Use It or Lose It

The other night I had a lively conversation about remote controls with a neighbor, Lynn. Lynn is a college professor, a spry woman in her 50s, and a self-described technophobe. She was complaining about how hard it is to use the TV she and her husband recently bought. Her husband, by the way, is a technophile. Last time I visited their house, his office had three computers and all kinds of half-working gadgets strewn about.

Lynn and her husband are Netflix subscribers, and they love watching movies after dinner. But as soon as she gets into the living room and sees the five remote controls strewn across tables and chairs, she’s petrified. She calls for help and suddenly no one is around. The room gets cold and dark. She wants to hide under the sofa. The whole system is a monster: Sometimes she can get the DVD to come up, after a half hour coordinated attack on the remotes, but there’s no sound. Another half hour to get the sound working. Once she sees the DVD on the screen and has sound, it takes a few more minutes to get past the main menu. And after she’s finished watching something, she can never get back to the cable channels. She got frustrated just describing this process to me–so it must be making her very upset.

She and her husband have a standard model TV they bought last year—a middle-of-the-road Samsung flat panel. Their DVD player, sound system, and VCR are all midrange models that you’d find at any electronics store. So why is it that in 2009 we still can’t make a television and DVD player that just about anyone can connect and use? Lynn isn’t the only one with this problem, I’m sure of that. Most people over 50 are baffled by their entertainment systems. I understand that home theater buffs want extreme versatility. But most people are not home theater buffs, nor are they looking for frustration when they turn on the TV.

Lynn’s TV has tiny buttons along the bottom, and she needs a magnifying glass and a flashlight to figure out how to turn up the volume. Why is she drawn to the buttons on the TV instead of the remote? There are at least three reasons. One, finding and using the right remote is annoying. Two, she’s going to need the magnifying glass for the remote, too, so why not go directly to the source? Three, and most importantly, she hates the idea of remotes in the first place. And in order to explain why, we have to take a step back.

Lynn recalled that many years ago, her grandmother refused to switch from a rotary to a touch tone phone. Lynn thought this was ridiculous, and she told herself she’d never be such a luddite when she got older—she would navigate new technologies gracefully. Putting Lynn’s failure to keep that promise (through no fault of her own) aside for a moment, why might her grandmother have preferred rotary? After all, rotary is much slower than touch tone, and what could be easier than pressing a button? Lynn guessed that because her grandmother’s generation centered around the mechanical part of the 20th century, they saw the rotary dial as a way of physically acting upon the telephone system. They relied on physical affordances. Lynn’s grandmother wanted to physically tug on the phone system itself in order to complete her call, because that was the metaphor, and if there was no labor involved here, then nothing was actually happening. The idea of touch tone broke her entire mental model of the phone system, and it dampened the romance of a phone call. Given how remarkable the telephone is, it kind of makes sense that you should have to do a little work (and pay a hefty rate) in order to connect to your loved ones far away.

The satisfying thing about mechanical tools is that they feel like an extension of your body. Think of cars with manual transmissions vs. automatic. By automating the system of gears, by removing the human from physically acting on the transmission system, we also remove a primal sensory experience. People who spend all day riding bicycles around town love fixed-gear bikes—which don’t coast and have only one gear—precisely for the same reason: there is a deeper sensory connection, the bike is truly an extension of the body. The body feels bigger.

We seem to have a deep sense of connection to our tools if they are simple enough. As hunters and gatherers, we used weapons, and the people who could really become one with their hunting weapons survived. Mechanical tools like the rotary phone tap into the exact same body sense. I’m arguing here that Lynn’s grandmother’s desire to use the rotary phone wasn’t just because of habit or culture, it was in part a primal desire for the mechanical experience.

If that’s true, then all great man-machine interfaces, physical or virtual, should take advantage of this mechanical sense. Our bodies want to “dial” phone numbers or “turn up” the volume. The manipulation is so clear and direct. Lynn’s TV remote, on the other hand, piles one abstraction (wirelessness) onto another (“pushing” the volume up) onto another (virtually “switching” between DVD and TV mode), and she freaks out.

