Only Apple fans could possibly be surprised by Wil Shipley's article. Compared to other software and hardware vendors, Apple aren't particularly different in their outlook on keeping users tied to their systems. Steve Jobs said in an interview with Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal (June 2004):
"We don't want to get into something unless we can invent or control the core technology in it. And the more we look at it, for more and more consumer devices the core technology in them is going to be software. More and more they look like software in a box. And a lot of traditional consumer electronics companies haven't grokked [fully understood] software."
Put another way, by controlling the software we can tie users to our products. It's an attitude shared by many other software and hardware companies and obviously Apple doesn't "Think Different(ly)" in this regard.
Compared to other software and hardware vendors, I really don't think Apple are particularly different in their outlook on keeping users tied to their systems. Here's what Steve Jobs said in an interview with Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal (June 2004)
"We don't want to get into something unless we can invent or control the core technology in it. And the more we look at it, for more and more consumer devices the core technology in them is going to be software. More and more they look like software in a box. And a lot of traditional consumer electronics companies haven't grokked [fully understood] software."
Put another way, by controlling the software we can tie users to our products. It's an attitude shared by many other software companies and obviously Apple doesn't "Think Different(ly)" in this regard.
The Greenpeace page states clearly that the company rankings are based on publicly available information, but gives no indication that they actually contacted the companies concerned - something they should have done at the very least.
Nevertheless, the fact that Apple is a highly secretive company is no reason for us consumers to give them the benefit of the doubt. There is no reason why they should be secretive over their environmental credentials, unless of course, those credentials don't amount to much as claimed in the (admittedly flawed) Greenpeace report. If anything, the lack of information Apple provides only serves to reinforce the perception that they aren't particularly green. Why would any company want to hide their environmental credentials? Given Apple's skill at self-promotion, you can bet your bottom dollar they'd milk any "green" opportunity for all the attention it was worth.
What are your thoughts on the ease of use of CSS? Much has been written about the elegant simplicity of CSS. This is certainly true for simple layouts. In my opinion though, CSS begins to lose that elegance and simplicity for more complex layouts. It feels difficult to use, confusing and unwieldy. One might think this is inevitable for more complex page designs, but what are your thoughts? Do you feel that CSS remains easy to use for complex layouts?
Congratulations to Alex Bendiken. The redesign is very nice. I particularly like how easy it is to scan down the page quickly and pick out individual elements. The new design gives Slashdot a much more polished and tidy appearance.
Here's what I understand about the Google Book Search service and some of the contentious issues surrounding it...
First of all, Google will not allow users to read the full text of in-copyright works. They will only display a small snippet of text (or a few pages for publishers who have signed up to Google's partner program). In order to let users see those snippets of text, Google is scanning the entire content of books. That scanned digital file will be held and owned by Google. But they are scanning entire in-copyright books without the publisher's consent. Rather than approach publishers for their permission to scan their titles first, Google is asking publishers to contact them if they want to opt-out of the scheme. It's not surprising therefore that some publisher's have described Google's approach as arrogant.
As far we know, the content of the scanned books will only be indexed by Google, not by other search engines (this could change in the future - the decision lies with Google). And what will Google do with those scanned titles once the copyright expires? They're free to do as they wish of course, but publishers remain uneasy that Google is digitizing in-copyright titles right now, well-before many titles reach the end of their copyright status. Why did Google not obtain the permission of publishers first before scanning titles? How could they have not forseen the backlash this would cause? Isn't it rather telling that even the Bodleian library in Oxford will only let Google scan out-of-copyright works?
Google are spending their own money on scanning titles, so of course one expects them to want to make money from the project in the long term. Nevertheless, the book scanning project puts the accumulated knowledge of thousands, if not millions of books in the hands of just one corporation (yes, that's right, corporation, not philanthropic organization). Should we be concerned by this development or should we welcome it?
