There is nothing wrong with the page

May 16, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

In the ongoing ‘flat versus skeuomorphic user interface’ debate, a recent contribution that’s absolutely worthy of attention is Matt Gemmell’s article Tail Wagging. You should take your time and read it, if you’re interested in the subject, because Matt makes a lot of great points and I pretty much agree with most of what he says.

But there’s an observation I’d like to make regarding this passage:

We forget that physical objects are also just specific embodiments – or presentations – of their content and function. A paperback book and an ebook file are two embodiments of the text they each contain; the ebook isn’t descended from the paperback. They’re siblings, from different media spheres, one of which happens to have been invented more recently.

The biggest intellectual stumbling-block we’re facing is the fallacy that just because physical embodiments came first, they’re also somehow canonical. The publishing industry is choking itself to death with that assumption, despite readily available examples of innovative, digitally-native approaches.

[…] An iPad demonstrably is not a book, and doesn’t behave like one. Digital embodiments have their own unique strengths and weaknesses in comparison to physical ones, and metaphors from one world can only be stretched so far before breaking in the other. Usually, the seams appear quickly.

While I agree with the general concept, I think that the ebook/paper book example isn’t a particularly strong one. The structure of a book is rather simple: a cover and a bunch of pages bound together. Yes, it’s probably unnecessary to do a thorough digital emulation of a paper book, with page-turn animations, red ribbons as bookmarks and other elements such as gutters, visible corners, textblocks, etc. (That would indeed be a case of gratuitous skeuomorphism). But there’s nothing wrong, in my opinion, in maintaining pagination as a fundamental structural element in an ebook as it is in a paper book. When the book as collection of sheets (codex) replaced the scroll, the advantages were obvious: books were easier to handle and easier to read; information was easier to locate and it was easier to make references inside a text. 

Today, given the computational power of smartphones and tablets, an ebook could theoretically be structured as an ancient scroll, a continuous flow of text, without numbered pages or other rigid paper book metaphors; an ebook reader (whether a physical device or a software application) could handle the search for information inside a text very easily: a search field, a pop-up index where you just tap on a chapter or section to jump there, and so on. But I contend that reading an ebook with an ‘infinite scroll’ interface is not as practical as reading a paginated ebook. It may be fine for reading articles, essays, short stories, but it certainly becomes tiring and awkward for novels, especially novels where a chapter may go on for a hundred pages’ worth of text. 

Lukas Mathis explained this more eloquently in two articles published last November. In Scrolling vs. Pagination he writes:

[…] the kind of control scrolling gives to users seems completely meaningless in the context of the task the user is engaged in. She’s reading a book. It’s a mostly linear affair. Her main goal is to go through the text from beginning to end. The additional control isn’t helping with that goal, it’s just creating more work. […]

If I’m reading a novel, the experience I’m having should be the book’s story unfolding in my head, not my fingers scrolling the page every few seconds. In this case, good UX design means not interfering with the actual experience the user is having: the book’s story.

Pagination gets out of the way. Read a page. Push a button. Read the next page. Repeat. No needless interference with the actual text being read, no unnecessary interactions that could pull the reader out of the book’s world. (Of course, switching pages still interrupts the reading experience, but to a lesser degree than constant scrolling does.) 

In More on Pagination, Mathis writes:

Look at iOS’s home screen. There are pages of apps. You jump between pages, you don’t scroll. Is the home screen’s pagination an artifact of paper book technology, or is it simply a better idea than having a home screen that can be scrolled? I’d argue that it’s a better idea.

This example also shows that a simple interaction model isn’t pagination’s only advantage. How do you find apps on your home screen? For many of the apps you use often, you probably find them by their position. Pagination allows you to organize things spatially.

This (typically) doesn’t apply to automatic pagination, where page breaks are chosen in a way that can’t be predicted by the author, but it does apply in many other situations. If you use iBooks author, you design individual pages that perfectly fit the iPad’s screen. This means that you can ensure that paragraphs that belong together are on the same page. You can make sure that illustrations and pictures are next to the text they belong to. And your users can identify things by their position: «look at the image at the bottom left of page 35!»

To summarise, Gemmell is right when he says that “The biggest intellectual stumbling-block we’re facing is the fallacy that just because physical embodiments came first, they’re also somehow canonical”, but at the same time I think that we shouldn’t dismiss all the elements of a physical medium when it comes to designing and building its digital counterpart. Structural elements of physical embodiments — such as pagination in a paper book — can still work quite well in a digital context. 

