What I use: The essentials

December 3, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Software

As you grow to be an expert Mac user, you start to rely on a series of handy little utilities, some of them being so useful they really become a fully integrated part of your workflow and user experience. These are usually the first third-party software you install when you’re configuring a new Mac or a second machine. Here is a brief list of utilities I can’t do without, in no particular order of importance. As you will see, most of them are free, but I strongly suggest donating to the developers if you find their app useful.

TextExpander

Price: $34.95

What does it do? — “TextExpander saves you countless keystrokes with customised abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings and images.” (product description)

Why do I use it? — For my translation work it’s not uncommon to have to enter the same words or even phrases more than once. With TextExpander I can associate a word, expression, even whole links to an easy-to-memorise keystroke: this saves a lot of time while typing, not to mention the increased spelling accuracy. I have shortcuts for all Apple products with tricky spelling, such as “iPhone”, “iPad”, “iPod touch”, “iTunes”, “iMovie”, etc. When I’m translating tech manuals or tutorials, these words are repeated a lot in the text, and when you have to write iTunes fifty times, sometimes you slip and write “itunes” or “Itunes” or “ITunes”. I have TextExpander autocomplete to iTunes every time I start typing “itu” and voilà, always the correct spelling. This is just a tiny example of the different ways you can use TextExpander. I can’t recommend it enough. $35 well spent indeed.

Dropbox

Price: Free (Basic account)

What does it do? — Dropbox’s sync service is quite well-known by now, but here goes the product description taken from its website: “Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere. This means that any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website. Dropbox also makes it super easy to share with others, whether you’re a student or professional, parent or grandparent.”

Why do I use it? — I’ve been a Dropbox user since the early days. Now you can find many competing cloud services on the Web (some of them offering more space with a free account), but I still prefer Dropbox’s approach. I only have a free 2 GB Dropbox account, but it’s enough for me because I don’t use it for backing up all my files. Rather, I use my Dropbox folder to store essential documents and the most recent projects, so that I can sync them with all my Macs and always have them ready whatever Mac I have with me when I’m on the move. I’ve never had a problem and in a couple of occasions Dropbox even saved the day: since every time you save changes on a file Dropbox saves a version and stores a history of the actions you carried out with the file, I managed to restore a series of accidentally deleted files more than once.

f.lux

Price: Free

What does it do? — “f.lux makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. […] f.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you’re in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again. Tell f.lux what kind of lighting you have, and where you live. Then forget about it. F.lux will do the rest, automatically.” (product description)

Why do I use it? — Simply put: I use it regularly because it’s been saving my eyes. I wear glasses. I’m shortsighted and astigmatic. I usually stay up late at night in front of my Mac, and since I mostly read and write, I stare at a lot of white pages with black text. Before discovering f.lux, I usually went to bed with very tired eyes. Sometimes I was forced to take long pauses because I simply couldn’t look at the screen continuously. Sometimes I had to give up work completely and go to bed even if I wasn’t really tired, all because my eyes were teary and burning from all that staring and I was also developing a headache. f.lux has made things dramatically better. If you care about your eyes, do yourself a favour and download it. It runs on Mac OS X (with a version for PPC Macs), Windows and Linux.

Hazel

Price: $21.95

What does it do? — From the application website: “Hazel watches whatever folders you tell it to, automatically organizing your files according to the rules you create. It features a rule interface similar to that of Apple Mail so you should feel right at home. Have Hazel move files around based on name, date, type, what site/email address it came from (Safari and Mail only) and much more. Automatically put your music in your Music folder, movies in Movies. Keep your downloads off the desktop and put them where they are supposed to be.”

Why do I use it? — Hazel has many other features than what’s explained in the bit I just quoted. I use it because it does what it does efficiently and reliably. I mainly use it to keep my Downloads folder tidy. It’s my stealthy sorting office. I have created rules to send downloaded files in different folders according to their extension: ZIPs go in a folder, DMGs in another, PDFs in another, you get the idea. The beauty of Hazel is that once configured properly, it basically disappears, working behind the scenes. No Dock icon, no menubar icon, just a preference pane. Another piece of software that’s worth every penny. Highly recommended.