Does anyone really pay any attention to these awards? The headline for the Wired article says it all really - "usual suspects dominate Webbys" - in other words, every year they revisit the same limited pool of websites. Of course, they can't ignore what's popular, but it's laughable that they describe themselves as a "leading international award" when the sites that have won are almost all US-centric with a few nods to the UK. Is that their idea of "international"? And how on earth did the World bank get an award for activism?!
You can already share your ideas on the Web
on
Idea Stock Exchange
·
· Score: 2, Funny
There are a number of "idea banks" already on the Web such as Should Exist and Halfbakery. These sites are a bit diffrent from the approach described in the NYT article though.
If one throws a million darts at a dartboard, it's highly unlikely that none of them will hit the bullseye.
But who's going to find that diamond in the rough? It would be nice to think that good content (or well-written content) rises to the top and gets noticed, but that's hardly the case. In fact, plenty of popular blogs prove quite the opposite!
To their credit, Microsoft have spent time and resources in making Windows more accessible to users with disabilities. Their efforts may not be perfect but they're not ignoring the issue. For quite some time, they were ahead of Apple in this respect, although Apple too are now addressing this issue (no doubt partly because of government legislation).
As for your suggestion that we design for users who aren't disabled first and then look at other users - surely this is the reason why so many of the current solutions feel clunky? They are bolted on top of a design that works well for one group of users, but not for others. But this raises another question: can one over-arching OS design accommodate all needs? I don't know the answer for certain, but I'm guessing that a solution would require a rethink of our current (out-dated?) desktop metaphor. For some idea of an OS design that can work well with both sighted and blind users, see Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface.
The only way to stop global warming were for the people of the world to collectively reduce their usage of energy...
We are incredibly wasteful of the energy we have available and we can do a lot to reduce consumption already (in reality though we won't because we're too apathetic and don't really care).
...and lower their standard of living.
We need to change our lifestyle, yes, but that doesn't mean a lowering of living standards. Too many people equate living standards with the number of goods and gadgets they own. We are very fortunate in the West (North America and Western Europe) to lead comfortable lives and we can easily continue to do so even if we reduce our rapacious appetite to consume. But, as your post implies, it won't happen because we're too self-absorbed to do anything until it personally affects us. Our whole economic model is built on the idea of constantly producing and consuming. We can't sustain this model given the world's finite resources. But we haven't even had a debate about what a sustainable economy might mean in the future (and few of us seem willing to change our profligate lifestyles).
How will future historians judge us? Perhaps as wealthy, apathetic societies that when presented with scientific evidence of environmental danger, continued to pollute and plunder the world's resources because we simply couldn't see beyond our own immediate needs.
Language is such an important part of any nation's culture, it really is depressing to see it treated with so little interest or value. Writing is a skill we should all value highly; and, yes, that also means paying due attention to spelling and grammar.
There are certain writing mistakes that seem to crop up repeatedly on the internet. They are beginning to bother me because the overall attitude seems to be one of nonchalance from the writers of these errors and even other readers.
Some examples I've noticed:
- An inability to distinguish between 'your' and 'you're'
- Similar confusion with 'their', 'there' and 'they're'
- Frequent misspelling of 'lose' as 'loose'
- Confusing 'effect' with 'affect' (and vice versa)
- Using the phrase "I could care less" when the writer actually means "I couldn't care less" (although this is so frequent in the US, it seems to have become acceptable form)
- Also using 'of' instead of 'have' ("it could of happened")
- Missing out 'of' completely as in "a couple weeks ago" (this seems to be a difference between UK and US English)
Should we be tolerant of these mistakes given that most of these errors are committed by native English speakers? Why do we bother lamenting a supposed decline in our educational standards when in the real world we adopt an indifferent attitude to such mistakes anyway?
I'm guessing that Google have purchased Measure Map in large part due to the usability or "user experience" element that has gone into the service.