Back to flat vs. skeuomorphic design

Back to the general debate, that an interface is drawn to suggest a two- or three-dimensional representation doesn’t really matter, in my opinion. As I’ve said previously, an interface design isn’t necessarily good and efficient because it’s minimal, and isn’t necessarily bad and gratuitous because it’s skeuomorphic. What a skeuomorphic UI design shouldn’t do is deceive the user. What a minimal UI design shouldn’t do is provide non-obvious methods of interaction. 

As a corollary, I’ll add that what really matters in creating a good, usable application is coherence. Choose a model and/or æsthetics and stick with it all the way. There’s nothing inherently wrong in designing a calendar app that looks like a paper calendar or desk appointment diary, provided that the illusion is gracefully maintained everywhere and all visual expectations fulfilled. If minimalism and abstraction are the design principles of a similar app, make sure that all interactive elements are consistently apparent, and that the minimalism for minimalism’s sake doesn’t lead to an interface that’s too mystifying due to its lack of visual cues.

Why Newton

May 14, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Newton MessagePad 2000

Every now and then I like to post photos of my ‘mobile office’ setup of the moment. Very often this setup includes one of my Newton MessagePads, and often enough, when people see I have a Newton with me, they’re curious to know why I keep carrying a 15-year-old device (20-year-old in the case of the Original Newton MessagePad). I’m talking about people who actually recognise the device. Sometimes — especially in person — I get asked what’s that thing I’m using that looks like an ebook reader but it has a colourful Apple logo on it and why is that and so on and so forth. I also get the occasional opinionated feedback: why use that old Newton when I’m also carrying an iPhone and a 9.7″ iPad.

The answer is quite simple, really. The Newton offers me a unique experience: writing naturally using a pen-like instrument, on the surface of a device which recognises and transforms my handwriting in typewritten text I can edit, copy, paste, and send to my Mac as a text file.

Today we are accustomed to technologies that give us instant gratification. In this regard, the Newton demands a bit more patience. Forget the jokes about the poor handwriting recognition: the later MessagePad models and version 2.x of the NewtonOS handle handwriting recognition much better than the first models. You have to practice a bit, there’s a stage of training and adaptation, where you help the device to understand your writing by correcting its mistakes, and where you sort of adjust your writing rhythm in a manner that the Newton can gracefully keep up with you, interpreting and transforming your words as you jot them down. Having patience at this stage is crucial. In my experience, you get to sacrifice a bit of instant gratification at the beginning, only to have a very satisfying reward later.

This means that now I can write a note on my Newton faster than I can type it on my iPhone or iPad. Also, if I’m in a hurry and I need to write down something quickly, I can tell the Newton not to recognise the handwriting on the fly — I can simply save the note ‘as is’ and go over it later.

The long battery life and the incredibly persistent storage are another two features that make my Newtons invaluable tools. I haven’t lost one bit of information since I started using my first MessagePad 2000 twelve years ago. These pieces of 1990s technology already got rid of the manual Save command well before the advent of iOS and other mobile operating systems. Whatever I input in the Newton, I know it won’t be lost (unless, of course, the device suffers some catastrophic failure), and if I need to do some extended word processing, I can always put down the stylus, connect the keyboard, and type away. But again, what really fascinates me and keeps me incredibly attached to my Newtons, is the experience of just writing down something as if I were using pen and paper, and see my writing recognised and neatly arranged in editable form.

There’s so much talking lately about how we live in the future, how ‘magical’ technology can feel today, and so on and so forth. I remember July 2001, that first weekend I spent learning the basics of my then-new Newton MessagePad 2000, and seeing my first handwritten notes and calendar entries digitised. Despite being already discontinued, I felt I was holding a powerful, futuristic device. Even today, at least in part, I still can’t consider it an obsolete piece of technology.

Paul Miller’s debriefing: some considerations

May 2, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

At the end of April 2012, Paul Miller, one of the writers at The Verge, started his experiment — staying away from the Internet for a year. During his leave of absence, The Verge periodically published his observations about his newfound ‘unplugged experience’; I read a few of those articles, and I’ve enjoyed Miller’s style and musings. I remember, one year ago, how many people considered his experiment just a silly thing. Some — rather patronisingly, I must say — were quick to point out that to have a well-adjusted relationship with today’s always-on state of connectedness, it’s better to use the network wisely, to actively control its influence over our lives, and to act accordingly when we perceive it’s just too much.

I defended Miller’s intentions and his desire to start a path of self-discovery. In the past, people left their urban environment and went to India and the Far East on trips of self-discovery (and I mean trips in every way). Miller’s journey is no different — a kind of modern equivalent of that, if you want. 

