“software”
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2 days ago I had a major breakthrough in Domburi’s interface. I had been racking my brain for several days for a simple, elegant way to provide all the new functionality I had dreamt for it, but the standards I’d set made the task daunting:
Simple and easy to understand
Building (or at least not interfering) upon earlier knowledge
We’ve been using (web) GUIs for decades now, patterns have emerged. To waste them a silly thing would be. Right-click contextual menu, buttons, selection methods, drag & drop, and general link behavior (from one-click-activation to middle clicking on a link to open it in a new tab) are useful patterns we learn early and should be respected.
Consistency
I wanted to have the same interface for thumbnails and full-size images, just like Imagery works now (with almost the same toolbar for both cases).
I’m obsessive with claiming the precious few screen real state I’m able to and profoundly detest what Edward Tufte once called “administrative debris.” The goal is to see at a glance as many images (and nothing more!) as it is usefully possible.
Even onhover interfaces must be extremely discreet, not only for conceptual clarity, but because rendering times can make for a jarring experience.
On the other hand, even if keyboard shortcuts and other tricks & gimmicks are more efficient, I believe it’s crucial for users to be able to get a visual overview of their options.
Modeless
Modes WP can be useful and uncannily efficient—I love Vim—but they take a huge cognitive load to understand and use, and many, many hours of practice for them to become second-nature. They’re prone to frustrating mode errorsWP too.
Text is always a good thing, text and icons can sometimes be an improvement, but icons alone I usually find confusing and useful only for the most trivial of cases. The big problem with text of course is all the space it demands.
I dabbled for a while with tool palettes like those of Adobe Photoshop but in the end sweared off modes of any kind, even graphic ones.
I tried expanding the weird text-toolbar I currently use in Imagery but it proved too constraining.
Jensen Haris’s Office User Interface Blog sent me reeling into the possibilities of ribbons and contextual tabs (GUI innovations in upcoming Office 2007), but though interesting and definitely appropriate sometimes, they can be brutal overkill for such a simple application as Domburi.
In the end, it was clear to me that what was needed was a contextual menu of some sort and a way to activate it graphically (since I wasn’t willing to break the right-click, and other keyboard/mouse combos reeked of inelegance).
I finally found my solution in a little known interface innovation from Flickr (who introduced it only recently in a May 16, 2006 redesign).
They call it a “person menu” but it’s not the menu itself what interests me, it’s the way it’s activated: you hover over someone’s (otherwise undefiled!) buddy image and this obvious sidebutton appears; you click on it and your options to manipulate the image are presented.
This is a natural evolution of the pulldown button ( ), of course, but it allows for a revolutionary array of possibilities. I’ve been playing with the idea for 2 days now and am ready to nominate the onhover sidebutton as one of this decade’s contributions to our shared GUI alphabet: a visual, yet non intrusive, way to activate a context-menu. I’m using it everywhere in Domburi now (the idiom is evolving some impressive refinements!) and it has simplified things further than I thought possible. In the prophetic words of Jeff Han: “the interface just disappears.”
Exciting times!
Back when I was a serious download freak, always looking for that little app that’d make it all right, Nonags was one of my favorite haunts. They listed only freeware and well-behaved, no-nags shareware. The design was accordingly simple and unobtrusive (though quirky). How weird then that now when trying to download something you’re taken to one of those infamous “Your-download-should-start-automatically” pages, full of Google ads that don’t stand a chance of being remotely relevant (relevant to what? the “invitation” to join Nonag plus?). Worst, the cheapest, lowliest possible kind of popup (party poker! your computer is at risk!) creeps underhandedly (that is, hides beneath your current window).
It would be ironic, were it not sad.
Just good fun writing. On the singularity to boot. To be read with that eemadge from Moravec I always quote in such settings.
Perhaps the week’s biggest and scariest robot news, though—certainly for journalists—was the robot reporters story.
Thomson Financial has been using automatic computer programs to generate news stories for almost six months. The machines can spit out wire-ready copy based on financial reports a mere 0.3 seconds after receiving the data. Thomson management likes its reporter robots so much that it has decided to expand the fleet.
Flesh-and-blood journalists were quick to decry the move. “Those editors who can’t wait to install computers at the expense of journalists should beware,” warned Mark Tran in the Guardian article “Robots write the news.”