People want to physically act upon the worlds using the most direct manipulator available: their bodies. In his diary, Brian Eno said, “Computers need more Africa in them,” and I think that’s finally starting to happen. For thousands of years, we had purely mechanical technologies and we refined our tools in service to our innate mechanical sensitivity. In the last 40-50 years we have abstracted and flattened our tools, and technology really traded away its soul. Today, I think things are finally getting small enough and smart enough that we can bring the soul back, thoughtfully merging mechanical and digital. And who knows—maybe in the future, when we are all seamless cyborgs, Lynn will finally be able to turn on a movie without going nuts.

By now, there are many reviews of the iPhone 3G. They evaluate hardware specs and software features, make speed and pricing comparisons, and foment rumors about future changes. But when it comes to the way technology changes my life, all this information is irrelevant. What’s relevant is the impact of this device, as a whole, on my behavior. Does it improve the quality of my life? Kill bad habits? Save time? Does it encourage responsibility or better organization?

To find out, I had to go buy the phone and start using it. I have had the iPhone 3G for two weeks now, and during this time I’ve paid particular attention its impact on my everyday behavior. So I thought I’d summarize what I’ve found so far.

For me, the iPhone’s unwieldy keyboard and tiny screen provide its greatest behavioral benefits. Its embodied interface inertia has weened me from unhealthy technology habits and has improved my communication. With the iPhone, I write fewer and shorter e-mails, I call people more often, and I don’t browse the web as much.

Here’s what happens in practice. Walking around the city during the day, I’ve found only one way to hold the phone and type on it with more than one finger: cradle it in both hands and use your thumbs to type as you narrowly avoid walking into fire hydrants or other iPhone users. For me, this typing position starts hurting pretty quickly. My thumbs tighten up and get sore from all the flexing, and my wrists start to hurt. It’s true that the iPhone keyboard software is very polished, but compared to a desktop it is almost entirely unusable, even without the wrist problems. I can eek out short e-mails or enter calendar events, but for any serious writing I need a real computer.

So the iPhone is a huge time saver because it’s so painful to use. On a typical pre-iPhone morning, I would wake up and rush to the computer–before doing anything else–to check my e-mail. It’s a terrible habit, and I think it’s pervasive among the folks I hang out with. But the morning after I bought the iPhone, I woke up and checked my e-mail before even getting out of bed, and when I was finished I didn’t feel compelled to approach my real computer before breakfast. This morning, for example, I actually read a book! I spent an hour reading before even going near my desk. This habit has stuck since day one, and I’m loving it.

The iPhone has also encouraged me to find new ways to communicate. Let’s say I get an inspiring e-mail from someone that generates lots of ideas. On the computer, I would reply with a brain dump, maybe spending an hour crafting a message. But with the iPhone, I’m reluctant to type more than a sentence. Maybe I call the person instead. Voice conversations are so much more efficient and intimate than e-mail. And yes, sometimes a long e-mail is warranted, in which case I can sit down at the computer and really focus on it.

My web browsing habits have changed, as well. I’ve spent way too many days of my life staring blankly at random web sites. But Mobile Safari requires so much patience and determination that I don’t use it unless I really, truly need it. This is the feature I’ve always wanted in a web browser, and the iPhone delivers!

A side effect of these changing habits is that my computer is now reinvented as the place where only real work gets done. If I sit down at the computer, it is because I have a task in mind. As long as I can pull myself away when that task is done, I’ll be much more efficient with it. And it’s easier to pull myself away if the computer isn’t so overloaded with different functions in my life.

Google Maps invoke the other big behavior change. I needed to find a good cafe the other day, in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Normally this would entail 20 minutes of wandering around. But I quickly found something within one block. I’m always in the position to suggest something nearby, or to look something up, and I’m really happy about that.

