They might just call it Cloud OS

Source: Google goes for speed, security in Chrome OS | Web Services | Macworld.

[...] As such, when the first Chrome OS netbooks hit the market at the end of 2010, Google expects them to be “companion” devices whose owners will also have conventional PCs in their houses. [...]

I wonder what’s going to happen to netbooks before the end of 2010, though. Isn’t this too much planning ahead?

As such, it seems that the Linux-based Chrome OS will also require that end-users be very comfortable with cloud computing and its basic idea of keeping applications and their data stored in a vendor data center.

I for one am not very comfortable with that at all.

In exchange, Google is promising an operating system that it says will be exponentially faster at booting up and significantly more secure than conventional PC operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Mac OS.

And:

For security, Chrome OS places each application within what Google calls a “security sandbox,” stripping applications of the usual, broad access rights they have in conventional operating systems, and thus limiting their ability to do damage if compromised by malware. If Chrome OS detects a security problem, it has been designed to reboot itself to address the problem.

“Chrome OS runs completely inside the browser security model, which is very different from how traditional operating systems run today,” Pichai said.

And that might be cool and all, but Chrome OS also runs inside the ‘cloud’ security model, and to me that sound less reassuring, especially after what happened with the Danger/T-Mobile/Sidekick situation last month.

These, of course, are just first impressions. Chrome OS looks very interesting UI-wise: I’d call it an activity-centered OS — there isn’t a real focus on the concepts of ‘applications’ and ‘documents’. The user experience at this early stage looks much more centered around activities and events.

A daring project

I had the pleasure of knowing what it was all about a little before the official launch. A few days ago Ángel Domínguez, a friend and fellow translator, published a personal project which I find courageous (or daring if you want — pun intended) and well executed. Tired of poor Spanish translations of articles and excerpts from Daring Fireball, John Gruber’s popular weblog, Ángel has put together Daring Fireball en Español, which is precisely the Spanish version of Gruber’s website. All by himself.

Attention to detail is impressive: the color scheme is identical but used in reverse, fonts and layout are the same. As Ángel wrote:

Great effort was put into trying to emulate the original structure and logic of the original Daring Fireball, and for the most part it has been achieved. Posts in Spanish have two stars that link to both the Spanish entry and the original English entry, and titles are linked to the original news source that is mentioned in the very entry.

Ángel’s idea is that his work could become a reference point and a reliable source for Spanish technical press, Spanish Mac-oriented blogs, Spanish tech pundits, etc. in need to properly cite John Gruber’s articles and comments. This translation work is obviously useful to all Spanish-speaking readers who can’t read Gruber’s pieces in the original English.

John Gruber is aware of it, and gave his approval so long as it is specified that Daring Fireball en Español is a personal project and not affiliated with the original Daring Fireball. I’m a bit surprised that Gruber did not mention it officially, neither on Daring Fireball, nor on Twitter. Ultimately one should feel nothing but pride for such an initiative. If it happened to me, I’d be honoured: I would think, here’s someone who appreciates my work enough to bother creating an entire website and volunteering to translate my work, surely devoting a considerable amount of time to it — to translate the articles I’ve already written and to keep the blog constantly updated, following my pace and keeping up with my updates. I think that such an effort should be awarded at least by mentioning its very existence.

Needless to add, Ángel Domínguez’s work is of the highest quality. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, I urge you to take a look at his website anyway, perhaps comparing it with the original by opening the two in different tabs in your browser. It is perhaps the first case of a blog with facing translation.