Google Analytics (from what I can see of the screenshots on Google's website) has a very static, statistical appearance to the way it presents data. Measure Map seems to be taking a different approach - a less cluttered appearance than analytics, selectively showing key website stats (rather than showing everything at once) but still letting users drill further into the stats data to explore in more detail if they want to. From what I understand, Measure Map also uses Ajax and Flash to let users explore data interactively, rather than just presenting them with a static page.
This is quite a development! I suspect that Pixar will continue to operate (largely) autonomously, but there will undoubtedly be a good deal of knowledge sharing between Disney and Pixar. John Lasseter has often expressed his admiration for Disney's animators and their pioneering role in developing the medium. While there might seem to be a lot of enmity between the two companies, I suspect there's also a lot of mutual respect between the artists at both studios.
People may not like the management decisions made by Disney (which have often dictated the direction of their films) but the company still employs a great many talented artists. And of course, Pixar continues to benefit from Disney's considerable marketing muscle - few other companies know how to so thoroughly milk their products for every cent they can get (and I don't say that as praise).
I'd certainly be interested in using an e-book device with a high-quality display. But not for reading books, more for reading articles, reports, PDF files and even web pages. I have so many documents in electronic form, but reading them online is still not particularly pleasant (particularly for PDFs, which despite what Adobe claims, are not a good format for online reading).
Printing all these articles would probably be equivalent to destroying a small forest in terms of paper consumed. But let's face it, even on the web, we tend to browse a large amount of plain text content. Simply reading online articles, even discussions like this one on Slashdot, perhaps saved for offline reading (yes I know you lose the interactive element of responding to posts), would be more pleasant on a display that matched the appearance of paper.
I hope the e-ink technology is adopted by other manufacturers so we have a number of vendors (and prices) to choose from.
While I'm sure the software has its flaws... shoot its a 1.0 release. What 1.0 software doesn't have some flaws
So what you're essentially saying is that it's expected that companies will make sub-par version 1.0 releases - no matter what the price of the product? And that we should lower our expectations of any such release so we're not disappointed when we encounter bugs? Would we tolerate this from Microsoft or any other company, or is it just Apple that gets this special treatment?
Sorry, but this lazy attitude is exactly why companies continue to get away with releasing poor, buggy software that fails to deliver what it promises. We shouldn't accommodate any shortcomings in the software just because it's a version 1.0 release. If the product promises X, Y and Z, that is exactly what we should expect. The moment we lower our expectations is the moment when companies believe they can happily get away with poor releases and with fixing things later. Since that is pretty much the state of the software industry now, I suppose we've already reached that stage.
The Xara program has been around for a few years - every incarnation has had excellent magazine reviews. It has a loyal base of users and one of the primary reasons is it's powerful set of features and its easy-to-use interface. They are not starting from scratch on the usability front - they already have a head start. If you have a Windows PC, the best way to see for yourself is to simply download the trial version and give it a spin. Even better, compare it to Adobe Illustrator with its plethora of floating palettes and you'll see how tired and old-fashioned the Illustrator interface feels in comparison. Of course, these are all my subjective opinions; but then, what isn't on Slashdot?:-)
This certainly is a "new kind of music" - the type no-one would want to listen to. If you program a computer to generate notes using an algorithm, you don't end up with music, you end up with noise; and that's exactly what WolframTones produces.
I wrote about this very topic recently on my blog. This is what I had to say:
The browser is great for displaying information, for sharing content online, for communicating with others and for entering relatively simple types of information. But it's not very good for performing complex interactions.
You can't do photo editing, edit a video, design documents, make or edit music, draw, paint, create an animation, make your own digital effects and no doubt perform a whole host of other tasks. But if you were to buy a new computer (or already have one), these are exactly the sorts of things you are likely to be interested in doing or learning more about. Even basic word processing is quite horrible when done through a text box in a browser.
Even in instances where you can accomplish some of the tasks above, you are usually presented with a hobbled interface that offers you little capability or choice. Take Content Management Systems - perhaps the most ubiquitous of all web apps - they still have to drastically simplify their methods of interaction to accommodate the browser's limitations.