Beyond that, there isn’t much. What about the amazing touch interface? The WiFi? The App Store? The iPod features? I suppose I can cite Terry Gross more often now, but in general these features haven’t had a big impact on my behavior, they’re just nice to have. Also, there are lots of iPhone games and other applications that I haven’t delved into yet, so I’m excited about opening up more good-behavior potential from this device. I’ll let you know what arises…

Shame on me. I spent eight hours at the Apple Store waiting to get an iPhone 3G. Karl and I got there at 8am, and I thought I could make it out by 10am. No chance. But once you’ve waited somewhere two hours, you’ve got a strong incentive to stay. What kind of materialistic, selfish, foolhardy, spendthrift, oafish, uber-trendy halfwit am I? I am so embarrassed.

Shame on AT&T. From my perspective, their red tape is the reason there are such long waits for these phones. Once Karl and I got to the front of the line, we were ushered upstairs where an Apple rep helped us activate our phones. But when he brought up the price, it was $499, not $299. We weren’t eligible for an upgrade. As I pleaded for their help getting my account set up properly so I could start paying them twice the price for their lovely service, I looked around and noticed that many of the people I waited in line with were also on their phones, also wrangling with AT&T.

Shame on Apple. It is not at all clear from their web site that the phone is subsidized. Nowhere do they mention $499. The only prices they talk about are $199 and $299. And Apple doesn’t advise current AT&T customers to call AT&T and check upgrade eligibility. Apple’s what to bring page is silent on the issue. It seems as though they’d rather have me find out only after a long wait, at which point I might buckle and get the phone anyway, even at $499. So beyond the six hours we waited in line, I spent two more hours making three phone calls to AT&T to discuss eligibility. Then I was told I would have to wait 72 hours for an answer from AT&T. Apple gave me a “golden ticket” in lieu of a phone and sent me home.

Flash forward 72 business hours, 5 days later. AT&T approved me for the lower pricing. But the store I waited in line at is now completely out of iPhones. So I took my golden ticket up to the 5th Avenue store—practically the only store in the country with the phone in stock at this point—and got into another battle. This time, thankfully, I was able to skip the entire line. And I found an employee who worked for both Apple and AT&T. The entire time we talked, she had two iPhones up to her head, both connected to AT&T customer service on behalf of different people in the store. Even though she works for AT&T, she only has access to the same customer service number that customers do. She just knows the right keywords to say if she wants things escalated.

Two hours later I emerged, iPhone in hand!, having paid the full price because Apple’s system still wouldn’t recognize that I was eligible. The AT&T rep told me I have to call AT&T and ask for a $200 refund, wait another 72 hours, then call Apple and ask for my money back, then wait another 5 days, and I should get a refund.

Flash forward another week and a half. AT&T hasn’t done anything yet. My call with them was escalated up to the VP’s office, and they called me a couple times just to confirm what was happening. One person asked if they could call me back in 30 seconds, and didn’t call back. I missed two calls from them over the weekend, when I was on vacation. And of course they don’t leave a direct phone number, so I called back this morning, to the general customer service number, and the guy said he’d put in a reminder that I was waiting. We’ll see if that works. So far at least AT&T acknowledges that I am owed money, but who knows how long it will take for them to proceed.

Long story short, it will be a while before the conveniences of this new phone defray the time and money I’ve already spent on it. Oh, how the materialistic, selfish, foolhardy, spendthrift, oafish, uber-trendy halfwit suffers.

I love microwave ovens with dials. One dial for the cooking time, and one for the power level.

What more do you need, right? So you can imagine my surprise when I saw exactly how much you could screw up this simple, elegant solution. I spotted this in a gas station in Crescent City, California a couple months ago:

The designers of this microwave really went the extra mile to be helpful. Instead of the usual numbers showing how much time you’re dialing in, which are just so confusing, they used letters! What a novel approach. And they provided a handy heating guide below the dial that maps the letters A through S to different foods you might want to cook. The guide evokes nostalgia, too. It is sure to bring a tear to the eye of anyone who remembers when we all subsisted on hamburgers, microwave popcorn, hots dogs, and pizza, before burritos and sushi ruthlessly invaded the culture of single-handed eating.