Tognazzini’s Proposals to improve the iPhone Springboard

I had been waiting for Bruce Tognazzini to update his AskTOG column with some juicy contribution. When I realised that his most recent article talked about solutions to improve the interface of the iPhone / iPod touch, I immediately started reading, with much trepidation. But I have to admit that I was rather disappointed by his analysis, and I find none of his proposals particularly elegant or persuasive. His analysis is interesting and well thought out and deserves to be read in full, of course, he’s the interface and usability guru, not me. In the introductory paragraph, What’s wrong with today’s Springboard 1.0? (Springboard being the formal name of the home screen on the iPhone / iPod touch), Tognazzini makes an interesting premise:

Unlike the Finder or Desktop, rather than giving access to as many apps as you could possibly want, the current Springboard limits you to 180 apps. Paradoxically, this would not be a bad upper limit on a Mac or PC, as apps tend to equal trouble and the more you have, the more trouble you’ll encounter. On the iPhone/iPod Touch, however, 180 apps is terribly limiting as iPhone/iPod Touch apps translate to fun, not trouble, and the more apps you have, the more fun you can have.

The big limitation of the current system of screens on the iPhone is that you cannot sort the applications in a very efficient way:

Yes, Apple does give you the ability to sort out your apps, but that quickly breaks down when you have, for example, one and a half pages-worth of travel apps, a quarter page of medical, 7/8ths pages of scientific instruments, etc. With a fixed upper limit of 11 pages, with no way to label pages, and without sufficient space on pages to hold all one’s apps for that category, things begin to break down. As one approaches the 180-app upper limit, the pages descend into chaos, as new apps randomly place themselves in any available spaces, with nowhere logical to move them.

Once you hit the maximum number of apps, apps just start falling off the edge. This is apparently already happening in sufficient numbers that Apple, in 3.0, released an all-too-typical programmer hack: They enabled users to have invisible apps they can call up using Search as long as they can remember the app’s exact Name. For example, if you have the American Automobile Association app, you have to type in “AAA”. Oh, wait! It’s not called “AAA”, it’s called “Roadside”! What are the chances you’re going to remember that two years from now when your car breaks down?

Tognazzini suggests five alternatives for improving the situation.

The first is to enable users to have identification labels associated with pages:

True, Tognazzini suggests that “Apple could initially show no labels at all so that the new user would encounter no added complexity,” but for me this solution is less effective than it looks. Example: what do you do when applications that fall under a certain category (or label) are more than 16? Suppose we have 22 applications under the label “Dictionaries and reference”: the first screen of 16 applications will have that label at the top, but what about the following screen, containing the other 6 apps? What label will it have? Still “Dictionaries and reference”? Or “Dictionaries and reference 2″? It does seem impractical to me.

And for those with 500 applications this is still a patched-up solution to say the least, as the only form of shortcut is to hold the finger on the label to display a drop-down menu with all the labels; this way the user can reach the screen with the desired application slightly more quickly. However, this creates two further problems, or rather two sides of the same problem: how to handle applications that do not belong to any label? (Because if you have only two IM apps, for instance, it seems pointless to devote one full screen to them). To better take advantage of the functionality the user should necessarily break applications into categories, a rather tedious task. Not to mention the interface itself, which becomes unnecessarily crowded from a visual standpoint, and unnecessarily complicated from an operational standpoint.

The second proposal (perhaps keeping in mind the partial ineffectiveness of the first) is vertical scrolling.

Vertical scrolling would not move page-at-a-time the way horizontal scrolling does, Tognazzini writes, Users, instead, could scroll row-by-row. They could also “throw” the page vertically and have the window scroll down rapidly, in the manner of the address book. This way you would circumvent the limit of the previous proposal (that is, how to handle more than 16 applications under the same label across more than one screen). With vertical scrolling you could have, say, 27 travel apps on a single labelled screen, for example. You keep the most used on top and scroll down to reach those you use less frequently.

It’s more appealing a proposal for sure, but I get the impression that being able to scroll in both directions, horizontally and vertically, will end up confusing users. Then I’d also like to know whether Tognazzini has thought about setting a limit to the vertical scroll or not. How many applications could be included in a vertically extended screen? I also think that by extending the app placement over the two axes requires more steps to reach an app. Imagine this scenario while you’re on the go: to find app XYZ you have to flip three screens horizontally, then scroll ‘a bit’ vertically, but since vertical scrolling doesn’t move one page-at-a-time but row-by-row as a list, finding the application you are looking for isn’t so straightforward because it is more difficult to memorise its position in your muscle memory, so to speak.

