*Note: My apologies to Mr. Lopp as this quote was not attributed to him from the start, it appears that my quote logs in Yojimbo are not always 100% accurate. Thanks to @mbadger for pointing this out.*
Nothing special, just a bunch of things that have been bugging me lately.
1. Blue makes for a great icon color and everyone else uses it — be the exception, not the rule.
2. Make the name of your app/service something that a normal person can pronounce, on first try, without help.
3. Spell the name like a normal person. Twitter works because it makes logical sense, spelled as it sounds. Tumblr is hard to explain to a non-tech user — tell your Mom to go to Tumblr.com and see what she types in. I don’t want to remember which consonant you doubled or which vowel you dropped. Things like Digg work because you can tell people: “it has a double g” — stray from the basics too far and your service/app will confuse people.
4. Ditto for your URL. 37signals couldn’t get basecamp.com, so they chose basecamphq.com — I can remember that and so can most people, more importantly I can *say* that: basecamp “H-Q” dot com. Don’t make it hard on the user.
5. If you are going to change a standard UI behavior, you better have good reason for it — looking cool doesn’t count.
6. People look for save buttons, if you don’t need your users to worry about saving — tell them that.
7. In fact if you change anything that a user would normally press button to do, best to tell the users that you don’t have the button and why.
7. If I am putting data into your app/service I damned well better be able to get it back out with a click — in some sort of useable format.
8. If you can’t come up with an innovative user interface — stick with generally accepted standards. ‘Unique’ is never a good word when a person is referring to your UI.
9. Beta testing is free, users understand this — but please charge for your product once you launch, that is, unless you have another reliable income stream setup already (e.g. a trust fund).
10. No one has a perfect version 1.0 product, just make it stable.
11. Look at what other apps do wrong, more than you look at what they do right — fill the voids, don’t clutter the market.
12. If you are replicating a stand alone product (e.g. Calculators) try to think about how it is best implemented on the particular interface you are building for — don’t focus on directly copying the device. (e.g. Soulver’s reinvention of the calculator UI)
This is a very neat looking and sounding machine, the Samsung Series 9 is thinner than the MacBook Air at the thickest point and thicker than the MacBook Air at the thinnest point. It costs a touch more and has a few hours less battery life. It is faster on paper and the screen is much brighter. Windows slows it back down to being slow than the MacBook Air.
What intrigues me about this machine is that for a first rev ultra-portable is seems to have done very well. The speed tests are based on Windows performance and thus are likely to remain poor. If they get the resolution bumped up to match the 13″ MacBook Air, Samsung has a great option for frequent Windows travelers.
Zach Epstein:
>So here we have a tablet that’s not even a month and a half old… doing somewhere north of $70 million in sales… in a market that is barely a year old and currently dominated by a single device… and it’s a flop.
An interesting take, but I still am going to say that this device will be forgotten in 6 months.
Peter Cohen:
>Analysts with Deutsche Bank estimate that Motorola has shipped about 100,000 Xoom tablets since the device went on sale in February.
Ouch. That $800 price point (w/o contract) sure makes this something only a few would care to buy it seems.
Tyler Galpin with an incredibly detailed look at how one goes about installing an SSD in their 2010 27″ iMac, while maintaining the stock HD:
>First of all, I did this and it was a hugely ridiculous process. I learned a lot of things the hard way as I went along with the install, so hopefully this guide will help some of you through the process. Details: I have a mid-2010 27” iMac and installed this SSD to work alongside my HDD which was already factory installed in the iMac.
Great source of information if you want to make this upgrade.
An awesome look at a lot of computer interfaces used in movies — no analysis, just a boat load of screenshots.
MrGQ in the Apple discussion board on the FaceTime bug:
>I am experiencing the exact same issue recently. Most notably just minutes ago when i called my GF and i saw a “picture” of myself from today when i was at the office. I know it was from today because i had the exact same shirt. The weirdest thing is that picture is not stored on my iphone.
You may be thinking that, while this is weird, it isn’t that creepy. Nasetron adds the creepy though:
>Some of the images that have been coming up on mine are from times and places when I know without a doubt that I haven’t been using facetime.
