In the course of a post about Browsing vs. Searching, user interface guru Bruce Tognazzini touches on something central to the experience of using the current generation of Apple software:

[...] Instead of working to make everything visible to the user, Apple's industrial and graphic designers, now fully in command, are doing just the opposite: Apparently bereft of even the barest knowledge of behavioral (HCI) design, they have busied themselves hiding everything they can, increasing visual simplicity at the expense of actual simplicity. Then, they pretend both to themselves and to us that the only instruction you'll ever need for an iPad is, "Turn it on." iPad users are left to stumble around, trying to find the things they need to get their work done, things so carefully hidden that without a friend to help them, they are unlikely to ever find them.

Case in point: At some point in the past, perhaps the distant past, Apple added the capability to jump from letter group to letter group by holding down on the letter column, rather than just stabbing at your letter of choice (and usually missing). After four years of using iDevices, during the course of writing this column, I accidentally held down for a second on an alpha character, causing the slide bar to appear. I never knew before that moment that hold-and-slide even existed in Contacts. Principle: If a capability is not visible and the developer does not teach that capability, it may as well not exist.

Damned straight! I had no idea the slide bar existed until I read that last paragraph earlier this evening.

I like iOS, I really do, but it's a crying shame that the most usable portable computers I've ever owned were designed by Palm¹ and Psion² back in the 1990s.

Come on Apple, you can do better than this…

[Via Daring Fireball]

1. I loved my Palm IIIx and Tungsten T. The T5 was prettier and had better hardware specs, but by then PalmOS was clearly running out of steam. ↩
2. My Psion Series 3c was the best-engineered portable hardware I've ever owned. The Psion Series 5 came with tremendously capable software, but it wasn't as robust, and it was orphaned when Psion decided to concentrate on making software for smartphones. ↩

Lower than a Snake's Belly in a Wagon Rut, or Flying Low is Fun! Some amazing photographs of pilots indulging themselves (and unnerving those of us stuck at ground level.)

My favourites:

• A B-52 cruising below deck level.
• The South African aerobatics team getting their feet wet.
• An English Electric Lightning poised to slam on the power and take off like a scalded cat.
• A Vulcan sneaking up on a graduation parade at RAF Swinderby.

The last two get extra marks from me because in the 1970s and 1980s I saw those types at umpteen air displays; they seemed like they'd flown in from a Century 21 production. The Vulcan, in particular, looked like an aircraft from fifty years into the future. In fact, it was designed in the late 1950s and had long since abandoned the role it was designed to fulfil, i.e. carrying Britain's nuclear deterrent.

[Via MetaFilter]

Jonathan Zittrain declares that the PC is dead. Which would be fine, if only the smartphones and tablets that are ushering in the post-PC era weren't so locked down:

[...] Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don't merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we're seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other – and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse. [...]

[Via The Brooks Review]

Having lived in Paris for almost a decade, Simon Kuper has come to the conclusion that happiness is a table for one:

[On lunch...] By now I've worked out the essential elements. For me, the first is solitude. As a married person with children living in a cramped city, loneliness isn't the problem. Rather, you're always drowning in loved ones. Happiness is a table for one with something to read. I don't go as far as the man I know who says he's happiest when eating dinner alone with a book about war, but nearly. As I once had to tell my wife: "Nothing you could say could be as interesting as this article that I'm reading." (After some thought, she offered the correct response: "I'm pregnant." Luckily it was a joke.)

A long lost episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos: The Meat Planet.

Just perfect.

[Via MetaFilter]

<sarcasm>Six reasons why The Thing prequel is better than John Carpenter's 1982 film.</sarcasm>

THE STUPIDITY

Oh yes, we're in Antarctica, so I think I'll just pop outside and wave at that helicopter WITHOUT PUTTING MY COAT ON. And oh, any one of you could be a Thing, so hey, let me just STICK MY HEAD IN ALL YOUR MOUTHS TO SEE IF YOU HAVE FILLINGS. Because, you know, Things can't reproduce metal or something, though they don't appear to have any problems with clothes or zips or whatever. [...]

[Via @AnneBillson, via guardian/film-staff]

Ted Sabarese's photographs match fish to people. Every bit as odd as it sounds.

[Via kottke.org]

Clarifications & corrections from the Daily Mail.

[Via LinkMachineGo]