Gravity pulls ink down. If you store your markers in a cup like I do you’ll always get squeaky markers that perpetually run out. A better way to store them is perhaps upside down, like new ketchup bottles, they working with gravity.
The problem then becomes that it’s harder to tell the colors apart.
A simple packaging re-design would probably encourage markers to be stored up-side down and whiteboards the world over would rejoice.
On a semi-related topic we released an update to our Whiteboard iPhone/iPad App.
Posted in Ideas, Misc., Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
The story of Android vs. iPhone reminds me a lot of the story of Microsoft Windows vs. Apple Macintosh. In this version the part of Microsoft will be played by Google.
The similarities are striking. Apple was first to market and wowed everyone. Google followed close behind with a competitive, less polished product. Now is where it get’s interesting. In the original story Microsoft had success with the OS but it wasn’t until Windows 3.1 when everything clicked. I believe Android could be at a similar tipping point. A large number of hardware OEM’s are on board with Android and with a small number of adjustments the OS is primed to take off.
What needs to change?
- Apps are inconsistent, and hard to use. The design patterns and guidance that are available in iOS are missing and developers are left to come up with their own sets of best practices.
- Level of design and attention to detail is low. The OS works, but not well.
- App market is incredibly poor. No wonder dev’s aren’t making money. No excuse Google has to fix this. App Search is even worse, I expect more from Google on this topic.
Fix those three things and Android will take off faster like a rocket.
Tags: Android, Apple, Battle, Iphone, Windows 3.1
Posted in Apple, Google, Microsoft, mobile | 3 Comments »
Apple released a product that was decidedly un-magical when it released the Magic Trackpad. Despite the use of the word “Magic” the device was really just a big trackpad with nothing to amaze or delight the end-user. The battery charger that comes with it was more impressive.
The true trackpad of tomorrow would have the following characteristics:
- Control the computer pointer with touch gestures (duh)
- Provide application specific touch interface enhancements
- Web browser specific controls at your fingertips
- Formatting tools from your word processor at your fingertips
- Crop and resize photos with your fingers visually.
- When typing a number show a calculator keypad
- Many of the interface enhancments that are taking place on the iPad could be transposed to desktop apps.
A huge efficiency is in minimizing the number of times your hand has to move from the keyboard to the mouse and back. This is why there are so many keyboard shortcuts for things that can be done with a mouse. The mouse/trackpad can evolve to present visual ways to process input in a way that would be more efficient then either the keyboard or a mouse.
There’s an opportunity to create a true visual and magical input device that combines the best aspects of a trackpad the iPad and the mouse.
Tags: Apple, ipad, Magic, Mouse, TrackPad
Posted in Apple, Ideas, Prediction, User Interface | No Comments »
- The UI design is inconsistent and ugly and has many usability issues
- Since there are inconsistincies in screen size it make it hard to write certain types of apps. Games in particular.
- The Android Market is broken, in many ways but primarily the checkout experience.
- Any app no matter how bad gets in.
- Google is not providing a good app-search experience.
- The tools that developers can use are not good enough to create great apps, only good ones
- Background apps kill the battery
- Every six months Google releases an OS update but it takes the carriers 8-12 months to roll out an update
- See #1
Tags: Android, Google, UI
Posted in Google, mobile | No Comments »
- The keyboard design isn’t as slick as the iPhone keyboard design
It’s not quite a MacBook keyboard layout and it’s not an iPhone keyboard layout either. Commit actions like, done, go, search aren’t colored like on the iPhone. The dashes, dots, commas are hard to distinguish. On the iPhone a typewriter like key pops out so you can visually confirm that you hit the right key. On the iPad there is no feature to deal with occlusion.
- How you hold the device really alters the user experience and how apps should be designed.
On the iPhone the design is done in such a way to accommodate the way you hold the device. For example in mobile Safari and in email the command buttons are along the bottom of the screen. This puts many buttons in thumbs reach. On the iPad key buttons in both email and Safari are across the top. This means that if you’re holding the device along the bottom you can’t reach many of the buttons without moving your hands. Since the home button tends to be along the bottom there’s no comfortable rest-state.
