Tweet of the week, courtesy of @kjhealy, a.k.a. Kieran Healy:

Alain de Botton plans to build a series of temples for atheists. Apparently he has never heard of Apple Stores. dezeen.com/2012/01/25/ala…

[Via Crooked Timber]

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. ↩

Siri's apparent unwillingness to provide useful responses to search queries relating to birth control makes Apple look terrible. I wonder how much embarrassment it would take for Apple to cite the program's 'Beta' status and pull it for a while so they can work the bugs out?

For what it's worth, I'd be astounded if the behaviour people are reporting is the result of a deliberate strategy on Apple's part of trying to avoid giving information about contraception, rape and so on. If it is, it's clearly very poorly implemented, both because the iPhone will happily let you google for them¹ and because it's such a hot button subject that there's no way it would have gone unnoticed for long.

I strongly suspect that Siri's anomalous behaviour will turn out to be some combination of the user's location, the quality and consistency of data in the databases and directories Siri is acting as a front end for, and some rough edges in Siri's code. Running natural language search queries against third party databases is hard: doing so when your data providers may themselves be erring on the side of caution when it comes to tagging and categorising the data you're accessing is never going to be close to completely accurate. Doing all that and having Siri respond in colloquial English rather than displaying less user-friendly but more informative error messages like "Connection refused" or "0 records found", and thus making every failed query look like the result of a conscious decision on Siri's part. isn't helping one little bit.

Whatever the reason, it'll be interesting to see how Apple respond.

[Via MetaFilter]

1. Thus shredding any argument Apple might make that they're attempting to shield young iPhone users from information that some jurisdictions might not want them to be able to access. ↩

One for the Safari users among you: the ZoomBySite extension makes Safari remember the zoom level you applied last time you visited a site, then automatically applies it again for future visits. Marvelous for the many web sites that assume we all still have the eyes of our 21 year old selves.

The one feature ZoomBySite is missing is that it doesn't respect Safari's Zoom Text Only setting and always zooms both text and images. You can still use the default Safari zoom feature, so it's not a disaster, but it's mildly irritating to have to switch to the native Safari method for some sites when ZoomBySite otherwise does such a good job.

Apart from that quirk, ZoomBySite does one thing and does it really well: recommended.

In enthusing over his iPad, TV producer Ash Atalla requested a feature that I'd be willing to bet Jonathan Ive doesn't have on his drawing board just yet:

What additional features would you add if you could?

Some sort of tea-carrying device would be good. I drink 10-15 cups of tea a day, so it would be good if it just had a circle in it where I could put my tea cup right through the middle of it, and then it would reform itself once I had finished my tea. At the moment I use it as a tray when I'm carrying things around, so often I have a mug of tea on top of my iPad. And I just wish it would make that system a little bit safer, because one day it's going to have a bath in lovely Earl Grey.

Alternatively, I suppose that if Apple could make the touchscreen register the presence of a larger-that-finger-sized non-organic circular object then they could rewrite the iOS display routines to display a skeuomorphic image of a coaster under the cup and flow the user interface around the virtual coaster so that the cup didn't obscure anything important.

Remember when Apple made TV adverts styling themselves as opponents of Big Brother. Judging by a recent Employment Tribunal finding, that stance is inoperative:

Crisp, who worked in an Apple Store, posted derogatory statements on Facebook about Apple and its products. The posts were made on a "private" Facebook page and outside of working hours. One of his colleagues, who happened to be a Facebook "friend", saw the comments, printed the posts and passed them to the store manager. Crisp was subsequently dismissed for gross misconduct.

The employment tribunal rejected Crisp's claim for unfair dismissal. [...]

Despite having "private" Facebook settings, the tribunal decided that there was nothing to prevent friends from copying and passing on Crisp's comments, so he was unable to rely on the right to privacy contained in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (covered in the UK by the Human Rights Act 1998). He retained his right to freedom of expression under Article 10, but Apple successfully argued that it was justified and proportionate to limit this right in order to protect its commercial reputation against potentially damaging posts.

I'm not saying that the tribunal's findings are wrong in law: apparently Apple Retail's 'social media policy' emphasised that employees were forbidden from posting unfavourable opinions on the company's products on social media sites, so on the face of it the ex-employee was in breach of this policy.

My problem is threefold:

1. With the tribunal, for apparently holding that even though the employee used Facebook's privacy controls to restrict access to his comments the fact that someone could have copied-and-pasted the text of those comments negated his right to privacy.¹ By that logic, if he'd been talking to a couple of friends in a pub or in his home, the fact that one of his pals could have surreptitiously recorded his comments using their smartphone renders those comments public too. This is a terribly bad idea.
2. With Apple Retail, for trying to gag their employees outside working hours. I don't doubt that their social media policy bans derogatory comments from employees. I just think that a) they shouldn't be trying to control what employees do when they're not at work, and b) they need to distinguish between genuinely public expressions of dissatisfaction and private letting-off of steam.
3. With the little shit who ratted on his 'friend'² to his Apple Store bosses.

