Ok, I’m not going to hack (too much) on a phone that hasn’t even been released yet, but if this screenshot is indicative of HTC’s ability to “hide the windows mobile ui” on their new “Touch Diamond” iPhone competitor, they really should just pack it in.

What is up with that giant mess of arrows in the upper right hand corner? Do we really need a T9 slider next to the spacebar? What are those tabs attached to, and why do they look like buttons? Why is there a giant radio button next to “home”? I think the copy of GEOS that shipped with my C64 looked nicer than this.

On the weekend, I did something semi-unusual: I installed a major new operating system on the day of it’s release. This is only semi-unusual because my hesitation only applies to Microsoft operating systems. On Linux, I’d install the latest and greatest of everything, and then potentially spend a few hours cleaning up the mess I’d made (remember, the purpose was to play, not get any work done).

In any case, Leopard Day arrived and I happily set about installing it on my Macbook Pro after making a full system backup on my new Seagate FreeAgent Go external drive. I’d be interested to see a correlation between external hard drive sales and the release of Leopard, as I’m fairly certain you’d see a fairly hefty spike. As an aside, the FreeAgent is a nice little drive that satisfies my major requirements: lightweight, and bus powered (meaning it doesn’t need an external power supply). It’s not overwhelmingly fast (it took about 3 hours for SuperDuper! to archive my 70gigs of data), but once Time Machine gets running I don’t notice it at all.

It’s taken a few days to get fully comfortable with Leopard. I have run across a few annoyances (and bugs) but the good definitely outweighs the bad.

Without further padding the content of this post, here’s a collection of thoughts and tweaks related to Leopard that you might find interesting:

• The Address Book no longer has support for Bluetooth devices. This is disappointing, but Blue Phone Elite looks like a good replacement for that functionality, as well as what Proximity provides.
• On a related note, Proximity seems to work just fine, as does everything else in my Calendar Synchronization post (excepting, of course, the Address Book SMS stuff).
• Quicksilver was picking up the backup copies of my applications from the Time Machine drive. To disable this, in Quicksilver select Catalog / Applications and de-select “Find All Applications”
• Spotlight was finding stuff on my Time Machine drive as well. I’m not sure if this happens to everyone, as the drive wasn’t empty when I initially plugged it in, and various posts in the Apple discussion groups seem to indicate it’s not a common problem. Solved by adding the Time Machine backup directory to Spotlight’s Privacy page.
• Spaces is great, but I wish it were a little more configurable. I run a multi-monitor setup most of the time (laptop sits open to one side of an external monitor). What I would really like is to have separate “spaces” for each monitor. Unfortunately, Spaces sees the two monitors as one large workspace, and switching to a new space swaps both. I would prefer to have Mail, iCal and iTunes open on the laptop monitor at all times, but setting those apps to “All Spaces” makes a big mess when I disconnect the laptop and run as a single screen.
• Spaces seems to have several bugs related to switching applications. In truth, I don’t know if these are bugs in the apps or in Spaces, but certain apps don’t behave themselves very well. For example, Cmd-Tabbing to Firefox will send me back to the correct Space but not activate Firefox. Adium doesn’t seem to respect the “All Spaces” command very well. And Photoshop CS3 has trouble with it’s fading UI elements when you activate it from another Space. None of these are show-stoppers, but hopefully they will get resolved fairly soon.
• The FreeAgent Go comes with a double-headed USB connector - one for data, and one for power. Turns out, you only need the data plug connected on the Macbook Pro. This is nice, as the MBP only has 2 USB ports and they are on opposite sides of the machine. The additional power connector is, allegedly, only required for certain laptops that don’t provide enough power over a single port. Fair enough, but the MBP does so you can forgo plugging them both in.
• I’ve had a few power-related issues since the update. Once, the system crashed when waking from sleep. On another occasion, the system refused to power down. Finder stopped, but the OS hung showing nothing but desktop. I have a suspicion this is related to Bluetooth devices (doh!). I’ve also had a few occasions where, when reconnecting the external monitor, I log in and the system immediately goes to sleep. I can wake it and log in immediately with no harm, but it’s still odd. I’m considering resetting the system manager to see if that clears things up.

