Totally agree. I really don't like the trend of websites going into a "mobile-like" view as soon as the window they're in is resized to something like half my screen width. Responsive design run amok.
Actually the scrollbar became outdated with the advent of the mouse wheel. What is not outdated however is the presence of the scrollbar
The scrollbar did not become obsolete with the mousewheel, as evidenced by the fact that the scrollwheel exists on all desktop platforms. As for visual feedback, on mobile platforms like iOS the scrollbar is shown when scrolling to address the visual feedback issue.
I can't believe you just wrote up something about scrolling, but you missed the conflict in functionality between swipe to delete and swipe to scroll.
What conflict? The swipes are orthogonal. Learning how to do a swipe vs a tap is a fundamental skill to using any mobile OS so if you can't do it yet maybe mobile isn't for you..
Every swipe may in fact have meant to have been a tap, so you need extra safeguards in place of an operation like delete, not just blithely assign it to a swipe
There is no way to accidentally do a full delete swipe rather than a tap. Normal swipe just exposes the option to delete. A full delete swipe requires a long deliberate swipe.
Hitting back to exit an app in Android has little consequences because Android has supported multi-tasking from the get-go.
Nope. As recently as 2.3 many apps quit when you backed out of them. Not destructive per se as the app should save state, but definitely a jarring transition when you all meant was to close some menu.
Even if you reboot the device, a lot of apps save their state so when you open them you're right where you were before.
So in other words, exactly as iOS has done since the beginning (well ok, maybe version 3). The entire development environment is geared around never keeping unsaved state around.
Never mind that in the few cases where you did have to use it, it was really, really helpful. Simplicity trumps all apparently.
No, they did usage testing and decided that it was vastly more useful to have a multitasking button there which will get used much more frequently. The correct decision.
Everything you learn, you learn from being taught, seeing other people doing it, or by doing it by accident.
Nonsense of course. Many apps have shortcuts for actions that they will tell you about in the app, generally using gestures. Obviously there won't be keyboard shortcuts if people don't connect keyboards to mobile devices often.
Your parents are probably just having an easier time with the iPad because it implements a much more limited set of features than a full-blown computer app.
Yes, so the premise of the article that the iOS interface is impossible or very difficult to learn for many is total nonsense. Fundamentally there is a limit to how many features you can efficiently use into a phone with a 5" screen and touch input. That limit is lower than in a desktop with a 30" screen and a mouse and keyboard. No amount of UI design will ever overcome that.
Try programming a spreadsheet with its myriad of different functions. It's a helluva lot easier on a computer than a tablet or phone, because the latter devices have much more limited input options.
Well duh. Now design an interface for a touch operated device that is just as easy as a desktop to edit spreadsheets. I am almost certain this is impossible, hence the compromises we see on mobile interfaces.
Justin Bieber makes music. If it sells, it's good...
You say that like it isn't true. The market has spoken, and Justin Bieber's music is good for the target population. if it wasn't. it wouldn't sell. Just like McDonalds food is good because it hits a sweet spot between convenience, price, and taste. Market appeal is a better indicator of overall goodness than most measures, because it is not subject to your particular definition of what constitutes good.
By the way, by market share we can objectively say that Android is better for the worldwide market than iOS is. In certain countries it seems to be an even split, for the world as a whole it's overwhelmingly Android. Again, they've hit the sweet spot of price, features, quality that the global market wants.
tl;dr Criticizing design is easy. Any grad student that's taken a human interface class could write this article (and many do) illustrating how a certain design violates the criteria they just learned. But despite their background I would only start to take these guys seriously when they propose a touch interface designed for phones which has all the properties they espouse and retains all the utility of a modern smartphone. Sure it would be great if every single feature was immediately visually discoverable. But how do you do that when you have so little screen space? Do you sacrifice content for UI? Let's see their great alternative.
To respond to their points in detail:
Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read
You know how they say lead with your strongest point? Right off the bat the first thing they claim is that Apple's fonts are impossible for many people with normal vision to read. Nevermind many, show me a single person with normal vision that CANNOT read Apple fonts and I will save their life, because clearly they have a brain tumour and need treatment immediately. Why would anyone take this article seriously when it leads with provably false claims? Anyway let's move on..
