Interface Design and the iPhone

I found this thanks to John Gruber at Daring Fireball and have been waiting days for the video to come back on line. It’s Edward Tufte performing a superficial dissection of the iPhone’s human interface design choices.

It’s a treat to hear someone as adept in the field pulling apart the elegance of the iPhone and finding — largely — very little fault in the choices the design team made. He makes an point between the iPhone’s use of “image resolution” and “Cartoon resolution” that I don’t get completely — that it’s somehow a bad thing that the Stocks widget looks cartoony compared to his example of a stock chart, which looks more like Excel. His re-imagined Weather app compared Apple’s elegance to something you might see on a screen at NIST.

It’s short, and worth watching if you’re an iPhone aficionado.

Just caught this on TechCrunch via Daniel Burka on Pownce — not sure how it slipped by me! Pownce, the long-compared-to-Twitter micro-blogging tool, comes out of beta tonight. Great news for Daniel, Leah Culver, and Kevin Rose, who’ve worked hard to build a great tool for social aggregation.

I’ve been using Twitter and Pownce for the last six months, on and off, and I’m torn between the two. Which is a whole lot better off than I was before, when I was torn between just how stupid I thought they both were in the first place.

Twitter, Pownce, and legions of tools that have adopted the “Status” function, all appear to address the question, “what are you doing right now?” With Twitter, I didn’t really care at first. The public posts range from invites to meet-ups to updates on bathroom performance, to shots at sports teams, to cries for help.

Then, I ran into some folks on both services who know how to actually use them. Take Alex France, for example, who goes by the Pownce moniker dignews. Alex posts tech news and links with short headlines, and has become one of my favorites to follow, because he seems to share my interests. Alex is 16-years-old, from Manchester, England.

Or how about Thomas Hawk, president of photo-sharing site Zooomr, who is using Pownce as part of his photographic jihad to share a half a million finish, corrected images with the world. Every day I’m greeted with a handful of gallery-quality photography.

For me, where Pownce takes the hands-down lead is in offering the ability to group my friends into sets. Close friends? Co-workers? Each can have their own group, and you can ensure that messages you send to one group don’t clutter up the inboxes of others, who might find the message inappropriate.

Look at it this way: I set up a new “Clients” group. I can use the tool to send quick status updates to my clients who might need to know timely information about our work together. In a recent software launch, the client group served as a key lynchpin in delivering timely information to the people who needed to know it. And that, after all, is the key to employing a tool that actually fits the job.

This is the biggest hurdle, still, and I hope the Pownce launch drums up enough mainstreamish press to get the message out: these social aggregator/micro-blog services aren’t just for tweeners and programmers — there’s a business use, too. Finding the sweet spot where tool and utility intersect will help us all be more productive, and efficient.

If you use either tool, find me here on Twitter, and here on Pownce. And don’t forget to find me here on Facebook, and here on LinkedIn, too!

Jens Alfke writes a great insider post on his decision to leave Apple and move into life as an independent developer. The whole thing is worth reading, but the part that gets to me is this:

It’s deeply ironic: For a company that famously celebrates individuality and Thinking Different, Apple has in the past decade kept its image remarkably impersonal. Other than the trinity who go onstage at press events — Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller — how many people can you name who work for Apple? How many engineers?

Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

Axia College of University of Phoenix MySpace PageI haven’t posted much about my experience at University of Phoenix. It’s a big place with many challenges and, even with nearly a decade under my belt there, I’m ill equipped to comment on most of them. But I find this one downright funny.About six months ago the director of marketing called me in to a meeting with the MySpace folks. They were evaluating alternative media for marketing purposes and had been approached by MySpace with an advertising package. For over $100,000 they’d set up Axia College of UOP on MySpace and give them ad space on the MySpace internal site network, driving clicks back to the Axia MySpace page. This, for something like three months. (note: I could have that backwards — it’s been a while — but it could be $300,000 for a month. Either way, it’s ridiculous).

I just thought the only ONLY thing that defined the Red Sox was that they couldn’t win the world series. So then they won, and they’re not really the Red Sox anymore. They’re just some anonymous team that players leave so they can go cut their hair and join the Yankees.

– Curt Siffert

Today, the WSJ reports that Apple has reduced prices on all their DRM-free tracks to $.99, making the per-track price equal to that of tracks with DRM throughout the store. In addition, they have launched a wide new selection of indie artists and labels under the iTunes+ moniker, making Apple the new champ in volume of DRM-free music, buy maybe one or two tracks. Amazon recently launched their MP3 store, with over 2 million tracks and $.89 per track pricing for most songs to widely positive reviews from industry. 

Wow. Did I ever misjudge this band. I hereby take it back — almost everything I said about them a few weeks back.If you’re not following the Radiohead saga, several weeks ago, the band made news when they announced they would not sell their new album on iTunes because the store refuses to sell albums as albums, and instead requires artists to agree to sell at least a few tracks track-only, at $0.99 each.I still contend that shunning track-only sales is silly. But in the context of my hyperbole, I said I’d ignore the band entirely as a result. Then, I went on trying to ignore them.I tried hard.