Luckily it seems the images are not being shown to any one but the iPhone owner — but still, why is it taking these pictures at all?
MG Siegler reporting the tagline for Apple’s new app that let’s you see a gallery of ads:
>Great ads. On-demand. In your pocket.
That’s messed up, what’s even more messed up is how many of us will download this.
Chris Foresman on an iPhone survey about customer satisfaction:
>That doesn’t mean users on Verizon don’t see at least one significant benefit: fewer dropped calls. Verizon iPhone 4 users reported a dropped call rate of 1.8 percent. AT&T iPhone 4 users, in contrast, had a dropped call rate of 4.8 percent—more than double that of Verizon iPhone 4 users.
What’s interesting about this is not that it is telling us what we already knew about AT&T, but that dropped calls don’t seem to have anything to do with the iPhone 4 antenna position. 1.8% for Verizon is nothing — nothing.
Every reader should know this already, but in case you don’t: I can be wrong and often am wrong. Whenever you put an opinion out there on the web, or state something as fact — you run the risk of someone smarter than you reading it. Often they correct you and you try to correct things where you can.
Personally, both on this blog and in real life, I try to correct myself immediately upon learning that I am wrong. It’s a mark of a strong man to be able to admit when they are wrong, or to acknowledge an excellent competing argument.
I think I may have been wrong about [Mr. Reader](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mr-reader/id412874834?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4) — an RSS client for the iPad that [I wrote a short quip](https://brooksreview.net/2011/04/quick-takes-on-five-apps-7/) about in my weekly Quick Takes series. I basically said the app sucks and made a very inaccurate statement about scrolling through news items. I apologize for that.
What I meant to say (though I did very unclearly) is that you can’t thumb through a full view of the RSS item using arrow keys like you can in Reeder. Yet, that is not the case at all — via DM on Twitter Justin Blanton pointed out to me that not only can you do that — you can also change the position of that bar.
While I still don’t care for the app, my original assessment of: “I think it sucks.” Is dead wrong.
I think it is crashy as all hell and not ready to be a primary news reader for most all users — that can be fixed with a quick update and we are comparing it to apps that have been around for quite some time. ((Meaning they have had time to work out these kinks, I remember Reeder being crashy at one point.))
My main problem with Mr. Reader remains that it just doesn’t feel and look as good as the rest of the iOS interface. ((Though the ‘New York’ theme is best.)) That leads to a disconnect, which in turn leads to a degraded user experience. Fortunately these are all things that can be changed with an updated theme, as my major usability problems all seem to be unfounded (aside from crashing).
The coloring isn’t the only problem that I see — there is too much clutter going one, and too much UI chrome. This app needs a toning down before it is an app for me, I do think there are a good chunk of users that will enjoy it, especially after the crashes get fixed.
To those of you that like Mr. Reader, those that considered not buying on my original advice, and especially to the [developer](http://www.curioustimes.de/mrreader/index.html) — I am sorry.
Melinda Beck:
>Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
I am no short sleeper and am very much a morning person. Yet, I see the same thing that the WSJ is reporting here — many people thinking they do need less sleep than what they truly need. Funny thing is this last bit in the article:
>Nowadays, some short sleepers gravitate to fields like blogging, videogame design and social media, where their sleep habits come in handy.
Some people, in an already tiny group, gravitate towards these professions — just found that irrelevant and funny to include.
Justin Blanton:
>On balance, I think it’s a solid release, especially for this category of app, which inevitably generates a lot of criticism from us ‘power’ users, because it’s something we use all day, every day. The developer appears to be rather responsive, so I’m expecting great things in the future, and am sure that most of the app’s larger issues (most notably, instability) will be attended to in short order.
It is a very solid release — but it doesn’t feel as elegant as the iPad itself does, thus a mismatch that I hate. Also Justin pointed out that I was wrong about a scrolling point in my quip about the app, I have since updated the [original post](https://brooksreview.net/2011/04/quick-takes-on-five-apps-7/) to reflect my wrongness. ((Thanks for that Justin.))
