EdgeCase is a nifty new utility for the Mac. Tons of features on the Mac rely on Fitts’s law. Notably, the Mac makes good use of the «infinite width» provided by screen edges. These «infinite width» edges allow you to quickly access the menubar, reveal a hidden Dock, or slam your mouse into a screen corner to activate Mission Control, Exposé, or another feature.

This stops working reliably once you have more than one monitor. Now, the edge between the two screens disappears. Instead of hitting the edge, the mouse moves to the other screen. EdgeCase solves this problem. With EdgeCase, the edge returns, and works as if you only had one monitor.

To move your mouse to the other monitor, hold down ctrl or ⌘, wait for half a second, or «bounce» the cursor on the edge.¹

Recommended.

Chabudai Gaeshi

Sebastiaan de With:

I learned countless things at Apple, but the most important skill I acquired was the ability to simply take a set of extremely polished designs—sometimes designs I’d easily consider to be the best I’d made in my life—and throw them away, trash them entirely, and start over. It’s where truly great design is born. Since my time at Apple I’ve done this many, many times, and it has always resulted in incredible progress. You have to learn to kill your babies, mercilessly. They’re just pixels. You can do better.

It’s interesting that Nintendo does the same thing. At Nintendo, it even has a name; it’s called «Chabudai Gaeshi» («Upending The Tea Table»).

Nintendo is known for delaying the release of its games. This is largely due to the perfectionist tendency of Miyamoto who would go as far as scrapping the entire development if he did not find a game up to his standard.

For example:

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was supposed to be released immediately after the release of the Nintendo 64. Instead, Miyamoto, who was the producer, repeatedly ordered the game to be redone, resulting in numerous announcements of delays by Nintendo until the game’s eventual release on 11/21/1998.

It’s painful, hard, and often time-consuming to restart when you’re already done, but you can’t argue with the results. Both Apple and Nintendo create some of the best, most inspired design out there.

Completely redoing Ocarina of Time again and again and again may have been tough. But today, that game is widely considered to be one of the best and most influential videogames ever created.

Jono Xia, writing about the recent Gmail redesign:

But these icons are particularly bad. Again with the cult of minimalism: the icons are so streamlined and featureless that they all look the same: a row of meaningless, square, grey objects. When I want to mark something as spam, I used to be able to click the “spam” button. Now I have to mouse over each square grey object one at a time, looking for the one that pops up a “Report Spam” tooltip. (It’s the stop sign. Why a stop sign? I don’t know. Years of using GUIs have trained me to interpret a stop sign as an error message.)

Update

Henning Hoefer notes that Google added a setting to revert back to the text labels. I don’t think this is the right way to improve a user interface.

Marco Arment, writing about Twitter’s «Innovator’s Patent Agreement»:

A patented «invention», even when patented under these terms, is still patented. It’s not free for anyone to use, and willfully infringing upon it is still dangerous and unwise.

(…)

I didn’t patent [my] older inventions because I couldn’t afford to. I probably could have patented some of the newer ones, but I didn’t even look into it enough to do basic prior-art searches. I fundamentally disagree that software patents (and many other types of patents) are a net gain for society, and I can’t participate in that system in good conscience. That’s a stand that I’d like to see more companies adopt.

Agreed. I realize that Twitter might feel that they have no other choice than to get as many patents as possible. Given this, Twitter’s IPA is better than nothing. But it’s definitely not the solution to this mess.

Literature & Latte’s Keith Blount makes an important point about using color in user interface design:

As Joni Mitchell sang, you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone (although in all fairness she was talking about trees rather than colours in icons, and I’d concede that trees might be a little more important). When Apple decided to drain the icons in these programs of their colour, I learned something about the way my brain works that I hadn’t hitherto ever had to think about: my brain is an awful lot faster at processing colours than it is at processing shapes.

I’ve written about the importance of color in my book:

From a usability perspective, using color is beneficial. Colors make things easier to perceive. Our brains are really good at doing tasks such as “find the green icon on this screen.” In [his book] Information Visualization, Colin Ware notes that color is “preattentively processed,” meaning that we identify color before we give it conscious attention. In other words, when we look at a user interface, we can find and identify user interface elements with a specific color really quickly and easily.

Neven Mrgan:

Simple ideas like this will naturally occur to many people. A small percentage of those will have the ability to execute on them. A small percentage of those will then actually do so. And an even smaller group will combine it with an otherwise interesting product, thus making it into something.

People often assume that ideas are where value is created. In reality, ideas (even non-simple ones) are plentiful, easy, and often generated by more than one person at the same time. Ideas are essentially worthless. Value is only created when people actually make stuff.

See also: patents (which protect the worthless part of this equation, and thus make it harder to do the truly valuable part).