- About my laptop
It starts out with just email and some web-browsing but pretty soon you realize that most of the things you do can be done on an iPad. Not all, and this gap is closing. In particular heavy typing tasks (blogging for me) and heavy editing, especially visual and graphics editing is still better with a laptop. That being said I am much happier bringing a light iPad to a meeting then a heavy laptop.
- You don’t use this device like a giant iPod.
I’ve never read a book or a magazine before on either my laptop or iPod. I’ve never played a four person multi-touch game on either of these devices. The experience is different and fun. In a new way. Magazines and books are key here. This is the future of digital content.
- Certain people could use this as a replacement computer but I can’t.
Email and web browsing without compromise. (Well maybe the Flash thing) Other then that you have a pretty nice device for doing the core things my mom uses her computer to do. For technical users the iPad doesn’t do enough to replace their laptop.
- Screen orientation is flipping me out
When you hold the screen in vertical orientation you get 4 icons across and 5 icons down. When you flip the screen you get 5 across and 4 down. The annoying part is that the icons re-positions so you can’t use spacial memory to find an icon. Was that icon on the top right? Ohh, sorry now it’s in the middle left.
- The web is not ready for the iPad (yet).
There are still plenty of sites with embedded video/flash and when I hit these sites I am likely to move on. I almost never stop what I’m doing to go grab my laptop. As the iPad sails past the 1M mark the tech-savvy sites will transition over to H264 video. The issue is primarily video although other flash goodness will still be missing.
Flash sucks but HTML5 is worse then Flash on many things, more on that in another post.
Subscribe to this blog to hear more on that.
- The battery lasts a freakishly long time
It’s nothing like a Kindle but compared to other bright-screen electronics. Wow. That’s all I have to say about that.
- A different user experience is fundamental to touch computing
I remember a program manager from Microsoft talking about the Tablet PC back in 2000. He said, in the history of computing there has never been a product category that has failed as often as tablet based computing. From the Alan Kay to the Apple Newton and even Windows for Pen Computing. The history books are filled with these ‘slate’ computers that have failed. He then went on to explain how the Tablet PC would be different because it focused on the input experience.
The truth is that the tablet/slate experiences of the past were not that different. It was Windows with a great input editor. It’s too early to tell if the iPad will succeed or fail but the iPad user experience is so different in a fundamental way that it will change how people interact with computers.
How do I know? My two year old is now reached out and trying to scroll the screen on my laptop. If that’s not the future I don’t know what is.
Tags: Apple, Design, ipad, mobile, User Experience
Posted in Apple, Design, Review, Uncategorized, Usability | 1 Comment »
It’s interesting to look at several mobile on-screen keyboards side by side to compare various design decisions. I’ve shown screenshots of the iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile phones.
- The iPhone is the only keyboard that always displays characters in upper-case. I believe this may help legibility as well as being consistent with desktop keyboards.
- All three make use of the entire region for hit-testing but the iPhone makes the buttons appear smaller giving the illusion of white-space between the letters. This may help users target toward the center of the button when typing.
- The iPhone is also the only keyboard to use color to both offset the modifier keys and the completion keys. This gives the keyboard a funnel style appearance.
- The Windows Mobile keyboard extends the A and L keys to use all available space.
- Android and Windows Mobile both tend to use the classic keyboard “Enter” key rather then the task centric command. This can be confusing when using the arrow symbol right next to a delete arrow symbol.
On a positive note the keyboard all use almost identical spacing so if you learn to “touch type” you’ll be mostly OK as you move between devices.
Tags: Design, GUI, Keyboard, mobile, on-screen
Posted in Apple, Design, mobile | 3 Comments »
Firefox has it’s own layout language called XUL that is used to style and design much of the UI inside Firefox. If HTML is so great why did Firefox need XUL? The reason is that HTML and CSS are inneficient at describing user itnerfaces, designer intent and basic design. Google Chrome’s UI? Nope. Safari UI? Nope. Internet Explorer? Yeah Right.