There has been a lot of talk about Android market share versus the rest of the industry — but these ‘analysts’ are just talking about Android versus the iPhone. It is all rather pointless, as we know that market share is not the end all, be all of business. Ferrari makes a pretty nice living off of a small market share, as does Apple with Macs. So does Leica, ditto Rolex. I am not going to waste your time with *another* post about mind share or about profit share.
*None of that matters.*
I have something more Apple fanboy-ish ((I mention this to save both of us some emails.)) to talk about: the eventual demise, the non-starter, the successful failure, of Android.
### Successfully Failing ###
This is exactly what Wil Shipley was talking about in his [recent post about farming versus mining](http://blog.wilshipley.com/2011/04/success-and-farming-vs-mining.html). This passage by Shipley is what I mean when I say a company is ‘successfully failing’:
>The stock market itself encourages this behavior: what’s important to the market is the potential growth of your sales, not your current sales, since the point of buying stock is to sell the stock to someone else later on, at a higher price.
In other words, not worrying about longevity of the company (or platform).
The stock market has screwed over the consumer and investor perception of what success really means. I think success means turning a nice profit — not looking like you *could*, at some point (in the future), possibly turn a profit. This is the deception that so many companies are pulling right now — companies like (to name a few): Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and that new free service that just launched. Which is a polar opposite of the real money that companies like: Microsoft, Apple, EA, Disney and others are making… today.
Android seems to be another platform (one in a long line) that is pulling this veil over peoples heads — except that they just aren’t fooling investors or tech pundits — they are fooling users and a few developers as well. What Google has done with Android is to quickly build it up as a market share leading (or soon to be leading, depending on who you ask) platform. They did this by leveraging:
– minimal (if any) licensing fees to handset makers
– opening up the software to allow handset makers **and** carriers to put crapware on the devices… I mean customize the devices
– made it easy for developers to get into the marketplace ((Ahem, no Apple approval process.))
– set a standard of free software in their store
All of these things combined have lead to good market share, oh yeah, almost forgot one: being on every major carrier — every.
Google lured developers with the promise of sales given a widespread and growing market. Google lured handset makers by giving them an iPhone-like OS, that they can cheaply and quickly use to compete with the iPhone. Google lured carriers with the same iPhone-like interface, but one that also allowed complete carrier hacking — I mean customization. They lure buyers because these devices look like an iPhone, are priced like an iPhone, but aren’t on a crappy network. ((By some people’s perceived estimations — except those poor bastards in SF, where AT&T hates you.))
The reality is that to use Android the handset maker must:
– make the handset
– customize the OS to work with that handset
– add in handset customizations
Then we go to the carrier, who:
– buys the device
– customizes the software, again
Then you get to the developers, who:
– now have a different screen sizes on a multitude of devices
– a different set of inputs ((Hardware keyboards, buttons and so on))
– they “fix” their app to work with this device
Then we get to the user, who:
– pays for all these “extra features”
– buys a case ((I have been told that it can be hard to find a case for any given Android phone. Personally I have seen a lot of Android users with cases, but if it is hard to find one — that’s just another negative.))
– can’t get timely software updates
– has on obsolete phone (and case) that the developers, carriers, and handset makers are no longer interested in supporting after 6 months and 20 new devices have hit the market
– oh and, users are locked into a 2-year contract
That’s the Android way — what about that reads long term success to you? The entire model looks more like a market share grab with no real idea of how to sustain that growth than it does a growing and healthy platform.
Yet, [Fred Wilson continues to whine about](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/04/android-continued.html) how developers should be developing for Android first — an argument he seems pleased to go down fighting with. He keeps saying this even though developers report similar findings as those released by MLB, according to [Edible Apple](http://www.edibleapple.com/mlb-ceo-bob-bowman-ios-more-likely-purchase-content-than-android-users/):
>Just a few weeks ago, Bowman stated that MLB app sales on Apple’s iOS are 5 times greater than on Android.
Yet it is Android that has the bigger market share.
That’s a big difference, one that surely will perk up any mobile developers ears. So why on earth would you develop for Android first — that’s akin to trying to become a millionaire by donating millions to charity first.
It doesn’t work.