MenuMeters

Price: Free

What does it do? — From the application website: “MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for Mac OS X. […] The CPU Meter can display system load both as a total percentage, or broken out as user and system time. It can also graph user and system load and display the load as a “thermometer”. […] The Disk Activity Meter displays disk activity to local disks on the system. […] It is hotplug aware, and will show activity on FireWire and USB disks as they are mounted. The Disk Meter menu shows volume space details for local drives […]. The Memory Meter can display current memory usage as either a pie chart, thermometer, history graph, or as used/free totals. The Memory Meter menu shows a breakdown of current memory usage and VM statistics. The Memory Meter can optionally display a paging indicator light. The Net Meter can display network throughput as arrows, bytes per second, and/or as a graph. […] The Net Meter menu shows current interfaces and their status. Interface information is gathered from the SystemConfiguration framework and thus is Mac OS X network location aware.”

Why do I use it? — I discovered MenuMeters when Mac OS X 10.4 was the latest version of OS X and I’ve been using it ever since. There are probably more sophisticated monitoring tools out there, but I’ve never had the urge to look for something else when MenuMeters does its job pretty well. I’m not one of those control freaks who need to monitor all the information a tool such MenuMeters can provide, all the time. I use MenuMeters mostly for monitoring the network status. It’s the best, most immediate indicator of problems with my network connection and it gives me reliable information on upload/download speeds. It’s probably the first piece of third party software I install after a clean installation on a newly acquired Mac that’s capable of running Mac OS X.

Choosy

Price: $12

What does it do? — The developer explains it better than I could: “Say you get emailed a link to a great website, you want to open the link but you may not always want to use the same browser. That’s where Choosy comes in: It can prompt you to select a browser or choose a browser for you, all based on your settings. It’s highly customisable and easy to use. You can tell which browser you want to use and which ones to ignore, you can customise what it does in different situations, you can customise the appearance and you can even set up advanced behaviour rules to do very specific things in very specific circumstances.”

Why do I use it? — Those who know me well, know that I like to try many different browsers, and I reached a point where I was using a dozen of them. Sometimes I wanted a link not to open in Safari (which has always been the default browser on my Macs), and I was getting tired of opening the link in Safari, copying it and pasting it in another browser I was testing (or right-clicking the link, copying/pasting it, etc.). Choosy has addressed my needs in this matter with surgical precision. Even now that I use fewer browsers (Safari, Chrome, Stainless and Camino — sometimes Opera, but nothing more), Choosy is still quite useful. For instance, when I suspect that a link will bring me to a website with Flash content, I tell Choosy to open the link in Chrome (I’ve removed the Flash plugin from my Macs, leaving only the built-in plugin in Chrome). I make a very basic use of Choosy, but I’m really satisfied with it. If you use more than one browser on a regular basis, I suggest you give it a try. 

Notational Velocity

Price: Free

What does it do? — “Notational Velocity is an application that stores and retrieves notes.” This is how its website introduces it, but there’s so much more behind its apparent simplicity: real simplicity. Among its unique characteristics: instant incremental search, all content encrypted automatically, auto saving (way before it was such a hyped feature in Lion), native synchronisation with Simplenote, or via files in Dropbox with PlainText, Elements, iA Writer, and other iOS apps.

Why do I use it? — Short answer: it’s my digital synchronised scrapbook and keeps all my notes everywhere I go, no matter what device I’m using at the moment. Long answer: Synchronised writing.

The Unarchiver

Price: Free

What does it do? — From the application website: “The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for ‘Archive Utility.app’, the built-in archive unpacker program on Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than Archive Utility, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder. It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems.”

Why do I use it? — Simply because it’s an excellent tool. Let me go out on a limb here and say it’s the best tool of its kind. Another utility I’ve been using for a long time, it has opened any compressed archive I’ve thrown at it, even in outdated formats such as Compact Pro, DiskDoubler and ARJ. It has opened SIT archives when even StuffIt Expander (or Deluxe) failed. It has opened ZIP archives even when Mac OS X’s Archive Utility told me they were ‘probably corrupted’. Same with RAR files. Just download and install it, use it as your default unarchiving application, you won’t regret it. And donate to the developer.