These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations
Of course much of the science was based on a mouse and keyboard interaction on a computer, not touch on mobile.
However, when Apple moved to gestural-based interfaces with the first iPhone, followed by its tablets, it deliberately and consciously threw out many of the key Apple principles.
This is why those interfaces work. Let's take a scrolling view for example. The traditional approach is to put a scrollbar in, and that's what most everyone was doing before the iPhone came along. The scrollbar is discoverable and it provides visual feedback. Sounds good right? Well it turns out using a scrollbar on a mobile device is a miserable experience. Swipe to scroll turned out to be the vastly superior method, and as soon as you learn to swipe (my 1 year old figured it out watching me) it is trivially easy to operate without any additional visual clutter.
Same with other gestures in the iPhone. Deleting a row in a table. You can put a button on every row to make that discoverable at the cost of high risk of accidental deletion and visual noise, or you can make rows swipe left to expose the delete function. The swipe once learned in 5 seconds is vastly superior for the rest of your lifetime using it. Accessing the notification centre by swiping down from the top. You could put a button on every single screen, or you could save the space and use a swipe. Clearly the swipe is far preferable to using up screen space on a 4-5" screen.
A woman told one of us that she had to use Apple’s assistive tool to make Apple’s undersize fonts large and contrasty enough to be readable.
So a person with a visual impairment used accessibility options to correct for it? This is a problem how? Later they confuse font weight with font size. Both are adjustable in iOS, of course if you really need very large fonts you will run into some sizing issues in some apps.
What kind of design philosophy requires millions of its users to have to pretend they are disabled in order to be able to use the product?
A vision impairment is a disability. A minor and common one, but still one. By the way, the common way to correct this disability is with glasses. I have poor vision, but never had an issue with reading Apple fonts because I've corrected my vision by wearing glasses. The author's implication that someone with a disability should be asha
It's not the GPS its the screen plus active routing plus GPS plus voice that drains battery. In other words GPS navigation. Just running the GPS in the background and logging it isn't that bad
Not true at all. I've used the GPS on my iPhone for multi day backcountry trips with no service. Works perfectly fine and gets a fix in seconds while my old dedicated GPS would take a minute.
Odd. I had a couple issues with the first release of iOS 8 and Yosemite as far as Handoff, Continuity, and Airdrop goes, but since some later update it's been rock solid. I use airdrop all the time between various iOS device and Macs and haven't had any issues for ages. Same with continuity. I don't find handoff very useful so haven't really tested much.
>> So if China supplies nuclear reactors to the world --- and ultimately also the United States for a hefty price, when natural gas declines and we shake ourselves awake from this renewables nightmare
You're funny. By the time that happens solar will supply the majority of the power and energy storage will have advanced enough to spread it out. Gas will do the rest. Nuclear will be useful but just an expensive backup.
>> What doesn't seem to work well, in my experience, is breaking down a project into microscopic detail and individually estimating each detail
I find this very useful.. Not microscopic detail but detail enough that it forces you to really think about the project. I find without this developers tend to leave out tasks entirely.
Apple. They are very up front with how they get their money from you and that's in the hardware prices. They charge a lot for hardware but so far they don't try to screw you after purchase by advertising or selling your data.
Apart from Apple fanboys, I don't think anybody is stupid enough to buy a new device just to get a software upgrade.
Too funny, given that Apple users don't have to buy a new phone to get the latest software, since Apple actually cares enough to update their old devices. Interesting how now we're supposed to believe that a lack of support is actually a good thing.
Not to mention his bullshit about fighting global warming with a $3B investment. Collected all the publicity and goodwill when he made that announcement and never followed through or did anything of significance
>> Switching from oil and coal to natural gas is a positive step in reducing both carbon emissions and other pollutants.
