I discovered Kim Harris’s website thanks to a tweet by Stephen Fry (the two, I learn, were roommates at Cambridge). He’s written only three entries so far, but what entries they are! Christianity: Believe It Or Else is a must-read, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy Harris’s writing even if you ultimately disagree with him.
I don’t care if he’ll update just once in a month, I’ve added his blog to my bookmarks.
Source: How to reset and manage the OS X 10.7 Launchpad interface | MacFixIt — CNET Reviews.
Kessler:
By default Launchpad will show all of your installed applications, and if you click and hold one application they will all go into the familiar iOS “wiggle” mode in which you can then drag them into groups and move them around as you see fit. While you might enjoy doing this on a new system, if you have a number of applications already installed on a system that you have upgraded to Lion, then you may experience a certain level of frustration in dealing with pages and pages of application icons, especially if you have multiple Parallels Desktop virtual machines installed.
If you are experiencing these frustrations with Launchpad and still wish to use the feature, then one approach you might consider is to clear out Launchpad and start it over from scratch, to organize as you see fit.
As for me, I still haven’t upgraded to Lion, but from what I’ve seen of the Launchpad so far, I can safely say it’s a nice idea, but I don’t think I’ll use it at all.
Despite all the progress we’ve made with browsers, and despite the variety of choices we have at our disposal in Mac OS X, I still think that bookmark management is their weakest, most overlooked feature. But since things aren’t improving, I thought that maybe I could start rethinking my bookmark organisation on Safari, which is my main browser.
Back in May, I wrote:
The other day I was browsing all the bookmarks I saved in Safari since day one and, despite my repeated attempts to organise them, the whole picture is just a big, sad mess. Drastic times call for drastic measures, and the next move is indeed a bold one: I will erase my Bookmarks file and start anew. Of course, I won’t just throw everything into oblivion’s whirlpool and get rid of more than 6 years of accumulated links. I’m willing to carry out a preliminary step that is probably going to be painful and somewhat time-consuming, but I hope it’ll be worthwhile: sifting.
Then, after isolating a core base of links (mostly shortcuts to places I frequently visit on the Web), I’ll start again with a different approach to prevent this kind of almost uncontrollable growth. The goal is to use Safari’s Bookmarks Bar basically for bookmarklets, and to have there just a couple of bookmark folders: one for the aforementioned core base of links, another as a temporary parking space for bits and pieces I’ll use in future articles.
This post is basically an update on how this operation is proceeding. I still haven’t reached the minimalistic results I hoped for when I was writing that above, but during these past two months I’ve done most of the sifting, which is the hardest part.
This is a rather faithful representation of the Bookmark Bar’s layout when I set up the G4 Cube a couple of years ago and synced the Safari Bookmarks on my MacBook Pro to the Cube via MobileMe (but keep in mind that since then I’ve removed at least three bookmark folders plus another folder containing feeds):
My Safari Bookmarks Bar in 2009 (click to enlarge)
While this is my current Bookmark Bar layout:
My current Safari Bookmarks Bar (click to enlarge)
Visually, the bar may still appear full of stuff, but note that the first ten items are bookmarklets, 9 of which can be accessed easily and rapidly using the keyboard shortcuts displayed in the figure.
As I said, the goal of having just a couple of bookmark folders: one for the aforementioned core base of links, another as a temporary parking space for bits and pieces I’ll use in future articles is still a bit far, but not that far, and ultimately I may even be satisfied enough by the current layout. I’ve been using this bookmark configuration for a while and I’m noticing it’s quite effective, and a lot more effective than the previous situation.
As you can see, the number of bookmark folders is lower than before (12 against 17+4), but most of all the contents of each folder have been considerably trimmed and therefore now it’s much easier to navigate them (the Reads bookmark folder, for example, used to contain no fewer than 150 items — now they’re down to 25). I could reduce the items on the Bookmark Bar even more by grouping the direct links to Flickr (f), Tumblr, Twitter (T) and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) into a single folder of most frequently accessed links, but I prefer having a faster access to each one of them and saving a click, rather than create a minimal Bookmark Bar just for visual tidiness, while sacrificing functionality. Also, now that Safari 5.1 comes with the Reading List feature, I’ll probably delete my ‘Ten Items or Less’ (10-) folder, in which I usually put the articles to read at a later date (no more than ten, as the name implies, so as to have things under control and avoid the Read It Later routine I mentioned back in May).
Back to the underlying sifting and cleaning process:
If I had to make an overall estimate, I’d say that the whole number of bookmarks I have now in Safari is more or less 30% of what it was just 2 months ago, which — you’ll agree — is a remarkable improvement. I still have a lot of stuff to go through, but now at least the situation is manageable.
Usually, Rands doesn’t post very frequently, but each time he does publish an article, it’s always a treat. Among other things, he is very good at analysing behaviour in general, and nerd behaviour in particular (see the seminal The Nerd Handbook, which is the way I was introduced to Rands’ writing back in 2007).
I was eager to know what were his thoughts about Mac OS X Lion’s interface, and I frankly did not expect a specific post about it, much less two posts. Yet, to my surprise, between July 29 and July 31 he posted The Desktop Transition and The One Rule, both highly recommended reading.
Rands has managed to convince me that Mission Control may be more effective than the previous combination of Exposé and Spaces. The only point I’m still unconvinced about and upon which I don’t agree with him is (you guessed right) when he talks about the new, ‘natural’ scrolling direction in Lion:
For those of you not familiar with the situation, in the latest release of Mac OS X, Apple reversed the scrolling action. Your scrolling wheel or your two-finger trackpad drag go in the opposite direction. Cruel joke, right? Did they swap the left and the right buttons on the mouse, too?