TidBITS Opinion: Let’s Stop with the Siri Baiting

December 1, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Source: TidBITS Opinion: Let’s Stop with the Siri Baiting

Adam Engst:

This is actually a serious issue in one respect, since it shows just how important technology has become in shaping our impressions of the world around us. And that in turn points to how essential it is that we continue to scrutinize how well search-related technologies work and remain aware of those technologies’ inescapable limitations. Just as you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet, you shouldn’t believe everything Siri tells you.

[…]

So can we stop pretending that Siri is anything more than ELIZA’s chatterbot daughter? Siri can be useful, and is a whole lot of fun to demo, but it’s unreasonable to read anything more — certainly not Apple corporate policy — into Siri’s successes, failures, and little asides. Heck, we can’t even get Apple PR to say what Apple policy is most of the time. At least Siri always responds to our questions.

Siamo tutti bravi

November 30, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Mele e appunti

Sto notando sempre più di frequente sul Web una tendenza che non mi piace per niente: quella della critica facile, veloce, a buon mercato e, se possibile, condensata in una frase. Non mi riferisco al breve sfogo occasionale diretto a questa o quella applicazione perché l’arrivo di una nuova funzione (o l’eliminazione di una vecchia) ci frustra, ci guasta il flusso di lavoro, ci scompagina abitudini fossilizzate. E non mi riferisco nemmeno all’attacco alla persona quando si dovrebbe invece rispondere a quel che la persona afferma, al suo pensiero, alla sua analisi (anche questo mi infastidisce grandemente, ma temo sia ormai una battaglia persa).

Mi riferisco al liquidare il lavoro altrui in quattro parole, in un commento magari condito con quel pizzico di acidità per fare il figurone con la propria cerchia di conoscenze (online e offline). È ancor più irritante quando la critica è rivolta a un prodotto che nemmeno si è provato, o che si è provato per un intervallo di tempo assurdamente breve. Intendiamoci: capita di imbattersi in quell’applicazione, servizio, dispositivo che sappiamo da subito non ci sarà utile. Purtroppo, dalla preferenza personale al sentenziare che l’oggetto in questione è inutile, sarà un flop, è progettato da schifo, il passo è sempre più breve. Ultimamente pare che sul Web tutti diventano ingegneri, designer, progettisti, tipografi, sviluppatori e — soprattutto — punti di riferimento del buon gusto dall’oggi al domani, nel giro di un post o di un tweet. Mi stupisco che non si viva già in un mondo migliore, vista la quantità di gente così in gamba nel giudicare in un istante quel che è buono e ciò che va scartato.

Che ha stimolato la scrittura di questo mio intervento è stata la lettura di un articolo nel blog di Shifty Jelly una piccolissima impresa di sviluppatori iOS e Android australiani. Nell’articolo, intitolato Voi siete dei milionari, vero? (You Guys Are Millionaires, Right?), gli sviluppatori raccontano molto apertamente di quanto sia dura la realtà quotidiana di chi decide di fare lo sviluppatore indipendente, spiegando che in un ambiente così competitivo come l’attuale piattaforma mobile in realtà gli sviluppatori che incassano guadagni strepitosi sono pochi. Se ve la cavate con l’inglese, leggetevi tutto l’articolo. I due frammenti che mi interessa estrapolare sono questi:

A ogni prodotto che creiamo dedichiamo tantissimo lavoro (e ci mettiamo tante delle nostre energie). A volte troviamo persone che lo deridono, o che lo considerano indegno di attenzione dopo averlo utilizzato per 13,2 secondi. Poi ci dicono di non prendercela, di non considerarlo un fatto personale. Facile a dirsi. Quando si investono sei mesi della propria vita, giorno e notte, nella creazione di un prodotto, col cavolo che non si prendono sul personale i commenti altrui.