The third proposal: User-Controlled Icon Positioning; that is, letting the user place application icons anywhere in a page in some characteristic way, to be able to recognise a certain page at a glance:

Uhm, no, I can’t find this convincing enough. I admit I have no rational objection to it, just a gut reaction: I do not find this improvement particularly elegant or effective. As you keep buying and adding apps, it’s difficult to maintain these distinctive layouts.

The fourth proposal: Containers. A lot of people talk about the problem of organising applications on the iPhone, and the idea of enclosing them in containers (or folders, drawers, stacks, what you will) is usually the first that comes to mind, especially to tech-savvy users who are used to the metaphor of the desktop computer. I have already addressed part of this argument in the past, and I still think that the introduction of folders would be a step backwards with regard to the immediacy and simplicity of the iPhone’s interface. It would be necessary to devise a way (or command or gesture) to create a new folder, then another to visually differentiate each folder, then another to insert / change the name, then another to move items in and out of a folder, to manage a folder hierarchy, and so on.

Yes, I have my own proposal, which I’ll explain in a moment. Now comes Tog’s fifth proposal: multiple links, namely the possibility to have aliases to reach a certain application from different points.

No, no, absolutely not. It’s complicating and confusing things to the highest level. It is, once again, looking at the iPhone and thinking that its interface is extensible in the same way as a computer interface is. Or considered as such. On iPhone spaces and paradigms are different, and one must take these differences into account when navigating its interface. Any addition should consider how much it affects the whole interface, how much complexity it adds, how many new gestures it introduces and whether they’re worth it, and so on.

My modest proposal

I, too, have been reflecting on how to tackle the problem and limitations of the iPhone springboard mentioned by Tognazzini. My proposal takes into account something I find essential: the problem of managing more than 180 applications installed on your iPhone or iPod touch directly affects only a minority of users (we are talking about a lot of people for sure, but considering the global amount of iPhones out there, those who manage more than 180 apps are still a minority). Such a proposal for improving the iPhone springboard must therefore be as non-intrusive as possible for the majority of users, who should be able to keep using their iPhone as usual. The proposal must not complicate the iPhone UI and must not introduce visual clutter or new commands or gestures that are difficult to memorise.

My proposal is the possibility to view the contents of the iPhone in an alternative, optional, transparent way. It doesn’t move or change anything permanently — it’s the ability to switch to a different view that hopefully can help those who have a disproportionate number of applications. My proposal is to create on the iPhone OS the equivalent of this application (or widget):

Say you have an application that is called “Manage Apps” or “App Manager”. Tap the icon and you’re presented with a MobileMail-like UI: apps are displayed in ‘List view’. Want to put all weather apps in a specific folder? Tap on [+] and you create that folder. You can even choose between a set of default folders, possibly with distinctive icons (e.g. reflecting the App Store categories). Folders always appear at the top of the list, followed by any application you don’t want to put into a folder. Folders and apps are sorted alphabetically, and to browse them quickly there’s the familiar A-Z column on the right. There might even be Smart folders, like in the Finder or in iTunes. User-definable Smart folders, of course, but also with presets to automatically organise the applications following the App Store categories and criteria (a quick solution for those who can’t be bothered to create ad hoc categories).

To manage the movement of large numbers of applications inside folders you may select them in advance and then move them, just like email messages within MobileMail. Or at worst you could resort to iTunes and do it from your Mac.

All this sorting and organisation would happen only within the “Manage Apps” application, and would be an easier, more powerful option for those with large volumes of applications. You would return to the familiar screens of icons and classic iPhone view by quitting the app at any time. So it would still be easy to have access to the apps we use most (the ones we generally place on the first 2-3 screens) and there wouldn’t be any unnecessary complexity.