Now he’s back, and he has summarised his year away from the Internet in a very interesting article. Sure, Miller’s considerations can be condensed as follows: leaving the Internet was great at first — more time to think, focus, read, write and give friends and relatives the attention they deserved; but after a while old (bad) habits resurfaced, things devolved into periods of inertia, and also came the realisation that the problem isn’t Internet per se, but lies within one’s self.

Therefore, some people (Miller included, perhaps) will consider this Internet-deprivation experiment a failure. I don’t think it’s been a failure. If this one-year sabbatical has brought Miller a better understanding of his self, then it’s been successful. Anyway, Miller’s summary has been a thought-provoking read, so here are some observations I’d like to add. 

Back to where you’ve never been

There’s a detail that struck me when reading Miller’s piece. At one point, not far from the beginning, he writes:

I thought the internet might be an unnatural state for us humans, or at least for me. Maybe I was too ADD to handle it, or too impulsive to restrain my usage. I’d used the internet constantly since I was twelve, and as my livelihood since I was fourteen. I’d gone from paperboy, to web designer, to technology writer in under a decade. I didn’t know myself apart from a sense of ubiquitous connection and endless information.

Using the Internet constantly since the age of twelve means not having much memories of how things were before the Internet. What’s good about this is that Miller’s viewpoint isn’t much affected by nostalgia. You can’t really pine for what you don’t know. This, in a way, made Miller’s journey away from the Internet more ‘pure’ and also more challenging. For comparison, when I started using the Internet constantly I was 28. That makes a huge difference. If I were to do a similar Internet-deprivation experiment, it would be quite easy for me to switch back to my pre-Internet days. I could find and relive my good old routines in a few days. This is mainly because, having developed a life before the Internet, I’ve never really felt my online and offline dimensions as two inextricably intertwined components. As I wrote in my article Online, offline, and the ‘need’ to share:

I tend to see some kind of separation between the online and the offline because, well, I lived that moment when the online started creeping into my life. I lived that moment where the online started becoming an activity that separated me, in some ways, from my surroundings. I lived that moment in which logging in and ‘going online’ was somehow like going someplace else. And since I could spend (a lot of) time doing things in this ‘other place’, the experience was more addicting and detaching than, say, losing myself in a book (an ‘offline’ activity). While over the years and especially in these recent years I’ve come to accept this increasing interconnection between the online and the offline, while I’ve come to terms with the fact that technology has gone under our skin (figuratively for now, and maybe literally soon), for me the “disconnection from the smartphone and social media” is still a disconnection, and “the logic of social media” doesn’t follow me long after I log out.

So, if I disconnected from the Internet for a year, I’d simply remove the ‘online’ component, and it’d be easier for me because I always felt the ‘online’ component as something that has been added to, not implanted in (or grown within) my life.

That’s why I think Miller did a rather good job in finding his ‘offline space’, at least at first. And in my opinion, one of the reasons why things haven’t stayed great in Miller’s Internet-less life is precisely because his experience without Internet was somehow new, was something he never really experienced before as an adult. This has a significant impact when it comes to connect and socialise with other people. Or in this case, maintaining connections that have for the most part developed within the Internet era.

Out of sync

Miller writes:

But without the internet, it’s certainly harder to find people. It’s harder to make a phone call than to send an email. It’s easier to text, or SnapChat, or FaceTime, than drop by someone’s house. Not that these obstacles can’t be overcome. I did overcome them at first, but it didn’t last.

It’s hard to say exactly what changed. I guess those first months felt so good because I felt the absence of the pressures of the internet. My freedom felt tangible. But when I stopped seeing my life in the context of “I don’t use the internet,” the offline existence became mundane, and the worst sides of myself began to emerge.

I would stay at home for days at a time. My phone would die, and nobody could get ahold of me. At some point my parents would get fed up with wondering if I was alive, and send my sister over to my apartment to check on me. On the internet it was easy to assure people I was alive and sane, easy to collaborate with my coworkers, easy to be a relevant part of society.

So much ink has been spilled deriding the false concept of a “Facebook friend,” but I can tell you that a “Facebook friend” is better than nothing.

My best long-distance friend, one I’d talked to weekly on the phone for years, moved to China this year and I haven’t spoken to him since. My best New York friend simply faded into his work, as I failed to keep up my end of our social plans.

I fell out of sync with the flow of life.

These observations perfectly exemplify the point of view of someone whose life, relationships and connections have all been developing in a meaningful way within the Internet era. It’s hard being disconnected when everyone else in your life is not. It’s hard having to communicate through ways — the phone call, the written letter, dropping by someone’s place — that are considered dated and quaint. Today, an unannounced visit (even among friends) is basically frowned upon, almost treated as an unauthorised intrusion. I fondly remember a time when it was considered a pleasant surprise. 