E, poco più sotto:

E lasciamo perdere le estenuanti discussioni che di tanto in tanto saltano fuori con le persone se debbano o meno acquistare un’applicazione da 1,99 dollari. La gente passa ore e ore a ponderare l’acquisto di un’applicazione da 2 dollari, passando in rassegna le varie recensioni, scrivendo un’email allo sviluppatore, controllando i vari forum online. La stessa gente che poi entra in una caffetteria in cui non è mai stata prima e ordina un caffè da 4 dollari. Dallo sviluppatore si aspettano supporto e aggiornamenti gratuiti illimitati. Dalla caffetteria non si aspettano niente se non un caffè mediocre.

Un altro caso recente è l’annuncio di Little Printer da parte di Berg, una società di consulenza di design che ha pensato di creare una microstampante wireless pensata per connettersi alla nuvola ed essere comandata da uno smartphone. L’idea è quella di utilizzarla per stamparsi dei piccoli promemoria, o una scelta di notizie, o passatempi, o qualsiasi altra micropubblicazione e portarsi queste informazioni in tasca. Quando la notizia ha cominciato a diffondersi, si è subito creato un chiacchiericcio sgradevole in Twitter e altrove, con interventi lapidari come “Inutile”, “Che idea stupida”, “Tornare alla carta, bella idiozia”, “Ma questi dove vivono?” e altri commenti sarcastici. Ovviamente senza nemmeno aver provato il prodotto. Tanto basta vedere un minuto del video di due minuti realizzato per presentare Little Printer per capire che è una boiata, no?

Beh, no. L’idea può non piacere. L’oggetto potrebbe essere l’ultima cosa a entrare in casa nostra. Per alcuni certamente non servirà a nulla. Diamogli ugualmente una possibilità. Rispettiamo il lavoro altrui. Dietro quella stampantina c’è il lavoro di persone che hanno investito tempo, denaro e si spera passione per cercare di produrre qualcosa di simpatico e originale. 

In troppi blog leggo un atteggiamento di superiorità nell’appioppare critiche (e qui dico in generale, non della Little Printer in particolare), a volte pare perfino per il solo gusto di poter dire Ve l’avevo detto se alla fine un certo prodotto non ha successo. 

Criticare va benissimo, per carità, ma che la critica sia informata, ponderata, costruttiva. Lo sprezzo concentrato in quattro parole, a mio avviso, dice molto più del critico di turno che non del prodotto criticato.

§

Chiudo con un piccolo aneddoto: ho di recente acquistato Portal 2 dopo essere stato positivamente (e inaspettatamente) colpito dal primo Portal. Ho trovato questo sequel per molti versi più godibile e coinvolgente del primo episodio. Tuttavia l’altro giorno ho raggiunto un punto del gioco in cui mi sono un po’ arenato in una situazione che pareva irrisolvibile, e nell’universo di Portal, in cui si procede per stanze dove occorre ingegnarsi per trovare un modo per raggiungere l’uscita, una tale situazione di stallo rendeva tutta l’esperienza decisamente frustrante. Poi ne sono uscito, ma con la sensazione che il gioco si era fatto più lungo del dovuto, tanto più che mi è scappato il tweet di sfogo, dove dicevo più o meno così: “Se il primo Portal mi è apparso più corto di quel che avrebbe dovuto essere, Portal 2 mi sembra molto più lungo di quel che dovrebbe essere”. Fare queste valutazioni di impulso è molto facile, così come è facile mettersi a fare il game designer da poltrona e pontificare Io avrei fatto così, avrei eliminato questo e inserito quest’altro, ecc.