There's one exception to this pattern of desktop capability and browser equivalence and that's email. Web-based email has been phenomenally successful, but it still hasn't displaced desktop email software. I know of no company that has moved its staff to a web-based email system for day-to-day use in the office (excluding remote access).
The cross-platform, "no install" aspect of running an application through a web browser is, I believe, what continues to make it so appealing to many developers (and, of course, the prospect of making an application available to a global audience), but there's plenty of life left for desktop applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Only Apple fans could possibly be surprised by Wil Shipley's article. Compared to other software and hardware vendors, Apple aren't particularly different in their outlook on keeping users tied to their systems. Steve Jobs said in an interview with Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal (June 2004):
Put another way, by controlling the software we can tie users to our products. It's an attitude shared by many other software and hardware companies and obviously Apple doesn't "Think Different(ly)" in this regard.
Compared to other software and hardware vendors, I really don't think Apple are particularly different in their outlook on keeping users tied to their systems. Here's what Steve Jobs said in an interview with Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal (June 2004)
Put another way, by controlling the software we can tie users to our products. It's an attitude shared by many other software companies and obviously Apple doesn't "Think Different(ly)" in this regard.
The Greenpeace page states clearly that the company rankings are based on publicly available information, but gives no indication that they actually contacted the companies concerned - something they should have done at the very least.
Nevertheless, the fact that Apple is a highly secretive company is no reason for us consumers to give them the benefit of the doubt. There is no reason why they should be secretive over their environmental credentials, unless of course, those credentials don't amount to much as claimed in the (admittedly flawed) Greenpeace report. If anything, the lack of information Apple provides only serves to reinforce the perception that they aren't particularly green. Why would any company want to hide their environmental credentials? Given Apple's skill at self-promotion, you can bet your bottom dollar they'd milk any "green" opportunity for all the attention it was worth.
What are your thoughts on the ease of use of CSS? Much has been written about the elegant simplicity of CSS. This is certainly true for simple layouts. In my opinion though, CSS begins to lose that elegance and simplicity for more complex layouts. It feels difficult to use, confusing and unwieldy. One might think this is inevitable for more complex page designs, but what are your thoughts? Do you feel that CSS remains easy to use for complex layouts?
Congratulations to Alex Bendiken. The redesign is very nice. I particularly like how easy it is to scan down the page quickly and pick out individual elements. The new design gives Slashdot a much more polished and tidy appearance.
Here's what I understand about the Google Book Search service and some of the contentious issues surrounding it...
First of all, Google will not allow users to read the full text of in-copyright works. They will only display a small snippet of text (or a few pages for publishers who have signed up to Google's partner program). In order to let users see those snippets of text, Google is scanning the entire content of books. That scanned digital file will be held and owned by Google. But they are scanning entire in-copyright books without the publisher's consent. Rather than approach publishers for their permission to scan their titles first, Google is asking publishers to contact them if they want to opt-out of the scheme. It's not surprising therefore that some publisher's have described Google's approach as arrogant.
As far we know, the content of the scanned books will only be indexed by Google, not by other search engines (this could change in the future - the decision lies with Google). And what will Google do with those scanned titles once the copyright expires? They're free to do as they wish of course, but publishers remain uneasy that Google is digitizing in-copyright titles right now, well-before many titles reach the end of their copyright status. Why did Google not obtain the permission of publishers first before scanning titles? How could they have not forseen the backlash this would cause? Isn't it rather telling that even the Bodleian library in Oxford will only let Google scan out-of-copyright works?
Google are spending their own money on scanning titles, so of course one expects them to want to make money from the project in the long term. Nevertheless, the book scanning project puts the accumulated knowledge of thousands, if not millions of books in the hands of just one corporation (yes, that's right, corporation, not philanthropic organization). Should we be concerned by this development or should we welcome it?