But the table is still quite applicable in today’s convenience stores, and the nice thing about this letter dial design is that the convenience store owner could augment the table with her own sign listing additional convenience store foods that were invented after this microwave. You know, “for Hot Pockets, dial F. For Easy Mac, dial H…”

But the bad thing about this dial design is that it sucks. Even in 1981, when some people were surely confused about how long it takes these magical ovens to cook common foods, they did not need letters on the dial. The letters only add myth to the magic. Here we have a new and exciting technology in our culture, and people honestly want to know how it works and how long things take to cook in it. But if all they remember is to dial E for their hamburger, they are not learning anything. This dial encourages a whole new mental model for microwaving that is redundant, confusing, and, worst of all, proprietary.

Now, I will admit this is a very old microwave, made during the “wild west” days of microwave oven dial design, an era when we still hadn’t reached consensus, an era of wild experimentation and lots of illicit drug use. And I am thankful that they used letters and not arbitrary numbers. But I still think they should have known better.

The saving grace is that there are smaller time indicators. You know, for compatibility with other microwaves.

Oh, you might have noticed one other thing. The dial markings are backwards! They go counter-clockwise, so when the microwave is off, you read “S, R, Q, P, O…” from left to right. I struggled with this for a minute, because you do actually turn this dial to the right, just like most other dials. But the difference with this dial is that the letters are actually marked on the dial itself, which is uncommon, and the indicator for which letter you’re on is in the space outside the dial.

Put another way, which of these kitchen timers would you rather use?

I’m posting this only because I had trouble getting Apache back into shape after a Leopard upgrade, and I wanted to post a fix. Switching to Leopard (which comes with Apache 2.2), I needed to get virtual hosting working again for my development work. Some files and settings have moved.

The apache config for Leopard is in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, and to turn on virtual hosting you must uncomment line 461, which includes /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf. While you’re at it, if you need PHP, uncomment line 114.

Then edit httpd-vhosts.conf. I wanted to still be able to use the Mac’s default DocumentRoot for requests on localhost, but turning on virtual hosting in Apache 2.2 disables the server-wide DocumentRoot and ServerName, and the first virtual host you define becomes the default instead. Here’s what I needed in order to get my specific name-based virual hosts working:

#
# Use name-based virtual hosting.
#
NameVirtualHost *:80
#
# VirtualHost example:
# Almost any Apache directive may go into a VirtualHost container.
# The first VirtualHost section is used for all requests that do not
# match a ServerName or ServerAlias in any <VirtualHost> block.
#
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName myrailsapp.biz
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName wpclient.com
DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents/wpclient.com"
</VirtualHost>

This configuration should work for multiple virtual hosts, but for me it wasn’t totally successful until after restarting the system—a simple “sudo apachectl graceful” didn’t do the trick. It may be that I also modified /etc/hosts and the system wasn’t fully assimilating my changes. Also, since I had upgraded from Tiger, my user-specific configuration files had moved, so my userdir (http://localhost/~carl/) stopped working! The fix for this was:

sudo cp /etc/httpd/users/* /etc/apache2/users/

So, thanks to my father’s generocity, this week I was paid–in the form of a new computer–for what would have been a pro-bono web site for one my family’s many enterprises. And it actually turned out to be more exciting than I thought. A computer is just a computer, right? We all have to upgrade, but it’s basically the same thing. But every once in a while, something comes along that changes the way I work and reminds me of the value of proper tools.