On the day after Apple announced a record quarter, John Gruber runs down a list of possible reasons why people are switching to the Mac. I’m not going to argue with any of his statements — for the most part, I think he’s dead on. But I’d like to add one of my own, based on my personal experience of switching from the PC to the Mac.

I’ve always been a PC user, at least since our first 386SX-16 that my Dad bought for us when I was in high school. Before that, I used Apple IIs at school and spend many a day playing Pools of Radiance and coding text adventures on my Commodore 64. I had certainly played with Macs, but they always seemed foreign and inaccessible to me. I can vividly remember commenting to a friend (in the days of Windows 3.1) that using a Mac made me feel like I was trapped in Windows and couldn’t get out of it. Keep in mind, I also had about 4 different versions of my autoexec.bat and config.sys files that could be swapped in depending on the memory requirements of the program (or, more likely) game I wanted to run.

In any case, I pretty much lived and breathed PCs from DOS 4.2 through to Windows XP, and made my living developing web and Flash applications on a variety of PC hardware. In the meantime, I also ran Red Hat Linux on an old Pentium 100 (complete with F00F bug) that served as my router in the pre-LinkSys NAT box days, and even dabbled with a Debian (unstable) KDE desktop for about 9 months — although frequent reboots to Windows (or sluggish sessions in VMWare) to use Photoshop made it impossible to give up on Windows completely. All the while, I followed the progress of OS X from a distance, happily digesting Ars Technica’s in-depth reviews of the OS on every release from pre-beta through to Tiger. I’m a curious fellow that way.

For me, using a computer has only partially been about the tools that it provides. It’s also about playing. I love to install things, mess around with servers and settings, just to see if I can get it to work. It’s the same reason I bought a PSP — because it was hackable. I could make it do fun and interesting things. I could play with it, not just on it.

Right now, it’s the Mac that embodies this sense of play the best for me in the computer world. Linux was fun for a while, but it lacked the professional tools I needed to do my job. And it lacks the completeness that Apple provides, each service integrated with the other in a way that makes you want to connect the widgets to the doodads, and watch them play together.

This sense of play extends beyond the OS services and bundled applications. A system like Quicksilver could never exist on Windows or Linux, as much because of the APIs exposed through AppleScript as because of the giddy sense of discoverability built into the application by someone that clearly cares dearly for the Apple ecosystem. (It’s funny to write that about Quicksilver, an app I once described to a fellow Unix-head as “like a pipe for GUIs”).

The Mac opened up a whole new world for me to play in, and the rabbit hole runs pretty deep. For me, Vista was the final straw — not only did it not provide anything new and fun to play with, it made everything my PC used to do seems horrifically slow. It lasted a few months, and then I switched.

Because if it’s not play, it’s just work.

One of my favourite ways to get introduced to new music, and to introduce others, is through a simple game called “revolving DJ”. It can be played at parties, in your office, or anywhere you can hook an iPod up to a set of speakers. The rules are simple: each participant plays a 3 song set in turn until the party ends and everyone goes home. By trying to choose music you think everyone else will enjoy, or is unfamiliar with, you pick up all kinds of new influences.

It was during a lazy Friday afternoon of Revolving DJ and beer than an idea was sparked in my head, regarding the iPhone and the lack of 3rd party native applications. It doesn’t take too many songs before you long for a method to effortlessly transfer tracks directly from one iPod to the next. A few moments later, someone will inevitably realize “hmmm, the Zune could actually do that“. Unfortunately, it’s implementation was so hopelessly crippled by the marketdroids and RIAA-fearing managers at Microsoft that the device was essentially stillborn.

Apple has also built an iPod with WiFi — it’s called the iPhone, and while most people are rightfully focusing on the new features of the device (phone, web browser, email client), it’s also considered one of the best iPods ever built (ignoring the anemic storage for now). The device runs a version of OS X, meaning the only preventing a mobile p2p application that can share music with friends or strangers is a smart programmer and a way to load the application onto the iPhone — conveniently left out. The Zune crippled it’s WiFi in firmware, but an open SDK on the iPhone would mean anyone could easily install such an app on their phone. Even better, if you didn’t already have the p2p app, you could easily jump on the web and download it the moment you needed it. It’s the viral-social, the dream application for music-heads everywhere, and Apple can’t stop it without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which is pretty much what they did by not shipping an SDK for the phone.