Does anyone really pay any attention to these awards? The headline for the Wired article says it all really - "usual suspects dominate Webbys" - in other words, every year they revisit the same limited pool of websites. Of course, they can't ignore what's popular, but it's laughable that they describe themselves as a "leading international award" when the sites that have won are almost all US-centric with a few nods to the UK. Is that their idea of "international"? And how on earth did the World bank get an award for activism?!
There are a number of "idea banks" already on the Web such as Should Exist and Halfbakery. These sites are a bit diffrent from the approach described in the NYT article though.
But who's going to find that diamond in the rough? It would be nice to think that good content (or well-written content) rises to the top and gets noticed, but that's hardly the case. In fact, plenty of popular blogs prove quite the opposite!
To their credit, Microsoft have spent time and resources in making Windows more accessible to users with disabilities. Their efforts may not be perfect but they're not ignoring the issue. For quite some time, they were ahead of Apple in this respect, although Apple too are now addressing this issue (no doubt partly because of government legislation).
As for your suggestion that we design for users who aren't disabled first and then look at other users - surely this is the reason why so many of the current solutions feel clunky? They are bolted on top of a design that works well for one group of users, but not for others. But this raises another question: can one over-arching OS design accommodate all needs? I don't know the answer for certain, but I'm guessing that a solution would require a rethink of our current (out-dated?) desktop metaphor. For some idea of an OS design that can work well with both sighted and blind users, see Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface.
We are incredibly wasteful of the energy we have available and we can do a lot to reduce consumption already (in reality though we won't because we're too apathetic and don't really care).
We need to change our lifestyle, yes, but that doesn't mean a lowering of living standards. Too many people equate living standards with the number of goods and gadgets they own. We are very fortunate in the West (North America and Western Europe) to lead comfortable lives and we can easily continue to do so even if we reduce our rapacious appetite to consume. But, as your post implies, it won't happen because we're too self-absorbed to do anything until it personally affects us. Our whole economic model is built on the idea of constantly producing and consuming. We can't sustain this model given the world's finite resources. But we haven't even had a debate about what a sustainable economy might mean in the future (and few of us seem willing to change our profligate lifestyles).
How will future historians judge us? Perhaps as wealthy, apathetic societies that when presented with scientific evidence of environmental danger, continued to pollute and plunder the world's resources because we simply couldn't see beyond our own immediate needs.
Language is such an important part of any nation's culture, it really is depressing to see it treated with so little interest or value. Writing is a skill we should all value highly; and, yes, that also means paying due attention to spelling and grammar.
There are certain writing mistakes that seem to crop up repeatedly on the internet. They are beginning to bother me because the overall attitude seems to be one of nonchalance from the writers of these errors and even other readers.
Some examples I've noticed:
- An inability to distinguish between 'your' and 'you're'
- Similar confusion with 'their', 'there' and 'they're'
- Frequent misspelling of 'lose' as 'loose'
- Confusing 'effect' with 'affect' (and vice versa)
- Using the phrase "I could care less" when the writer actually means "I couldn't care less" (although this is so frequent in the US, it seems to have become acceptable form)
- Also using 'of' instead of 'have' ("it could of happened")
- Missing out 'of' completely as in "a couple weeks ago" (this seems to be a difference between UK and US English)
Should we be tolerant of these mistakes given that most of these errors are committed by native English speakers? Why do we bother lamenting a supposed decline in our educational standards when in the real world we adopt an indifferent attitude to such mistakes anyway?
I'm guessing that Google have purchased Measure Map in large part due to the usability or "user experience" element that has gone into the service.
Google Analytics (from what I can see of the screenshots on Google's website) has a very static, statistical appearance to the way it presents data. Measure Map seems to be taking a different approach - a less cluttered appearance than analytics, selectively showing key website stats (rather than showing everything at once) but still letting users drill further into the stats data to explore in more detail if they want to. From what I understand, Measure Map also uses Ajax and Flash to let users explore data interactively, rather than just presenting them with a static page.
