Interface expert and technology explainer
British Columbia, Canada
I thought of this idea walking up the hill to get home, and it took approximately seven minutes to Photoshop. I gotta do more stuff like this, it makes me chuckle and my heart sing.
(Original digital camera picture © iStockPhoto / jsemeniuk. Legal stuff: in case it has to be said, this is not an Apple camera, it’s just for fun. Sigh.)
(Yes, I appear to be in a combative mood again.)
“The iPhone is a closed platform, and Apple sometimes seems inconsistent in how they approve apps for the store, therefore OMG IT’S 1984 ALL OVER AGAIN EVIL DICTATORSHIP I’M MOVING TO NORTH KOREA WHICH IS FREE IN COMPARISON WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN.”
“Stupid genie animations don’t help me write the quarterly ROI report on bulk-buying staples for the 4th floor cubicles. Some of us have valuable work to do.”
“iPad as laptop replacement? Yeah, right, in the store I tried hooking it up to my RKV-8DZ camcorder to do some Final Cut Studio editing and oh wait that’s right THERE’S NO FIREWIRE PORT. Why would anyone buy one?”
“Why does Apple get so much press? GenPlusPC Research shows they only have 3.9% marketshare across a midrange of pro-level consumers, yet they achieved a year-on-year increase of 26.4% in national press column inches! And now I’ve spent thirty seconds talking about them, which isn’t reflective of how much I like the products. Oh god, I’m stuck in an Apple loop. And now I’m talking about being stuck in an Apple loop. Help me.”
“You think the iPad is revolutionary? Uh, hello, it has a battery, a technology that’s been around for over two hundred years. And magical? Waved it around in the kitchen, dishes still not done. Fail, waiting for revision two.”
Apple wants to kill Flash the same way you want to kill the wasp that’s flying around the fruit bowl. You don’t hate the wasp per se, you just don’t want to get stung by surprise whilst serving the cantaloupe.
We (still) need a better browsing experience, and I’m on a mission to promote it. For part 3, I’ve created a comparison picture to again show easy gains in vertical space.
Browsers, such as Apple’s Safari, need to make better use of vertical space. Less focus on functionality and more on page content.
Here’s my mockup. (Click for large version.)
Seventy eight pixels on a 1024 x 768 screen is about 10 percent more web page.
(Also, notice how I’ve thrown my website visual consistency to the dogs with striking grey for the background, and a serif font. Rawr.)
Recipe background
My great-great-great-great-grandfather once sat me on his knee and said, “You know what kid? People read books for the words.” He then wrote that insight down as a magic recipe.
Today, I’d like to share that recipe with you for improving Apple’s new iBooks.
Ingredients
Directions
Alternative recipe
Instead of making your content bigger, show more content on each page.
Serving suggestion
Here’s one I prepared earlier. (New approach on the left, old on the right.)
Following from my last post about the iTunes store, I appear to be on a roll here. Here’s how you can give the iTunes store’s search results a makeover.
Here’s the current store search results page (click to embiggen) for ‘TomTom’, where inexplicably the app search results aren’t at the top – even when you search from an app store page:
And my mockup (click to embiggen):
Again, purposely an evolution rather than a revolution. There are some really creative ways you could take these search results even further, given the huge amount of store content you have to sift through.
An iTunes thread on Ars Technica inspired me to give the iTunes store a user experience spring clean – specifically, browsing TV shows.
Here’s the US store’s current presentation of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 1 (click to embiggen):
It’s crowded. Information is duplicated, such as the main season picture, the show title and season number, and many little details like “Genre: Comedy” (we’re, uh, in the Comedy section).
The episode list feels like a wall of text, unbalanced in density between name and descriptions, and doesn’t encourage you to browse and engage. And I’ve really tried hard to think of a reason why anyone would want to sort the episodes by time – the need for a column format is questionable, not helped by the column widths not being resizable.
Finally, it has some carry-through annoyances from the rest of the store, such as the incomplete breadcrumb trail – of course, that reflects a bigger structural issue.
So here’s my version, purposely an evolution rather than revolution (click to embiggen):
Notable changes:
I may work up a ‘revolutionary’ example. My mockup is mostly window dressing, apart from the experimentation with episode display.
The biggest problem with iTunes is this: it uses a relatively inflexible display approach for all its content – movies, podcasts, music, (soon) books, and so forth – and it’s really starting to creak and groan under the strain. Such diverse content types need tailored presentation to be fully engaging and successful.
(As an aside, remind me next time not to Photoshop up an example that uses a mottled blue background. That caused me seven levels of pain.)
Some (techy) audiences have been clamouring for the iPad to support multitasking: more than one app running at the same time.
Despite the naysayers, it’s hard to argue with the ability to listen to your favourite internet radio (Pandora) when using iWork, or continuously chatting with your friend (Beejive) whilst web browsing.
Here’s how Apple could implement it.
A ready-made, mostly-permanent ‘dock’ for indicating and accessing background apps is already available: the status bar.
Background apps would need to have:
When the user is in a background-supported app and clicks the in-app button (say ‘minimize’), the app could minimize itself into an icon in the status bar, returning the user to the springboard. The app continues to run, but can be recalled at any point by touching its icon in the status bar or in the springboard.
As in the screenshot below, the focus on the recalled app could be enhanced by dimming the foreground app. Some form of front panel would be ideal.
(Used Beejive as an example app)
I have used red/yellow buttons for closing/re-minimising the app; however this is an OS X Desktop concept, used by me only to show ’something’ is feasible here. iPhone OS-style named buttons could equally be used (with agreed terminology).
So with this approach to background apps:
I don’t think Apple will be doing free-for-all multitasking any time soon. However, it won’t be because it’s hard to implement.
Another alleged early prototype of the new Apple tablet, the proposed iPad. (Cough.) I don’t agree with the realism they’ve gone for, but it could be an interesting approach — especially the “keypad”.
(Original lilypad, frog, hand images © iStockphoto.com, Andrejs Zemdega/Steve Snyder/Feng Yu respectively)
See below: I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on a prototype of the Apple Tablet due to be announced next week! Hopefully the image will stay up long enough before Apple’s lawyers tell me to pull it down.
(Original tablet image © iStockphoto.com / Paul Rosado)