For an action I perform hundreds of times a day, I’m shocked that I’ve left natural scrolling on and now that I’ve become used to it, I’ll explain why old scrolling is actually wrong. That’s right. We’ve all been doing it wrong because it’s not how we think.
Try this. Go grab your closest iPhone or iPad, turn it on, and scroll… in any direction. Do it a couple of times, have some fun. Now stop. Before your next scroll, I want you to think what your brain would do if when you put your finger on the screen and slid to the right if the screen went to the left. Usability disaster, right? No way I’d ever convince you that was the right way because you would argue “that is the natural way for it to work”.
I agree.
It’s called natural scrolling because the scrolling works how your brain expects. I know this because each time I’ve scrolled and thought, “Whu…?” I remind myself: “Think as if your finger was on the screen” and then I’m content.
In usability terms, if you have to resort to thinking to correctly execute an action, something’s not exactly right. I’ve already expressed my thoughts regarding this particular gesture in Lion, but I’ll say that again: there isn’t a right or wrong way of scrolling. There are two different interfaces: in one you manipulate objects by directly interacting with them on the screen with multi-touch gestures. In the other you manipulate what’s on screen indirectly. No matter how intuitively (see Magic Trackpad): unless Apple starts introducing Macs with multi-touch displays, their interfaces will always be operated indirectly.
Gesturing on a trackpad seems a rather acceptable compromise to interact more directly with interface elements on a Mac, but there’s always some kind of abstraction involved: to scroll ‘naturally’ on a Mac you have to think as if the text you’re scrolling were on your trackpad or, as Rands puts it, as if your finger were on the screen. Put this way, this isn’t much different from the kind of abstraction that there is behind the scrolling on the classic Mac OS up to Snow Leopard — i.e. the reason why you scroll down to move text up is that you’re not operating on the text itself, but you’re grabbing the scrollbar and using it to move the text for you, so to speak.
This, up to now, has been considered an effective abstraction to scroll text on a mediate interface: you operated the scrollbar as a slider, as a counter-weight, so you scrolled in the direction you wanted the scrollbar/slider to go. With Lion, you have to change your target (not the scrollbar anymore, but the text) and think like you’re using another interface, iOS’s. I still question the effectiveness of this shift, since not everyone on a Mac uses the same input device (there are mice, trackpads, even graphic tablets), while everyone with an iDevice uses their fingers.
I wanted to add a brief, personal observation to the ongoing debate regarding the crisis of digital news and news in general. Not as someone who works in the sector — I don’t. Not as a web designer — I’m not one. Just as a reader, as a consumer of news, as a mere observer.
This post has been inspired by a recent, very interesting piece by Andy Rutledge called News Redux. Rutledge expresses his views on the matter in a compelling way, in such a manner that hardly passes unnoticed, especially among other designers and people belonging (in various capacities) to the field he criticises.
His opening statement sets the tone:
Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days.
The rest of his article illustrates what, in Rutledge’s opinion, is wrong with digital news and their presentation, then he constructively displays how he would work towards a possible solution to the issue. And you know what I think? That his criticism hits the mark nicely. I understand he has chosen The New York Times just as an example to demonstrate a more general problem, but in analysing the Times politics page, he points out exactly all the details that confuse and irritate me as a reader. Every one of them. And I believe that his criticism stems from his frustration as a reader first and foremost, and then as a designer.
Reading news online has undoubtedly all the advantages of the here and now nature of the Internet, so you can always count on updated news, plus your experience is supposedly enriched by photo galleries and videos. But when it comes to browsing and actually reading news stories, I still enjoy a better reading experience with a physical newspaper. Recently, the only online newspaper I can read from my computer is the Guardian, but in the ‘readable’ version created by Phil Gyford. About this particular project, Gyford’s thoughts on why he decided to do it are worth a read as well. I concur on every point he makes regarding what he calls the “three main issues that a better online news-reading solution should address — Friction, Readability and Finishability”.
In the Finishability section of his article, Gyford perfectly explains something that has been bothering me for a while about news websites:
When I read a newspaper I’m holding a coherent package of news. “Here,” it says, “is what you should know today.” Once I’ve read it — or, at least, flicked through it — I know I’m up to date. I don’t need to read anything until tomorrow’s newspaper, which will catch me up with everything that happened in the intervening time. And while I’m reading the paper I know how much there is remaining — the pages in my right hand — and I know when I’m done.
This is very much not the case with a news website. There is no sense of an ending. There is no way I can be sure I’ve at least decided whether to read “everything”. There is, on most websites, no way I can be sure I’ve seen all that’s been published since I last visited.
This is fine if you visit frequently, or rarely, or sporadically. If you just want a dose of what’s happening “nowish”, news websites are designed to show you that. But if you want the equivalent of a newspaper — “Here is what you should know today” — you’ve gone to the wrong place. Not everyone does want this, many people just want “nowish”, but if and when you do want something else, there’s nowhere to go online, no daily newspaper equivalent.
I understand that designing websites like The New York Times or The Times is not easy, and that probably designers would do a better job if they could work without interferences, but both Rutledge and Gyford are right: these websites should be made more reader-friendly.
What I like to call the “giant News Tree”, since the advent of the digital age, has been cut in two smaller trees — the online news and the paper counterpart — hoping they could both live long and prosper by taking advantage of their respective strengths. Instead, we’re reaching a peak where both disappoint: the regular newspaper feels limited compared to the always-updated website; the news website disorients the reader by offering too much information on a single page, in a mix of relevant and irrelevant details which do not create an overall pleasing, satisfactory reading experience.