[Via The Register, via Risks Digest Volume 26: Issue 60]

1. I'd be more well-disposed towards the finding if they'd held that Facebook's policy of frequently expanding the boundaries of what portions of a user's content is publicly available means that a Facebook user couldn't be sure how long private postings would remain private! ↩
2. Yet another demonstration of how unsuited that term is to the way social networking actually works. ↩

Jack Donaghy demonstrates one good reason why Apple won't be adding Siri to the Apple TV any time soon.

[Via Daring Fireball]

How to make sure your stolen iPhone gets returned. Heh…

Steven Levy's obituary for Steve Jobs is probably the best all-round non-technical summary I've read today of the life of the man who changed computing:

The full legacy of Steve Jobs will not be sorted out for a very long time. When employees first talked about Jobs' "reality distortion field," it was a pejorative – they were referring to the way that he got you to sign on to a false truth by the force of his conviction and charisma. But at a certain point the view of the world from Steve Jobs' brain ceased to become distorted. It became an instrument of self-fulfilling prophecy. As product after product emerged from Apple, each one breaking ground and changing our behavior, Steve Job's reality field actually came into being. And we all live in it.

Detractors will say – correctly – that few of Apple's products were truly the first of their kind. The Apple II was competing with Commodore's PET, the TRS-80 and a host of Z80-based S100 bus systems. The Mac and the Lisa were inspired by the Xerox Star. The iPod wasn't the first portable MP3 player. The post-1997 Macs increasingly used industry standard PC components, to the point where since the switch to Intel processors you could use your Mac as a bog standard Windows PC if you were so inclined.¹ The iTunes Store wasn't the first online music store, it was just the one that benefitted from being slickly integrated with the world's best selling MP3 player. The iPad is far from being the first tablet computer the world has ever seen.

And yet … in between genuinely groundbreaking devices like the original Mac and the iPhone, Jobs and Apple kept on producing computing devices that were better designed, worked better and were continually updated instead of being milked for profits. If Apple didn't make something first, it had an enviable track record of making it better. "It Just Works" was the slogan: it wasn't 100% accurate – computers are complicated machines doing complicated things, and there's a limit to how far even Apple can keep them from falling over at the most inconvenient moment possible – but Apple have come closer to making the slogan reality than any other IT company in the microcomputer era.

Doing that once could be down to luck. Doing it two or three times would be a neat trick. Pulling it off umpteen times over the course of some thirty-odd years tells you that the company had something special. With all due respect to Woz and Jef Raskin and Jonathan Ive and Tim Cook and the many people who made MacOS X the nicest desktop Unix system in creation and created all the other minor miracles Apple has produced over the last 15 years, it's pretty clear that Steve Jobs was that something special.

Here's to the crazy ones!

1. Though it's a terrible waste of a nice computer to not use it to run MacOS X like Steve intended. ↩

I'm sufficiently unhappy with Safari's performance since the introduction of version 5.1 to give this a try:

Annoyed by Safari 5.1's tendency to spontaneously reload pages when you didn't ask it to? There's a workaround for it, but it introduces a few problems of its own. Some Safari extensions will not work, and some of the new gestures won't work either. [...]

Given how many extensions were broken anyway by the 'upgrade' to WebKit2 in Safari 5.1, I'm willing to risk losing the use of a few more extensions if it results in a more stable browser.¹ I hope Apple have thrown a bunch of people at this problem and are going to roll out Safari 5.2 with WebKit2.1 ASAP, or I'm going to have to learn to live with OmniWeb's lousy Applescript support all over again, or else switch to Google Chrome and rewrite my various Applescripts one more time.

[Via Daring Fireball]

1. So far, so promising. But it's very early days. ↩

Services Manager is a free utility for users of Mac OS X versions 10.6 or 10.7 who want to take control of their Services menu.

The standard Keyboard control panel makes it almost impossible to figure out where a given service will show up: this program makes it a simple matter of selecting the appropriate checkbox. Seriously handy, especially once you start making services of your own using Automator.

[Via Mac OS X Hints]

@tcarmody:

Could you imagine if Jobs reappeared in a few months with long straight hair, bright white turtleneck & NBs, & said "I am Steven the White"

[Via Snarkmarket]

Rui Carmo poses the right question in the wake of Steve Jobs resignation from the post of Apple's CEO:

The real question is not "What will Apple do without Steve Jobs", or even "what will the industry be like without him".

No, the question we should ask ourselves is "Why are there no others?"

Why, short of a handful of people peppered around the industry (some in the unlikeliest of places), are there no publicly recognizable, charismatic leaders driving their own Apples with a laser-like focus?

Unedited Thoughts About Technology:

Microsoft

The most mindblowing thing in technology right now is your inability to make products that people love (with very few exceptions). Brilliant, creative people work for you, and they have seriously incredible ideas. You have more money than Jesus Christ's rich uncle. I have these crazy high expectations, these hopes that you'll blow me away and you totally let me down. Just try making something other than an Xbox that I can fall madly in love with, and that more than 5 other people will buy because you didn't wait until 3 years after the rest of the market to launch it? Please? Also: I can't fucking believe you won't have a real tablet until 2012. I guess we can use it to liveblog the end of civilization. It better be so good Jesus Christ himself rides down to earth on it, if you're going to take that long. People like Skype, though, and Windows 8 looks alright maybe, so good job there. I guess.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

The folks at Arc90 couldn't persuade Apple to allow them to publish a Readability app for iOS devices: perhaps they'll have more luck with one of these app ideas:

These prototypes are the product of a collaboration with the Arc90 Lab, beer and waking up at 3am with a killer idea that isn't so killer the following morning.