Standards people, it’s all about standards! Sure.
If the standards are so great and the browser makers claim great performance why aren’t the core bits of browser user interfaces built using the very same tools?
Tags: Browsers, HTML, Standards
Posted in Browsers, Design, HTML/CSS | 1 Comment »
Why it will succeed
- The iPad will crush the Kindle market. It’s cooler, slicker, has a color screen and will have thousands of apps at lau nch. While people can read books and newspapers the bulk of the interesting content is on the web and the web is much better on the iPad then the Kindle.
- The iPad will crush netbooks. It’s a more portable experience and it’s touch enabled. The keyboard is close to full size. The apps are designed to be portable unlike a netbook where you’re trying to use full size apps on a 1/2 size screen. Netbooks are underpowered from a performance standpoint to run typical productivity apps (Office.)
- The computer has traditionally been in the office or the den. This is a move into the living room. If the phone is a communication device and a laptop is for creating content then the iPad is for consuming it and that hasn’t existed before.
Why it is doomed to fail
- The potential owners of the iPad already have an iPhone and a laptop. While some of the scenarios could be better on such a device they are not sufficiently better and the limitations of the platform out-weigh the advantages.
- If the device is a browsing device then the browser makes a huge difference. Because of the closed nature of the iPad we can’t expect to see Chrome, Firefox or Opera on the iPad. Last I checked Safari only had a minority browser share. Add the lack of flash to the equation and a lot of sites will have you reaching for a laptop.
- The iPhone was a success because when the device was released all the existing phones were terrible. The iPhone was a replacement device to something that was flawed. With the iPad it’s not a replacement device. It’s a supplemental device. The problem it’s solving is less of a pain point.
- Basic multi-tasking is obvious and needed on a larger device (music+browsing) or (homework + calculator.) While a single app makes for a simpler experience there’s no reason that I can’t be productive while other apps are loading data, syncing, downloading or doing other background tasks.
Tags: ipad, Iphone, Tablet
Posted in Apple, Prediction, mobile | 2 Comments »
Tablet style computing has been one of the most failed technologies ever. History is full of examples of similar devices that have crashed and burned.
1950′s Styalator electronic tablet, 1960′s RAND Tablet and Dynabook. Various generations of Apple Newton devices, Microsoft Slate’s and Windows for Pen based computers. Even the Kindle that has sold about 1.5 million units total could be viewed as a failure when compared to numbers like 40-60 million iPhone’s and iPod Touch devices.
Why have so many companies tried and so many failed? Perhaps more importantly what does Apple think it can do to succeed? Here’s what I predict:
- Best overall device for consuming content. Books, Magazines, Music, DVD’s.
Devices of the past focused on creating content (usually with a pen) only the Kindle was good at reading content and only book form at that.
- Best mobile web-browser. Sure you can pinch and zoom on your phone but if you really want to surf you need something larger. This middle ground is great for a tablet sized device. You can finally read a website on a bus or train without trying to balance a laptop or looking too conspicuous.
- Interface based on the iPhone. Clearly Apple has nailed the iPhone UI. They will take this base and extend it to a larger device. Not as big as a laptop but somewhere in between. The touch based interface will be enhanced with a two hand multi-touch predictive keyboard. Everyone will hate it at first. Three months later everyone will call it brilliant.
- It’ll look like a flat iPhone. 90% screen, a little edge. Thin as hell. It’ll be priced so that people perceive it as being expensive and premium compared to everything else. $799, maybe more. Expect people to say… Why would I get that when I can get a Kindle for $259. That sort of thing just makes people desire it even more.
- App developers will flock to it.
- Magazines will be the killer content.
- Social games will be the killer app.
Tags: Apple, Canvas, Iphone, Slate, Tablet, Taplet
Posted in Apple, Design, Prediction | 2 Comments »
