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]

[...] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Via Daring Fireball]

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.

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.