“Look at what happened in Space Odyssey, when HAL took over the spaceship. Or worse still, think of Terminator 3, when the Skynet network of computers unleashes nuclear war.”
Tran was joking. Well, half joking. But his joke was also a poignant plea. A robot may be able to turn a share report into three pithy paragraphs in less than a second, but it can’t go and watch movies about other robots and turn that into a warning for the world.
Because it can’t live, it can’t think. Or so we think. Tran’s conclusion isn’t very reassuring. “We endangered financial journalists could prolong our lives in the short term by slapping more adjectives into our copy,” he suggests, “but the writing does seem to be on the wall, as far as earnings reports go.” If all that stands between a writer’s job and redundancy is a few adjectives, well, that’s plain scary.
”Scary”—yes, nice adjective. It’s got human emotion, empathy, experience. Good, we’re still on the right side of the Turing Test the side the robots can’t get to.
Or can they? I can hear the laments already, with 20/20 hindsight. First they came for the bomb disposal crews, and we said nothing. Then they were spot-welding and spray-painting on the auto plant assembly lines, and still we said nothing. Only now that they’ve come for the journalism jobs do the journalists scream. But it’s too late.
Mistrust and paranoia have set in. How do we know Mark Tran isn’t already a robot? “Tran”—does that even sound like a human name?
It’s a losing battle. These days, it seems, there are fewer and fewer jobs a robot couldn’t do. Even automatic translation, which some said only humans could do properly (because meaning requires context and context requires lived experience) is coming on by leaps and bounds, pulling jobs out from under the feet of the lower-level human translators.
Heh, that “first, then, now” schtick never grows old. Here’s another instance of it.
That last paragraph of the quote was included simply for Chepe & Andrea, the two wonderful translators-to-be in my life, to read and grok. It’s not that I don’t support such a lovely liberal-arts profession (I’ve surely considered it for myself in several occasions). I simply believe it’s going to be among the next professions to be submergedEE by AI, and seafaring success thereon will require a different skillset and attitude.
[Inside Friendster] there have also been Fakesters, evidence of how contemporary Americans crave connectedness. Users composed profiles for their pets (and then connected their pets), their colleges (and then connected to their alma maters) and household odds and ends (and then watched the conversation that developed between “salt” and “pepper”). To Ms. [danah] boyd it was interesting not only because people played with identity, but also because of the range of reasons they did so.
Apparently Friendster management could conceive of only one reason: to subvert the site. So it began terminating the Fakesters. That set off a Fakester revolution, complete with a manifesto: ”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all fakesters and real people are created equal.”
I’ve been plowing through Humanized today and though it’s been somewhat less interesting than I thought it would be (perhaps my expectationsELZR were just too high), here are two very worthy text scraps:
Why do people use Google Maps? Because it’s just so nice to use. Microsoft’s Terraserver gave users access to high resolution satellite images many years before Google Maps did the same. (In fact, while attempting to be clever, I inadvertently terrified my to-be roommate: I used the service to view an aerial photograph of his home and asked him some leading questions about the stuff in his backyard. It took until the second quarter of college before he even talked to me, and then only warily.) But, it wasn’t until Google rethought online maps that the security and privacy issues of such a service came into the national conscience. Why? Because whereas Microsoft had given access to satellite imagery, Google made them accessible.
[Bracket Notation for Editing is] simply three sets of square brackets. The first set denotes deletion, the second set denotes addition, and the third set denotes a comment. It’s easiest to explain by example. Let’s start with a simple sentence plagued by two typical errors:
They called to say that their coming over in an quarter-hour.
An editor might revise the sentence to:
They called to say that the[ir][y’re] coming over in a[n] quarter-hour. [][][Be careful with “their” and “they’re”.]
The link is the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries..
Steven Johnson, Interface CultureAM, p110-1
Indeed it is, but then we might as well feel warranted to pose the seldom-asked question of why are hyperlinks underlined. Dull utilitarian answers aside, an intriguing yet plausible historical explanation (or rather, re-interpretation) herefollows.
I believe our answer traces back to the humble clothe buttonA, that immemorial “knoblike appendageWP used on wearing apparel either for ornament or for fastening,” forgotten (as much else) during the Middle Ages, dismissed as vanity by the Puritans, and traded to Native Americans by early settlers.