Ultimato il gioco, ho deciso di acquistare anche The Final Hours of Portal 2, una sorta di libro elettronico interattivo che, nello stile dei contenuti extra dei film in DVD e Blu-Ray, spiega i retroscena e racconta del lavoro dei programmatori e designer di Valve, delle difficoltà che hanno incontrato nell’ideazione di una storia e di una dinamica di gioco che potessero reggere il successo del predecessore e diventare a sua volta un successo ancora maggiore. Leggere questi dettagli e ascoltare i commenti audio inseriti come extra nel gioco, in cui gli sviluppatori spiegano come hanno affrontato i vari ostacoli e risolto problematiche all’apparenza insignificanti, è stato illuminante. Ritengo che questa pratica dell’illustrare il processo di realizzazione di un prodotto sia davvero ottima e utile. Troppo spesso infatti si critica qualcosa senza avere la benché minima idea di come si è arrivati a costruire quel qualcosa. E, dall’altra parte, le persone che costruiscono per davvero devono tenere sempre in considerazione questo tipo di critiche facili e taglienti e creare prodotti che passino il test della ‘prima impressione’. Una cosa che, nell’era della gratificazione istantanea, si fa sempre più complessa.

A review of reviews

November 29, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Yes, I know: the title sounds presumptuous, the intent ambitious. I just want to point out a few things I’ve been noticing more and more often in reviews in general, and in tech reviews in particular. Things that somehow bother me, both as a reader and as a tech writer myself. Some may read this as a holier-than-thou attitude, but the truth is that I have made similar mistakes in the past, so I’m not calling myself out while expressing my criticism.

“I’ve tried this product/service/software for a couple of days, and —”

And this is the worst possible start for a review. It doesn’t matter who you are: you can be a staff editor for a renowned newspaper or magazine, you can be a blogger with a reputation, you can be a nobody, but with such a beginning you’re throwing your credibility out of the window — at least in my eyes. You’re making me look for another review.

I know you probably have deadlines. I know they probably gave you the device on Friday and expect your 5,000-word review on Monday. Yet I think that in most cases you don’t have enough time to make a thorough assessment, especially with sophisticated devices such as smartphones, tablets, computers and related peripherals. Sometimes you need to spend more time with a device to get accustomed to certain choices in its operating system, user interface, and general design. Sometimes you need to spend more time with a software application (or service) to have a better understanding of its abilities or to fully realise its usefulness — and not necessarily because of a fault in the software, but because its usefulness is designed to be experienced the more you use the software (or service). Not everything is designed to stand out by instant gratification.

On the other hand, if you are given just a couple of days to review a product and you have no choice or say in it, at least don’t start your piece that way. You can do better by mentioning in your conclusion that, regrettably, you didn’t have as much time as you wished to properly explore the product. You may argue that this is just semantics, and you would be right, actually, but sometimes semantics is what makes people read or skip your review. 

The review is about the product, not about you

A lot of reviews I read are dominated by the reviewers and their long shadow. I enjoy the personal style, the occasional quip and so on, but I think that the more you disappear from a review, the more you try to keep it balanced and remove as much bias as you can, the more your review will be informed, informative and useful for the prospective buyer/customer. How you use a device shouldn’t be used as a metric to make quick judgments on the usefulness of a particular feature or design choice. (You could certainly use yourself as a type of user among others and point out that those who have similar habits/peeves as yours will probably find a particular feature useful, cool, handy or not). 

Of course I’m not saying you shouldn’t have an opinion — in the end a review is based on personal impressions — but I believe the most intellectually honest approach is to give ample space to observations and to clearly emphasise what is your personal opinion and judgment. In other words, the reader should be able to always ‘see’ the product while reading your review, without being obfuscated by your thick fog of opinionated (negative or positive) criticism. As I’ve often said, a good measure of your experience is how little of your personal experience you let come out in your allegedly objective essays/reviews. With your review, you’re helping people make a choice about a product, not showing them how smart you are.

Who is your audience?

This is related to the previous section. Often I read reviews where it’s immediately clear (to me) that you’re not addressing the general public: you’re really talking to your peers. Which means other tech writers, bloggers, journalists, nerds, Mac/iOS/Windows/Android fans, and so on. If you’re doing it deliberately, then everything’s fine and also everything I’ve said so far doesn’t apply. Because you’re talking to your circle, and everyone expects you to be opinionated, biased and politically incorrect. However, since your website is public, you should at least put a bit of a disclaimer in your review, stating that it is addressed more to your peers than anyone else. This way the occasional visitor who reaches your blog or website by way of a search engine will be properly informed about what to expect from your assessments and from the tone of your review.