Amazon launched their MP3 store — as widely predicted — but did it in the first commercially viable fashion the market has seen since iTunes debuted years ago.Others have tried, but all have failed to gain much ground on Apple’s store, not because of onerous copy protection schemes, but because all the competitors to date have been so, so very stupid.

I won’t buy the next Radiohead release. As a matter of fact, I haven’t thought about Radiohead in years. I remember Radiohead listening parties in college, but since the advent of the iTunes Store, they’ve fallen off the radar.Until this morning, when I had a chance to catch up on the Wired blog. Eliot Van Buskirk has a quick post about how Radiohead has shunned iTunes not because of DRM, not because of pricing, but because the online store refuses to sell their releases as album-only.

According to an EMI, Radiohead refuses to distribute via Apple — even through Apple’s DRM-free iTunes Plus store — entirely because of Apple’s policy of selling tracks individually:”iTunes insists that all its albums are sold unbundled, but 7digital doesn’t.Radiohead prefer to have their albums sold complete. The artist has a choice, and if they feel strongly then we respect that.”

This is a tough one. It’s tough not because of some overpowering ethical nerve, but an emotional one. Artists certainly should have the right to determine distribution, but to allow this archaic emotional attachment to a format to get in the way of public access to the material is foolish. This is a statement many bands tried to make when Apple launched the music store — bands that realized quickly that they hadn’t the might to change the course of history through market protest. The beautiful part about this whole argument is that Radiohead, like ColdPlay and Pink Floyd, are lousy to listen to one track at a time. Fans know this, and I have to imagine would by the whole album on iTunes, even if the option existed to purchase one track at a time.And now, Radiohead’s refusal to be in the iTunes store has further cemented them in the category of emo-also-ran, along with the Beatles’ army of attorneys, and all the others who chained themselves to the old ways just before the bull dozer mowed them down. And I’m forced to say of their next release, “who cares?”

Between Dan Frakes and John Gruber, we have a great summary of the current mess that is the ringtone business, particularly as it is addressed by Apple:

What it comes down to is, as Gruber so eloquently put it, that “the distinction between ringtones and songs is an artificial marketing construct.” The entire ringtone market is based on artificial restrictions—not physical ones, not technological ones, not even logical ones—put in place to create a market where one would otherwise not exist.

It’s this last point that is particularly important for our purposes. The idea of creating a market where one doesn’t exist is the foundation of entrepreneurialism. It’s how the computer and cell phone industry got started. It’s how people are wearing jeans as a result of the Westward Expansion. It’s how Las Vegas was founded in the middle of the desert.

This came in courtesy of Irina Slutsky’s Pownce feed this morning:

The Project for Excellence in Journalism compared stories on user-news sites with content from traditional news sources. A key finding: The news agenda of the user-sites — Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us — was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the stories users selected didn’t appear anywhere among the top stories in the mainstream media coverage studied.

Shock and awe indeed. This is covered in full at journalism.org. The cognitive dissonance here stems from news organizations’ need to keep the lights on, while the populace is, in most cases, interested in being informed. The challenge: a cursory glance across any of the social sites bears little in terms of news I need to know. Let’s see… top “World & Business” headlines right now on digg.com…

OK, so I’m interested in Ron Paul and Castro. But 7 Underwater Wonders of the World? You build me an underwater city as a weekend getaway at the foot of the Mariana Trench, and we can talk.

For years, Apple’s made waves by wholly replacing successful products with radical revisions that truly evolve the product line. Today’s “Classic” announcement is an interesting departure. I’d fully expected the company to discontinue the current larger iPod with Video in favor of an iPhone-form factor phoneless iPod. They did introduce the phoneless iPod, the iPod “Touch”, but left a slight revision of the old school iPod in the channel.

The squabble between NBC/Universal and iTunes — the latest squabble — is particularly amusing. The network has said they’re pulling their content and — in related news — said they’re launching a new service of their own, Hulu.com. The new portal has not launched yet, but the splash page up right now looks like this:

Note, second from the bottom left: “Drive”. That’s right, NBC is using this opportunity to go out on their own, to enjoy the freedom of their new lives unshackled from the iTunes master, by working with FOX, who’s promoting a show they had so much faith in that they didn’t even air the final three episodes on broadcast television. That’s not really fair. Guilt by association isn’t the problem. No, the problem is that NBC is creating a new network, building a new brand where TV isn’t, in order to be out from under the thumb of a quality service where TV is.

On August 1, 2007, I broke up with my employer. There’s another post in me on that point, and it has something to do with why I haven’t posted here in exactly that long. But for now, I need to talk about MySpace. Because today, I broke up with her, too.

And it’s not because I was down-sizing my social relationships. In fact, I’ve upsized — at least in raw numbers. No, I broke up with MySpace because… well… I think she’s been cheating on me.

She hasn’t sent me a substantive message in months. All I get, every single day, are messages from other people she’s seeing, people hawking their bodily goods online, wanting to be my BFF. There was a time, not long ago, where people from my deepest past would find me on MySpace, would reach out to me, touch me in some new way. Not so, any longer.