One of my biggest frustrations with Vista, at least initially on my 2-year-old desktop, was the incessant disk thrashing. The computer sits in the corner of our living room (it’s a small condo, so it’s basically all living room…), and the hard drive is not exactly quiet while under load. Every night, after about five minutes of idle time, the disk would grind away endlessly for hours at a time. I have a ton of mp3s and videos, so I assumed that eventually Vista would index everything and it would settle down. It never did, so I went on an adventure of shutting down every possible service to see what was causing the disk thrashing.

Eventually, I found it. If you’re suffering this problem, change the frequency of index updates and it should settle down:

• Open “Power Options”
• Click “Change plan settings” for your currently selected power plan (if I try really hard, I can almost imagine why this is under Power Settings. Almost.)
• Click “Change advanced power settings”
• Find “Searching and Indexing”, then “Power Savings Mode” in the tree
• Change the setting to “Balanced”

Well, after three months of disk thrashing and obscenely poor performance, I’m going back to XP on my desktop. Vista has some niceties, but on that machine (only 1GB of RAM) it was just too painfully slow to use, especially with two accounts logged in at the same time.

Windows Explorer keeps frustrating me as well. Switching directories takes 10-12 seconds while it refreshes it’s thumbnail cache, and the “smart” columns wants to treat every directory as if it were full of MP3s (thanks, but I really don’t need to see the Artist and Rating associated with my ZIP files).

The change, for me, is actually much bigger than that: I’ve quit my job, and joined a startup in the online money transfer arena. This is the project I’ve always wanted. A small, focused team of great people, and the chance to work on something I can truly call my own. Live by the sword, die by the sword, and all that good stuff. I’ll be the sole UI dude, designer and implementer of wondrous interfaces for the website and administration tool. To accomplish this, I’ve made the big switch — I bought a Mac. MacBook Pro, to be precise.

I’ll post more in the future about my experience with the Mac, but if my initial impressions hold, it’s everything I dreamed it could be, and certainly everything Vista is not.

Some shorties:

• Expose: Wow. Completely changed my workflow. I love it
• Font Rendering: I never had a problem with Windows’ font rendering. Now I do.
• It Just Works: for the most part, it actually does just work
• Home/End keys: come on, Apple… really. I hit the Home key probably 300 times a day, and I’ve never, ever wanted the behaviour Mac’s use by default. Thankfully, there are workarounds for this
• Uptime: I’ve had it for a week, and I still haven’t rebooted it. Ever.

After I first installed Windows Vista, I attempted to use the default application (whenever possible) for activities which I usually installed some kind of helper app. For example, I initially toyed with Media Player instead of installing Winamp, and use the included photo manager instead of grabbing Photoshop Album.

In the process of installing my iPod software, I also decided to give iTunes a whirl. I have never actually used iTunes — it’s always been completely at odd with my expectations from music management software. The few times I played with it, it was baffling. I didn’t quite understand it’s legendary status as the most usable media player available. It was also huge. Read the rest of this post… »

A few weeks ago I wrote about some concerns about Vista’s usability in a post titled Windows Vista and the Measurement of Happiness. I’ve now had a chance to test those concerns myself on my home machine, and what I’ve found is a mixed bag.

To give Vista a fair chance, I’ve tried to leave it as uncustomized as possible, usually the default Microsoft solution when one was available instead of installing my preferred app. On XP, it takes me 4-5 hours of tweaking and installing to get my desktop to where I want it. For Vista, I’m only go to seek out alternatives after I’ve tried the built-in solution for a while.

Read the rest of this post… »

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the User Experience 2006 conference in Seattle, Washington. We spent several days covering the fundamentals and latest trends in developing usable products, such as usability testing and developing personas. With most members of the audience usability professionals, one would expect, to some degree, a consensus on the best ways to design and build truly user-friendly software.

Thursday night found us at a presentation by Microsoft’s Tjeerd Hoek, Director of User Experience Design for Windows. Now, Tjeerd is an extremely smart guy, and given the short time period of the presentation, managed to show off some impressive development efforts going into Vista.

Read the rest of this post… »