In this case, I was upgrading from a PowerMac G5, a big hunky desktop machine. I don’t know why I thought I’d need all of those card slots or hard drive bays. Maybe I just bought it as a doorstop for my ego. Anyway, over the years I only ever added RAM to it. So when choosing a new machine, the number of card slots didn’t enter into it. The decision really came down to portability vs. screen real estate, and even though my life is in mobile turmoil right now, I opted for screen real estate.

Four days with the new machine and I’m utterly convinced I’ve made the right choice. I bought a 24″ iMac, and I now have a luxurious 7.1 megapixel LCD landscape in front of me. It feels like my productivity has doubled. It’s similar to the way I felt when Exposé came out. The main screen is 1920×1200, and I think that makes the biggest difference for me. But the secondary screen (my old 20″ LCD) is also indispensable, because I can now give my e-mail, IM, and a full calendar the space they deserve.

That’s the thing: More space really changes the way I work. For example, if I keep iCal open on my secondary screen, it becomes the virtual equivalent of tacking a calendar to the wall. That is very, very valuable. It means that I can rely on iCal because I don’t have to find and open it each time I want to add to it. It means that I can actually use iCal now. Because I can just glance at it. I can rely on iCal always being there. So the secondary screen becomes the screen at which I glance while I’m working on other things. It’s the screen of passive interruption–the communication center. I can be interrupted, but without the real work around. Psychologically, even with the ease Exposé, that makes a big difference to me. It’s counterintuitive, but more space seems to allow me to focus better.

My secondary screen is the virtual cork board above my virtual desk, and I think that over the next couple years, as the desktop metaphor finally dies out, its replacement will have to have this functionality in some form.

Anyway, I’m grateful to have this new machine and the productivity boost that comes with it. (thanks, Dad!)

YouTube: August 2005

August 2007

Here’s some real estate speculation for you. In the last post I focused changes to YouTube’s toolbar over two years. In this one, I want to talk more broadly about the whole page and how it has changed since August 2005. This is less about particular vocabulary, white space, and other details, and more about the audience and the content.

What was removed?

• New user hand holding – before, a big box in the most valuable part of the page introduced the site, with one sentence dedicated to each of Watch, Upload, and Share. This box is entirely gone. Today, watching is self-explanatory, especially thanks to the big video that automatically loads in the top right corner. Upload has moved to a prominent button in the top right (with an arrow graphic), and Share is just intuitively obvious in the “Broadcast Yourself” tagline and in the content itself.
• The tag cloud – early YouTube had a cloud of recent video tags. Tags were hot back then. I could go on about tag clouds and their failures, but I’m guessing it came down to three things: 1) they tell without showing — and on a video sharing site, why not just show? 2) they are rarely clicked, and 3) they are visually cluttered. Beyond the tag cloud, YouTube also removed the list of tags from the Featured Videos metadata. Good riddance — a category, title, and humane description work better.
• Excessive tabs and links – See my previous post
• Recent users online – This is when YouTube thought they were a social network. We see a list of 8 recent users, along with counts of videos, favorites, and friends for each of them. This was removed for obvious scaling reasons: after a community grows beyond, say, 500 users, this just isn’t interesting information for anyone.
• Sign up promotion – a bold yellow box, in a very valuable spot, beckons you to sign up. It’s not very convincing, though. Chances are, you’re going to sign up only when you’re trying to do something else. You’re not signing up for the sake of signing up. So why push the issue? Instead, the new YouTube has a login box in the right column, and a small “sign up” link on the top right in case you really can’t wait.
• Video of the month contest – This has been replaced by all kinds of slicker cross-promoted contents and ads.

What was added?