Why do I think this is important? Because we tech-savvy geeks and power users all have our pet peeves, our habits, our preferences, our standards of excellence, our needs and expectations, which are going to be rather different from those of ‘regular people’. Our beloved iPhone may be ‘just a fancy phone’ for the man of the street, and many people don’t really care about which OS runs these fancy phones, as long as they make calls, send texts, do some email and Web browsing and have a bright screen so that they can find their way around using Google Maps. To remain within the smartphone realm, don’t assume that a two-second delay in opening an application is an unacceptable performance in a modern smartphone and that this is going to be a deal-breaker for everyone. You will be surprised at the amount of people who don’t even notice such a lag. (Or, if they do notice, they might not mind that two-second wait). 

If you’re trying to write an objective review, just keep in mind that the end user may come from a radically different experience than yours when you’re judging what’s good and what’s bad in a product. For instance, writing things such as “If you’re accustomed to iOS and the responsiveness of an iPhone 4, you’ll need time to get used to this other smartphone’s interface and you’ll probably find its performance disappointing” is more useful (and accurate) than just saying “This other smartphone’s performance is ridiculous and these design flaws in its UI certainly don’t help either”. Users’ perceptions vary a lot, depending on what they’ve been using before. My parents both have old-school Nokia mobile phones, and when they tried my old iPhone 3G, they found it quite snappy and pleasant to use, while I find it annoyingly sluggish and at times unresponsive since I became accustomed to my iPhone 4’s general performance.

That said…

…Products (both hardware and software) have flaws, bugs, terrible design and usability choices, and other problems that clearly go beyond the subjective realm, and an honest review ought to point these things out. Again, your knowledge and expertise should guide you and suggest the best way to express such faults and issues, so that people can understand whether a certain issue is a big deal per se (e.g. a lack that makes a device patently less useful or usable, a feature that is poorly implemented by today’s standards or in comparison with competing products), or an annoyance that largely depends on personal habits and experience (e.g. I like to have applications with menubar icons for easy access and this app lacks one, and it sucks for that).

Maybe I have stated the obvious here, but if you read certain reviews carefully, you will start noticing the same things I did. If I’m not making direct examples isn’t for lack of honesty, but just because it doesn’t seem fair to single out anyone in particular. Reviews, especially of big products, are important, as they may contribute to their success or failure. Writing thoughtful and thorough pieces may take longer than you’d like (and sometimes all that matters is that the review be ‘out there’ just after the product’s introduction), but you’ll eventually provide a better service for your readers and your reputation will benefit in return.

The double-edged revolution

November 27, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

In reaction to Bret Victor’s now well-known Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, iOS developer David Barnard wrote a piece titled “Pictures Under Glass” is Revolutionary, Not Transitional. His conclusion:

There are certain cases in which more tactile feedback may be able to enhance human-computer interaction without adding to the learning curve — such as the pneumatic displays Bret links to in his post — but I can’t get over the hunch that tactile interaction, like Siri and other voice input technologies, will augment and enhance Pictures Under Glass interaction, not revolutionize human-computer interaction.

In a following article, Barnard admits to being annoyed by the tone Bret Victor used in his rant:

I’m pissed off because Bret, in his post about the future of interface design, denigrated the very thing I’m most passionate about and spend every day working on — Multi-Touch user interfaces on touch screen devices. Well, just iOS really. In his follow up post, Bret did clarify that he doesn’t think the iPhone and iPad are bad, for now anyway, but overall the follow-up was similarly dismissive.

I’ve already said enough about some of Bret’s arguments I think are flawed, but I want to talk more about the tone of his post. I think it was arrogant, distasteful, and ultimately counter productive.

While I understand Barnard’s position and sentiments, I have to disagree as regards to Bret Victor’s tone. Perhaps because not only have I read Victor’s posts but I also translated them into another language, I certainly didn’t find his tone arrogant or distasteful. Since I still haven’t had the chance to share my views on the matter, I figured this was a good start. 