The ‘finding people’ aspect Miller talks about is another thing where my experience and his experience significantly diverge. Having developed my strongest friendships mostly before the advent of the Internet, if I were to stay disconnected for a year, I wouldn’t encounter much friction in reverting to ‘older’ ways of (re)connecting with my best friends. We all used to chat a lot on the phone, and arrange meetings and outings via phone or text. If I could afford such an Internet-free sabbatical, I guess it would be beneficial to my personal relationships, because most of them actually started suffering when the Internet began pervading our lives. For someone in my position, all this talking about Internet that ‘connects’ people, all this babbling about the ‘power of social media’, is rather ridiculous. For someone in my position, apart from a good few exceptions, the ‘connections’ developed via the Internet can’t really compare with relationships developed and cultivated in person, in the ‘offline’ dimension. 

In general, Internet has brought convenience, more than depth, to the way we connect with one another. That’s why, for me, a “Facebook friend” is not better than nothing. That’s why, for me, certain ways of being ‘connected’ via the Internet aren’t all that different from when people keep the TV or the radio on because “it keeps them company”.

Yes, when we put Internet aside, we also put aside its convenience: every road looks uphill, we see every small delay or obstacle as ‘friction’, and it’s hard to keep up when everyone drives a car and you’re the only one on foot. Perhaps Miller could have been more proactive in his attempts to keep in touch with people, but I also think that his friends and acquaintances — knowing his situation — could also have gone the extra mile more often. What I find especially sad in that “falling out of sync with the flow of life” is that we’re living in such dysfunctional times where people of Miller’s age (and younger) feel compelled to return to the Internet because, as Miller writes, “The Internet is where the people are”. Internet should be a part of the flow of life, sure, yet I’m feeling that Internet is progressively commandeering the flow of life. And while not everything Internet has brought with it is bad, I can’t help but feel saddened by where things are going.

Visitor statistics

April 23, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

#alttext#

Harry Marks, in his post Quality over Quantity:

It’s difficult to pull yourself away from the feeling that you need to be posting more and doing everything you can to keep numbers up, but when it comes right down to it, it’s all about who is paying attention to your work, not how many.

I stopped obsessing over visitor statistics shortly after the migration from the old Quillink Observer to this website+blog. I admit to having been a website stats addict up to 2011, and I admit that in the past I often associated quantity with relevance. And the feeling Marks talks about — I know that very well. 

Of one thing I’m sure, though. Ever since I started writing online (2001) and maintaining a blog rather regularly (2005), visitor statistics never influenced the choice of content or the frequency I posted. There was a time when I genuinely thought that posting quick links to interesting stuff I find while browsing my feeds and the Web was a way to ‘keep the site fresh’ and maintain interest, but that didn’t improve or worsen the status quo. I’ve just been keeping my pace and following my rules — which are quite simple: to write and publish articles only when I have something to say; to favour longish, original pieces instead of quick link-posts with a line (or a word) of commentary; to let my followers on Twitter and App.net know when I’ve published a new article without insisting or shoving it down their throats, so to speak.

Over time, I’ve learnt to overcome my insecurities about ‘relevance’. I’ve learnt that there are people out there who value my opinion and who are willing to listen to what I have to say. I’ve learnt to appreciate that having ‘only’ 80 visits in a day is fine when one of those 80 gets in touch with me via Twitter, App.net or email to tell me that he or she has liked my article.

Meanwhile, what I’ve been doing with those visitor stats is to try to figure out a way to use them as behavioural indicators. One thing I’ve noticed is that readers can be a fickle bunch, no matter the quality one offers in a blog. In the past I’ve had some well-known and respected guys link to a few articles of mine that got their attention. The increase in traffic was substantial (and even if I don’t care much about numbers, I’d lie if I said that I didn’t feel good about the increased attention), but it pretty much reverted to its usual standards in a day or two. The image above sums this up pretty well.

While I still find a bit depressing that a lot of people, after discovering my blog in such a way, don’t stick around, my attitude has changed pretty much over time. Once I would have thought It’s my fault, I’m not interesting enough. Now my reaction is more like Hey, this is me, this is what I write about; I strive to provide good quality and well written pieces. You won’t return? Your loss. It’s not arrogance. I’ve been writing (in two languages) for so long I know what I’m capable of. And over time I’ve received enough appreciation to give me the additional boost to further strengthen my resolve to keep on writing, here and elsewhere.