“Hey become a mobile app developer and start with Android, it will pay for the Top Ramen you can eat for the next 6 months you spend developing for iOS. Then the money you make from iOS will pay for the Filet Mignon you eat while you try to keep up with new Android device screen sizes.” *Sounds fun.*
Except that it isn’t and as [Marco Arment so succinctly put it](http://www.marco.org/4295159845):
>But, I digress. We’re talking about Android… which has terrible development economics hindered by severe fragmentation and poor payment integration, and is not generally used by most of the influential people needed to spread the word on new services.
And that’s the key to this whole successful failure. How attractive is a mobile platform to both users **and** carriers ((They need to be able to advertise that their devices can compete with the iPhone.)) if there are no apps worth a damn? Truly, there are very few apps worth owning (free or otherwise) on Android — yet I own hundreds of iOS apps, most of which are damned good and the worst of which would be amazing compared to the best Android has to offer.
This isn’t an argument about the quality of iOS versus Android, or the idea of “open” or closed systems. This is an argument that is basically saying: Android is pulling a fast one on just about everyone because while they have apps, they don’t really have *apps*.
If Android can’t get happier users, then there is no Android future. That can’t happen, until Android starts getting quality developers. Which in turn can’t happen until Android can figure out how to make the time and effort worth a good developers time. Which in turn won’t happen until Android figures out what the hell it is trying to do longterm.
Android isn’t a farmer (to use Shipley’s analogy), yet they aren’t quite a miner either — and that’s a problem. Google isn’t looking for a quick payout from Android — they want users to stay with Google services. Yet they aren’t performing the nurturing actions one needs to take to build a real platform. Android seems an awful lot like [Color](http://color.com/), but I digress.
Without good, dedicated developers you can’t have the ecosystem that is making iOS a wild success among developers **and** users. [MG Siegler](http://parislemon.com/post/4347154066/a-nightmare) reports:
>I’ve talked with hundreds of developers over the past few years on this very topic. The common refrain: nearly all of them talk about what a headache Android is to develop for when compared to the iPhone — both in terms of work put in and rewards gotten back.
[Craig Grannell sums it up even better](http://reverttosaved.com/2011/04/05/iphone-dead-in-the-water-claims-blodget-while-apple-cries-tears-of-pure-profit/):
>Devs go where the money is—it’s really that simple.
It is completely plausible that Android could exist for years to come and that they will continue to be a market leader. There is, however, a reason that Linux has never taken off for “normal” computer users — while Windows and Mac OS has done quite well — Linux is just not user friendly. There is a market for Android, but it is the same market of users that prefer the command line to the GUI — that is: users that think its neat to dial via the command prompt rather than a keypad or address book interface. I am saying — hardcore nerds.
Jon-Erik Storm [weighed in](http://pugjunk.com/is-android-taking-over/) on the matter wondering why so many people think there will only be one platform left standing:
>That’s your evidence? Really? I can come up with three counterexamples. One, gaming consoles. There are three: XBox, Playstation, and Wii. There has almost always been more than one important gaming console. Two, there are several web browsers that people use. If IE were still the only one, standards like HTML5 and CSS wouldn’t matter. Three, is Facebook really the only social platform? What is Twitter then? Maybe iTunes would have been a better example, eh? And as for PCs, Apple seems content with it being the #1 laptop and #2 PC maker with its approximately 8% market share, but yet reaping more profits. But the point is these examples are unscientific and don’t explain why technology platforms stabilize that way (if they do) and why that will apply to smart phones.
Agreed, and then some. The thing is I don’t think there will only be one platform left standing, but I do think that of the current platforms on the market, only iOS will still be a strong competitor in 3-5 years time — Android will either be dead, rebooted, or of little significance — do you think for one minute Nokia, HTC, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson aren’t working on a better OS?
People assume that because Android has captured a larger market share, that Apple can’t catch up — I am saying that they can **and** will catch up — but that it doesn’t matter. We just got the iPhone on Verizon in the U.S. and make no mistake that it will soon come to ever major carrier — world wide. That’s the plan, it’s been the plan all along. Apple chose the slow roll-out approach, the conservative approach, and they are reaping the benefits in the form of cold hard cash. Success is not market share or mindshare — success is profits.