Those who have a lot of apps would benefit from having the ability to set alternative views within a sort of ‘app browser’. Those who only have four or five screens of apps can easily ignore this new app browser/manager and continue to use the iPhone or iPod touch without any visible change in the UI they know and love. I think it’s an elegant and potentially effective way to manage large amounts of apps, but obviously it’s not for me to say.

“Harman Kardon”

It’s Harman Kardon. Harman Kardon. Not ‘Karmann Kardon’. Not ‘Harmon Kardon’. HARMAN KARDON. I’m sick and tired of these typos. People, just pay attention for once. Here, go to their site and learn the correct spelling.

Two features I want in the Mac OS X Finder

• The first one was present in Mac OS 9 Finder, and was a window view option with which you could have Finder windows reduced to tabs in the bottom. Very useful if you wanted to keep a series of windows permanently on screen without being too invasive. The command was View > as Pop-up window. I miss this often.
• The second one could be a nice improvement over the typical menubar clutter. I’d love to have certain menu extras to appear only when there’s notable activity from the related service/application. For instance, the Time Machine icon could appear only during backups. If this doesn’t convince you, another interesting alternative would be to have the option to choose between the icon in the menubar or in the Dock. That would bring Docklings (of Mac OS X 10.0 memory) back. Why move the menubar clutter to the Dock, you’ll ask: well, the Dock is more flexible, literally, while you can only have a certain amount of menubar estate (those using 13.3″ MacBooks know that well). In System Preferences you could even have all 3 options, like this:

  

Just saying.

Apples and Oranges again

Source: Microsoft to ship European Windows 7 without a browser; Macs to follow suit? – MacFixIt.

Like Microsoft, Apple includes their browser with its operating system, and Safari’s preferences are the only location for manually changing certain settings such as the default browser. This creates a similar situation where in order to have certain global system functionality (changing the default browser) you will need to keep Safari installed on your system. Because of the situation with Microsoft, will we see Apple similarly pressured to remove Safari from the Mac OS for European customers?

Apple is not a monopoly. I don’t see why it should be ‘pressured to remove Safari’. Removing IE was Microsoft’s decision, in the end. Microsoft has taken that decision to prevent future troubles with EU regulations. The idea that since Microsoft did it, everyone else should follow suit appears ludicrous to me.

The point-and-shoot computer.

Thinking about it, these new subcomputers called ‘netbooks’ share a lot with digital point-and-shoot cameras. I was taking a look at the latter, the other day. Digital compact cameras all have a small footprint so that they can easily be pocketed and carried around. They’re lighter and cheaper (some much cheaper) than their DSLR counterparts. They have fewer or simplified features, smaller sensors, smaller collapsible lenses. They usually have a series of usability tradeoffs, too. Controls are cramped, tinier, at times more difficult to operate for those with big hands and fingers. But all in all they can take decent photos and generally make for a nice second camera alongside a bigger, more sophisticated DSLR. Some people will also argue that these compact digital cameras are even better than their bulkier brethren for certain uses: they’re unobtrusive, quieter, ideal for quick snaps and candid shots, and for documenting parties and outings with friends.

So when someone asks whether a netbook is a ‘real computer’, I think about digital point-and-shoot cameras (heh, even those film disposable cameras that are still available in many stores) and I raise a similar question: are they ‘real cameras’? Yes, they are cameras. They are pretty, handy little cameras taking photos and stuff like the big ones. And netbooks, they are handy little computers that have (little) screens and (little) keyboards and (little) trackpads, and they can do email and web browsing and stuff like the big ones.