That's the thing though, we don't actually know if this is true. Methane leakage can easily invalidate that argument and studies have shown we are leaking more than anyone wants to admit
Every research team who discovers the disability market seems to set out to build an affordable eye tracker. And they all fail. I should know I was on such a team:)
C++ and Qt already works great on Android with a nice IDE as well. Bonus: your code will work on iOS and windows phone and blackberry and windows and Linux and Mac at the same time
There's mocking because you can get a superior ebikes kit for less money that won't be full of proprietary components. That's not to say they won't make money, but there are better options out there
Slashdot Mirror
Totally agree. I really don't like the trend of websites going into a "mobile-like" view as soon as the window they're in is resized to something like half my screen width. Responsive design run amok.
The scrollbar did not become obsolete with the mousewheel, as evidenced by the fact that the scrollwheel exists on all desktop platforms. As for visual feedback, on mobile platforms like iOS the scrollbar is shown when scrolling to address the visual feedback issue.
What conflict? The swipes are orthogonal. Learning how to do a swipe vs a tap is a fundamental skill to using any mobile OS so if you can't do it yet maybe mobile isn't for you..
There is no way to accidentally do a full delete swipe rather than a tap. Normal swipe just exposes the option to delete. A full delete swipe requires a long deliberate swipe.
Nope. As recently as 2.3 many apps quit when you backed out of them. Not destructive per se as the app should save state, but definitely a jarring transition when you all meant was to close some menu.
So in other words, exactly as iOS has done since the beginning (well ok, maybe version 3). The entire development environment is geared around never keeping unsaved state around.
No, they did usage testing and decided that it was vastly more useful to have a multitasking button there which will get used much more frequently. The correct decision.
Nonsense of course. Many apps have shortcuts for actions that they will tell you about in the app, generally using gestures. Obviously there won't be keyboard shortcuts if people don't connect keyboards to mobile devices often.
Yes, so the premise of the article that the iOS interface is impossible or very difficult to learn for many is total nonsense. Fundamentally there is a limit to how many features you can efficiently use into a phone with a 5" screen and touch input. That limit is lower than in a desktop with a 30" screen and a mouse and keyboard. No amount of UI design will ever overcome that.
Well duh. Now design an interface for a touch operated device that is just as easy as a desktop to edit spreadsheets. I am almost certain this is impossible, hence the compromises we see on mobile interfaces.
Justin Bieber makes music. If it sells, it's good ...
You say that like it isn't true. The market has spoken, and Justin Bieber's music is good for the target population. if it wasn't. it wouldn't sell. Just like McDonalds food is good because it hits a sweet spot between convenience, price, and taste. Market appeal is a better indicator of overall goodness than most measures, because it is not subject to your particular definition of what constitutes good.
By the way, by market share we can objectively say that Android is better for the worldwide market than iOS is. In certain countries it seems to be an even split, for the world as a whole it's overwhelmingly Android. Again, they've hit the sweet spot of price, features, quality that the global market wants.
tl;dr Criticizing design is easy. Any grad student that's taken a human interface class could write this article (and many do) illustrating how a certain design violates the criteria they just learned. But despite their background I would only start to take these guys seriously when they propose a touch interface designed for phones which has all the properties they espouse and retains all the utility of a modern smartphone. Sure it would be great if every single feature was immediately visually discoverable. But how do you do that when you have so little screen space? Do you sacrifice content for UI? Let's see their great alternative.
To respond to their points in detail:
You know how they say lead with your strongest point? Right off the bat the first thing they claim is that Apple's fonts are impossible for many people with normal vision to read. Nevermind many, show me a single person with normal vision that CANNOT read Apple fonts and I will save their life, because clearly they have a brain tumour and need treatment immediately.
Why would anyone take this article seriously when it leads with provably false claims? Anyway let's move on..
Of course much of the science was based on a mouse and keyboard interaction on a computer, not touch on mobile.
This is why those interfaces work. Let's take a scrolling view for example. The traditional approach is to put a scrollbar in, and that's what most everyone was doing before the iPhone came along. The scrollbar is discoverable and it provides visual feedback. Sounds good right? Well it turns out using a scrollbar on a mobile device is a miserable experience. Swipe to scroll turned out to be the vastly superior method, and as soon as you learn to swipe (my 1 year old figured it out watching me) it is trivially easy to operate without any additional visual clutter.
Same with other gestures in the iPhone.