• Videos being watched right now – Certainly more interesting than list of recent users. This is a dynamic Flash piece that flips through recent videos until you roll over something.
• Promoted Videos and Ads – The revenue has to come from somewhere, right? And now that Diddy is out there with his camcorder, now that the networks have gotten hip to this, the cross promotions are flying all over the place. August 2007’s YouTube features the presidential debates (YouChoose), a huge promo video for UFC on Pay Per View, and a series of promoted videos across the top of the home page (how much do these cost?).
• Video ratings – the five star system. People love their stars. As if being featured or having a high view count is not enough. Most videos on the front page of YouTube have four or five stars. But some of the most watched videos have poor ratings because they’re controversial. So effectively, stars are more a measure of controversy than quality.
• Tabbed video listing – It isn’t just about featured videos anymore. You can choose to see Most Viewed, Most Discussed, and Top Favorites as well. These other three categories tend to have a lot of overlap, so it’s good that YouTube doesn’t waste time showing more than one of them at a time. On the other hand, what’s the difference between Most Viewed and Most Discussed, from the user’s perspective? Does anyone care?
• “What’s New” box – something for the returning users? A post from the YouTube corporate blog. A promotion for mobile videos (iPhone!)
• Popular Videos for Mobile Devices box – YouTube is very proud of their iPhone partnership, and they should be.

Overall, they’ve made huge improvements, if that wasn’t obvious from the page grabs. The data/ink ratio is so much higher, and the information hierarchy is more clear (the old YouTube had too many elements with similar priorities). Even the promotions are mostly pure content, so you hardly notice you’re being promoted on!

The Internet Archive is great for looking at web site usability changes over time. Lets just look at one part of one site: the toolbar on YouTube.com.

December 2005

August 2006

February 2007

August 2007

The changes are not subtle. This is over a period of two years, as the site grew from a niche into one of the biggest sites in the world. So I’m going to try to read between the lines, imagining some of the lessons learned by YouTube over the last couple years.

• Notice the rise and fall of administrative debris. After the toolbar was initially introduced (not long before December 2005), it had to pass through a painful bloat phase before reaching relative simplicity.
• In the early days, they may have needed the “watch and share your videos worldwide” tagline. By August 2006, YouTube was confidently mainstream—or their site had reached self-explanatory usability nirvana—so they shortened the tagline. I’m wondering if they ever needed the old tagline at all. But in general, it seems that as a company becomes more well-known, their logo can get very small, and the content itself becomes the logo and tagline (OK, some logos stay huge anyway). The content and interface become the identifying mark. The interface is the brand, and the logo is just there so you know what to call the interface.
• YouTube may have had ambitions about being a strong social network at first, but today it’s very clearly video centered. The “User Search” option is gone, the “Friends” tab is gone, and the Community tab is about group videos, not friends or individual users. My question is, did they even need those features in 2005? Was the “Friends” tab key to their viral growth, or was it always a bad idea?
• They finally found the right place for the search box: front and center, and highlighted by a darker background. Just between Feburary and August 2007, they’ve been able to shrink the height of the toolbar tremendously. I bet search is the most common function on YouTube after watching videos. “Did you see the latest Spiderman dance video?”
• The word “Home” on YouTube means home from YouTube’s perspective, not from the user’s perspective! It means “Our home page where we put the stuff we want you to see.” It does not mean “The place where all my stuff is,” as it does on Facebook.
• As a result, all of the “My Stuff” link cruft does not belong under the Home tab. A series of “My”s followed by one word make my eyes glaze over, anyway: the “My Account” page, which has sections for all of the relevant My items, is much simpler. By August 2006, “My Account” is among the utility links. As a side note, given that Home means YouTube’s Home and not My Home, shouldn’t “My Account” really be called “Your Account”?
• In fact, the home tab doesn’t even need to be a tab! Click the logo. In fact, if you hover over today’s logo, the word “Home” appears to its right. What if the logo were a tab, as with Amazon or Apple? The logo-as-tab is kind of irrational (what are the other tabs, if not part of Amazon?), but it works.
• It’s hard to see from my site grabs, but today’s tabs are slightly bigger than the tabs of 2005, now that there are fewer of them.
• “Groups” becomes “Community” — and that’s good, because Groups could be groups of anything. Communities are groups of people.
• “My Subscriptions” was folded into the “Channels” tab. On YouTube, a channel is a subscription to someone’s videos. But channels make me think of TV channels, and today’s TV channels are centered around subject areas (“Categories”), not people. Without clicking, I couldn’t have told you the difference between Categories and Channels. These areas must be for frequent/return visitors.
• Feb 2007: What is a QuickList, anyway? Obviously no one took the bait, and now it’s gone.
• A brief try at “Upload Videos” (Feb 2007) goes back to “Upload” (Aug 2007), “Search Videos” (Dec 2005) becomes “Search” (Aug 2006), and “Viewing History” (Aug 2006) is just “History” (Feb 2007). In fact, any word referring to videos or viewing is redundantly obvious and wisely removed.