However, when you use a digital point-and-shoot camera, you’re not doing photography — you’re taking snapshots. Your concern is not taking good photographs. Your concern is being practical. Technically speaking, the result is often like the point-and-shoot cameras themselves: smaller, of lesser quality, cheaper. Or, if you love these little cameras, you’ll talk about the result as being ‘not bad’, or ‘good enough’. Bigger, more sophisticated and more expensive digital SLRs have less usability tradeoffs, and offer more refined and advanced sets of features which usually let the photographer focus on his/her work, not on just being practical (hopefully). Now apply the same logic to netbooks and full-fledged notebooks.

In 140 characters or less

Writing about Twitter has passed the point of redundancy.

For me, it’s routine

Source: Inbox Zero: Delete, delete, delete (or, “Fail faster”) | 43 Folders.

Merlin Mann:

Kill junk, kill pseudo-junk, and then kill all the stuff you won’t ever respond to. Whatever’s left is yours to return.

This is the core of my personal email management. I do this everyday, effortlessly, and in the worst case scenario I’m left with a few unread messages. Many have praised the Inbox Zero approach, and I was expecting something utterly revolutionary, in a sense. Mann’s suggestions are solid, don’t get me wrong, but to me a lot of them seem pretty basic. Or at least, it’s how Email Management 101 should be. Apparently the number of clueless people incapable of handling their inboxes out there is even higher than I thought.

The pirate’s identikit

Source: BBC NEWS | Technology | Court jails Pirate Bay founders.

Speaking to the BBC, the chairman of industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) John Kennedy said the verdict sent out a clear message. [...] “There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that,” he said.

The New Oxford American Dictionary built in Mac OS X’s Dictionary application defines pirate as (excerpt): “a person who appropriates or reproduces the work of another for profit without permission, usually in contravention of patent or copyright : [with adj. ] software pirates.”

Piracy is not OK, of course. But it isn’t a black-or-white issue, either. There are many, many shades of grey. In 2003 Rolling Stone interviewed Steve Jobs. The iTunes Music Store was beginning to be successful at that time, and Jobs and his interviewer Jeff Goodell had a pretty interesting conversation, also about piracy and the music industry.

Two crucial bits. The first:

Of course, music theft is nothing new. Didn’t you listen to bootleg Bob Dylan?

Of course. What’s new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet — and no one’s gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock — open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it — puts it on the Internet. You’ll never stop that. So what you have to do is compete with it.

The second:

Lately, the recording industry has been threatening to throw anyone caught illegally downloading music in jail. How smart is that?

Well, I empathize with ‘em. I mean, Apple has a lot of intellectual property. We told ‘em that, too. We said: We really get upset when people steal our software. So I think that they’re within their rights to try to keep people from stealing their product.

Our position, from the beginning, was that 80% of the people stealing music online don’t really want to be thieves. But that it is such a compelling way to get music: It’s instant gratification. You don’t have to go to the record store; the music’s already digitized, so you don’t have to rip the CD. It’s so compelling that people are willing to become thieves to do it. And to tell them that they should stop being thieves — without a legal alternative, that offers those same benefits — rings hollow. We said: We don’t see how you convince people to stop being thieves, unless you can offer them a carrot — not just a stick.

I have downloaded the occasional music torrent. Am I a “pirate”? According to the aforementioned Oxford dictionary definition, not really. I have not appropriated or reproduced the work of another for profit without permission. But technicalities aside, consider this: I own more than 5,000 vinyl records. I own more than 2,000 CDs, and at least 500 of them are the CD version of albums I already own in vinyl format. To have the compressed, lossy digital version of albums I already own in vinyl and CD format, it’s often quicker to look for the music on peer-to-peer networks. Or, sometimes, I just don’t want to fire up iTunes and have it slow down my PowerBook G4 to rip the music I’ve already bought twice. Hence the occasional download. I honestly don’t think I’m doing something that wrong. Sure, there are a lot of freeloaders out there, but, as I said, different shades of grey.

Back to the John Kennedy quote, I have the feeling that this verdict won’t change a thing.