This is quite a development! I suspect that Pixar will continue to operate (largely) autonomously, but there will undoubtedly be a good deal of knowledge sharing between Disney and Pixar. John Lasseter has often expressed his admiration for Disney's animators and their pioneering role in developing the medium. While there might seem to be a lot of enmity between the two companies, I suspect there's also a lot of mutual respect between the artists at both studios.
People may not like the management decisions made by Disney (which have often dictated the direction of their films) but the company still employs a great many talented artists. And of course, Pixar continues to benefit from Disney's considerable marketing muscle - few other companies know how to so thoroughly milk their products for every cent they can get (and I don't say that as praise).
I'd certainly be interested in using an e-book device with a high-quality display. But not for reading books, more for reading articles, reports, PDF files and even web pages. I have so many documents in electronic form, but reading them online is still not particularly pleasant (particularly for PDFs, which despite what Adobe claims, are not a good format for online reading).
Printing all these articles would probably be equivalent to destroying a small forest in terms of paper consumed. But let's face it, even on the web, we tend to browse a large amount of plain text content. Simply reading online articles, even discussions like this one on Slashdot, perhaps saved for offline reading (yes I know you lose the interactive element of responding to posts), would be more pleasant on a display that matched the appearance of paper.
I hope the e-ink technology is adopted by other manufacturers so we have a number of vendors (and prices) to choose from.
So what you're essentially saying is that it's expected that companies will make sub-par version 1.0 releases - no matter what the price of the product? And that we should lower our expectations of any such release so we're not disappointed when we encounter bugs? Would we tolerate this from Microsoft or any other company, or is it just Apple that gets this special treatment?
Sorry, but this lazy attitude is exactly why companies continue to get away with releasing poor, buggy software that fails to deliver what it promises. We shouldn't accommodate any shortcomings in the software just because it's a version 1.0 release. If the product promises X, Y and Z, that is exactly what we should expect. The moment we lower our expectations is the moment when companies believe they can happily get away with poor releases and with fixing things later. Since that is pretty much the state of the software industry now, I suppose we've already reached that stage.
The Xara program has been around for a few years - every incarnation has had excellent magazine reviews. It has a loyal base of users and one of the primary reasons is it's powerful set of features and its easy-to-use interface. They are not starting from scratch on the usability front - they already have a head start. If you have a Windows PC, the best way to see for yourself is to simply download the trial version and give it a spin. Even better, compare it to Adobe Illustrator with its plethora of floating palettes and you'll see how tired and old-fashioned the Illustrator interface feels in comparison. Of course, these are all my subjective opinions; but then, what isn't on Slashdot? :-)
This certainly is a "new kind of music" - the type no-one would want to listen to. If you program a computer to generate notes using an algorithm, you don't end up with music, you end up with noise; and that's exactly what WolframTones produces.
I wrote about this very topic recently on my blog. This is what I had to say:
The browser is great for displaying information, for sharing content online, for communicating with others and for entering relatively simple types of information. But it's not very good for performing complex interactions.
You can't do photo editing, edit a video, design documents, make or edit music, draw, paint, create an animation, make your own digital effects and no doubt perform a whole host of other tasks. But if you were to buy a new computer (or already have one), these are exactly the sorts of things you are likely to be interested in doing or learning more about. Even basic word processing is quite horrible when done through a text box in a browser.
Even in instances where you can accomplish some of the tasks above, you are usually presented with a hobbled interface that offers you little capability or choice. Take Content Management Systems - perhaps the most ubiquitous of all web apps - they still have to drastically simplify their methods of interaction to accommodate the browser's limitations.
There's one exception to this pattern of desktop capability and browser equivalence and that's email. Web-based email has been phenomenally successful, but it still hasn't displaced desktop email software. I know of no company that has moved its staff to a web-based email system for day-to-day use in the office (excluding remote access).
The cross-platform, "no install" aspect of running an application through a web browser is, I believe, what continues to make it so appealing to many developers (and, of course, the prospect of making an application available to a global audience), but there's plenty of life left for desktop applications.