I tried out two new services over the last couple days, Highrise (contact management web app) and GrandCentral (a “one phone number for life” VoIP call-forwarding service). I’m not going to review them here, but I noticed that both services make the false, tired assumption that either my address book is static or their copy of it is authoritative. They provide a way for me to send them my entire address book, but it’s designed as a one-time operation. So either my address book never changes, or their copy of it is all-holy. I don’t want to single out these two apps, though; this is a serious problem. Skype, Adium, LinkedIn, Facebook, you name it. Many many more apps are culpable. And it seems ironic that, in 2007, the Internet is creating more data disparity for me across everyday applications, not less. I thought this was supposed to be the great connector of people and data?

Web applications are partly to blame. Highrise offers import/export options for vCards. To their credit, they do delete obvious duplicates when you re-import set of vCards. But that’s not syncing, it’s just dupe detection, and it still assumes that Highrise’s copy of the contacts is authoritative (their copy always “wins” on an import). I want to sync! I don’t even want to manually initiate it. I just want the network to assimilate my changes automatically. Unfortunately, as much as we all love JavaScript these days, this isn’t something you can do inside a browser window. But moving this data around manually is a 100% waste of time, so when I sign up for Highrise, I’m signing up for that time waste. I believe there is no customer for whom the import and export function for address books is a benefit.

We need syncing. We need to smoothly merge versions of our data from different contexts.

One answer is to store things in fewer places, but that’s unrealistic in 2007, unless my plan is to quit the Internet entirely. Fact of life: My digital data is dispersed all over the place. I have bookmarks in five different web browsers on two computers. And my address book is so dynamic that the authoritative copy is in my head and in a stack of business cards in my desk drawer, and the digital copy on my Mac is rarely up to date. But when I do bother to update it, I want to do that operation only once. I want to be able to make updates in different contexts; it really shouldn’t matter.

So why is syncing so hard? Part of the problem is that most software doesn’t remember my actions, it only stores the data I acted upon. So later, when I sync, the computer tries to compare one address book copy with another, but it often can’t decide how to merge the two. I have to explain my intentions again: I want this copy, I don’t want that copy, because this is the copy I changed most recently. Were a dated change log in place on both ends, fine-grained version control, the computer would already know what I intended in the first place. But developers have historically faced a lot of space limitations when programming, as computer memory and hard drive space were once a huge premium. So metadata still seems luxurious to some. Or it seems unrelated to the problem at hand; an afterthought. But notice that developer tools have long been able to sync: multi-user version control systems for code have been around forever.

I think the real trouble is that syncing is dangerous for software companies. Some see syncing as a potential recurring revenue stream, so they see little incentive in opening things up. Apple will let me sync—if I sign up for their .Mac service. Cell phone companies offer a centralized over-the-air backup service for my address book…so smooth syncing would eat into their subscriber base. I recently heard of a phone company that’s been able to monetize the sync operation itself: $2.99 a shot, for me to move the data a couple feet between phone and computer.

Syncing would also make it easier for me to switch to the competition. Companies would much rather hold my data hostage with artificial barriers like proprietary data formats and closed APIs. I’m part of probably 15 social networks right now, and all of them sovereign states who pretend the others don’t exist. Apple has been so successful not because they play well with others, but because they’re creating and selling all of the devices you’ll ever want to sync between. It’s magical to see all of these devices talking to each other so smoothly, isn’t it? Yet there never was a technical limitation to it!

