Have you seen it? One of the best interfaces I’ve ever seen. Check out the quicktour movies for some true Apple design excellence. Nevertheless, some social software aspects (no, photo albums don’t count) would have been cool — and dragging keywords to pictures in order to tag them (like in iPhoto) is still a hassle…but wow, what an interface! I’m getting 1995 SGI vibes here (In a good way, that is! You know, that everyone-else-is-still-in-the-stone-age kind of feeling.).
Being able to mark the ones I’ve read is good.And that means podcast integration! Aside from not being able to browse the Apple Podcast Directory for some reason, the interface for storing podcasts is really nice and simple. I’m switching from iPodderX, which used to be my tool of choice.
There are serious threats to the iTunes+iPod value chain now in the form of other better, more open music stores, and new music players integrated directly into mobile phones with slick form factors. Is this the first step towards the downfall of Apples vertical value chain? Will the next version of iTunes offer a sales platform for podcasts? Will the next iPod be a mobile phone? Many questions, and as usual only Steve knows…
Andrew Baio (creator of upcoming.org) just told me that the upcoming API now has full tag support. I’m now displaying tags on the event feed here.
The addition of tags+API definitely was the tipping point — now I’m really using the service. I’ve got several iCal subscriptions; Stockholm, Helsinki, and Berlin.
Couple of things; The hierarchy of metros should probably be flat altogether, editing of events could be more wikified, the fixed event categories should be dropped in favor of folksonomy. All in all: Kudos to Andrew!
Greasemonkey is clearly showing the way. What’s so cool about it is that it enables users of websites to actually contribute code to them!
A good example: I used to be annoyed by the fact that Flickr used Flash to display photos on individual photo pages. On OS X, it causes a slight delay in the loading of each page, destroying the otherwise slick user experience. Meet Lickr. It solves this problem quite elegantly by providing a javascript version of the photo display widget. Sure hope the Flickr folks are listening!
I wonder if there is a way for Greasemonkey to add something to the User-Agent HTTP-header so that site owners can be notified when their sites are being “remixed”. That would totally close the loop.
Just enabled tags on the blog. You can see it in action on the sidebar “previous posts”-feed. Makes it consistent with my del.icio.us-feed, and it makes Technorati happy (Actually my post is the only one showing up under collaborativefiltering).
And I bought a copy of ecto, which is by far the best blogging client for the Mac. I also hear the next version has even better tagging integration…
Hierarchic filesystems are dying a slow death. While we wait for Apple to get its act together, we can use Quicksilver (my machine’s own little Google) to advoid endless clicking and drill-downs in open/save-dialog boxes. If you use this script, you can get rid of the clicking altogether!
I’m on the boat from Helsinki to Stockholm, eating breakfast. Just returned from a weekend in Helsinki where I, among other things, attended the Aula Exposure book release brunch. The book, which I wrote a piece for, has come out both interesting and beautiful. Shoutouts to Alex, Jyri, Marko and the book designers for such great work!
I spent last night in the cheapest possible cabin with a drunk trucker from Russia and two gays from France, also drunk. Scary — the minute these strangers entered the cabin, I knew I would sort of have to watch out for them all night. I tried being rational and just shut my eyes and sleep, but my gut feeling was constantly saying “You don’t trust these guys”. And so it happened that my relentless thoughts once more returned to the subject of trust and computers.
Kids lost in car game on the boat
To me, it’s obvious that one of the trickiest issues in interface design today is an issue of trust. The average user suffers from lack of trust in computers and the softwares running on them — and this, in a sense, keeps us from designing smarter programs and interfaces. By “smarter” I mean programs that can drastically reduce human workload by conducting some kind of behind-the-scenes reasoning — I’m talking about ways of improving the way the computers work with us rather than the way we work with computers (but clearly the former imposes radical changes to the latter).
Of course, this widespread lack of trust has many reasons. A big one is that computers still are dumb and buggy. Another one would be that we’ve seen so many “smart” UIs and agents who turned out to be stupid and annoying. Remember the “smart menus” from Windows ME? You were desperately fumbling after the disable button after having experienced this numskulled something constantly deciding for you which menu items were important and which were not.
Yet, we are inevitably moving into a future where we will be forced to put a lot of trust in computers in order to get by. We are seeing evidence of this already today. For instance, I trust my mail client to take care of junk mail for me. I have just a vague concept of how it’s doing it — probably it’s by using a combination of boolean logic and neural nets — but I’ve learned to trust it nevertheless. In essence, what I trust is something — call it an agent or entity — capable of some kind of reasoning. Yes, I know that real people programmed it’s behavior at some point, and that it’s actually them I trust and that it’s actually them I ought to blame if something goes wrong.
But, in everyday life that’s not what happens — in everyday life you will blame the damn program when it filters out the wrong mail. I mean, imagine calling up your secretary’s mom and complain just because your secretary happens to throw important stuff in the bin! And even if you do complain, that won’t get rid of your secretary. Besides, it probably turns out the programmers stole the AI code from some obscure open source project anyway. And the guy who originally wrote that code died.
I have, and millions of Hotmail users have, without even being fully conscious about the implications, engaged ourselves in a trust relation with a computer program, at least on the level of our everyday life.
In fact, the moment we make the computer do work of this kind for us — reasoning if you will — we simply have to trust it, or at least relate to it as if we trusted it.
Annoyingly enough, since it’s just a computer, we can’t blame it when it does wrong, and this gives rise to a lot of frustration. Actually it makes people furious.
On the one hand we have this entity which happily overtakes hours of our work without a complaint, on the other hand this work is done exclusively on the premise that we’re not permitted to complain if things go wrong. And we won’t get an excuse, nor a promise that the same thing won’t happen again. Actually we can be quite sure it will.
And yet, we humans seem to be able to establish a sort of pseudo trust in all kinds of devices and processes - and the need for an ability like this seems to grow by the day. Just think about everything from games to search engines to smart book recommendations to the segway to electronic pets (for your kids) to modern jetfighters to autonomous trains. Everywhere things are starting to use all kinds of different models for autonomous reasoning, and we just have to sort of go with the flow and trust these devices, even though we don’t know how they think and even though we can’t expect the devices themselves to explain this to us.
Where will this take us? I’d still say someplace good. I think this development is necessary, inevitable and that it eventually will bring harmony, possibly virtuosity or even a divine feeling of greater symbiosis, to computer use.
But we have a long way to go, and before we get there — much much more frustration.
This is where I put down thoughts and reflections on the web, music, design and entrepreneurship. It’s also a place for my bookmarks, my photos and my portfolio.
I’m a student at Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm School of Economics. You can find out a lot more about me and what I do in my portfolio.
| Skype | +46703639900 | vCard