The New iPad's Screen Under the Microscope

Like any self-respecting UI designer, I have a microscope¹ sitting on my desk.² Here are some pictures comparing a bunch of different screens. They’re all taken at approximately the same magnification.³ At the scale that the pictures were taken, the width of this bar equals about 1mm:

Note that not all screens are oriented the same way; sometimes, I had to turn the devices to take the picture.

Here’s the iPad 2’s screen:

And here’s what the third generation’s screen looks like:

It’s easy to conceptually understand the idea of quadrupling the pixel count, but once you actually see what this means, it’s frankly pretty astonishing. The iPad 2’s pixels look gargantuan next to the diminutive pixels from the third-gen iPad.

By the way, Apple’s PR makes it sound like there’s almost no space between individual pixels. While there’s much less space than on the old iPad, rows of pixels are still placed quite a bit apart from each other.

Similarly, here’s an iPod touch (2007):

Here’s an iPhone 4S:

Comparing the iPad 3 to the iPhone 4S shows the iPhone’s slightly higher resolution:

Let’s see some other recent devices. Here’s a BlackBerry PlayBook:

And its similar competitor from Amazon, the Kindle Fire:

There were some rumors that the two used similar hardware. Clearly, this doesn’t apply to the screen at all.

Moving on to some cell phones. First, the HP Veer:

Next, the Google Nexus One.⁴ It sports one of these horrible PenTile RGBG OLEDs:⁵

Let’s look at some recent gaming devices. This is a Nintendo 3DS:

Note how this screen doesn’t have square pixels; two pixels fill up one square. This is so the screen can send a different pixel to each eye, creating the 3D effect.

Here’s the PlayStation Vita:

For comparison, its predecessor, the PSP:

And Sony’s «other» portable console, the Xperia Play:

And finally, here’s the OpenPandora:

This screen looks a bit blurry under the microscope because it has an anti-glare coating. In real life, the screen looks great, especially in situations where the other screens show distracting reflections.

Update

Somebody asked for an e-paper Kindle. Here’s the Kindle Keyboard (third generation), at the same magnification:

Update 2

Somebody asked for a more recent Android device. Here’s a Sony Tablet S:

Update 3

Here’s the HP TouchPad:

Update 4

This is a picture of the Galaxy Nexus’s screen that should be roughly at the same scale:

It was taken by Keyan Mobli (via imahotdoglol). It’s another PenTile RGBG OLED, so it only has two subpixels per pixel.

Update 5

Dr. Drang has some more pictures, taken using a better microscope. Also, on a completely unrelated note, I agree with him that iPhoto on iOS isn’t necessarily a beginner’s program, but I don’t think pro users are happy about having to read a manual or watch an Apple Keynote, merely to figure out how to do the most basic things in the application. Mystery meat gestures may have the worst effect on casual users, but they’re bad for everybody.

Update 6

Via mefi, a Commodore 1702 Color Monitor, an NEC 33090WQXi, and an IBM T221. Also, StickyCarpet notes that «This is starting to sound like an evaluation of MP3 bit rates made through $3 ear buds.» Well, yes. If I haven’t been clear enough, let me repeat that this isn’t a scientific evaluation of these screens. It’s really just a bunch of interesting pictures. And finally, my microscope is really cheap, but I am in fact able to turn off its LED lights :-)

The world’s first gesture based calculator, via Steven Troughton-Smith.

Griffin McElroy on The Verge, writing about how developer Gearbox interpreted feedback from user testing sessions for their game Borderlands:

«A couple of things were very clear to us when we started working on Borderlands, and a few things took a few tests for us to really understand,» Armstrong explained. «There are rules that we’ve come to interpret as key things we need to follow, things like: Testers try to speak in fact, but they speak in emotion.»

(…)

«For instance, Borderlands is a game about wanting things,» Armstrong explained. «But one of the common things we hear people say is ‘Boy, I’d like to build my own gun.’ Okay, you can build your own gun. Now the game’s over, congratulations. The quest for the perfect gun is over. It ends when you can build your own gun, and if you can do that in the first hour of the game, the game’s over.»

Via Felix Metzger.

iPhoto's Mystery Meat Gestures

Back in 1998, websites would often force visitors to aimlessly move their mouse around, trying to reveal hidden icons or pieces of text that would explain where to click. Frustrated with these hidden, obscure navigation elements, web designer Vincent Flanders coined the term «Mystery Meat Navigation».¹

After downloading and playing around with Apple’s new iPhoto for iOS, I felt like I was teleported back to 1998. Touching and gesturing in different ways would make seemingly random things happen. I regularly unintentionally activated features, changed views, opened or closed pictures, and got iPhoto into states I wasn’t sure how to get out of again.