With society’s mechanization through the first and second Industrial RevolutionsWP, there was dire need to create appropriate interfaces for the control of the suddenly ubiquitous machines and one of the simplest, most versatile methods invented came to be called “button”WP, owing to its creative resemblance to the former fashion accessory (both were usually round after all).
One subtle point, which shall prove of great importance later, must be remarked now: Owing to human factorsWP, most control buttons are usually seen from a very specific angle. Words fail me to further describe it but perhaps some pictures can help to illustrate the matter:   the keyboard on the ←left shows the usual, canonical perspective of buttons we’ve grown accustomed to since the late 18th century, and any other perspective, say, the keyboard on the right→, feels immediately awkward.
But back to our story: When the turn came for society’s computerization, there was again dire need to come up with suitable interfaces for the novel symbolic devices. Abstruse command-lineWP interactions followed at first, but thanks to Xerox PARC’sWP bitmap revolution1 graphical interfacesWP were envisioned (and, eventually, accepted). The new art form required new metaphors2 and prompted a creativity explosion that continues to this day, but few metaphors proved more fertile or intuitive than the visual staple that became the “graphic button”. Beveled out, it’s “push affordance”3 invites interaction (a click, a push, a press) like nothing else we’ve come up with since.
With the advent of the inter-network, you guessed it, that direst of needs—the interface—made itself felt again. We needed a way to link geographically and semantically far-flung documentsEE together. So what if Ted NelsonWP himself, hypertext’s father, was thinking in our trusty ole friend, the button, when he came up with his gift to the world?
The hyperlink might just be the latest, abstract, stylized reincarnation of our centuries-old pal, the button.
Yesterday’s postELZR on a recent essay by Thomas L. Friedman made me remember just how good the man is and how much I enjoyed his latest book, The World is Flat. Today I chanced upon this MIT lecture1 in which he discusses the book at length and it may be even even better than the book itself. Friedman’s a master storyteller and shines in front of a live audience. The video quality is pixel-art at best but no matter, I promise you this hour and a half will be one of your day’s highlights (and when you watch it, don’t miss the answer to the final question posed to him: “How can an open society be secure?”).
Friedman himself’s a very interesting man—Mediterranean studies BrandeisWP B.A., married to one of the hundred richest families in America, won every journalistic accolade there is—don’t forget to check out his pedia and this U.S. News & World Report writeup on him (listing Friedman as one of America’s best leaders).
1 While you’re at it, give the MIT Video Index a good browse, there’s good stuff aplenty.
I will one day build a Fortune Global 500WP company made out of less people than my then age. The headcount limit should keep it interesting.
 I really do. This quick demo by Merlin Mann only whetted my appetite. Had I the money, I swear I’d buy an overpriced MacBook Pro just to get my hands on itWP.
Isn’t it weird that Macs’ current killer app (for that’s certainly what Quicksilver has become) is a sort of meta-program (a launcher to control other programs)?
...and this is one of the best.
In academia, in industry, and in the commercial world, there is a widespread belief that computing science as such has been all but completed and that, consequently, computing has matured from a theoretical topic for the scientists to a practical issue for the engineers, the managers, and the entrepreneurs..
I would therefore like to posit that computing’s central challenge, ”How not to make a mess of it,” has not been met. On the contrary, most of our systems are much more complicated than can be considered healthy, and are too messy and chaotic to be used in comfort and confidence. The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed.
For us scientists it is very tempting to blame the lack of education of the average engineer, the shortsightedness of the managers, and the malice of the entrepreneurs for this sorry state of affairs, but that won’t do. You see, while we all know that unmastered complexity is at the root of the misery, we do not know what degree of simplicity can be obtained, nor to what extent the intrinsic complexity of the whole design has to show up in the interfaces. We simply do not know yet the limits of disentanglement. We do not know yet whether intrinsic intricacy can be distinguished from accidental intricacy.
To put it bluntly, we simply do not know yet what we should be talking about.. The moral is that whether computing science is finished will primarily depend on our courage and our imagination.
Edsger W. DijkstraWP, Communications of the ACM, Mar 2001, Vol. 44, No. 3
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