focusing all my attention on this one thing. And I hope that as we bring the experience of reading things like novels more into the electronic realm that we consider this. Yes, it's great to be able to cross-link and do all manner of Web 2.0 stuff with a novel. But I don't want that stuff to be in my face. I want it to feel like I'm reading a book most of the time. I think that's valuable. I like the idea of giving a designer control over everything, even the font face, so that he or she can present their full vision to me for a given publication.
There's a lot of thought that goes into laying out a magazine or even a novel for printing. Just go to any bookstore and pick out a pulp book to compare to one from an author du jour. Don't look at the quality of the writing. Look at the quality of the presentation. Taking away anything about the actual content (i.e. remove the actual author and subject matter from the picture). Which one's easier to read? Probably the one with the bigger budget. And that doesn't mean you need a big budget. It just means that considering those minute details involved in choosing typefaces, line spacing, layout, page-breaks, etc. (which tends to happen for books with a bigger budget) makes a difference. It's nice to be able to change fonts, etc. on something that's poorly laid out. But I'd rather just get a good quality layout. If I'm still paying $10 or more for an e-version of a book, I actually expect it. A plain text document might give me all the power in the world, unless my interest is actually reading the thing.
So, yeah. Can Wired on the iPad use some improvement? Certainly. But I still think it's a step in the right direction, especially for an avid reader, not to be confused with an avid web-surfer, although you often find people who fall into both groups.
Coffee, Diaspora, and Indulging in the Test-first Kool Aid
Today was a day to be thankful for caffeine. I truly don't know what I'd do without coffee. Even when I'm not tired, I need to have my cup. My favourite, when I'm not freezing (in other words, for about 3 months of the year in Edmonton) is the iced americano. It was one of the worst tasting drinks I've ever had when I first tried it, but it grew on me. A lot. When nothing else can get me out of bed in the morning, the thought of iced coffee will. Coffee, in general, functions as an energy booster, a social thing, and creativity enabler all at once for me. Some people instantly feel more creative with a cigarette hanging out of their hands. For me, it's coffee. My only real addiction. And you have to admit, there are worse things in the world than coffee to be addicted to.
But enough about coffee. Today was also the day we all heard about Diaspora, a "new" social network idea that will decentralize social networking and allow users to own their own data. They've raised a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars the last time I checked, before any code has even been cracked. I found this amusing for a couple of reasons. One, it's certainly not a new idea. I wish I could find the article I read a couple of years ago on it. It was as intriguing then as it is now, but everyone was just so enamoured with Facebook at the time. I also remember a friend of mine who's like the canary in the mine shaft, talking feverishly about the need for people on social networks to be able to encrypt their data so that they are able to turn it off at any point. I'm not really sure how that would have worked, but as usual my friend was before his time in wanting to give users more control. Had he waited a bit for the world to suddenly have social networker's remorse, maybe he could have been collecting a bunch of startup seeding. If you happen to run into this friend of mine and you don't understand what he's saying, write it down somewhere and meditate on it every day for the next few years. And in 3-5 years, you'll be the only one who isn't surprised about the way things are. The other thing that I found amusing was the fact that people I'm pretty sure don't care much about privacy were suddenly cheering these guys on, and I'm sure I'll have to keep biting my lip a bit over the weeks to come. Don't get me wrong. I fully support what they're doing. It just bugs me when the success of an idea outshines the idea itself. Make no mistake, if these guys are successful (and there have been attempts before them to do the same thing), it won't be because they raised a bunch of capital. It'll be because (a) they truly believe in the right for people to be able to control their own data and (b) the world at large has recognized the disadvantages of entrusting its personal data to a handful of organizations.
It's funny because most of us in growing up have at some point "learned" that idealism is inherently wrong. It's a mark of maturity when you start to scoff at those silly idealists who think ideas alone can change the world. Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything. And yet right now is the perfect time to be an idealist. True, ideas are bountiful, but so are busy, busy people who don't really know what they're doing. While marketing companies scramble to concoct the next great viral sensation, a squirrel (Canadian, I might add), can pop out of nowhere and take the world by storm. Why? Partly because it's funny. And partly because of the idealism of remix culture, which has the audacity to think that you can just take a couple of pictures without asking and photoshop them together to create something interesting. It may very well be that to be a true pragmatist these days is to denounce the dogma of pragmatism.
Anyway, this has taken a sharp turn into philosophy land. I admit, my bias has always been towards looking up to the people who first bring ideas into the world, rather than towards the ones who figure out how to mass market them. That might also be why I like smaller companies. They don't have enough resources to coast on a bad idea for too long, nor to follow too far behind someone else's good idea. They don't have the inertia. The only way they're going to make it is if the idea's good and they genuinely believe in it. That actually creates inertia, and any time I see it, I want to be a part of it. I don't think you can ever truly fail unless you give up on the idea that lit the fire in the first place. Hmmm... sounds like good advice. Maybe I should follow it more often myself 
Seems we haven't left philosophy land just yet... wait... I think I see the exit somewhere up ahead.
I got to pair program with Sean from M7 (who is also a fellow musician) today. What is it about tech people and music? Anyway, I think that after we get the remote coding down to a science, we should try a remote jam fest. Sure the latency will be horrific, but it'll simply remind me of the good old days of digital recording. I've been pampered by this 10 millisecond stuff for too long. It's time to go back to the old neighbourhood like Rocky did in Rocky III.
The company is also starting to look at making user interface refinements, and although it can sometimes make for frustrating coding to tweak things at that level of detail (it tends to cause a lot of back and forth movement with any given feature), I think the result will be worth it. When you know all the ins and outs of a system at the code level, it can be easy to forget how confusing it can look to an end user, even a very technically proficient one. Sometimes changing a font or adding a bit more whitespace can make all the difference.
Lastly, I got to see the good side of test first development today as Sean and I solved a bug that at first seemed really strange, but became more and more obvious as we came up with the perfect test for it. And while making the fix, other tests that started failing kept us on the right path. In the end, everything passed again, and we were quite confident with the fix. I'm hoping to study up a lot more over the next few weeks on the philosophy behind when to write a test and what kind of test to write. I think it's going to be one of those things where the more I learn about it, the more I'll realize there's way more to learn.
There you go. Your second last regular stream of consciousness post before I start to slack off on my tech blogging duties.