Four years after: a brief review of my MacBook Pro

April 18, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

15-inch MacBook Pro mid-2009

It was late June 2009 when I opened that box. My first Intel Mac, a 15-inch MacBook Pro, with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM, 256 MB of graphics memory, and a 320 GB hard drive. Considering that up until then my main machine had been a 12-inch PowerBook G4, with a 1 GHz processor, 1.25 GB of RAM, 32 MB of graphics memory, and a 40 GB hard drive, you can imagine how noticeable the improvement in performance and user experience was for me.

My line of work doesn’t require frequent equipment upgrades, thankfully, so I usually change my main Mac only when absolutely necessary. The downside is that when the time to upgrade comes, I have to choose a new model wisely, because it has to last for a few years, and that means choosing a machine with a certain degree of upgradability. In this regard, I must say that this MacBook Pro has turned out to be a great choice.

With hindsight, 2009 was a good vintage for MacBook Pros. This Mac is certainly better manufactured than the aluminium PowerBook G4s and MacBook Pros of the 2003–2007 era. The ‘precision aluminium unibody’ case is a remarkable improvement over the previous assembly design. Simply consider the fact that, to replace the internal hard drive, on my 12-inch PowerBook G4 I had to remove more than 40 tiny screws, while the count goes down to 14 on this MacBook Pro. But the unibody assembly is also a marvellous improvement because the MacBook Pro, after almost four years of intense use, basically still looks like new.

It took a while to get used to the keyboard (I still love the feel of the keyboard of the aluminium PowerBooks), but again, I had to recognise that the keyboard in the unibody MacBooks is simply better designed. For one, it’s easier to clean, and there’s virtually no place where dirt can accumulate. In this regard, a terrible spot in the previous aluminium PowerBooks and MacBook Pros was the space along the bottom row of keys, just above the trackpad/palm rest area. 

Four years after: what’s bad

Somehow it doesn’t seem fair to include the hard drive among the weaknesses of this MacBook Pro. Considering that in almost four years I’ve actually turned off the MacBook Pro probably less than 10 times; and considering that for the most part the MacBook Pro has been working 16–18 hours a day on average, I’d say it’s rather amazing that the stock hard drive has lasted this long. 

Instead, the one truly disappointing element of this machine has to be the optical drive. At first it was just noisy (even noisier than the tray-loading CD/DVD drive of my clamshell iBooks), then, maybe after a year of light-to-moderate use, it became erratic and unreliable: sometimes it would refuse to read a CD-RW or DVD‑R disc I had burnt a few days before; sometimes it managed to burn a DVD on the second or third attempt. After a month of not using it, one day it just stopped working. What a piece of crap, indeed.

…And what’s good

Practically everything else. I don’t use the MacBook Pro for particularly CPU-intensive, demanding applications, but nonetheless I still use it for a bunch of different tasks, and I have at least a dozen applications open at all times. After four years (and unlike previous Macs) it doesn’t feel old or slow or sluggish. Sure, it helps to have upgraded the internal RAM to 8 GB (the maximum allowed by this machine); and of course the latest MacBook Pros and Airs are and feel faster, but my MacBook Pro still holds its ground when I return to it. When I decided to upgrade from my 12-inch PowerBook G4 after five years of continued use, one of the reasons was that Apple had left PowerPC Macs behind, but most of all it was because of the general performance — sadly, that poor PowerBook was showing its age. (Mind you, it’s still in use as a lightweight second option, and it’s still a great machine for Web browsing, email, light photo retouching and similar tasks, and it’s undoubtedly useful in case of emergency).

However, one truly outstanding feature of this MacBook Pro is the battery. On a full charge, it still lasts almost four hours, with medium screen brightness, and wireless (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) turned on. After four years, it’s really amazing, especially when I think of the generally mediocre battery performance of most of the PowerBooks I used before (all fine and dandy during the first year or so, then operating time and reliability rapidly decreasing). 

Conclusion

I’m quite satisfied with this 15-inch mid-2009 MacBook Pro. It’s still a responsive machine, well manufactured, resilient and great looking. It still has a healthy battery performing surprisingly well and, apart from the mediocre quality of the optical drive, there’s really nothing to complain about this machine. I predict a few more years of use, since I intend to do one more upgrade to further extend its useful life: a dual SSD-HD internal configuration, with the SSD as the main unit, and the current 500 GB hard drive as secondary unit, replacing the useless optical drive (with the help of adapters such as this one). And whatever Mac I’ll purchase when it’s time to upgrade again, I’m positive this MacBook Pro will still be a fantastic second machine to have around.