About Victor’s tone: let’s don’t forget it’s a rant. When people rant, they usually have to get things out of their system because they’re generally not satisfied with the status quo. Educated people tend to write their rants in a provoking manner so that the audience receives the message with a similar, um, ‘dose of annoyance’ as the person writing their rant. To put it another way, in a rant one reflects part of his annoyance to the public, resulting in a bitter — but hopefully thought-provoking — tone. Which is what I think is happening with Bret Victor’s Brief Rant.

About “Pictures Under Glass”: in his Brief Rant, Bret Victor writes:

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It’s a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it’s the star player in every Vision Of The Future.

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

I believe that some people have misunderstood Victor here. He is not criticising the present. He is not saying that Pictures Under Glass (Multi-touch technology) is bad/limited per se. What I think he’s criticising is that all these Visions of the future basically revolve around a technology that doesn’t seem to be much different or evolved from what we have today. And I have to agree with him.

Yet I also feel the same as David Barnard when he says I can’t get over the hunch that tactile interaction, like Siri and other voice input technologies, will augment and enhance Pictures Under Glass interaction, not revolutionize human-computer interaction. And I can’t help feeling it’s a pity.

See, Multi-touch technology has been (still is) a revolutionary step in human-computer interaction, but my fear (and probably Bret Victor’s) is that this technology will overstay its welcome, so to speak. This is what I mean with double-edged revolution: something that starts as being unquestionably revolutionary and then ends up being something we’re unable to really move away from. It’s probably going to be a slow-paced evolution by more and more refined iterations. Multi-touch technology is already propagating on other devices and machines by contagion and replacing their previous interfaces. 

And it’s not always good. I have already seen scanners, printers, photocopiers, mini hi-fi systems, dishwashers, washing machines with touch interfaces. Some of their original interfaces, essentially made of physical buttons, levers and knobs, were well-designed and usable. In short, there wasn’t (and isn’t) anything really wrong about them. The only drawback, possibly, is that buttons, levers and knobs are mechanical parts that may break after excessive use. The great advantage of some of this ‘low tech’ interfaces is that for the most part they are really simple and can be operated without even looking once you’ve familiarised with their controls. Touch panels, especially touch panels with changing screens, must be operated while looking at them. Sure, a buttonless home appliance with just a touch screen looks so cool and screams ‘future’ from a mile away, but how do I turn the damn thing on? Does an all-in-one printer really need to have an iPhone-like interface, with apps you can add such as the weather, a daily planner, Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter search and BBC News? 

In my opinion, for some applications, the Multi-touch interface brings an unnecessary layer of complexity. With my washing machine, if I want to set the Delicates/Silk program, I just turn two knobs, one for the temperature, another for the program itself, each program being characterised by a letter. If I want to use less water (because I’m only washing a couple of things, for example), I also press a button with the icon of a basin filled with water and “1/2” above it (meaning “half the usual amount of water”). Each knob has a different tactile and auditory feedback, and I could set the program with my eyes closed. With a touch panel or a touch screen is another story.

But I’m afraid that’s what’s going to happen in the next years: an increasing amount of devices, machines, appliances, with unnecessary touch interfaces slapped onto them (because multi-touch is revolutionary and is ‘the future’) and perhaps with even less regard for true usability (because multi-touch interfaces are perceived as invariably ‘simple’ and ‘intuitive’). Bret Victor’s rant is an invitation not to rest on our laurels, not to content ourselves with moving a finger on a glassy surface, not to make the same error we made with traditional computers, their interfaces and interaction paradigms — that is, holding on to them for decades until they become too limited and inadequate. For me, one of the most important passages in Bret Victor’s rant is this:

And this is my plea — be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don’t just extrapolate yesterday’s technology and then cram people into it.

I love multi-touch, and I certainly recognise its importance. iOS’s interface has made technologically advanced and sophisticated devices more approachable for the less tech-savvy and for those who have always had a struggling relationship with computers in general. However, like Bret Victor, I surely hope that twenty years from now I won’t be interacting with my ‘tablet’ (or whatever device it will be) in the same way I’m doing today, with a finger touching an unresponsive surface.