What people are reluctant to write is that while Android is selling well — it is still a poor overall user experience. This is yet another factor of Android’s model that is actually detrimental to the platform. This is akin to the bargain basement PCs you can buy — sure they run Windows, but they have cheap motherboards that lock up and not enough RAM slots to make the computer useable.
Only in phones it is not the motherboard or RAM slots that users care about — it is the battery life. Here again Android is failing miserably. In part you should pass some of the blame to Google for not making a more energy efficient OS, but most of the blame should fall on hardware manufacturers for not providing energy efficient hardware components and picking and choosing new technologies (like 4G) wisely.
The last thing a user wants out of their brand new Android phone is to be able to use it for [only 4.5 hours](http://www.bgr.com/2011/03/28/htc-thunderbolt-review/).
So the very “open” nature of Android causes two problems for the long term viability of the platform: user experience and developer experience. The user is suffering because they can’t get a good hardware/software solution that rivals the battery life and overall stability of something like iOS’ platform — this is something that Google has little control over. Even if Google were to make their OS a better user interface that iOS — the handsets would still be (for the most part) hit and miss — that’s not acceptable to users. ((Point of reference: Ford Pinto, Yugos, Pre-2000 Jaguars, eMachines, any Palm Treo after the 650, Blackberry Storm, Windows Mobile 6.5, etc.))
### Glimmer of Hope ###
Amazon.
Amazon knows how to sell stuff — specifically [they know how to sell digital goods](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/22/8-steps). Amazon has their own app store for Android, and [I am not alone in thinking](http://kenyarmosh.com/blog/how-the-amazon-appstore-addresses-the-other-android-challenge/) this may be, but a ray of light shining through the darkness. It is an interesting thought, Google could power the Android OS and Search/Contacts/Ads, HTC builds the handsets, and Amazon sells the content to the users — all the while each of those are battling with carriers for some semblance of control (or more likely to get the carriers to chill out on adding “features”).
That, I guess, is the true upside of the “open” platform — even with handset makers and OS developers screwing the pooch, a third party can interject and completely save the platform.
Question then becomes: can Amazon save Android, from itself?
Matthew Shaer reporting news from IDC ((IDC stands for Idiotic Data Center, FYI.)) analyst Ramon Llamas, news Shaer surely can’t believe:
>And by 2015 – just four years away – Windows Phone will be the second most popular OS in the world, Llamas added, right behind the Android OS.
I can’t wait.
Georgina Prodhan reporting for Reuters about the Financial Times not wanting to use Apple’s iOS subscription service:
>He said he was hopeful of a positive outcome to negotiations with Apple, but added: “If it turns out that one or another channel doesn’t mix with the way we want to do business, there’s a large number of other channels available to us.”
>He added: “We have a great relationship with Apple.”
Whereby ‘other channels’ he clearly means the PlayBook — wait that’s not shipping — must just be Android then. Because we [all know those users like to pay for stuff](http://www.edibleapple.com/mlb-ceo-bob-bowman-ios-more-likely-purchase-content-than-android-users/).
TJ Luoma on the AirPort Extreme:
>I buy Apple’s Wi-Fi hardware for the same reason that I buy their computer hardware: it works better than many competitors’ products, has been more reliable, and doesn’t require me to spend a lot of time maintaining it.
That’s not just one users experience — it seems to be everyones that has every used an AirPort Extreme. I have one at home and switched to it from a LinkSys router running an install of DD-WRT to get a boost in reception. I can’t imagine going back to that crap. The AirPort just works — and works damned well.
When we remodeled the office that I share with another two companies the larger company that we sub-let from was trying to device a wireless network. They had an IT pro come in and install a robust, custom, wireless network complete with antennas coming down from the acoustical grid ceiling. Eight months later a new IT company came in to redo the network and they replaced that system with just one AirPort Extreme. These IT guys are not Mac guys — but they told me that in their experience the AirPort routers can’t be beat for small offices (less than 30 people).
They *are* that good.