Deleting a row in a table. You can put a button on every row to make that discoverable at the cost of high risk of accidental deletion and visual noise, or you can make rows swipe left to expose the delete function. The swipe once learned in 5 seconds is vastly superior for the rest of your lifetime using it.
Accessing the notification centre by swiping down from the top. You could put a button on every single screen, or you could save the space and use a swipe. Clearly the swipe is far preferable to using up screen space on a 4-5" screen.
So a person with a visual impairment used accessibility options to correct for it? This is a problem how? Later they confuse font weight with font size. Both are adjustable in iOS, of course if you really need very large fonts you will run into some sizing issues in some apps.
A vision impairment is a disability. A minor and common one, but still one. By the way, the common way to correct this disability is with glasses. I have poor vision, but never had an issue with reading Apple fonts because I've corrected my vision by wearing glasses. The author's implication that someone with a disability should be asha
well there's your answer. Not a good idea to skip your meds.
It's not the GPS its the screen plus active routing plus GPS plus voice that drains battery. In other words GPS navigation. Just running the GPS in the background and logging it isn't that bad
Not true at all. I've used the GPS on my iPhone for multi day backcountry trips with no service. Works perfectly fine and gets a fix in seconds while my old dedicated GPS would take a minute.
Odd. I had a couple issues with the first release of iOS 8 and Yosemite as far as Handoff, Continuity, and Airdrop goes, but since some later update it's been rock solid. I use airdrop all the time between various iOS device and Macs and haven't had any issues for ages. Same with continuity. I don't find handoff very useful so haven't really tested much.
>> So if China supplies nuclear reactors to the world --- and ultimately also the United States for a hefty price, when natural gas declines and we shake ourselves awake from this renewables nightmare
You're funny. By the time that happens solar will supply the majority of the power and energy storage will have advanced enough to spread it out. Gas will do the rest. Nuclear will be useful but just an expensive backup.
>> What doesn't seem to work well, in my experience, is breaking down a project into microscopic detail and individually estimating each detail
I find this very useful.. Not microscopic detail but detail enough that it forces you to really think about the project. I find without this developers tend to leave out tasks entirely.
Apple. They are very up front with how they get their money from you and that's in the hardware prices. They charge a lot for hardware but so far they don't try to screw you after purchase by advertising or selling your data.
Apart from Apple fanboys, I don't think anybody is stupid enough to buy a new device just to get a software upgrade.
Too funny, given that Apple users don't have to buy a new phone to get the latest software, since Apple actually cares enough to update their old devices.
Interesting how now we're supposed to believe that a lack of support is actually a good thing.
Except there's nothing new or useful about the fire phone
Not to mention his bullshit about fighting global warming with a $3B investment. Collected all the publicity and goodwill when he made that announcement and never followed through or did anything of significance
And? You think the gas extraction will stop or scale down? So what if it lasts 14 years if we are dependent on continuing to scale up gas extraction
>> Switching from oil and coal to natural gas is a positive step in reducing both carbon emissions and other pollutants.
That's the thing though, we don't actually know if this is true. Methane leakage can easily invalidate that argument and studies have shown we are leaking more than anyone wants to admit
Every research team who discovers the disability market seems to set out to build an affordable eye tracker. And they all fail. I should know I was on such a team :)
C++ and Qt already works great on Android with a nice IDE as well.
Bonus: your code will work on iOS and windows phone and blackberry and windows and Linux and Mac at the same time
They might win if they can dominate the high end mobile chip space. Then they can sell at a premium to manufacturers of high end mobiles.
What part of cheap as shit media consuming device do you think describes the iPad?
Virtually no difference isn't good enough. Convenience is king as had been proven again and again and again.
Also there is no way in hell that I would hand over my purchasing data to an advertising company. That's the big difference from my point of view
When you're wrong all you have left is insults.
>> Apple will have access to your purchase data
No they don't. Maybe try actually educating yourself before spouting off on a topic.
Big difference between VISA and my bank having my purchase data and me handing it over to an advertising company like Google. Never going to happen.
>> Android has had a secure payment system, Google Wallet.
Purchase data is shared with Google. By definition that is not secure
There's mocking because you can get a superior ebikes kit for less money that won't be full of proprietary components. That's not to say they won't make money, but there are better options out there