It makes Apple a lot of money, but it’s not an open solution and they can’t possibly sustain it for a long time. Every company goes through cycles (see Sony), so we can never rely on one to come through for us. So what can we do to bring the Apple magic into the larger space of web apps, cell phones, and MP3 players?

Free software will help us; the political incentives are different there. Reverse-engineering will help crack the data monopolies, as well. This information wants to be free, and I believe the network will eventually destroy any false barriers. There are free phone projects in the works, and we’ve already seen open source iPod firmware replacements. The world is entirely hackable; so now we need to create more open standards for syncing all of this structure data, and start getting these free software projects talking to each other. No company would dare to do this, so it could be the next huge leap in the free software movement.

Karl at the DeCordova

Karl teaches me a lot about how “real people” use computers, and it’s fascinating. As a dancer, he has a kind of body intelligence that is spell-binding to watch, because it is beautiful and because I know I could never do it. I think his brain developed toward movement very early, and mine toward BASIC, so he has an extreme muscle memory that is very powerful and expressive. His favorite thing right now is mouse gestures, but I think the mouse is ultimately too simple of an input device for him. I believe there’s a missing interface paradigm and set of applications that could extend the self-expression of a mover just as Word extends self-expression of a writer. Marginalized and underfunded as dance may be, I’m learning that there are a lot of movers in the world, and that, as far as I can tell, few of them end up in computer science. The people writing code, myself included, are really writers and linguists—they’re stuck in their own heads. So anyone who wants to interact with or program computers with their whole body is, for the most part, out of luck.

The gamers are, of course, ahead of the interface curve. The Wiimote represents the biggest advance in input devices in a decade, I think, but it only tracks the movement of one limb, and on the software end it’s only scratching the surface. The current games emulate existing real world movement (golf, bowling)—they don’t let you code with movement, there’s no room to create new movement vocabularies. I’m ready for that; I think Karl is, too.

Along these lines, I saw Aza Raskin’s excellent talk “Death of the Desktop” at SXSW and he demoed two things that represent good steps away from the 25-year-old “desktop.” Why should the desktop die? Not because it’s old; because it is 3D: things are hidden and they should not be. We spend all day moving windows around. We spend all day looking for these files and applications that should just be right in front of our noses. Anything that is not direct content manipulation, Raskin posits, is wasted effort. Exposé helps, but doesn’t get us all the way there. And sure, you can boost your productivity by getting 2 or 3 monitors on your desk, but Raskin has a couple alternatives.

For today’s users, Raskin recommends Enso, his company’s Spotlight/Quicksilver app for Windows. It executes simple commands typed while the caps lock key is held down. It’s a CLI on crack. Good stuff, and in his demo he killed Explorer.exe just to show his app in place of the desktop, running on a blank screen.

But the real goodies came later in the talk, when Raskin demoed a Zoomable User Interface. It’s not really a product, but it’s cool! A ZUI is just a plane, often infinite, with all of your content on it: photos, documents, web pages, whatever. No desktop, no file browser per se, no icons, no “open” or “save” commands—just directly manipulable content everywhere you look. And as you work with your content, you develop a cognitive map of the content plane, so you can find things easily—eg. if I’m at my video album from SXSW, I’ll know that my recipes are generally to the left, and my new voicemails are up and to the far left.

Spore screenshot

But once again, the gamers are already way ahead of the operating system designers, training today’s children to use tomorrow’s laptops. Game designers have the luxury of creating entirely sovereign environments for their games, so they have a lot of flexibility. Many games are already ZUIs, both 2D and 3D. Will Wright’s Spore has a beautiful 3D ZUI. Raskin still hasn’t convinced me that 3D UIs are cognitively a bad idea; I think it really depends on the input device. Mice are not good for navigating 3D content, but something soon may be.