Hidden Gestures

It was only after I watched Apple’s Keynote, where Apple’s Randy Ubillos explains some of the gestures and features of iPhoto, that I finally started to understand how the application is supposed to work.

Apple can’t expect every iPhoto user to watch its Keynote, just to figure out how to use the app. It should be accessible to anyone.

While playing around with iPhoto, I didn’t discover most of the features shown in the Keynote. For example, you can darken or lighten the sky in a photo, but you do that by touching the sky, waiting for new ui elements to appear, and then sliding your finger. How is a novice user supposed to find this feature?

There’s some on-screen help, but it’s mostly useless. For example, Apple’s help tells you to «touch and hold with two fingers to use the magnifying loupe.»

But once you do that, there’s no further help or information!

The loupe seems to support different zoom levels. How do you access them? I don’t know.² Are there other features the loupe supports? I don’t know. Can you access the help system again, to get additional information? Nope, trying to do that just closes the loupe.

It’s okay to have a few gestures that aren’t easily discoverable, if they are simple, universally applicable, and fun enough that people will teach them to each other. Pinch-to-zoom is one such gesture. Most people probably won’t discover it on their own, but it’s such a fun gesture that the people who know it will show it to those who don’t. It’s also easy to learn and remember, and it works pretty much everywhere, so pinching pictures quickly becomes second nature.

Unfortunately, iPhoto’s hidden gestures aren’t particularly fun, and they only work in iPhoto. iOS’s built-in «Photos» app is a completely different application, despite doing essentially the same thing as iPhoto, running on the same device, and coming from the same company. Almost nothing you learn in iPhoto can be applied to Photos, or to any other iOS app. In fact, being proficient at using iPhoto will probably make you worse at using Photos.

Button Overload

Not every feature in iPhoto is hidden behind a gesture. Many other features in iPhoto are exposed using buttons, but they don’t fare much better. Almost none of the buttons have text labels, just (sometimes rather inscrutable) icons; it’s reminiscent of Microsoft Word’s insane toolbars.

There are so many unlabeled icons that I really have no idea what most do.³

In fact, there are so many buttons in iPhoto that when you run it on the iPhone, many of them become tiny. You can barely hit them with your finger.

And even if you realize what the buttons do, and manage to hit them with your finger, it’s often not clear how they work. Sometimes, you tap a button to activate a mode, but then you also have to do some other gesture (like sliding your finger over the picture) to trigger the actual effect.

Feedback

In addition to having many hidden gestures, iPhoto also commits the mortal sin of only showing the effect of many gestures once the gesture is finished. For example, iPhoto allows you to see a number of pictures side-by-side. You can remove pictures from this list by swiping down. On webOS, which offers a similar user interface for its cards view, swiping a card immediately gives feedback; the card moves with your finger, and you understand that something is happening.

In iPhoto, on the other hand, there’s no feedback. You need to finish the gesture; once you’ve done that, the photo disappears. A bunch of times, I tried closing a picture by swiping in the wrong direction, wondering why nothing happened. This mistake would have been immediately obvious, had there been any kind of feedback for making the correct gesture.

This kind of interaction design problem simply shouldn’t happen in one of Apple’s flagship products.

Something I like

But I want to close with something I really like about iPhoto: it looks distinctive and unique. But apart from a few examples (like the fanning-out brushes), it doesn’t fall into the skeuomorphism overkill trap — unlike many other recent Apple apps.

This Stuff Is Hard

It’s easy to find flaws in iPhoto, but it’s important to remember that Apple is sailing uncharted waters here. There are few (if any) other iOS applications that offer anywhere near the functionality that Apple managed to cram into iPhoto. In some way, Apple is trying to define a new language for touchscreen user interfaces. Perhaps they’re going too far with iPhoto: a little close button is much more obvious and easier to figure out than a hidden «swipe down to close» gesture. But then, if you have hundreds of rather complex features, you just can’t add a new button for every last one of them.

Microsoft’s Windows 8 has similar issues,⁴ but over there, users just have to learn a small number of consistent, system-wide gestures. I’ve recently used a BlackBerry PlayBook running OS 2.0 (which I really like). The PlayBook has two different system-wide gestures that you need to know in order to be able to use the device. BlackBerry teaches its users these gestures by sending them through an interactive tutorial the first time they turn on the device.

iPhoto, on the other hand, has so many different hidden features and gestures that this approach doesn’t really seem feasible.

This stuff is hard. iPhoto has many flaws, but I’m pretty sure the same could be said of the Xerox Alto’s UI. We’re new at this, but as we get better at designing for touch user interfaces, and as a common language starts to be established, designing touchscreen versions of complex applications like iPhoto will get much easier.