We hope they'll cast a new light on what technology can do to make us happier.

[...]

GetaGrip

While technology promised us convenience and productivity, its relentless advance seems to only put us further under water. From your never-ending email inbox to the unread count in your feed reader, the march of tech is always one step ahead of you. What we need is an app that pauses the insanity and reminds you of what's really important: your mortality.

GetaGrip senses when you're drowning in information overload and pauses everything. That endless stream of tweets, feeds and messages fades away. In its place GetaGrip reveals a jarring dose of reality. How long before others are noticing your protruding gut or receding hairline? How many retirement homes and funeral parlors are within a five mile radius of you? In a brief moment, your entire life (online and off) is snapped back into perspective. [...]

[Via The Awl]

In the wake of a tech pundit's suggestion that Microsoft sell off Bing to a suitable buyer – like, say, Apple – John Gruber came up with a truly brilliant idea that would put Bing back in the black PDQ:

They charge pay-per-view admission to listen live to the phone call as Steve Ballmer calls Steve Jobs and pitches him on Apple buying Bing.

Please, please, someone make this happen.

INCEPTION_FOLDER: Inception explained using only the Mac OS X Finder.

[Via kottke.org]

Stu over at Feeling Listless has a new toy:

I have (another) new desktop PC. This time it's this Compaq SG3-350UK Desktop PC, AMD Athlon II, 2.9GHz, 4GB RAM with 750GB HD and frankly it's frightening the life out of me. Windows 7 is an imposing, oppressive operating system, it's in a large black monolithic box whose hard disk light is at eye level and blinking on and off whenever I do anything.

Spookily enough, so do I. My ancient Mac Mini¹ finally pushed me to the point where there was nothing for it but to upgrade … to another Mac Mini. Nice as Mac laptops are, I don't really have any need for a portable machine and couldn't afford the price premium involved in buying a laptop anyway, so another desktop it was.

Barring some hassle persuading my ADSL modem/router setup to allocate my new Mac a DHCP lease² and a certain amount of confusion on my part over which video output to use with my cheap and nasty display, my new Mac was pretty much a drop-in replacement. It's a testament to the wonders of Apple's Migration Assistant and the commitment of so many software authors to providing Universal Binaries over the last few years that almost all my software and configuration details moved over to the new machine without a hitch.³

In short, that's why I have no links to post tonight: I've been too busy playing with my new (yet oddly familiar) toy to do any web browsing. Normal service should resume tomorrow.

1. How old? Old enough to have a PowerPC processor and 512MB of RAM. Painfully slow, constantly hammering the hard disk and unable to be upgraded to run Snow Leopard, never mind Lion. ↩
2. Partly my fault for not seeing the obvious solution staring me in the face, and partly because D-Link provide really lousy documentation. ↩
3. So far. I was a bit sceptical that upgrading across processor architectures would go smoothly and was sorely tempted to just reinstall apps, but so far I've been given no cause to regret my decision to trust in Migration Assistant. I'm sure at some stage I'll come across some shell script I wrote years ago with a hardcoded path to my old home directory that'll fall over, but that's on me. ↩

Fraser Speirs' ongoing series of posts on his iPad Project – a 1:1 deployment of iPads to pupils in the independent school where he teaches IT – has made for fascinating reading for some time now.¹ Not just for the techie stuff about how to manage, configure and backup all the pupil data and all those applications, but for the insights into the way that supplying enough tablet computers is changing how teachers teach and how pupils learn.

The latest post in the series is a good example. With a little help from a simple drawing application, the iPad – when plugged in to an external display via the VGA port – doubles as a digital whiteboard that is much more versatile than a regular whiteboard.

The point isn't that schools should replace their whiteboards with iPads, but that once you have a school where every teacher and pupil has access to a lightweight, flexible tablet computer there are all sorts of things you'll end up being able to use the tablet for that you might not have envisaged beforehand.

1. Of course, this sort of experiment is easier to carry off when the school in question is a smallish fee-paying institution rather than a state-funded comprehensive. Scaling this sort of project up is a very different challenge, but that doesn't in any sense invalidate the lessons learned from the project about the uses to which you can apply a tablet computer. ↩

A neat Mac OS X trick from Minimal Mac:

This just in from the Department of Who Knew? You can resize multiple point sizes of text in Mac OS X by using mathematical equivalents in that little box just under "Size". In other words, if you select multiple items of different sizes and want to triple the size of all, just type *3 (times 3) and hit return. Other functions ( / divide, + add, – subtract) work as well.

I'm not sure how often I'd use it¹ but it's worth knowing the option is there if I do have to quadruple the size of an entire block of text in one fell swoop.

1. I'd tend to select the block of text and use Command + and Command - to achieve the same effect, albeit less precisely. ↩